It's Fine By Me (6 page)

‘Hey, look at the petrol gauge,’ Arvid suddenly shouts, ‘we’re out of petrol. Have you got any money? I think I’m skint.’ He puts his hand in his pocket and we pull into the Shell station in Ask and empty our pockets. We have twenty-five kroner between us. I let the car roll to the first petrol pump and sit waiting for Arvid to get out and fill up. But he doesn’t move. We stare straight ahead, and we don’t speak, and then he says:

‘I’ve never filled a car with petrol.’

‘Me neither.’

‘I don’t even know where the petrol tank is. Do you?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Perhaps they come out and do it for us?’

‘They stopped doing that ages ago.’

‘Shit.’

We both get out and walk round the car and realise we have parked on the wrong side of the pump. Then a Ford Granada drives in, and a man in a hat and coat jumps out, and his face is flushed. He yanks the nozzle from the pump, bangs the cap open and stuffs the nozzle in and then he gawps at the pump, his lips moving, mumbling words I can’t make out, and then I see that what he is gawping at is the kroner counter, and what he is mumbling is the numbers as they tick by. He is at it for a long time, and we pretend we are discussing our route, and at the same time we are studying every move he makes. When he goes in to pay I hurry to the Opel and back it into position and do what he did before I forget, and hope it’s the right kind of petrol. I put in twenty-five kroners’ worth. Then I enter the kiosk with an unlit cigarette in my mouth trying to look as if it’s something I do every day.

After a few more kilometres heading north, I turn off the main road on to a bumpy gravel track. It rounds a sharp bend, and stones and ruts on the road pound the wheels and make everything shake. Then the road plunges down, and at the bottom of the hill there is a bridge over the river Leira where the rapids start. In the woods on the other side I glance in between the trees to see if my shack is still standing. It is not.

‘Fancy going for a visit?’

‘A farmer?’

‘A kind of farmer, yes. He lives right over there. Leif is his name. If he isn’t dead.’

‘OK, but if he’s dead I don’t want to see him.’

‘You were funnier with a hangover.’

I stop and change down to first and climb the hills on the other side of the river. We pass a few model farms, painted red and white the way they’re supposed to be, rose beds and everything neat and tidy, and Arvid looks around, his eyes full of expectation. He hasn’t a clue where we’re going. A few minutes later I see Tommy’s barn at the top of a steep slope. There is not a level square metre of land on his property. Some goats are grazing on the slope. At one time the barn was yellow, and he was so proud that this was the only yellow barn in the district, but now the paint is peeling and it is more grey than yellow. The odd board has gone missing, and we can see straight into the hayloft. There isn’t much hay. Behind the barn, you can see the farmhouse with its sway-backed roof, and once it was white, but now it is as grey as the barn. It is only five years ago, it must have looked the same then, but it did not
seem
like it.

We have to drive on a bit to find the driveway, and I keep looking for the blue letterbox that used to be a landmark before, but the box has fallen off and is lying on the ground, and I have to back up the car. I turn into the driveway and pick up speed, and as I remember it, there was a pothole in the road so muddy after rains that you had to have a tractor pull you out if you got stuck, and it probably isn’t any better now. And it isn’t. I put my foot down and shoot across, the mud flying everywhere. The rear of the Opel bounces into the air and Arvid jumps around in his seat and shouts:

‘Hey, take it easy, for fuck’s sake. This is my dad’s car! He’ll kill me!’ But I am driving fast now, because I have second thoughts and wonder how I got myself into this. But it’s too late to turn back, and I want this over and done with.

There are three cars in the yard. Not one of them has four wheels. They have stood there for a good while and one of them I remember very well. It’s an old Volvo station wagon that was used for everything from transporting piglets to delivering the dead on commission, and these were the only times the car was washed. The other two are what Egil called ‘crash cars’. You buy them as wrecks, get the engine running and drive them until they fall apart and leave them wherever they break down. A chicken cackles and sticks its head out of a smashed window. From where I am standing, I see nothing that can move under its own steam: even the wheelchair by the farmhouse door is missing a wheel and is lying on its back, rusting where someone left it.

A man in stained overalls comes round the corner of the barn and stands squinting, shading his eyes from the sun.

‘Hi, Bjørn,’ I say, and he shakes his head and strokes his jaw. Then he scuttles into a shed without saying or doing anything.

‘Who was that?’ Arvid asks.

‘Bjørn. Farm boy.’

‘Farm
boy
? He must be at least seventy.’

I scratch my head. ‘About seventy-two.’

‘Is he always so talkative?’

‘Bjørn never says a word.’ I walk over to the house and
knock at the door. No one answers, so I push it and go in through porch and call through the open kitchen door:

‘Hello, anyone at home?’ I hear a shuffle of feet and a woman of about thirty I have never seen before comes from the kitchen and looks surprised. There is something wrong with her legs. She doesn’t lift them when she walks.

‘Does Leif still live here?’

‘He sure does.’

‘My name’s Audun Sletten. I spent a summer here a few years back and I thought I would come by and say hello.’

‘Well, I don’t know, he’s asleep.’

Fine, I think, we’ll be out of here, but then I hear his voice from the living room.

‘Who is it, Ingrid?’

‘Young man called Audun. He’s come by, he says.’

‘Audun? Is that Audun, you say? I’ll be damned, be right there.’ There is a bit of a commotion, he groans as if he is making a serious effort, and then comes wheeling into the kitchen. He looks exactly as he used to, the grey crew-cut hair, his sculpted face like some bust I have seen in a magazine, and his upper body like a chunk of rock. But his legs are thinner, they don’t seem to carry him any more. There was some trouble with his legs before, but I didn’t see the wheelchair coming. I go up to him and shake his hand and he holds mine in both of his.

‘Well, if it ain’t Audun. It’s been a while.’

‘Summer of ’65.’

‘And now it’s 1970, that makes it more than five years. I’ll be damned, you’re big now. And strong too, I can see that. You’ve got a friend with you, a long-haired baboon?’
He laughs without malice, Arvid grins and goes to shake hands.

‘Arvid Jansen. I look after Audun.’

‘Oh, so he still needs that, does he? Well, I guess we too did that for a while, back then. I’m only joking. Audun was a boy who could look after himself. Be wrong to say anything else. He came here with that white bum of his, and welcome he was, that’s for sure. He could graft like an adult even though he was no more than a half-pint.’

‘White bum?’ Arvid whispers.

‘Shh,’ I say. ‘And Signe, is she here?’

Leif takes a deep breath and says:

‘I guess she moved. Lives somewhere in Trøndelag I’ve heard, I’m not really sure.’ He smacks his hands on the wheelchair. ‘And here I sit. But it’s fine, it’s fine. Ingrid helps me indoors and Bjørn outdoors. It’s fine.’

But I don’t see how it can be fine out here, or going anywhere but down the drain. Something must have happened, and I cannot ask. Signe with the large bosom and her large smile, Signe with her soft hands on her way up to the first floor where I was lying in bed that last summer, full of yellow fever and not able to sleep. Their children had moved out a long time ago, so the whole room was mine. Her white shift in the grey from the skylight, Signe with her white gentle words, Signe so kind. But I cannot ask. Once I sent a card, but there was no answer.

‘You see, somehow she fell ill. Well, let’s not talk about that now. Jesus, it’s nice to see you again, Audun. How’s your mother getting on down there?’

‘A lot better,’ I say. ‘A heck of a lot better.’

He looks at me with those fiercely blue eyes. ‘Yes, I guess she is.’ He strokes his chin and his bristles rasp loud enough for all of us to hear. He clears his throat takes another deep breath and says:

‘You know, your father was here a month ago. Strange you should come now. He was out of here, he said. He left his accordion, it was too heavy to carry with him. He said he was going far. I could just keep it, he didn’t give a shit, if you’ll pardon the expression. There it is.’ He points to a corner of the large kitchen. All the junk is still there, I remember a lot of it, and straight away I recognise the worn, brown case. I go over and open the case and there it is, black and white with red stripes on the bellows, a Paolo Soprani. I bend down and run my fingers across the keys as if the notes might come, but they don’t. For people with thick blood, I think. I look up at Leif. He is looking at me.

‘He didn’t look too friendly when he left, Audun, I have to say. But I don’t know what to do with that squeezebox. None of us here can play. Perhaps you could take it with you? That would be good. Then it would stay in the family, like.’

He crossed the line there speaking of family, and he knows it, so I don’t answer. I look down at the accordion.

‘Fine,’ I say, ‘we’ll take it with us,’ and Arvid, who has heard about this accordion, is about to speak, but then he catches himself before the words come out. The air in the kitchen goes quiet, and we stand there hardly daring to breathe. I think fast and say:

‘What happened to Toughie, the fox you kept on a chain behind the barn?’

‘Oh him,’ Leif says and tells the story of the fox that thought he was a dog and was kept on a rope behind the barn, and the hens refused to sit on their eggs as long as he was there. But everybody loved that fox and didn’t want to let him go, so Leif had to brood the eggs in his armpits and in the end Signe, Bjørn and all the guests were walking around with eggs in their armpits until they had aches and pains all over. Dinner was especially difficult, Leif says, and demonstrates how they had to sit at the table with their arms down by their sides, all posh like, and hold their knives and forks like aristocrats.

‘In the end we had better manners than the Sun King,’ Leif says, and Arvid laughs, and Ingrid hums by her bench, and as we leave I grab the case by the handle and promise to be back soon now that I have my driver’s licence.

We put the accordion on the rear seat and drive out of the yard. After the pool of mud Arvid says:

‘Why did you take the accordion?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You can’t even play it.’

‘I’m telling you, I don’t know.’

‘I don’t think your mother will be too happy about it, now that you know he’s close by. Do you believe in fate now or what?’

‘For fuck’s sake, I don’t know, I keep telling you! Goddamnit, why can’t you leave me in peace!’ I come out of the drive and turn too sharply round the bend and hit a fence post and it scrapes against the door, and I jump on the brakes. We both sit there. Arvid’s face is white.

‘Oh shit, I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘It was
my
fault. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.’

We open the doors. Leif’s house is on the opposite side of a hollow, but if anyone is standing in the window, I can’t see them. The car door is not as bad as I thought, but there is quite a scratch in the paintwork. But no dent. Arvid runs his hand along the door.

‘It won’t be cheap. The whole door will have to be resprayed.’

‘I can pay. I’m going to stop anyway,’ I say.

‘Stop what?’

‘Stop school.’

‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve got less than a year left. Weren’t you going to be a writer?’

‘You won’t be a writer just because you finish school. Did Jack London finish school? Did Gorky? Or Lo-Johansson or Nexø, or Sandemose, or anyone else worth reading?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Audun, that was a hundred years ago! No one went to school for long then! Today everybody does!’

‘Not me. I’m going to get a job.’

Arvid sits down in the ditch and starts throwing stones into the field, small ones at first and then bigger and bigger and he gets up and finds himself a big piece of rock and heaves it with both hands as far and as hard as he can and he yells:

‘Goddamnit!’ He turns. ‘What’s happening here?’ he says.

‘Nothing. I’ll just quit school.’

‘It’s not only that,’ he says, ‘and you know it.’

6

EGIL WAS TWO
years younger than me, and I am pretty certain I can remember when he was born. Or maybe I am mixing it up with stories Kari has told me.

One story goes like this.

Kari and I are alone at home. She is six and is supposed to be looking after me. My mother and father are away.
She
is at Stensby hospital having Egil, but I don’t understand that, only that both of them are away and Kari is with me, and anyway this is not the first time. It’s funny the things you don’t forget. There is a knock on the living-room window and I turn and see my father’s face through the glass. He looks strange. He is waving one hand and making faces, and his face fills the window. The door is locked, and he has lost his key. Kari goes to open it. She doesn’t really want to. I hear a bang and run into the hall and see my father lying face down on the floor. He is laughing into the floorboards. I hurry over and sit on his back, but then he gets up and I fall off, hitting my shoulder on the shoe rack. It hurts. I scream, but he doesn’t care. He goes over to the cupboard in the living room, it is called grandfather’s cabinet, I already know that. He bursts into laughter and says:

‘Now there are three of you. We have to celebrate.’ I don’t understand what he means, but he takes the pistol from the cupboard. I must have seen it before. It has been one
object among many; now it is different. He lifts his arm and fires three shots into the ceiling. We cover our ears, the loud cracks make our bodies shake.