I Refuse (17 page)

But I couldn’t remember why I tried to hang myself. Actually I couldn’t remember being mad, either. Or ill. If that sounds better. In which way I was ill. On the contrary, I felt normal, I felt that the world was as I knew it, and I too was the way I was supposed to be. I felt I was in tune with the world. I really did. But something must have been wrong, because they kept me in the Bunker for almost four months and didn’t let me out until summer was at the door looking in.

But then a thought came to to me.

Suddenly I remembered a pack of cigarettes, twenty Marlboro, a white cardboard packet with black lettering and a red flip top, and how I was always skint at the time because I didn’t have a job like Tommy did, I was at the
gymnas
, and my mother didn’t earn a great deal as a teacher, and she definitely didn’t keep me in cigarettes. So someone must have bought the pack for me, and this someone had done that at the kiosk in the hospital foyer. There was something about those cigarettes, they had a terribly bitter taste, and it scared me and I wondered if some mistake had been made in the factory, or if they had added too much of an ingredient they used in the tobacco, a secret ingredient in fact, and the factory workers had to sign a statement saying they had no knowledge of it, and the purpose of this ingredient was of course to make me more than usually addicted to this particular brand of cigarette, and now the cigarettes in precisely this pack, produced not so many weeks before, had become so toxic they could kill me. And it must have been Tommy who bought me the pack because my mother would never have done it, no matter how much money she earned or didn’t earn, nor anyone else in the close family, which wasn’t that big anyway, but they were all of them Bible Belt Christians and fierce opponents of the disgusting habit I had acquired. And so the big question was: did Tommy know about the ingredient and what it might lead to if there was too much of it. Did he know what might happen to me. I couldn’t rule it out. That was my thinking then. That I couldn’t rule it out. That Tommy knew. And after two cigarettes I felt really ill and threw the pack in a skip behind the hospital, so no one else would find it and suffer harm, a tramp maybe or a desperate thirteen-year-old girl rooting around, and I waited until I was absolutely sure that this particular batch, manufactured on this particular day, a Monday probably, was out of circulation before buying another pack. It took all I had. For I was addicted because of this special ingredient. It required willpower. But I did it. And it was after that week that Fredrik started smoking. When I started again. There wasn’t much else I would rather do than smoke back then, so I didn’t take the opportunity to stop. I may have had regrets about that later, but it wasn’t an option at the time.

Twice Fredrik asked me how I had landed in the Bunker. That was how we phrased it: landed, we said, as though we were golf balls hit at random by an amateur player, and like balls we flew in a curve through the air and ended up in a bush or a copse, or landed here, of all places, and then of course this was where we’d been heading all along.

‘I tried to hang myself,’ I said, which was true. But that wasn’t enough for him. Yes, but
why
did I try to hang myself, there must be a reason for it, he said, and that was why I was here, wasn’t it, not because of the hanging itself. And when he said it like that, I became unsure, because he wasn’t stupid, he was just a little mad, and it sounded logical. But whenever I tried to think back to the time before the woodshed, everything disintegrated, all my thoughts, all my memories, all my words flowed to the corners of my brain, to the margins where things lay forgotten and abandoned, like in empty, disused factory buildings, and didn’t want to be reconnected.

So I didn’t know what to answer. He was probably right. But the thing was, I couldn’t remember why I had tried to hang myself. No one told me, either. Not the doctors, not my mother. Perhaps they didn’t know. Perhaps I spent four months there without anyone finding out why. And they just let time pass, popped pills down my throat and hoped for the best. It hadn’t struck me until now, here in this café in Lillestrøm, where I was having a late lunch or an early dinner, that I had always assumed that someone understood why I did what I did and had treated me accordingly, and even though I couldn’t remember anything, the doctors, or my mother, could have told me why at any given point, if that was what they had wanted to do, or if
I
had wanted them to. But that I hadn’t.

To begin with, I pretended that the ward I’d been placed in was just like any other ward. And that was fine for a while, I had always been good at that, thinking my way into a role and simply becoming it and going through the motions as though I had an invisible audience, but the strange thing was that the role I always ended up playing was
myself
. It’s not so easy to explain. But as time passed it was hard to ignore the fact that in other wards people lay in beds, not only at night, but also most of the day, and when they no longer had to, by and large they were sent home. In the Bunker we didn’t lie in bed during the day. Some of us didn’t lie in our beds at night either, but wandered restlessly through the corridors, and then we were given pills that knocked us out so fast that if we weren’t near our beds when we swallowed them, we might not have made it there, but instead have fallen asleep on the floor on our way back. It happened to me a couple of times too. They were some pills.

The weeks passed, and when Tommy stopped coming, my mother was my only visitor. I saw nothing of Siri, but it can’t have been easy for her, I understood that, and gradually she faded from my mind and in the end I didn’t think about her any more.

I had some friends in my class in Valmo, and I had a good relationship with a couple of the teachers. They thought I was clever, more than averagely clever, and attentive and often capable of giving to the classes something extra, which they appreciated, and sometimes we talked about history and sociology outside the classroom too, and then we would stand around in the playground, or in the corridor, talking for such a long time that even the teacher was late for class. It could have been with either of them. Most often it was with Mathiesen, who taught history. He was a member of the Sosialistisk Folkeparti.

Neither of them came to visit me. I thought it was a little strange, I must say, that more people didn’t come to see me, I had really thought that those I knew from school, a couple of them at least, would come, no matter which ward I was in. But, they didn’t. Sometimes I wondered whether my mother had perhaps rung around and told people I couldn’t have any visitors because I had to rest, although the doctors hadn’t said anything to that effect, rather the opposite, but it seemed unlikely, even to me in my state. And now here I was, in this café, more than thirty years later, and I realised that it was exactly what she had done.

My mother was dead now, so I couldn’t ask her to confirm that what I thought was correct. Perhaps she would have denied it. Perhaps not. We became closer at the end, she fell ill, it was cancer, there was nothing they could do, the doctors at the hospital said, it was too late. Then she told me who my father was. He wasn’t from Mørk, he was from the Sørland, I had never heard of him before, and when she told me, nothing happened, I felt nothing.

During the last weeks they gave her morphine to relieve the pain, and it sent her floating in and out of this world, while I mostly sat at the foot of the bed reading some literary classic, back then it would have been D.H. Lawrence, and his thirst for life lay burning in my hands inside the cool, darkened hospital room.

When she was conscious I sat by her pillow, and truly, we did have a nice time together, and I wondered whether she would know, when she was finally letting go and was about to depart, right then, at the moment when she slipped the moorings, whether she would feel her hand opening, and if she did, would it come as a relief, would she say to me: ‘Jim, I’m dying now. It’s fine. Don’t be sad.’

I was forty when she died. During her illness I went to see her every day at home and later at the hospital, if nothing very important cropped up, and mostly it didn’t. It was as though there had only ever been the two of us. That was not correct. There were long spells when I never saw her. She didn’t like my wife, Eva, I don’t know why, she just didn’t like her, and she made that so abundantly clear that I had to take the consequences and be loyal to the person I was married to, I had no choice, and as a result the stretches between my visits to her flat in Grorud became longer and longer, and when I did come, I always came alone.

But none of this mattered now, I didn’t want to think about it any more. She died, things became what they became, and whether or not she had rung around to friends and acquaintances to tell them not to visit me in the Bunker, she definitely must have rung Tommy.

WE STOOD OUTSIDE
by the entrance to the Central Hospital. Jim had a cigarette between his lips, the smoke drifted towards the doors in the wind and was sucked through to the foyer whenever someone passed on their way in or out, and when the smoke got in his face he squeezed his eyes shut. His skin was black beneath his eyes and the skin around the bridge of his nose was red, as though his glasses had left marks, but he didn’t use glasses. He looked like Dylan on
Blonde on Blonde
,
that
tense. The weather was spring-like, the days had been light and warm, but then it suddenly changed and the temperature was in free fall, and the roads were unexpectedly slippery and icy as I came in from Mørk very early in the morning in Jonsen’s old Opel Kapitän. He had given me a day off from the sawmill. He had known Jim as long as he had known me and was worried and felt sorry for him. Tell him I said hello, Jonsen said.

There was a smoking room on every floor in the hospital, but Jim didn’t want to smoke inside, he wanted to smoke outside by the entrance. He didn’t smoke inside the house either, in Mörk, his mother didn’t want any of it, it’s not appropriate behaviour for a Christian, she said, and then he had to go out on the doorstep, and there he often stood. It was a well-known sight in the neighbourhood.

‘You don’t smoke in a hospital,’ he said. ‘You don’t do that, do you. You don’t.’

‘Jesus. Sure you don’t.’

Jim was wearing a thin, white hospital smock with only a T-shirt underneath, and he was so cold he was trembling, but not a line in his face moved. He stared into the air past my ear and smoked and thought hard about something that concerned himself only, not me, or so I assumed, as he didn’t say anything, and I felt out of place, lonely, an odd feeling to have when you’re standing next to your best friend in the cold, and I had driven so far to get here, more than forty kilometres, and he was constantly shifting his weight from one foot to the other, and it looked strange, but I don’t think it was because he was cold. I don’t know why he was doing that. We hadn’t seen each other much over the recent months although the distance between our houses, between Jonsen’s house and his mother’s, was still the same. But he went to the
gymnas
in Valmo and caught the bus early in the morning and came home late and was the star pupil there, even at gym he had become pretty good, in spite of the smoking, and I, for my part, worked overtime several days a week. The prices for timber were high now, and many farmers had taken out great swathes of timber from their forests that winter and just as many were at the other end, waiting impatiently to build new houses now that spring had arrived, and not only farmers, there were lots of different people wanting to build, it was like a boom. So we were cutting planks and battens as fast as greased lightning, and then everything had to go through the drier, and on both sides of the supply chain there was a queue, it was non-stop and it was driving us crazy. I barely had any sleep, and in fact I was absolutely exhausted. I would have loved to spend a day under the duvet, or more, but Jim looked like a junkie now, his face was haggard like a junkie’s face, that’s what struck me the first time I went to see him down in the Bunker, as it was called by the inmates. He had tried to hang himself in the woodshed. But the heating season was still on and his mother found him at the last minute when she went to the shed to fetch firewood in the bin, and after two days in intensive care and two more in rehab he was moved to the psychiatric ward, in the Bunker.

‘Jonsen says hello,’ I said.

‘What,’ Jim said.

‘Jonsen says hello. He told me to tell you.’

‘Oh, right.’

I had been to the hospital before he was moved to the psychiatric ward. That first night I drove in when he was still in intensive care. His mother had rung me and said, I guess you want to know that your friend has tried to take his own life. There was something about the way she said it. I had always assumed that she liked me, even if she must have thought I took God’s name in vain too easily, and the Devil’s too, but there was an edge to her voice now that hadn’t been there before, and I was not only sorry and frightened for Jim, I felt ill at ease. He’s at the Central Hospital, she said, and rang off, and I stood there with the receiver in my hand, and then I too put the phone down and went to Jonsen and asked him if I could borrow his car. My old Mercedes was in Lysbu’s garage with faulty brakes.

‘Of course you can borrow the car,’ he said. ‘Has something happened.’

He lay in bed in intensive care with his eyes wide open staring at the ceiling, but he did not see me. He probably didn’t see anything, and if he was thinking anything at all, as he was lying there, almost strapped to the bed, I had no idea what it would be. He had bandages around his neck, and his breath was wheezing in and out and not like he used to breathe all those times I listened to him at night after my father had gone wild and I had to stay over at Jim’s house and lie beside him in bed, and his breathing was so quiet you’d have thought he was dead and you had to lean over to make sure he wasn’t, and sometimes nudge his shoulder a little. Then he woke up at once and opened his eyes and smiled an invisible smile and said, just five minutes more, Mum, and went back to sleep. As quietly as before. Or the time we slept on the ridge by the fire lookout tower. We had set off straight after school and up through the woods. It was early autumn, and crisp, and there was hoar frost in the morning, frost in the evening, and we were going to put up a bivouac and make the roof as weatherproof as we could and sleep inside if there was rain. Or snow. But then darkness fell much quicker in the forest than we had expected, and we couldn’t put anything up.