7

Trine has been down to Kaffebrenneriet and bought herself a large latte and a blueberry muffin, which she’s already eaten. She’s gotten undressed again and put on her dressing gown, and now realizes that this is what she wants to do, more than anything: to sit in bed with a paper cup between her hands while Oslo—the capital city of Oslo, which she’d thought she would get such a buzz from, now that she’s here on her first trip without Haldis—Oslo can just stay shivering outside her hotel window. She’s deeply disgusted by herself: all of a sudden she feels it, that she’s so bored of herself and her drastic and sarcastic ways of flaunting her sexuality, especially when she’s doing it on the back of a relationship in which sexuality had been very much at the forefront, as a way of sneering at the relationship, and at herself. These ploys, these exaggerated gestures—tongues lolling out of mouths, figs rubbing against clitorises, secrets painted with gin and vaginal juice on paper—doesn’t it all just feel like meat that’s become too dry to chew, doesn’t her mouth just feel tired of all this chewing, isn’t her body rejecting all that dried meat, isn’t her body gagging and forcing her mouth to spit it all out, despite the fact that the dry meat is actually her own tongue? Yes.

*   *   *

Her phone rings. It says Wanda on the screen. The very same Wanda whom we saw earlier sweating in Frognerparken, lying in her teenage bedroom smoking, is now calling Trine. What links Wanda and Trine together in this universe is a very liquid evening at the end of a theater studies course they both took when they were students a number of years ago, when they drank each other under the table, quite literally: they lay under the table and discovered that there were many reasons why the two of them, out of all the people in the class, should be so attracted to each other, as friends, that is: they were both die-hard fans of PJ Harvey, and they both thought that most other girls were uninteresting and all seemed to be kind of unaware of their androgynous potential. Wanda would definitely choose Tracey Emin over Karen Kilimnik’s glitter palace any day, but her favorite piece from the “Postfeminist Art” exhibition would actually be Sarah Lucas’s Self Portrait with Fried Eggs, where the artist is sitting leaned back in a chair, in a rather masculine way, with a fried egg on each breast. And that very same Wanda is now phoning Trine, and the name Wanda flashes on the display four times before Trine pulls herself together and answers. Hi, Trine says. Hello, Wanda replies. Great performance yesterday. Yes, but there wasn’t much chance to speak, Trine says. No, you left early, Wanda says. Yes, Trine replies, I had a headache. It was fucking good, what you did, Wanda says. Thanks, Trine says. I mean, Wanda continues, you had just the right distance to motherhood, unlike all the others of your kind. What do you mean by “my kind”? Trine asks. She knows that Wanda hates mothers with buggies in cafés; I mean café moms, Wanda says. It hasn’t exactly been used that much, has it, the grotesque side of motherhood, Wanda says. Oh, I don’t know, Trine says, thing is, my tits were so full of milk they were bursting and I had to do something about it before the performance I was actually going to do, so what you saw was in fact Desperate Mother Milks Herself in Restroom. Wanda laughs. If I was going to do something about grotesque motherhood, Trine says, I would have just lain down and given birth, and then wandered around with bleeding nipples under a big hospital gown, and those lovely net panties you get that go up over your sagging belly, and the huge diaper that chafes against your ass and still you leave a trail of wet bloody patches behind you. That would have been something. Or I could have created a performance titled New Young Mother Tries to Welcome Visitors Who Don’t Understand How Crap It Is Not to Be Able to Put Your Own Baby to Your Breast When Other People Are Watching. Wanda laughs. But that’s what I thought was so fucking good, Wanda said, that you included that aspect, the reckless in relation to the grotesque. I’ve just seen Kill Bill: Vol. 2, Wanda says, and proceeds to explain what she sees as the main problem with the film, as we’ve discussed earlier, in other words, that everything The Bride does in film number two is rooted in and justified by the most typical of all female roles, namely, that of being a mother, looking after a child, not least, Wanda says, because she was let down by her partner! So, driven by maternal instinct! As though women can’t think! I don’t know, Trine says, she thinks Wanda sounds agitated, and that’s quite a heavy analysis for this early in the morning, she can hear that Wanda’s on the move, she can hear high heels clacking. Have you bought some new shoes? Trine asks, to get away from the mother discussion, Wanda never wears clacking heels. Yes, Wanda says, almost taken aback, because she hadn’t remembered that she was wearing them as she stomped about in her room, she bought them on the way back from running, they were standing there, so red and resilient, in a shop window, they’re fucking cool, red patent leather with high heels, Wanda says. They’ll look good onstage as well, Wanda adds, I’m breaking them in. Trine hears her take a drag on a cigarette. Where was Kåre then, yesterday? Trine asks. It’s over, Wanda says, there’s a kind of breeziness to her voice, Trine hears her blowing out the smoke, yep, it’s over and it’s fine. No doldrums for me. Oh, I’m sorry to hear that, Trine says, that it’s finished, I mean, not that you’re not in the doldrums, that’s good, obviously, Trine says, and thinks: red patent high-heeled shoes, the ability to spot a metaphor is obviously the first thing you lose when you’re down! But naturally, she doesn’t say that. She feels sympathy, she sympathizes with Wanda and the fact that she, the toughest cookie in the universe, is walking around in red patent high heels indoors, because she’s probably totally crushed. Well, Wanda says, it was about time, really. He’s an author, I’m a musician, it was never really meant to last. He’s forty-three, I’m twenty-eight, our lives are different. Clack, clack, clack over the floor. But yeah, we’ll have to meet up next time you’re here, Wanda says. Yes, we’ll have to, Trine repeats, and then they hang up, and Wanda takes off the red shoes because her feet are all sweaty, and Trine touches her tender breasts and thinks it would be good to do a piece about the maternal instinct, which could make you kill without hesitation. Wanda doesn’t understand. Wanda, Trine thinks, quite obviously doesn’t have painful breasts bursting with milk. She leans against the wall briefly and feels how hard and sore her breasts are. She has to do it again. She has to milk herself. She has to find a small bottle and milk herself. She wonders if Wanda will ever experience this, if Wanda will ever have bleeding nipples because they’ve been sucked by a newborn, and will develop black scabs over her nipples, like a revolting cock’s comb, welding all the small channels in the nipples together and stopping the milk from coming out, and if she’ll ever stand in the shower with her hands cupped over her breasts so the water jet won’t hit her nipples. If Wanda will sit on the edge of the bed the day after she’s given birth, and stare at her legs, the naked shins and thighs, and think that they look so thin and defenseless, on the hospital bed, sticking out in that way, from under the big hospital gown that rasps against her nipples, her legs pointing down at the floor. And if she’ll pad around in the big hospital gown, which all new mothers wear, when she finally manages to walk without fainting, pad around without any trousers or socks on, because she can’t bear to put on her trousers and socks, she can’t bear anything, even though they’re encouraged to wear their own clothes when they leave the wards and wander around in the hospital corridors so that they don’t look like demotivating wrecks for the mothers who haven’t given birth yet, if she’ll look at herself in a mirror and see an unknown creature, as though she’s something the wind just blew in through the window, and then, suddenly, be a mother pushing a sleeping, newborn baby, whom no one knows at all, but who has tiny white milk spots on its nose, down the corridors in a clear plastic crib, a freshly hatched mother who is almost invisible in her huge gown, with the exception of her bare legs and thighs poking out from underneath.