Kåre came into this world with an umbilical cord that no one could cut. The umbilical cord was attached to a placenta that refused to come out. It stayed where it was; it wouldn’t budge. They couldn’t cut the umbilical cord, or remove the placenta. “This is a bit of a quandary,” the doctor said. A bit. At first, his father took it as a personal defeat, the fact that he couldn’t cut the umbilical cord: he thought he must be the lowest of the low, a wretch of a father, when he couldn’t even do a simple thing like that. To be fair, the umbilical cord was both thick and slippery, but it wasn’t abnormally thick. Just abnormally strong. And there was comfort for Kåre’s father in the fact that no one else could cut it, none of the nurses, none of the doctors, no matter how hard they tried. “We’ll have to find a way to live with it, Marianne,” Kåre’s father said. “You’re attached for life, no doubt about it.”
* * *
Marianne didn’t really have any objection. In many ways, it was easier to keep an eye on the little boy, and she could just pull in the cord if she lost sight of him, or he ran away and hid. Having a private life with his father was of course problematic, but they managed all the same: it was just a matter of doing it as quietly as possible, with as little movement as possible. Kåre’s father, on the other hand, found it harder and harder to cope with the situation, he needed movement! he would sometimes shout when he got really angry, often after some public outing: a shopping trip or a walk in the park, when people had stared at the grayish white, naked cord between the mother and son. And at Kåre’s father, so he believed, as he walked half a step behind them with his head bowed. He couldn’t stand it any longer. He left.
* * *
Marianne didn’t really have any objection. In many ways, it was easier to live the way they had to live, when she could concentrate on keeping up with her son. There was so much she had to do. She had to run everywhere, climb trees, jump in hay, ride a bike, play football, go to his friends’ houses. And all the time she tried to be invisible, didn’t want to hinder her son’s development, knew that she had to let him do things, try things, she didn’t want to be a ball and chain, so when they were out being naughty and getting up to mischief, she closed her eyes. Stood outside the bathroom when they smeared it with toothpaste. Hid behind a tree when they secretly smoked a cigarette in the ditch. And covered her eyes when she had to go into the changing room with Kåre before and after swimming. And during Kåre’s sexual debut, as a drunk fourteen-year-old at a party, she lay hidden as best she could under the bed and covered her ears.
* * *
When Kåre got married, Marianne naturally moved in with the young couple. They made a bedroom for her next to their own, because the bride couldn’t cope with Marianne sleeping in the same room, so that’s what they did. It was actually nothing more than a dividing wall with a small opening so they could feed the cord through before they all went to bed. But the bride thought she saw Marianne’s eye staring at them through the crack. Marianne said it wasn’t true, but the bride was adamant, and made a curtain that she hung in front of the opening. The curtain was obstructed by the umbilical cord and the bride wailed and collapsed on the floor. “She’s everywhere!” she sobbed. “She’s everywhere, Kåre, and nothing works, I can’t bear it! I can’t bear it!” she cried, and in her desperation she bit the umbilical cord with all her might. “Ow!” Kåre and Marianne screamed, then looked at each other, horrified, through the opening; they didn’t know that the cord had become sensitive. The bride just sobbed. “I’m leaving,” she said. “I’m le-e-e-aving.” And she left.
* * *
Kåre didn’t really have any objection. In many ways it was much easier to live the way they had to live; now that his mother was getting old, he would have to start taking her slowing pace into consideration. He could no longer do the things he wanted to do: he couldn’t go out with his friends—she got tired so quickly, but it wasn’t that, she could happily sit in the pub and sleep, she said, but he didn’t want to, he said, he didn’t need to anymore. The truth was that he’d always been embarrassed when she fell asleep; her chin dropped onto her chest and she dribbled out of the corner of her mouth. So he would just have to manage without. “It’s always been you who’s done what I want, Mom,” he said. “Now I can do what you want.” So he went with her to play bingo. To the shops. And when she fell asleep in public places, he didn’t feel so embarrassed anymore, he even felt affection for her, as she sat there with a thin thread of spittle hanging from her chin; she was his mother. And she had gone with him everywhere. He loved her. He eventually got used to a quiet life, to a few hours with the crossword and knitting, to longer and longer afternoon naps, to all sorts of TV series and radio programs. To shuffling in his slippers across the linoleum. To going to bed at nine. It was peaceful. Pleasant.
* * *
But one day, in the middle of breakfast, Marianne died. Her heart had stopped, the doctors said, and Kåre was inconsolable. They also said that now that she was dead, they had to cut the umbilical cord. Because if not, Kåre would have to move to the graveyard. “But the cord’s sensitive now,” Kåre said. “It’ll hurt!” “Have you never heard of anesthetic?” they asked, and Kåre blushed. Of course he had, he mumbled. So they gave Kåre a general anesthetic. They were going to try to separate Kåre from his dead mother. But nothing worked. “What the hell,” the doctors said. “This is unbelievable!” The placenta had shriveled into a lump the size of a raisin that was attached to her pelvic bone; it had become part of the skeleton. Not even the part of the umbilical cord that was turning green could be cut by scissors, knives, or laser. Nothing worked. The bond was not to be broken. “Kåre, we have to cut loose part of her skeleton if you’re to be freed,” they said. Kåre looked at them, as if he was frightened they were going to hit him. His eyes wide open, his ears flat against his head like a dog; the specialist whispered he would live like a dog, when Kåre cried: “No, it’s fine, don’t do it!” “Then we’ll have to tie a small knot in it, to stop her death from feeding into you. There’s nothing more we can do, Kåre, we’re terribly sorry,” the doctors said. Kåre said it was fine. He just asked them to request that the funeral directors make a hole in the coffin, so the umbilical cord could get through. And to apply to the local council for permission to build in the graveyard.
* * *
Permission was granted, but the house could not be higher than the highest gravestone, or wider than was possible without disturbing the other graves, but that was fine for Kåre, he didn’t have much room to maneuver in any case, now that the umbilical cord had been shortened by six feet. It was fine, he had got used to the quiet life and he passed the days as he had before his mother died, doing the crossword, watching TV, listening to the radio. He shuffled his slippers against the wall every now and then, looked out of the window at the various funeral parties that passed once a week. To see if he could see her. She was always part of the funeral party, but never seemed to know any of the others standing there crying and comforting each other. She always stood on the periphery, dressed in black, her small white face looking down at the ground.
* * *
He had noticed her the very first time he saw a funeral party from his new home; she’d been right at the back and tripped on her long skirt, which was even longer thanks to the rain. One day when there was a lot of wind and rain, she had tripped right outside his house. It was well situated that way, he thought, it was just by the small gravel path that wound through the graveyard, so that funeral parties had to walk past to get to the graves. And when she stood up again and brushed down her knees, she looked straight at him. Heaven and earth stood still. And then she moved on. He watched her go. She folded her arms across her chest; she was a thin, dark line at the back of the party, in a far too long and wet skirt. He thought that he would love to kiss her in the wild wind. And the kiss would be like long hair in the wind, or like long grass in the wind, it would both suck them down to the ground and tug at them, as if trying to blow them away.
* * *
Oh!
* * *
He waited for her every day. She had started to look in now, every time she passed, they’d started to acknowledge each other, only just, with their eyes, but there was something, he didn’t know what it was, a kind of understanding, and then one day he dared, he had written a small message and held it up to the window, in the hope she would see: COME HERE, it read. Come here. He had tidied as best he could, washed the floor, picked a few flowers from his mother’s grave and put them on the tiny table, and he thought that everything looked nice. The only thing that made him a little uneasy was the umbilical cord: his part up to the knot was gray and healthy and fine, but Marianne’s side got blacker and blacker, closer and closer to the small knot, and he didn’t know if the knot was strong enough to keep her death at bay. And he had no idea what the girl whose name he didn’t know would think. He was standing there with flour on his hands when there was a knock at the door. He’d thought of trying to powder Marianne’s end of the umbilical cord, but now just wiped his hands as quickly as he could on a tea towel and opened the door. It was her. There she stood, small and dark, with her pale, pale face. Her arms folded across her chest. “Come in,” he said, smiling. “Come in.”
* * *
She had no family, she told him, and she was so lonely! She was utterly alone in the world! She cried in his lap. Funerals were the only place she dared to go to meet people, people were so open at funerals, they wept and opened up, and even if people didn’t know her, they assumed that she had known the deceased in some way or another, that perhaps she had done little jobs for them, cut their hair or something. Because they welcomed her, gave her coffee at the reception afterward, talked to her, asked how she had known the deceased, and generally she said something nice, something she’d heard during the service, and they asked about her, who she was, what she did. He stroked her hair. “But now you can come here,” he said. “For as long as I’ve got left.” “What do you mean?” she asked. “You see the cord that comes out from my belly?” he asked. She lifted her head and wiped the tears from her eyes. “Yes! What is it?”
* * *
He told her everything.
* * *
“She just left?” she said, when he told the bit about his bride. “Yes,” Kåre said, and felt a lump in his throat. Something was being squeezed somewhere. It stung and stung. “So you’ve got no children,” she said. He shook his head. “Nor have I. And I so want one! I want something that is mine! A home! Someone to be at home with!” She looked at him. “Do you think … would you want me, I mean, in theory, am I something worth having, am I something that someone would want—to be blunt, what do you think?” she said. “Would you want me?” he asked. “After all, I’m a man bound to his dead mother by an unbreakable umbilical cord!” “I don’t want anyone else,” she said, and threw her arms around his neck. Her body was so small and he could feel her vibrating. Kåre was trembling. “Who knows what my genes might produce,” he said. “You might get a child with an umbilical cord like mine.” “I don’t want anything else!” she cried with joy. And now he was going to kiss her.