Death of the Demon: A Hanne Wilhelmsen Novel (12 page)

“Tonight’s
not
just as good as any other night,” Hanne growled. “I’ve had an exhausting week, I’ve missed you, I’ve been looking forward to an enjoyable evening at home, I’ve been looking forward
to spending time with you, I can’t bear to quarrel, and what’s more, it’s true that we decided not to have children years ago.”

She slapped the wet cloth down, causing the drops of beer to spatter across the table.

“
You
have decided for us,” Cecilie said quietly.

Hanne realized the battle was lost. They had to go through this, as they did at irregular but fortunately increasingly lengthy intervals, reiterating the fundamental conditions for the difficult lifestyle they had embarked on when they found each other one spring day a hundred years ago, when they were both just finishing high school and discovering the realities of life. Hanne hated these discussions.

“You hate talking about anything difficult,” her mind reader commented. “If only you had
some
idea of how hopeless that makes things for me. I have to steel myself for weeks in advance when I want to bring up something that’s not just about the joys of spring.”

“Okay. Talk away. Everything’s my fault. I’ve spoiled your whole life. Are we finished now?”

Hanne threw out her arms, then crossed them. She stared at the TV screen, where a blonde woman was now standing, clad in a traditional Norwegian cardigan, at the top of the Holmenkollen ski jump, talking about an eleven-year-old girl who was a rising star in the sport.

“Hanne,” Cecilie ventured before pausing for a moment. “Of course we won’t have children if you don’t want to. We must agree in that case. One hundred percent. I’ll give in if you say no. But is it so strange, really, that I’d like to talk about it?”

Her voice was no longer angry or dismissive. But that was not enough. Hanne continued to sit motionless, her eyes stiffly fixed on the little ski jumper hovering sixty meters above the landing slope.

Now it was Cecilie who grabbed the remote control. The sound vanished and the screen flickered to black with a tiny dot
that continued to diminish before being swallowed up by all the darkness.

“I was watching that program,” Hanne said, her gaze still fastened on the spot where the white dot had disappeared. “I can in fact manage to do two things at the one time.”

She was startled as Cecilie burst into tears. Cecilie hardly ever cried. She, Hanne, was the one who resorted to tears at all hours of the day and night. Cecilie was the one who put things right, who was calm and logical, who had insight and courage and could face the world with unwavering rationality. Kneeling on the floor in front of Cecilie, she attempted to lift her hands away from her face, but it could not be done.

“Cecilie, darling, I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to be a grouch. Of course we can talk about it.”

The slender figure reacted by withdrawing even further into herself, and when Hanne tried to stroke her back, she trembled, as though in aversion. Hanne retracted her hand and stared at it as if it might conceal something frightful.

“Cecilie,” she whispered, terror stricken. “What’s wrong with you?”

The woman on the sofa continued to weep, but now at least she was trying to say something. At first it was totally incomprehensible, but eventually she calmed down a little. Finally she moved her hands from her face and looked directly at Hanne.

“I get so completely worn out, Hanne. I’m so tired of . . . I’ve often thought . . . The New Testament. Peter who denied Jesus and all that stuff, at Eastertime. Do you know why there’s so much emphasis on that? It’s because . . .”

Her violent sobbing seemed almost abnormal, she was gasping for breath and becoming blue in the face. Hanne didn’t dare to move a muscle.

“It’s because,” Cecilie continued once she had regained her breath, “it’s the worst thing you can do to anyone. To deny
another person. You have denied me for almost seventeen years, are you aware of that?”

Hanne fought a determined battle against all the defenses snapping into place inside her head. She clenched her teeth and rubbed her hands over her face.

“But, Cecilie, that’s not what we’re talking about just now,” she said slightly hesitantly, for fear of setting the convulsive sobbing into motion again.

“Yes it is, in a way it is,” Cecilie insisted. “Everything hangs together. Your defensive walls in every direction and that excruciating routine of yours that appears just as surely as
amen
in church every time I raise any important issue.
Bang, bang, bang
it goes, and then you’re like an impregnable fortress. Don’t you appreciate how dangerous that is?”

Hanne felt the fear that clutched at her like claws on her spine on the few occasions she understood Cecilie was seriously questioning their relationship. She ground her teeth as she battled against her own reactions and managed to hold them somewhat in check.

“If we’re going to continue to live together you
must
pull yourself together, Hanne.”

It wasn’t even a threat. It was simply the truth. They both knew it. Hanne probably knew it better.

“I will pull myself together, Cecilie,” she promised swiftly and breathlessly. “I’ll pull myself together wonderfully. I swear. Not from tomorrow or from next week. From right now. We can have heaps of children. We can invite the entire police station here. I can place an announcement in . . . We’ll have a civil partnership!”

She leaped up with energetic enthusiasm.

“We’ll get married! I’ll invite all my family, and everyone at work and . . .”

Cecilie stared at her and started to laugh. A peculiar, unfamiliar mixture of laughter and tears, while she shook her head in despair.

“That’s not what I’m asking for. That’s all nonsense, Hanne. I don’t need all that stuff all at once. I just need to have the feeling we’re moving forward. It was lovely that at long last you allowed Billy T. to enter our lives. Was that really so awful, do you think?”

Without waiting for an answer, she grabbed a cushion from the sofa and hugged it to herself as she continued, “Billy T.’s enough for the moment. But only for the moment. Soon I have to meet your family. At least your brothers and sisters. And as far as this about children is concerned . . . Sit down now, please.”

She replaced the cushion and cautiously patted the seat beside her.

Hanne stood like a statue, white as a ghost, adopting a terrified pose. Giving herself a shake, she sat down at the far edge of the sofa. Her thighs bounced up and down in a nervous rhythm, and she clenched her fists so ferociously that her nails dug into the palms of her hands.

“Take it easy, my friend.”

Cecilie had almost regained control over herself and the situation. She drew her girlfriend toward her and could feel how much Hanne was shaking. They remained sitting in silence for a considerable time before they were both able to breathe easily, calmly.

“Do you think it’s odd that I want to know why you don’t want to have children?” Cecilie whispered into Hanne’s ear.

“No. But it’s so difficult to talk about it. I know you’d like to have children. It’s exactly as if I’m stealing something from you whenever I say no. It’s just as if I’m stealing something from you all the time by being your girlfriend. I feel so small. So . . . nasty.”

Cecilie smiled. But she didn’t utter a word.

“It’s just that I . . .” Hanne began, sitting up straight. “I feel it would be wrong for the child.”

Cecilie protested. “Wrong for the child? Think about what the two of us can offer a child! It’s more than the majority of children
in Norway receive: intelligent parents, financial security, at least one pair of grandparents . . .”

They both smiled fleetingly.

“Yes, that’s right,” Hanne replied. “We could offer a great deal. But then I think that if I can’t quite dare to accept myself, then it’s bloody unfair to make life difficult for a child. Think of all the shit the youngster would have to put up with. At school. On the street. All the questions. Besides, I really believe all children ought to have a dad.”

“But it could have a dad! Claus has said he’s willing to take on that role, he’s said that for years now!”

“Honestly, Cecilie. Should the youngster have two mothers here and two fathers at Claus and Petter’s house? Great fun at end-of-term parties!”

Cecilie did not protest further, but not because she was in agreement. She disagreed fundamentally, deep within herself. Claus and Petter were good-looking, well-educated, kind, sensible, and stable men. She and Hanne had been quarreling and making love through thick and thin for almost seventeen years now. They would probably go on doing so until the day they died. There was plenty of room for a child in their relationship. There was a lot she wanted to say, but she kept her mouth shut. She had no idea why.

“I really believe a child should come into being through a mother and a father loving each other,” Hanne continued in low tones, leaning closer toward Cecilie. “Okay, so that’s not always the way it is. Okay, so there are loads of children who come into this world by accident, through carelessness, outside marriage, without love. Many of them get on well, and they’re all equally precious.”

Taking a deep breath, she sat up to take a gulp of beer and then remained sitting there, turning the glass around and around on its axis while shaking her head listlessly.

“I know all of that, of course. But I don’t think it should be like that if I have the choice! I want the very best for my child, and
I can’t give it that
! Don’t you understand that, sweetheart?”

Cecilie did not. But she realized that Hanne for once in her life had opened her innermost recesses, at least a tiny crack. In itself that was such an earth-shattering event that for the moment she required no more. Smiling, she stroked Hanne’s back.

“No, I don’t understand it. But it’s great you’re telling me about it.”

The silence was broken only by the sound of the glass being rotated.

“Adopting would be a different matter,” Hanne said suddenly, standing up just as abruptly. “There are all those children waiting in a queue out there. All the ones nobody wants. Then a well-established lesbian couple in Oslo would be an alternative that’s a thousand times better. Than a street in Brazil, for example.”

“Adoption,” Cecilie mumbled weakly. “You know that’s not legal.”

They stared at each other yet again.

“No,” Hanne said. “It’s not legal. It ought to be. It will be.”

“We’ll be too old by then.”

Neither of them dropped eye contact.

“I don’t want us to create our own child, Cecilie. I’ll never want that. Never.”

There was no more to say on the matter.

Hanne felt herself beaten black and blue. And had a thumping headache. An inexplicable sense of relief filled her without entirely being able to alleviate the ever-present hidden pain of guilt that always tormented her. At certain times strongly, at other times only as an extremely feeble murmur.

Cecilie stood up also and remained standing, facing Hanne for a few seconds before letting her hand slide slowly over her face.

“Are we going to eat, or what?”

Hanne switched on the TV set in order to resume the Friday evening ambience. On NRK, the presenter Petter Nome was chatting as though nothing at all had happened.

 • • • 

The wallpaper on one wall was now completely destroyed, apart from an occasional mountain-shaped fragment he had not been able to tear loose. Large and small curls of paper surrounded him on the floor, almost like a carpenter’s workshop. He wanted to strip that wall entirely before making a start on the next one. It was an amusing way to pass the time, and once or twice he had managed to rip off huge sheets measuring almost a meter in length.

Although still more canned food remained, he was starting to take a gloomy view of the prospect of lingering there. He could not quite remember what day it was, but it struck him as fairly certain that the residents would not absent themselves forever. He ought to find somewhere else. What’s more, he was stinking. He had already removed one stitch from his tongue, but it had bled so fucking badly he had let the other two stay put.

The temptation of the telephone persisted. Inside his stomach sat a tender lump of homesickness. Perhaps the police had given up. Then he thrust the thought aside.

However, it didn’t let itself be chased off so easily. At home he had a bed, a lovely blue Stompa bed, and he could get decent food. Pork chops. He wanted to go to his mum. He really wanted to go home.

Gingerly, he lifted the telephone receiver but dropped it as soon as he heard the dial tone and started on the other wall. This was more difficult, because someone had painted on top of the wallpaper so it adhered more firmly. The strips were smaller here, some as minuscule as locks of hair. Giving up halfway through, he padded out to the corridor again. Outside it was dark, and
the only faint illumination there came from the lamp in a little windowless toilet that he had left switched on the entire time.

Now he did not hesitate. Tapping in the familiar number, he let it ring. It took ages, and he was just on the point of giving up, intrigued about where on earth his mum could be. It was evening. She was always at home. Then she answered.

“Hello?”

He said nothing.

“Hello?”

“Mum.”

“Olav!”

“Mum.”

“Where . . . where are you?”

“I don’t know. I want to come home.”

Unexpectedly, he started crying, shocking him more than it did his mother. Gulping slightly, he tasted his own tears that contained a faint memory of early childhood. Homesickness overwhelmed him, and he repeated, “I want to come home, Mum.”

“Olav, listen to me. You have to find out where you are.”

“Are the police with you?”

“No. Are you in Oslo?”

“They’ll send me back to that fucking home. Or to jail.”

“No children are ever put in prison, Olav. You have to tell me what it looks like where you are.”

He tried to explain. What the kitchen looked like, what the house looked like. He described the thousand twinkling lights outside the dark windowpane in the living room and the pale pink haze lying like a heavy cloud over the city below him.