Toxic, p.16
Toxic, page 16
In the shed, I fill the containers before checking the milking interval on the PC. I look around for Gwyneth, who hasn’t been in the robot since yesterday. She’s one of the few cows I recognise visually, white all over but with black rings around her eyes, a bit like a panda, which could be why she evidently ranks low in the internal hierarchy. I’ve seen the other cows deliberately obstruct her when she tries to approach the milk- or concentrate-dispenser.
‘Come on, girls,’ I say as I go out and chase after her, while Meryl and another cow, who I think must be Zendaya, demonstratively block the entrance to the robot, ‘shouldn’t you girls look out for each other?’
‘Definitely not,’ a voice behind me says.
Mathilde is standing on the feeding trough, with her arms resting on the fence.
‘I thought you were a feminist,’ I say, smiling at her as though I’d known all along that she was standing there, but feel myself blushing because she heard me talking to the cows like that; something not even Andres or Mum have ever heard.
‘If you think feminism means that girls should look out for other girls, you seriously need to do some reading,’ says Mathilde. ‘But it’s quite nice in itself to see that, even here, shielded by traditions and sturdy mountains, even the cows are unable to avoid influencers.’
‘You’re welcome to give me a crash course on feminism – you who’s so uninfluenced,’ I say.
‘Gladly,’ she says, ‘in exchange for some fiddle lessons.’
I smile. ‘I thought you’d given up on the fiddle project,’ I say.
‘I never voluntarily give up something I’ve started,’ she says.
Every week, since she turned up at my lesson with Viggo two months ago, I’ve been hoping she would come back. She made both Viggo and myself play better, although Viggo did call her a ‘fucking opportunist’ afterwards. ‘Do you know what that word means?’ I asked, laughing. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘she’s freeloading on my lesson.’ ‘But she did make you play better. You’ve never played so well,’ I said, to which he couldn’t resist smiling, but then pulled himself together again. ‘It wasn’t because of her,’ he said, ‘I’ve been practising like fuck.’
I’d told Viggo that I would be taking a week off at the end of April to do the ploughing, so this Wednesday, with it now being early May, it’s been two weeks since I last saw him. He had been sending me occasional text messages containing various more-or-less funny or morbid GIFs and links to YouTube clips of snowmobile competitions. But in the last few weeks I’ve not heard from him. Mum said that his mother lost her job at the café last year, and his stepfather is disabled. I rarely saw them before, but since the pandemic I haven’t even seen them at the shop or out walking the dog.
When I arrive at the community centre for his next lesson Viggo is sitting with his back to me on the railing outside, his fiddle box lies on the stone slabs in front of him, and there’s something different about his posture, but I don’t see what it is until I get closer and he turns his upper body and his face lights up. One of his sleeves is empty and his left arm is in a sling beneath his unbuttoned coat.
‘Shit, what happened to your arm?’ I say.
‘It’s totally broken,’ says Viggo. I can’t decipher his expression, whether he is proud or angry, embarrassed or indifferent.
‘Oh no, how did that happen?’ I ask. ‘Football training,’ he says.
‘That’s terrible,’ I say, before glancing at his fiddle box, ‘but Viggo, you can’t play with your left arm in plaster.’
‘No, but I thought … maybe I can do it like that time last spring, when you played to me for the whole lesson?’
‘If Vivian has said she wants you to get your lesson I’ll tell her that you’ve had it, you don’t have to sit here with me and my fiddle,’ I say with a crooked smile.
‘No, she … she doesn’t even know I’m here,’ he says quickly.
I’m touched that he has become so dedicated that he hasn’t even taken advantage of an obvious excuse to skip the lesson. And it doesn’t occur to me, until I’m in the middle of the third tune – Viggo sitting perfectly still, a bit slumped, on the chair in front of me, watching me carefully – that there hasn’t been any football training since last autumn.
Mathilde has been living in the Johannes house for three months, although it feels longer. ‘She does a lot of nagging,’ Andres said to Mum a month after she arrived, ‘she can’t even change a broken fuse, Johs has to help her with everything.’ Those were my words, exactly what I told Andres when Mathilde called and asked me for help with the cooker she thought was dead. ‘Have you checked the fuse?’ I asked her when I got there. She shook her head. I’d already shown her how the old-fashioned fuses worked, so she could have easily fixed it herself, but although I didn’t want to delude myself that she was interested in me, as Andres would have said, she then offered me a beer and openly flirted for the rest of the evening.
The next day, when Andres said that he’d seen me sneaking home in the middle of the night, I was surprised by my own need to defend myself, but was unable to stop. ‘Yep, she’s a real fucking pain,’ I said, ‘she can’t even replace a blown fuse.’ Andres smiled briefly, but didn’t say anything else, until later that day when we were having dinner with Mum and Dad, and he seemed almost angry when recounting what I’d said. ‘It’s not that strange that she doesn’t understand the old fuses, is it?’ said Kristin. Andres glanced over, as if to prompt me, and I was left with no choice: ‘Er, yeah, it’s very strange to be over thirty and not even think to check the fuse box when the cooker isn’t working,’ I said. Andres leaned back in his chair, looking like he’d won a competition.
Later that evening, when Kristin and Andres had gone home, I was watching TV with Mum and Dad and it felt vitally important that I correct the impression Andres had given Mum of Mathilde. But starting a conversation about Mathilde in a casual way was impossible, so I just sat there until Mum finally said she was going to bed. ‘I think we should change the fuse box in the Johannes house,’ I said quickly as she stood up. She stopped and looked at me. ‘Oh really?’ she said. ‘Yeah, those fuses are no good, I spent hours trying to get them working yesterday,’ I continued. ‘Yes, I imagine you did,’ said Dad, laughing. Mum didn’t laugh.
The summer when I was fourteen, Stine came from Bergen to Mum’s ‘work camp’ as she called it. Stine was fourteen as well, experienced, had lived in three different foster homes and had been thrown out of them all, as she proudly declared on day one. Everyone was impressed, apart from Mum. Within twenty-four hours, I fell so in love with Stine that I became sick with stomach cramps and diarrhoea, which was a bad start since she and I shared the downstairs bathroom. Stine wore crop tops and Levi’s shorts in the cowshed, and refused to wear anything else. I still remember her bare thighs and legs in the huge rubber boots she had to borrow from Mum, and the tiny blonde hairs on her brown skin. She wasn’t particularly nice, I don’t think, I can’t remember that clearly, I think it was divide and rule with her, there was a lot of turmoil among the rest of us at least. Andres was sixteen that summer, I had caught up with him in height, but he was much broader, more handsome, and my voice was still breaking, so I was glad that he spent most of the summer in the neighbouring village on the moped he had just got his licence for.
Everything else from that summer has vanished into a fog of infatuation and teenage desire, but I remember one thing clearly: the sinking feeling I got when I realised that Andres and Stine had been sneaking out past my bedroom every single night, and that Mum had mentioned the words ‘illegal’ and ‘sexual delinquents’, although what seemed most important to her was conveying, to both Andres and me, that Stine wasn’t for us, that she wasn’t like us.
Since then it has become clear that, as far as Mum’s concerned, no one is for us, for neither Andres nor me. No one is good enough. ‘She looks like she’s about to snap in half,’ Mum would often say about Cathrine, who eventually turned out to have severe anorexia. ‘There’s nothing worse than girls who pick at their food,’ said Mum. Andres and I have made fun of the look she has given almost every girl I’ve introduced her to. But while I’ve mimicked her, it’s become ingrained in me – and although Mum has never told us who actually would be good enough, I still see every girl through her eyes and with her judgement.
For the last two months, I’ve been dreaming about Mathilde several times a night. Only a couple, or maybe four or five, six, maybe, have been erotic, the rest have been a blissful combination of dreams in which she leaves and returns, in which I call to her, shout at her, and last night Johannes was there too, Beware, she’s just like all the others and cannot be trusted, never allow her to go near your fiddle. Johannes never let Grandma touch his fiddles, in fact no women, not even Mum, were allowed to touch them. ‘It’s bad luck,’ he said, and once even said it on stage during a competition. I was sitting in the audience and could tell where he was going when he began the story about the time Grandma polished his favourite fiddle without him knowing, and how at first he couldn’t understand why the fiddle ‘wouldn’t play’, as he put it, ‘it was totally useless and bent out of shape, couldn’t be tuned, couldn’t be tamed,’ and it was only when he found out that Grandma had touched it that he understood what had happened. ‘Fiddles are easily affected,’ Johannes told the gathering of old and young fiddlers and women, and finished his story by saying that, for his part, he had learned that women and fiddles meant bad luck. I sat with my thigh muscles tensed from start to finish, worrying about the crowd’s reaction, but as usual Johannes received laughter and applause. ‘What that grandfather of yours gets away with,’ a lady who had been in the dance competition said to me afterwards, smiling, but with a stern look on her face. I was perhaps fourteen years old and didn’t know how to reply. ‘Obviously no one dares do anything except play along, for fear of —’ began her friend, who was standing beside her, but the dancer interrupted her, ‘They’re calling for us, Eva,’ she said before dragging her away.
Every morning when I wake up, I look over at Mathilde’s house, despite knowing that she won’t be up for several hours, and every night, before I fall asleep, I see the light at her window; she has the lights on in all the rooms all of the time, and occasionally I’ll catch a glimpse of her, and sometimes turn off my bedroom light and stand there watching for an hour or two. A couple of nights ago, she sat, for once, in the chair beside her lounge window, chatting on the phone, gesticulating and laughing. I picked up the binoculars and watched, she looked frivolous, as Mum would have said, but I couldn’t stop being happy about seeing her, couldn’t stop looking at her little gestures, and I laughed out loud when she picked her nose quickly and wiped her finger on the curtain while she was talking, and I carried on watching her until she turned off the light and went to bed.
‘Maybe we should finally thin out the birch trees at the back of the Johannes house,’ I say tentatively to Andres when I meet him in the shed one morning in the middle of May. I am totally consumed by Mathilde after last night’s dream. ‘I was thinking it would make it look a bit tidier for the seventeenth of May.’
The trees between my house and Mathilde’s have started coming into leaf because of the warm weather, and in just a couple of weeks the foliage will be so dense that only half her lounge window will be visible. For years, Andres and I have been planning to cut down at least two of the trees, which have grown far too big and regularly clog the gutters with dead leaves in the autumn. Andres is sitting at the PC, looking at cell counts. He doesn’t turn around.
‘Have you seen this?’ he says. ‘240,000 on Scarlett.’
‘Is that number 5423?’ I say. ‘Yes, I noticed yesterday, she’s got mastitis again.’
‘That’s the second time in three weeks,’ says Andres. ‘Have you looked at her?’
Luckily he seems calm. Sometimes, when he is feeling stressed, he’ll project his anxiety onto the cows, become unnerved by the slightest irregularity or sign of illness, and call the vet several times a day. I look at him from behind and realise that over the last few weeks he has been more level-headed than he has in a long time. He still uses hand sanitiser, wears a mask when he’s out walking, and is always fully updated on the infection rate in Norway and globally, but he seems less worried, and far less preoccupied with conspiracy theories. It makes me happy to think that Kristin, and Olav and Signe, have been getting some respite from the pressure Andres puts those around him under when he is stressed. Late last autumn Kristin came to my door, exhausted, crying, and talking incoherently about Signe being too afraid of 5G and corona to leave the house, she said Andres was short-tempered and totally unpredictable, was spending hours online reading conspiracy theories without filtering what he then passed on to the children, and would yell at Kristin if she tried to moderate any of it. I know how his anxiety can make him furious – when his nerves are aglow like that, they can flare up and spark a rage so explosive that as a child he would attack the furniture, or me, or Mum and Dad, I remember Dad once lying on the floor, restraining Andres, who thrashed around for perhaps half an hour before calming down. As an adult, he has learned to regulate himself, uses strategies and methods to calm himself down, running or riding the quad bike at full speed up the mountain. He can still blow his top and yell, swear at Kristin and the kids, but before last autumn it had been a while since that had happened.
I had noticed that he was more irritable and stressed than usual, but I was surprised by the extent of what Kristin told me. ‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said, ‘it’ll be alright, he’s just tired.’ As I expected, Andres got angry and instantly defensive when I tried talking to him. ‘You’ve been brainwashed,’ he said, ‘has Kristin been talking to you? She’s dangerous. You know she thinks that Signe should get an iPhone?’ I gave up quite fast when he set off on a long rant about cellphone radiation and the spread of infection. ‘You know nothing about it,’ he told me, ‘educate yourself, or get a family of your own to be responsible for. Then we can talk.’ In the end, I went round to Mum’s. She of course said nothing in response to my slightly toned-down version of what Kristin had told me, she just sat quietly at the kitchen table and didn’t raise an eyebrow until I’d finished, then nodded sharply. ‘I’ll take care of it,’ she said.
I have no idea what she said, or didn’t say, to Andres, but after a couple of weeks he was noticeably different, he was talking less about infection and disease, Signe got an iPhone; and although I’ve felt bad for him because of everything he’s had to suppress, I now think, when I see him sat safely and calmly in the chair while looking at all the sky-high cell counts in his favourite cow, that Mum’s intervention was for his own good.
‘I’ll look at her,’ I say, ‘but what about the birch trees?’
‘I think we can leave it another year or two,’ he says, before turning to me, ‘or is it perhaps urgent for you?’
When Andres and I took over the farm, we immediately decided to stop the sheep farming, which Mum had half-heartedly taken over from Johannes’s brother. We both hate sheep, and for the same reason: they are stupid. Both Andres and I have countless memories of running through dense forest and undergrowth chasing sheep which, in the blink of an eye, would vanish from the path and down an escarpment when being herded up the mountain in the spring. Then there were the long days of sheep-finding in the autumn, searching for sheep that in early summer had come tottering down the mountain by themselves, only to be chased back up again multiple times, but which, when it was time for them to be collected, would play up and do anything to avoid coming down. ‘Fine, just stay here and freeze to death!’ I’ve yelled at sheep through the cold September fog as they’ve walked off in the exact opposite direction to their home in a safe, warm barn.
Now that we’ve stopped farming sheep ourselves, I’ve warmed to them a little. It’s idyllic to see the little white dots of wool against the green pasture in the summer, when the sound of ringing bells in the mountains is no longer just a painful reminder of what’s awaiting us in the autumn. In recent years, both Andres and I have even volunteered to help when our uncle takes his sheep to the mountains. ‘It’s a tradition,’ I said to Mathilde when I asked her to join us, ‘almost the whole family goes.’ ‘Is there anything that’s not a tradition for your family?’ she said, laughing, but she seemed happy to be invited. What’s the dress code, by the way? she texted yesterday, as usual. None, I replied. She sent a thumbs-up. Later that evening I felt the urge to prepare her a little so that she wouldn’t make any big and, in my mother’s eyes, irreparable mistakes, but when I went over and rang her doorbell, she didn’t answer.
‘Just don’t run towards the flock, don’t get too close, keep your distance and herd them from the sides,’ I say the next morning when picking her up on my way to the field to collect the sheep.
She seems happy, relaxed in a different way from before, but slightly restless perhaps, constantly looking around on our way there. ‘No need to be nervous,’ I say, nudging her gently in the ribs, ‘just stick with me, and you’ll be fine.’ ‘Sounds like a healthy life motto,’ she says, smiling. When we arrive at the field, Mum and her brother are busy dividing the sheep. Mum looks surprised to see Mathilde, and I hope it’s only me who notices the one-second pause before she smiles.
‘Okay. Always good to have an extra pair of eyes,’ says Mum. ‘Do you have any experience with sheep?’
So unnecessary.
‘Experience?’ says Mathilde, looking at me.
‘I told her the basics, but all you really need to know is that they’re stupid and stubborn, and there’s nothing you can do about it,’ I say, smiling at Mum. Just as the last words leave my mouth, Andres comes along on the quad with both kids on the back. He parks, then nods to us before walking in the opposite direction, towards the other field, where the sheep destined for the mountain are now wandering around bleating at the top of their lungs.
