At last she looked up from the computer.
‘Name and National Insurance number, please,’ she said, ‘and a little more too would be nice,’ she said with her eyes fixed on mine, though slightly out of focus, almost successfully hiding her lack of interest, and she was only doing her job, and in that rather uninterested way she let her gaze fall down along the buttons on my jacket, one, two, three, four, all the way back to the screen, where her fingertips hovered exactly two centimetres above the keyboard, waiting for me to give her the information. I had seen her before, the last time I was here, when she was new and a bit awkward, she wasn’t that now, and she didn’t recognise me. Why should she. I gave her my name and number, which I knew off by heart, not everyone did, and it felt like being in the army, I thought, when she turned to me the way she did, as they had done right after we had moved from the neighbourhood into Oslo, and I showed up for the military service health check at Akershus Fortress and was weighed and found too light. I
wanted
to join the army, to be sent to Helgelandsmoen, to Haslemoen or all the way up to Bardufoss in the north, in any case as far away as I could get from my mother and Grorud which was only a sad stopover between Mørk and what was perhaps the rest of my life, but I never went to any of those places because they didn’t want me. My hands probably trembled a little too much for their taste, and now I couldn’t help my back straightening as I stood there in the Social Security office. That was so typical me. I tried to loosen up, lower my shoulders, perhaps put my hands in my pockets, but then I was suddenly clenching my right hand, I opened it and clenched it and I opened it and clenched it again, I couldn’t stop myself, and I looked down, and my fist was so tightly knotted that the knuckles were sticking up like white mountain peaks, the Rockies, the Carpathians, and my nails were cutting into my palm, and I thought, did I forget to take my pills this morning. I couldn’t remember taking them, if I had taken them before or after I went fishing. But I never forgot to take them. That was why I couldn’t remember. You don’t remember what you never fail to do, that is common knowledge, and obviously I feared the consequences. I knew what could happen if I didn’t take the pills, and I thought, is that what is happening to me now, and I felt dizzy and leaned over and grabbed the edge of her desk with one hand, and she stared stiffly at my hand and said:
‘One year,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Then new rules apply. Do you understand. You can’t be off sick any longer.’
‘I know,’ I said. ‘I know all that.’
‘Well, I sincerely hope you do,’ she said, and I thought, who is she to talk to me like that. If I had been Tommy I would have started swearing, I would have leaned forward with both hands on her desk, knuckles down, and said: What did you fucking say. But I wasn’t Tommy, I had barely used a swear word in my life, so instead I withdrew my hand and clenched it again. I closed my eyes and said:
‘I need to talk to someone in charge.’
‘You certainly do,’ she said.
I opened my eyes.
‘You can sit over there and wait,’ she said, pointing. ‘It’ll be a while.’
‘Do you think I’m an idiot,’ I said.
‘What.’
‘Do you think I’m an idiot.’
‘Oh, Christ,’ she said. ‘Just sit down,’ but I didn’t. I felt strangely giddy. My hearing’s gone, I thought. I cannot carry myself any more, I cannot raise myself. I cannot. It’s over. And that thought came as a great relief, like a gentle breeze, an open window, and I opened my hand, and my fingernails stopped digging into my palms, and I just let go.
Then finally I did as I was told. I walked over and sat down on one of the chairs by the wall, and already I felt different, lighter somehow, no, not lighter, airier maybe, something to do with space, room, receding walls. I was looser, yes, I felt looser. I had no idea what that meant, whether it was good for me or bad. But that wasn’t the point. Whether it was good or bad. The point was that it didn’t matter. That’s what was new.
I sat there for twenty minutes. Or more. It was probably not so unusual.
My caseworker was also young, not much more than thirty-five, maybe younger, but it was of no consequence to me inside his office in the corridor behind what you might call the sluice gate. I didn’t get upset, and he said what I knew he would say, that now, after a year, I was not entitled to any more sickness benefit, and I said I knew, and he said that now some decisions would have to be made and from now on they would be obliged to keep a closer eye on me, as he was sure I understood, and the task we had to resolve, the Social Security staff and me, and after that the Job Centre, was to get me back to work as quickly as possible, because of course now I wasn’t ill any longer, I was unemployed. But then I said that, strictly speaking, I could have any job I wanted, at least within the Norwegian library service, and probably other jobs in that field or in fields like it, and then he said, yes, that may be the case, but right now you are here, and you are
not
working in that area or any other, and then I said that was because I was on sick leave, that’s why, I said, and then he got irritated and said that he was fully aware of that, it was why I was here, he said, and I said, yes, precisely. Are you trying to be funny, he said, and he could sit there saying that and being twenty years younger than me, are you after benefits, he said. What, I said, what do you mean am I after benefits. Are you after a disability benefit, he said, disability benefit, I said, am I an invalid, I said, do I seem like an invalid to you. No, he said, not really, good, I said, because I’m not an invalid, and I don’t know what he was thinking as he sat there, twenty years younger than me, did he think I was quarrelsome, cantankerous, a troublemaker. He might well have done, but I was none of those things because what I said, I said calmly. I wasn’t nervous now, I wasn’t sitting ramrod straight with my knees together, on the contrary, my body felt relaxed, and free, and I was sitting quietly on the chair with my arms on the rests, without a twitch on my face, truthfully answering the questions he asked, and I wasn’t trying to be funny, or, well, perhaps a little funny, because that’s what it was now, in here, a little funny. I thought it was. What he didn’t get, I thought, was how relaxed I felt, how little tension I felt, and free and easy and not after anything at all. Absolutely nothing. It was a bit of a surprise to me too, in fact, because I hadn’t really seen it from that angle before, or if I had, it was long ago. I smiled, and he suddenly smiled back, and I thought, I don’t have to keep doing this. I don’t.
‘Here,’ he said, placing three forms one on top of the other and pushing them across the desk. ‘Would you mind filling in these and taking them with you to the Job Centre.’ He smiled. I smiled back. I took the forms and stood up, put them into my left hand and shook his hand with my right.
‘This will all be fine,’ he said, and I smiled.
I closed his office door behind me, and walked up the corridor feeling very calm, and around the desk where the young woman sat. She turned, looked at me and said:
‘That wasn’t so bad, was it.’
I smiled. She smiled back and she was very young and enthusiastic all of a sudden, and I walked past her between the tables where the men were still sitting hunched over their forms on every chair, and I dropped my own forms into a paper basket so conveniently placed beside one of the tables, and on to the door, which I opened, and I was out on the stairwell. I could feel how I was still smiling, so I stopped.
NOTHING CAME OF
my sea-going plan. I had told Tommy I was going and I meant it. I had been so confident, so determined, I had felt there was no other way out, and I knew where to turn and who would help me leave. I wasn’t the only person in Mørk who wanted to go to sea, I knew several who had gone already. But I hadn’t sworn an oath.
Tommy didn’t need me, I was sure of that. So it wasn’t because of him that I stayed home. On the contrary, I think he found it harder to see me as often as he did before, because everything was different after the evening he sat beside me crying behind the Co-op by Lake Mørk in the cold and dark, and all of a sudden it was me who had to comfort him and not the other way around.
He didn’t come to Mørk on the Wednesday evening, two days later. He had said he would. I had stood by Lysbu’s green pumps waiting, and I was a little nervous and unsure of which Tommy I would be meeting, whether it was the new, sad Tommy, in which case I would have to pull myself together and show tenderness and leadership, or the old Tommy, the one standing at the helm. But I didn’t see him that evening, and he didn’t come on Thursday either. I had stood at the petrol station by the green pumps waiting for an hour every evening until the weekend was over, and at last he was there with his bike on the Monday, and we walked down to the lake as usual and sat on our rocks, but he didn’t stay long. He was restless and distracted, and the conversation we had was going nowhere. After that he came less and less often.
Time passed. I changed. I could feel it myself. From my window on the first floor of the house where I lived with the Lydersens, I could see the BP station through an alleyway between the Old People’s Home and Mørk Machinery. I saw cars driving in and out again with their tanks full and sometimes I saw old Lysbu come from the shop into the daylight or the evening’s lamplight to help drivers who were in trouble, who had never once looked under their car bonnets or changed their windscreen wipers, and then he would go out of my field of vision and return a little later, on his way to the door. I don’t know why the sight of Lysbu always had a calming effect on me, as though nothing could be all bad as long as he was here, whether it was something to do with his body and the placid, unruffled way he moved or his equally placid voice, or his gaze, and I wondered sometimes whether anyone else felt the same way about him as I did. For years Lysbu had said he wanted to move, he was truly sick of the place, he said, of Mørk, but he was still here, and it made me happy. It was hard to imagine that one day he might be gone. If you could picture Mørk as a big wheel, maybe a bicycle wheel, with its shiny spokes pointing in all directions, Lysbu was the hub. For me at least.
If someone had been standing by the pumps, waiting under those lamps at night, or in the daytime, as now, in spring, it would also have been easy for me to see them from my window.
On this evening in May I was going up to Valmo for handball training. It was my first session. It was important, I had made a lot of friends. After long hesitation and thinking about Tommy and the twins and our house and our lives in that house, I had to make a decision, and then I just dived in. Instead of going to sea when I was sixteen, I finished school in Valmo so that I could start at the
gymnas
in the autumn, and to everyone’s surprise, in no time at all I was top of the class, and now several of the other girls wanted me to play up front in the school handball team. And I said I would love to. I had barely touched a handball, but I knew right away I was going to be good. Everyone did. That was why they asked. For a while everything I touched turned to gold. In the playground, Jackman, our gym teacher, said to me, you’re riding a green wave now, which was supposed to have something to do with traffic lights and cars, but we didn’t have traffic lights in Mørk and never would. Make the most of this time, he said. Later in life you’ll be glad you did. And I did make the most of it. I wanted to move on.
And now I had to hurry. I was lucky. It was quite a ride to Valmo, but this first time I didn’t have to cycle the long way up and the long way back down. It was fifteen kilometres in each direction. A neighbour had said he could take me in his car. He was a devoted member of the congregation, of course, and quite an important one, and also a good friend of Lydersen. I didn’t mind. He was going up that way anyhow and would come back down again at a suitable time and didn’t mind dropping me off and picking me up.
I packed my bag with my kit and trainers and a towel and a big red elastic hairband, and my hair was long now and a lot blonder than when I lived in the neighbourhood. It changed so quickly everyone could see it. Before, it was Tommy who helped me keep my hair tidy, right from the time Mum left. Dad never noticed how I looked. When it grew too long, Tommy cut it straight across at the back, from earlobe to earlobe, and we both thought it looked fine, like the pictures in women’s magazines, a little French, we thought, although not everyone at school thought the same. OK, that’ll do you for a while, Tommy would say, as hairdressers did, and he tickled my neck, and we both laughed, but now I just let it grow and wore a slide at school or tied it in a ponytail when we had gym.
I put my diary under the dresser, which is what you do, you hide it, and took my gym bag from the bed and looked out of the window one last time before leaving, and there was Tommy by the pumps. It was May and the evenings were long and it was easy for me to see that it was him. No one else held his shoulders the way he did. It had been a long time, all of four years had passed since they moved us from our house and pulled us apart, and most of the autumn and winter of that year had come and gone without us seeing much of each other, and then it was spring and summer, and autumn again and he cycled to Mørk with Christmas presents, as he had done the year before, and the year before that. He had made them himself in Jonsen’s garage, where they got up to all kinds of things except studying the engine of Jonsen’s car, an Opel something or other, what did I care, and the twins made their presents on the kitchen table at the Liens’ house. On my birthday Tommy even came up to the house and knocked on the door, but he wasn’t let in. Lydersen shook his head and said he had to stay out on the doorstep. I didn’t argue, I never argued with Lydersen. I did as he told me unless he was unreasonable. When he was, I dropped whatever I was doing and refused to lift a finger and turned my back on him, and most often he took the hint, he wasn’t all that bad, and standing outside was fine, it wasn’t so cold even though it was midwinter.