I Refuse (23 page)

‘The same to you,’ I said, and she left, and I watched her as she walked away. I took my handkerchief from my pocket and wiped my forehead. That was some kiss. When she was halfway down the high street on her way to the station, she turned and waved. I raised my hand. Then I walked back in through the swing doors and took the escalator up to Level 2.

In the gallery, I walked past the boutiques, not even looking at the signs and the names they displayed, and stopped right on the shiny track set in the floor between the gallery and the café, where you could pull a wide security grille across when the café was closed, so that no one could get in and make mayhem and steal, and now there were three people queuing at the counter. They had trays with piles of food, it was going to be a while, and even more customers might come to have dinner, not lunch, but I just stood waiting. And I didn’t really think anything. I just stood there. I didn’t know what I had imagined. That she would come out from behind the counter, take off her apron and walk up to me. Move towards me, like in a film. That even after Jim and my father still something new would happen on this day, as if it were a mark in time.

Her eyes were restless, I thought. She glanced back and forth between the trays and the keys of the cash desk and rang up the totals so quickly you could hardly see her fingers move, and she didn’t look up until she had finished with the three customers who had been standing in the queue and were hungry and then one more who had joined them in the meantime, and was now on his way to his table by the windows, and this time there was no table service, they had to carry the trays themselves.

She looked up and saw me at once. I stood where I stood. I didn’t take one step. Another customer came in with a tray in his hands, I could see he just wanted a vanilla slice and a coffee, but she leaned towards him across the counter and said something and smiled, and he was polite and smiled back and put his tray down, and then she turned the till key and put it in her apron pocket and came out from behind the counter towards me. That made me a little nervous, for I knew she was unhappy about something I had said or not said and then it had gone wrong, if something can go wrong between two people who have known each other for ten minutes, and now I was tormenting her by coming back up here, and she was forced to come over to say she couldn’t put up with this, I had to leave. I could leave, if it came to that. And then she stopped in front of me. She looked me straight in the eye, her head tilted to one side and then to the other. She waited. It made me feel awkward. And then she took a risk, I am sure that’s what she was thinking, I’ll just say it, she thought, come what may, and she said:

‘Can you wait for half an hour.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Good.’

She turned and walked back to the counter, opened the till with the key and rang up the vanilla slice and one coffee, and what I noticed was that she rang up the total much slower than she’d done before.

I started to walk along the gallery. A wave of heat washed through me. As if I’d just made my first parachute jump. And survived.

IT WAS A
long half an hour. I spent most of it in the bookshop on Level 1 in Lillestrøm Shopping Centre. It had a window facing the marketplace and the bandstand, but there was no music, nor any market trading to speak of, now in September. It was cloudy out where my father lived, but here the sunlight was flooding the marketplace in an unreal yellow, and yet the tarmac looked strangely frozen, almost blue, underneath. A woman walked past holding a carrier bag. On it was the logo for Match with a red triangle in the top of the M. She was wearing a woollen cap and gloves, but it really wasn’t that cold.

In the bookshop I found nothing of interest. All the new fiction, I didn’t know any of the authors’ names, and on two long tables there were three stacks of fat crime books next to each other, most of them Norwegian, and I hadn’t heard of these authors either, apart from maybe a couple of them, who were selling sensationally well, I had seen them in the newspaper, they were given a full-page spread on the arts pages in
Dagbladet
, and in the financial section at the back, because they earned serious money, but actually I didn’t much like crime novels. I had read Raymond Chandler’s books many years ago, but I don’t think it was because it was thrilling to work out who killed whom with knives, bullets and blunt instruments. What I liked was the main character, the private detective Philip Marlowe. I don’t know why, but he touched me in a way I hadn’t expected of a crime novel. There was something about him. A dignity, perhaps, an incorruptibility I didn’t feel I had myself, although I might have had it once. There was especially one book:
The Long Goodbye
, it made me feel upset, almost desperate when I had finished it. There were seven novels about Philip Marlowe, and after I had read them all I didn’t go any further. I was sure no other crime novel existed that could move me in the way Raymond Chandler’s books about Philip Marlowe had. And that was the only thing I was interested in at the time. It was many years ago. I had barely read a book since, that wasn’t non-fiction. I had put it behind me. I didn’t have time to be moved. What I decided was to let things take their course and think no more about it.

But standing between the piles of surprisingly extensive crime novels, it was difficult to concentrate. I kept looking at my watch. This mustn’t go wrong. I was suddenly afraid. What had I done. Everything would change, I thought. I can’t do it. It’s not within my powers. But this was the only chance I had, of that I was convinced. If I fail, I thought, I’m done for. Then everything would stay as it always had been. But it couldn’t be as it had been. It couldn’t. Everything had to change. Or else I was done for.

When I went back up the escalator, she was already waiting in the gallery outside the café. But I was on time, she had said half an hour, I was early, even, and still she was waiting for me. She had her jacket on. It was green, she looked good in it. She looked quite different. It surprised me. She was more feminine in that jacket, she was freer, I thought, unmoored, alarmingly accessible, I could feel it in my stomach, there was no way back. I walked along the gallery towards her, and as I walked I let my hand run along the worn, shiny balustrade with the concourse below, the way I would have done when I was a boy, when the whole world seeped in through your skin, and now the flat metal was cool and smooth to the touch, and for every metre I felt the nails hit my fingers, like the joints in a railway line, past the boutiques, past the bag shops and the shops selling absolutely pointless items and up to the café. When she spotted me she raised her hand to greet me. The same wave of heat washed through me. It felt extremely pleasant, electric but not painfully electric, the way an electric shock is painful, there was a higher tension, there were more volts than usual in flux, like a buzzing between your hips, there was more of a surge, more depth, like a stream of hot water against your chest. What the hell, I thought. I won’t look back.

I came up to her.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ she said.

I have to say something nice, I thought, so I said,

‘That’s a lovely jacket.’

And it was true, I meant it.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘And the same to you. Well, not jacket, but coat.’ She smiled. I could feel myself doing the same.

‘Are we going, then,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘we’re going.’

We walked across the gallery. She hooked her arm under mine, and when we were on the escalator, and the escalator was taking us down, we stood like that, arm in arm, blocking the way for anyone in a hurry, who wanted to get past, but we couldn’t damn well stand behind each other, I thought, not now. But there was no one coming, and once we were down we walked arm in arm from the escalator to the exit, past the sign saying Social Security 2nd Floor and into the swing door, and we only just got through it side by side and then onwards shoulder to shoulder, skipping into the high street. We stopped at the edge of the pavement, and then she laughed out loud and her laughter was surprisingly dark, it was new to me, I thought, and it made me restlessly tense, and here I was again. On this pavement. Like last time. But not like last time.

‘What now,’ she smiled.

I had no idea. Where could we go.

‘Where do you live,’ I said.

‘In Skjetten.’

‘Can we go there,’ I said.

‘No,’ she said. ‘That’s not possible.’

Right, I thought, that’s not possible.

‘We don’t have to go anywhere special,’ I said, ‘if you want we can just go to my car. It’s close by. Will you come.’

‘That’s why I’m here,’ she said, and she said it calmly and not in a submissive way, nor in a docile way, she didn’t let herself drift nor was she self-controlled and teasing, as many would have been in a situation like this: ambivalent, with the back door left open, slightly ironic, and then the wave of heat washed through me for the third time. She thinks like I do, I thought. She doesn’t look back.

We walked for two blocks and round the shopping centre on the opposite pavement, to the north, it was, and past the weird restaurant where I had already been, and it was only now that I saw the sign above the entrance, Jekyll and Hyde, it said, and the sign was flapping in the wind, and I thought, well, that’s why. She still had her arm under mine. We have known each other for a long time, I thought. That must be how it looks, us walking together in this perfectly natural way, but it wasn’t. It was that I
didn’t
know her which was so overwhelming, and everything converged so unnaturally intense in her hand on my arm, like a magnet it attracted everything to it and was yet so feather-light and new to me, and it was what I wanted, her being new to me, I wanted to hold on to this feeling for as long as I could, so that she could attract me to her, and not the other way around, that I attract her, to me. What good would that do her. She had to change me before it was too late, I thought, can she do that, I thought, is it within her powers.

We walked between the parked cars and over to my Mercedes with the tinted windows, and I was afraid she would say something about the car, that it looked expensive, or, oh my God, how elegant it is, but she didn’t. She paid it no attention. The parking permit had expired long ago, but that was no more than expected, and under the windscreen wiper there was a yellow parking ticket wrapped in plastic in case of rain. I unlocked the car, took the form and threw it on the back seat. I hadn’t had a parking fine for ages, so I didn’t know what it would cost me.

She looked at me and smiled.

‘That’s your fault,’ I said, and she laughed and shrugged.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Is it bad.’

‘Hell, no,’ I said. ‘There should be a cost. The price is probably much too low.’

‘Aren’t you going to look at it.’

‘No. I’ll be glad to pay whatever it says. It’s worth it.’

I walked round the car and opened the passenger door at the front, and the strong autumn sun on the grey paintwork hit back into my eyes, and I had to close them for a second, and I opened them again, and then there was a wind across the car park and in between the buildings, and in the bright weather Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde banged in the gusts from the house behind us, and I noticed the skin under her chin and her bare neck above the coat collar, and again the current flowed between my hips, and it was more than desire, but desire too. I bowed and said:

‘Here you are,
frøken
. Please get in.’ She laughed her dark laugh and collected her coat around her knees and sat on the seat and followed with her feet, and I carefully pushed the door to and walked back around the car to my side and sat behind the wheel, and when I had put my belt on and turned the key, she said:

‘It’s
fru
.’

‘What,’ I said.

‘It’s
fru,
not
frøken
.’

‘Are you married.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Is that why we can’t go to Skjetten.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

The engine was humming beneath the bonnet. You could hardly hear it. There
was
something about a Mercedes. I remembered how proud I was when I bought my first. It was quite old, but there wasn’t a scrap of rust on it and it had shiny, white paintwork, and I was still living in Mørk then, with Jonsen, I was still young, and I had been saving up for two years, and no one else in Mørk had ever owned a Mercedes, and so of course it stood out. Everyone could see who was coming along the road, from Valmo or Dal in the north or from Lillestrøm in the south, which was the idea, but there were many who turned sour and felt I had no business owning a Mercedes, who did I think I was. They thought me headstrong, ungrateful, but I had no reason to show them any gratitude, apart from Jonsen and maybe Lysbu, on the contrary, and I thought, let them drive their own crap cars and tractors, their Volvos and Bedford lorries to the mill and back, they still couldn’t touch me, they couldn’t rise above me, for I drove a Mercedes. But at this moment, in September 2006, in this car park in front of the building where once there was a Wine Monopoly I never went to with Jim, owning a Mercedes suddenly didn’t mean anything at all. It could have been a Toyota, a Skoda, what did it matter, what was
I
doing with a car like this, who did I think I was, it could have been a Peugeot, a Mazda, who was impressed by a Mercedes. Not me. Not Fru Berit Somebody sitting next to me at the front. She didn’t even look at it.

‘Just drive,’ she said.

But I had seen her hands. In the café she placed them on the counter in front of me, as if displayng them, and looking back that was exactly what I thought she was doing. Displaying them. I hadn’t seen a ring.

‘Just drive,’ she said.

I didn’t know what to say. I looked at my hands, one of them on the wheel, the other on the gear lever, and I didn’t have a ring on any finger. Not on my right hand. Not on my left hand. I could have had, but the one time it was an issue, I drew back at the last minute, and later I wondered whether it had been the right decision. It probably was.