3

My childhood memories are as clear to me as the things I perceive around me: the grain of the wood in the kitchen table, the pen, the paper, the yellow gerbera in the green glass vase, the cup of lukewarm tea, the dark shadows of the trees outside the window, the wind blowing. I am thinking about Plato’s allegory of the cave. It was difficult to understand his reasoning when I was young and studying philosophy at university. Now my thoughts flow easily. The allegory comes and goes. The shadow of ‘the good’ on the wall and the prisoners in chains who did not know of anything else but that. And yet the shadow itself was the very proof that ‘the good’ existed. The One. The starting point. These were the kinds of thoughts you could have before thoughts became relative: that you could not get behind the origin. There was a limit. It is not like that any more. Now our thoughts lead us all over the place and nowhere at all.

I picture the room in the attic. It must be a particular day that I recall. The restless shadows on the wall, not possible to see if they were cast by people. Had we visitors? Your birthday. I understood all the words but not what they meant. I heard them talking about the strong sun, about down-in-the-harbour and the fleet. About Nortraship and the war and the torpedoing. My only brother, Granny said. Daddy was named after him, his Uncle Finn who was torpedoed. Oh, he was one of a kind, all right. And there were shadows from branches, but no tree outside, not that I could see. Granny lit up a cigarette, and said fuck to Daddy, fuck, Finn. She liked to be teased. When she laughed in anger she was not angry. But excited.

The playhouse was in the garden. It was delivered on a lorry. But what did I know about the relation of numbers to time, I was only four years old. Sandalled feet went up the steps. They were made from old, tarred tram sleepers. Soles skidded on sand grains. There was sand on the bench too. The bench was the cooker. A yellow plastic cup and a red mug. The pine tree seen through the window quite different from the pine tree seen when outside. It was smaller seen from outside, when you saw it together with everything else that existed around it. The walls were smooth. The playhouse smelled of shadow and sand.

There were nettles behind the big house. Thin blades of grass tickled my legs. I got a cold bum when I sat on the stone steps at the kitchen door. It was always in the shade. Moss grew on the foundation wall alongside the steps. The door faced the spruce hedge. A little path ran beside the hedge down to the garage. Well-trodden, compacted sand. Stones sticking up here and there. Feldspar. The garage door was often open. Daddy lay under the car. Then he was not under the car any more but standing and showing me different tools. Adjustable spanner. Saw. Screwdriver. Pliers. The grown-ups smiled almost all the time. I did not understand every word they said but they were happy. It was me who made them happy but I did not know that then. They called to me from the window, asking if I was hungry. Asking if I would not like to take the spade and spread what little snow was left by the gate under the hedge. There was another girl there, ‘a little companion’, as Granny put it. Granny came to see us, visited the house that had once been hers. She had lived in America and I pretended there was an American city under the hedge. The grown-ups walked back and forth on the gravel, and the car drove out of the garage. Someone was expected. Several men came, and emptied manure onto the grass beside the yard. The heap lay there in sunshine and rain. Another day they burned grass and leaves. The gravel crunched beneath their feet, I heard the tram through the smell of smoke. It was a nice garden to be out in, with a potato bed, berry bushes and lawns. A small wood connected the garden to the neighbouring gardens. Tall pine trees, roots, pine cones and needles, I played in there.

Later on, we did not live in the house. That was because of Mum and Dad’s divorce. We had to move. I do not remember why, but I do remember successive flats, stairwells, lawns and washing lines between the blocks of flats, with wet sheets that were lovely to put your face against. One morning I entered the kitchen and noticed the gleam of the knives beside the breakfast plates and saucers. The dazzling light was of more interest to me than the loss of the house and the happy grown-ups. That is how children are. They take advantage of every lonely moment to play by themselves and in their games the world is recreated. It can be wonderful or less than wonderful. Enthralling, but empty, or dark, dense and boundless. This was in the early seventies, but I distinctly remember the linoleum flooring was from the fifties, and slippery. And so the days, the years and decades pass. Mum and Dad are friends again now, even live under the same roof sometimes, other times not. Thinking back, it is clear to me that I understood very little of their quarrels, why they had them, I do not remember a word of them. Children really do not understand an awful lot of what grown-ups are doing. How childish they are. No matter, the time around the divorce was not all that bad. But then family does not count for everything in a child’s life, almost but not everything, ninety per cent perhaps? The rest is genes and other kids. Little shits. At least at my school, but I cannot face thinking about that any more.

It is as if the fear in my body has already informed me, even though my mind is dull and distant, slumped in rumination: it is Emilie who is missing. They have released her name and a photograph. It must have been taken recently, on one of those hot days last week, because she is only wearing a T-shirt, and I think it must have been in the afternoon, when the sun is low and the light is golden. She is sitting on a wicker chair, against what looks like the wall of a house, on a veranda, with the poodle on her lap. Her eyes appear bluer than usual against the yellow wall, the whites of them shining, and her skin is a little red, sunburned perhaps, her freckles prominent where shadows fall on her face, cast by a tree, a softly defined pattern of leaves and swaying boughs. Her hair is strawberry blonde and up in a ponytail, which is coming loose. Her smile is broad and open and whoever is holding the camera may have said something at the moment the picture was taken, something that made her happy, because she is looking right at the lens, brimming with laughter.

A wasp crawls over a congealed tea stain on the kitchen table. I place my hand over it, cupping it first, so that the wasp buzzes and flies around inside as if in a cave, smacking into walls. Then I gradually press my palm down. It stings me at the bottom of my middle finger. I open my hand. A red circle appears and starts to swell. It hurts. I pluck out the black stinger. The wasp is not moving any more. I lift my head and look outside. The windows are streaked with a film of pollen and other dirt. There is a magpie on the fence. The post van arrives and the bird takes off. I go out, walking down the driveway. It is muggy and moist, rain on the way. The postman sees me and smiles. We usually say hello to each another. He even waves to me if he passes me on the road when I am returning from the shops in Slemdal. He is probably keeping an eye out for Emilie too. Driving slower than usual, looking in the gardens, feeling he could catch sight of her at any moment. A foot behind a bush. Something pink protruding from behind a woodpile, from between some trees.

If I am out in the garden when Emilie is passing by, I usually go over to the fence. I pet the little grey poodle and we talk about animals, especially dogs. She is going to join the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals, she has already decided that, and wants to be a vet if her marks in maths are good enough. Because she loves animals and hates to see them suffer. When she grows up she is going to buy a big house where animals that have had a hard time can live. She is going to look after them. There may be so much work with the animals that she will not be able to get married and have children, she tells me, but if it turns out she does have children, she thinks they will enjoy growing up in a house like that, because animals and children like each other, love each other in fact.

Emilie often looks down at the mobile in her hand while walking along, in her lopsided pink Uggs, which she wears all year round. The dog scurries from one side of the road to the other. She lets the lead out too far, I always think when I see her, what will happen if a car comes, if the dog suddenly pulls, makes for the other side of the road and the car does not stop?

I can clearly picture Emilie’s pale, delicate scalp showing through her centre parting, can imagine how it feels to hold that soft, smooth ponytail, pointed at the end, a brush of hair gently prickling the palm of my hand. She always wears the same piece of silver jewellery around her neck: a symbol combining an anchor, a heart and a cross. I had a similar trinket when I was at primary school. A charm. That was what we called them, the little silver figures we wanted as birthday presents, and hung on bracelets. The best was if you had figures no one else had, or at least the same as everyone else had, and everybody had hearts, anchors and crosses. Granny had given me my bracelet, and lots of charms too, I had forgotten that, but I remember now: a cat and a dog, a horseshoe, a four-leaf clover, a unicorn, my star sign, several angels and hearts. We talked about charms on the telephone, about how many different types there were, how new ones were always coming out, and I told her which of these I wanted most. Granny’s voice was cheerful, they are nice, she said, very pretty. Sometimes I received several in the same box from her, and not just at Christmas or on birthdays, I had a large collection in the end, but do not know where they are any longer.

Once I bent down and carefully lifted the trinket from the hollow of Emilie’s neck with my index finger. I wanted to examine it properly, to see if it was the same as mine. The warm, distinctive scent that children have hit me, a combination of hair, soap and something dry, sweet, but perhaps it was as much the absence of smell that I noticed, because children lack that pervasive odour of hormones and private parts.

That’s lovely, I said, I had one just like it. Yes, Emilie said, standing completely still while I examined it, Mummy gave it to me. She said she’d been keeping it for me her whole life. You know that it means faith, hope and charity, don’t you?

A woman in her thirties pushes a buggy up the hill and passes behind the postman. I often see her. I have considered exchanging a few words with her on occasion. I have also been thirty years of age with small children. But she does not seem the type to be interested in others. She is so thin that you might suspect she had an eating disorder, and always wears expensive brands, at least according to Tuva, who knows about that kind of thing. A caricature, Tuva says, a posh, west-side bitch. Her eyebrows are plucked, make-up evenly applied, face closed. She is unlikely to be thinking about Emilie. Perhaps about herself. Thinking about things she wants. Furniture to get. Clothes to buy. Trips to take. Or she is thinking about what she can eat and what she cannot eat. Things like that. You should never judge a book by its cover, I am aware of that, but still, she is a fucking cow. I don’t know why you let yourself get worked up, Tuva says, you don’t even know her. Because Tuva does not know that I am always on the run from my inner self and external things provide a welcome break, in the nature of other people, and Sod’s law. Release. How nice it would be to disappear into the world. It is different for Tuva, she knows so many people, has no need to compensate with either eating disorders or escape, for Tuva nothing is too small to talk about, and she talks to everyone, leans forward over tables, shop counters, information desks, she connects with people. I miss having her around, the sound of her determined footsteps through the rooms, the doors flying open and closing, her face appearing in the doorway: Hi Mum, what’s going on?

I open the gate. I have no shoes on and only a thin cotton skirt covering my legs. The temperature is in the high twenties and there is not a breath of wind. There are two newspapers and an earwig inside the post box. It begins to rain, a warm, light shower that increases in strength throughout the afternoon. I stand by the worktop and drink red wine while listening to the radio and looking at the gravel in the driveway, which has become wet, dark and glistening.

I am nothing but love to the children. Yet I continue to exist for myself.

I hear a rumbling in my stomach and take the crispbread packet from the cupboard, count out five and put cheese on all of them. They taste dry and boring on their own, but together with wine and a few slices of apple they are something else entirely. I do not know if I am eating in order to drink the wine, or drinking the wine so I can manage to eat.

My teeth are sore, or rather my gums I should say, they must be inflamed. I have to ring the dentist, but do not like using the phone any more, not since having a mobile. It makes it hard to concentrate, people calling while I am on the train, while I am walking along busy streets or am in the shower. I jot down messages and appointments on scraps of paper that I leave wherever I was when the phone rang, because it rings when I least expect it, when I have gone to bed, when I am on the toilet, and still I answer it, I have to when somebody wants me for something, it vibrates in my body, in my brain. Landlines are different, they can ring and ring in empty rooms without anyone hearing, or managing to reach them in time, and thus not bothering to try, but I do not have a landline, because I do not know how long I will be able to live in the house. As long as you want, Dad says, because it is his childhood home, but how long is that? Besides, I’m in two minds. I am not sure if I want anything at all, neither want nor do not want. When life drifts on and disappears all the same. Sooner or later memories break down, Dad’s, mine, the children’s, and then the house will fall into the void, out into the open. Whether it is knocked down or not. They may well tear it down soon. Dad and his sisters. There are lots of eventualities you cannot foresee. What did Granny and Granddad want with this house, to play at being grown-ups?

Yesterday I was sitting watching TV in the dark when Beate rang. A sudden blue glow on the coffee table, followed right after by the buzz and vibration of the telephone against the tabletop. I liked that. Two screens glowing for me, and I thought: What is it that goes wrong the whole time, between people?

Family life destroys everything.

And that is how you become a person.

I invited Beate for tea. Not that I needed to. She comes around quite a bit, just as often as Tuva and Georg. I make her food too. I do everything I once longed to do. Prepare tomato soup from scratch. Refrain from upkeep of the house, just clean here and there. Watch TV at all hours. Sleep when I feel like it. That’s the freedom of getting on in years and being divorced, I tell Beate.

I have a fair idea why she comes to visit, but I do not like to think about it, I do not actually want to know any intimate details about Beate’s life, her secret dreams and ambitions. I just want her there in front of me, young, fair-haired and pretty. I am hardly somebody who ought to be admired, I think, quite the contrary, but I cannot deny her, I have to play my role to the full. I am the adult. I am that other. Not her mother, not a relation, I am the alternative. In addition to being an author, something off the beaten track. Oh, if she only knew how it was to negotiate those meandering paths on the outskirts. But she does not. To Beate I am her mother’s exotic friend. I was once her best friend, but now Anita does not want anything to do with me. She is so busy. With what I do not know, but I do not fit into it in any case. She is in a place where the future is open, whether illusory or not. There are things happening in Anita’s life all the time. Over at the university. She has a career there to devote herself to. Colleagues, money and purchasing power go along with that. She buys clothes and other beautiful items, trips and experiences, she is thriving. And me, what am I doing? I do not quite know, I wander in the shadows, and if there is one thing Anita does not want, it is shadows. Darkness and loss. I can understand that. But then neither is she exposed to the power of thoughts, those distinct thoughts, unforeseen, unexpected ones that elevate you. Stirring something great, penetrating, opening impression after impression and making the world a different place, for a while at least.

But suppose she does concern herself with the big questions too, imagine she does have everything, and I am just someone who has lost out?

I have baked lemon cakes and a kringle for Beate’s visit. The cakes are resting on the green glass platter, sunlight flickering here and there on the worktop, which has not been oiled for a long time, and the wood has absorbed some stains. Why does it bring tears to my eyes? Because it is beautiful, and beautiful things do one good, and good things are painful.

I think too much.

Good things are dangerous. They bring shame.

Good things always slip away.

First the thoughts are here, then they are not.

Beate is standing in the middle of the kitchen with a bag of Twist chocolates in one hand and a new handbag in the other, or an old one rather, bought in a second-hand shop, with a catch that could surely be described as – I cannot think of the word, the image is hazy. That is surely – no. That closes securely. No, that was not what I meant. It’s retro, Beate says, and that helps, because I know what retro means, it comes from the French retriever, to get or fetch back again, recover, or as it says in the dictionary: Retriever, breed of dog used for retrieving game. But fetch what: handbags, letters, boxes of old photographs and account books, merely things others have left behind, and after all what did they know about us? I have lots of stuff like that, old stuff: letters, post office delivery notes about parcels filled with goodies on their way, postal orders, and several folders with summaries of assets and division of inheritance. Mahogany, crystal and jewellery. Easy chairs and a painting.

The catch must be a hundred years old, and as Beate tightens the strap and sticks the prong of the buckle through, something happens in my head, I see visions and hear voices: Mama. Women fill the room (is it a church service?) wearing heavy, clammy dresses, there is powder and dust in the air, unfamiliar smells (naphthalene, camphor, sweat?). When I die I will take these images with me to the grave. The women’s feet are freezing and the sweat within the dresses makes them even chillier. How are they supposed to regulate their hormones? Their bodies are perched, out of balance, but at least they can sit idle for a while, rest, half-asleep, gazing listlessly at the untreated wood on the back of the pew in front.

Is my life a result of this, an imbalance, a skewed relationship between wealth and earnings, work and rest, gender and longing?

My thoughts are out of control, I cannot steer the visions, I am a novel without a plot. Because an intrigue implies something definite, but I cannot manage to find the words for what that is. Just know it. And I am supposed to be some kind of writer? Is there something wrong with me, I wonder, growing frightened, am I sick, suffering the onset of dementia?

Do you think I’m very absent-minded, I ask Beate, but Beate’s mind is filled with thoughts of men. It must be, after all she is only twenty and has not had a boyfriend yet. Not that I know of anyhow. Beate in tight-fitting, faded jeans and thick mascara. Do men scare her, or does she scare them? And how is that I, a middle-aged woman, cannot formulate an answer to this question: Is it normal for young women to be frightened of men? All my experiences and memories suddenly flutter, come loose, blow away, and rush off, I am sat here and I know nothing. And this ‘am sat’. I have never used that before. Do I not always say ‘am sitting’? I AM SITTING HERE AND I DO NOT KNOW. Christ above. It is like one of the songs they play at the gym: Fuck you. Fuck you-ou-ou. That’s how it goes. One random word says it all. That is as close as I get at the moment. But Lily Allen has a tune – fuck you-ou-ou – I do not, I only have an isolated word or two. That means it is probably not Alzheimer’s after all, because at least then there are other words, instead of saying ‘knickers’ you come out with ‘glasses’, and instead of ‘man’ you say ‘cry’, and that makes for a different jigsaw puzzle, but the overall picture makes no sense, it is chaotic. It is rather the password that I lack, the key, the tune. A plot presupposes at least one connection. A causal connection.

I put on Leonard Cohen, it is for Beate’s sake, I have to give her something with love, but I do not know if Beate understands what I want her to hear in the line where he says, if it’s the person’s will, he won’t speak anymore, he will still his voice, as before.

I know what he means but I cannot say it, it would sound ridiculous, not just to Beate but to anyone, to try and explain an intuitive understanding with exalted, religious concepts. Besides, what is the point in consoling someone who is not sad?

Beate is not unhappy, as well as which my son could not possibly seem frightening to girls. Granted, Georg is himself young, just turned nineteen, but I cannot picture him ever becoming a man it was dangerous to fall in love with. I still maintain that everything is different for the young, for Beate, Georg and Tuva. They are not aware, nor should they be aware, of how things can go the wrong way, how a girl can practically invite a man to cause her pain. Penetration entails that. What is it about that, or the absence of it? That accounts for so many unhappy moments. It is beyond the reckoning of time, but that is hardly a sensible answer. It can be just as pleasurable as painful, but you do not know when it is going to be one or the other, you do not know why, and sometimes it can be both simultaneously. Is it perhaps a break in the narrative, in the personal storyline? Before it begins again, and moves in another direction?

I am not supposed to be able to explain everything.

I cannot.

Gender values change.

I hardly know anything.

These circumstances begin anew every day.

I am not lonely, not in the physical sense. Actually, yes, of course, particularly in the physical sense. The body is always alone. But seen from the outside. No. A mother is not lonely.

On occasion, I go to Halvorsen’s bakery with Mum and Dad, it is a compromise, because Dad would rather not spend money on cafés or restaurants. But Halvorsen’s is different. Granny would always take him there when he was small and buy him a millefeuille. Pity you can’t eat two slices, he says, lifting the plate and licking it clean, but they’re so bloody expensive. Mum looks another way. So eat two, you can afford it, she says. But the second one doesn’t taste as good, he replies, you mustn’t have too much of something. Nor too little, Mum mumbles, and asks for a top-up of her coffee.

Or nothing at all, I think. Nor the opposite of not getting: being pushed away.

I speak to old friends on the telephone sometimes. The mobile vibrates and lights up, and I do have a social life of sorts. Sometimes we meet up and drink wine. Knut calls me up every now and again as well, to talk about the children. He does not visit of course. That would not be on, him being my ex-husband. That is how he speaks, that is one of his stock phrases: That kind of thing is just not on. Actually, did he not die? It feels like that at times, and I grieve. I sometimes ask Tuva as well: Is he alive? Oh yeah, absolutely, she will reply, in such a way that I gather he is very much in evidence. With his obstinacy, no doubt. But he loves the children.

I would love to hold his hand, tell him loneliness drove us apart, but that it was not our fault. It was all God’s fault. Thoughts like that make me well up. Everything could have been so good, could it not? Love, no bed of roses? Then I remember. The irritation and everything just building up: anger, furious anger, the subsequent cold stand-off and finally nothing at all. He was so tight-fisted and so demanding. He was a drain on me, a huge drain and I was so empty.

You should get him a dog, I tell Tuva. It might be good for him. Mum, she says, laughing. You’re the one who needs a dog.