Toxic, p.19
Toxic, page 19
Mum nods as though she understands the connection. ‘Organic food is terribly expensive as well,’ she says, ‘and food’s expensive enough already, if you ask me.’
Signe is no longer smiling. Fortunately an uncle taps his glass at that very moment, then stands up and makes a speech about some distant relative.
One morning in September, I wake up to a message from Jakob. He says that he wants to talk to me and could we meet at a café that day. I feel a bit disappointed that he’s not been following me on social media, that he thinks I’m in Oslo, otherwise seeing his name on my cellphone arouses no more than curiosity. I reply saying that I’ve moved to Telemark, but that we can talk on the phone if he wants. He doesn’t respond, not until the next day when he writes saying that he needs to talk to me face to face. I’ll let you know when I’m next in Oslo, I write. I can come to Telemark, he writes. I think about it for a couple of minutes, weighing up the pros and cons of showing him off to Andres, of making him jealous, but decide that it’s too risky. I can come next week, I write.
I haven’t been to Oslo since I moved in February, and my reluctance to go back there is hard to define, but the whole place just seems … gross, I told Andres. ‘That’s really not the right use of the word,’ he said, laughing loudly, ‘you’ll never get it,’ he said, ‘only Johs and I understand all that, so don’t even try.’ It felt imprecise to me as well, but my aversion to going back is real, and it increases with every kilometre I drive, Notodden, Meheia, Kongsberg, Langebru. I hear a discussion on the radio in which the minister of health has to rake over his so-called appeal to the Norwegian public for them to resume having one-night stands, something which one organisation, whose name escapes me, thinks is morally reprehensible. ‘Are we really there?’ asks the infuriated man, ‘that the authorities are encouraging people to have casual sex?’ The prime minister assures the public that the statement is the health minister’s own opinion, and that she personally thinks everyone should be in long, stable relationships. I turn off the radio, drive past Liertoppen and, as always, wonder who could be in there, in a shopping centre in the middle of nowhere, on a Thursday morning.
I’ve agreed to meet Jakob at a café in Universitetsgata, but, after parking my car in the nearby multi-storey, I’m still over an hour early. I come out onto Hambros plass and realise that Oslo has its own smell behind the asphalt and exhaust fumes, or combined with them, perhaps, there’s something familiar and homely about it, anyway. I sit by the fountain in Sehesteds plass, looking up at the windows of my mother’s old publishing house. I’ve never considered it somewhere I would send my own manuscript, where it would be compared with and measured against hers, but since I’ve only written eight pages in as many months, I’m starting to realise that I might need the impetus she could provide.
I go looking for her books in Tronsmo, knowing exactly where the shop has them, I’ve stood at the shelf with all the spines displaying her name countless times, and for countless hours, without ever pulling one out. But today I can’t find them, and I react with a surprising amount of anger – towards her, towards her absence, but she smiles her little smile, the joy of still being relevant more than thirty years after her death overshadowing my longing. I doggedly go and ask for the books, the shop assistant checks, ‘No, they’re out of stock, I’m afraid, and I don’t know if they’ll be reprinted, but you can try the antiquarian down the street.’ I feel my eyes welling up.
The café is totally packed, not one free table. I sit on a window stool and see Jakob come out of the park gates, his hair is now longer on top, shorter at the sides and centre-parted like the blonde one in the Backstreet Boys. I sit up straight as he walks diagonally over the crossing almost without looking and comes through the door. When he spots me the look on his face immediately disproves my tentatively repressed assumption that he wants to tell me that he’s changed his mind, that he wants to try again, which I’d formulated at least five friendly and educative rejections to while driving here. I get up from the stool.
‘Hi,’ I say, ‘we’re allowed to hug again, right?’ I continue, taking a step towards him, but as I lean forward to put my arm around him he steps back, and I lose my balance and have to take another step to avoid falling.
‘There are too many people here,’ he says, ‘is it okay if we go somewhere else?’
‘Of course,’ I say, ‘I bought you a coffee.’
He takes the cup without looking at me, then turns and walks out the door. We sit on a bench in the park, but he keeps his distance. He takes a sip of coffee and stares down at the ground in front of him like a sullen child.
‘It’s good to see you,’ I say, ‘how are you? How’s it been going?’
He swallows, as though readying himself for something.
‘Not great, to be honest,’ he says.
‘Oh, no?’
‘No, and that’s why I wanted to speak to you, I want to talk about what happened,’ he says.
‘What happened?’ I say.
‘Between us,’ he says.
‘What about what happened between us?’ I say, curling my toes up in my shoes.
Finally he looks up and makes eye contact.
‘Everything. It wasn’t okay,’ he says, ‘it’s taken me a long time to understand it, but it really wasn’t okay, Mathilde.’
‘I agree,’ I say, feeling my pulse increase.
‘Do you?’
‘Yes, there was plenty that wasn’t okay,’ I say, ‘the way it ended, for example. I lost my job because of you.’
He stares at me in almost cartoonish disbelief. ‘Are you completely mad?’
‘You reported me, about a relationship that you initiated yourself, if you need me to remind you,’ I say.
‘I didn’t know any better, you took advantage of your position, you took advantage of me,’ he says. ‘I’m really struggling. They say I’m showing clear signs of PSD … T … post-traumatic stress.’
I really struggle not to smile.
‘Who’s they?’ I ask.
‘I had to get help, I was a total mess last autumn,’ he says, ‘I wasn’t functioning sexually.’
‘You weren’t functioning?’
‘No, I’ve become extremely sensitive in that area,’ he explains, like I’ve never met him before, like we’ve never been close, ‘I couldn’t emotionally connect to sex for months,’ he continues.
He looks insistently at me, waiting for a reaction. I don’t know what to say and wonder how many girls he actually slept with during the several months that led him to that conclusion. When I don’t respond he continues:
‘I just couldn’t establish new relationships,’ he says.
‘New relationships? You couldn’t even establish the one we were in, you said yourself that you had attachment issues,’ I say loudly.
‘Trauma,’ he corrects, ‘attachment trauma, you knew that, and you took advantage of it.’
‘Can you hear what you’re saying? You can’t take advantage of someone’s fear of commitment, Jakob, it speaks for itself.’
He goes quiet, and for a moment looks unsure, before locking eyes with me again.
‘You were my teacher, it was an indisputable power relationship where all the power was in your hands, and you took advantage of that, at least.’
I picture Jakob tearing my clothes off the moment he walks in the door; Jakob effortlessly lifting me up in his arms and carrying me into the bedroom; Jakob persistently ringing the doorbell again and again following a quarrel; Jakob sending me text messages about my ass while I’m standing five metres away in the classroom.
‘And you were just an innocent victim?’ I say, smiling at him.
‘Yes,’ he replies without pausing to think. ‘You abused me, it’s no excuse that you’re a woman.’
A woman. When he said that, with such scornful emphasis on the word ‘woman’, it made me feel old. On the drive home, I look in the rear-view mirror and the wrinkles round my eyes seem deeper, the grey hairs at my temples more prominent. I still don’t know what Jakob wanted to get out of the conversation, when I asked him, he couldn’t give me a proper answer. ‘I just wanted you to know,’ he said, ‘to know what you’ve done to me.’ I have no idea what I should do with his orchestrated experience, there was no point arguing, he seemed pre-programmed, I think he repeated the words ‘took advantage’ twenty times. ‘Are you looking for an apology?’ I asked in the end. ‘That won’t help,’ he said, ‘not when you clearly don’t regret it.’ ‘Oh, believe me, I fucking regret it,’ I said, ‘but now I have to go home, I’ve got work tomorrow.’ When he heard that I was now working at a secondary school in Telemark he stood up. ‘What the fuck?’ he shouted, ‘Are they letting you teach?’
It felt liberating to leave Oslo, better with every mile I was closer to Telemark, to the village, to Andres. ‘Why did they shuffle the letters in your name around?’ I once asked him, ‘Why didn’t they just call you Anders?’ ‘I was named after my great-grandfather,’ he said, ‘all the men in the family have been called Andres or Johannes since the beginning.’ ‘Of course,’ I said. ‘It’s a stressed An,’ said Andres, ‘so it’s Andres, not Andrés.’ ‘Andrés sounds undeniably sexier,’ I said with a Spanish s, ‘it’s exotic at least,’ I added. Everything about him is exotic, it is different and new, like nothing else, a mixture of steadfast and genuine and unpredictable and neurotic, in equal measures.
I don’t recognise any of the characteristics Jakob ascribes to me, but him calling me a chaotic relational wreck will remain the most unpleasant thing he said during our conversation. ‘You’ve got no idea what to do with your life, with your relationships, you’ve got no direction at all,’ he said. Maybe he didn’t say the last sentences out loud, I can’t remember. But while I drive towards what I now consider home, and by the time I pass the stave church in Heddal, I decide that Andres is the only right direction.
‘You look nice,’ a voice calls out behind my back, one week later, as I go up the steps of the secondary school.
I turn and look towards the car park to see that I’m being watched by the tractor gang; final-year students who drive tractors to school every day, wear work trousers and safety shoes, and compete to have the broadest possible dialect, which is sometimes impossible to understand.
‘What did you say?’ I ask, pausing and smiling at them.
‘I said you look nice today,’ says Åsmund, stepping in front of the group with a broad smile on his face.
‘Thanks. You too,’ I say, ‘cool trousers,’ I continue. He throws his arms out while looking down at himself. ‘Do you like my trousers?’ he says in a tone of voice that I can’t quite grasp, something unexpressed but reinforced by the looks on the other boys’ faces.
They snigger under their caps, pimples round their mouths, disproportionate bodies, and it makes me stressed and annoyed.
‘Yes, I do. You look totally prepared for creative writing,’ I say before turning and continuing up the steps.
‘That’s right, I’m totally prepared for anything,’ he calls after me, and the others laugh.
Afterwards, there’s a weird atmosphere in the classroom, no misbehaving like there normally is, and I don’t have to ask them to find their seats, when I enter they are already sitting at their desks, watching me intently. I ask them to start reading, then open my laptop and google myself, search Facebook and Twitter, find nothing, of course, and have no idea how I can find anything on Snapchat or TikTok, or whatever source of information they now use.
‘Does anyone have any questions?’ I ask, half an hour later.
Nobody says anything, but nobody looks away either, like they normally do to avoid having to answer, today they look straight at me, expectantly. When I’m finished with the last class I go to the headmaster and say that unfortunately I won’t be taking any more classes. He looks relieved, and says he understands my decision.
Andres and I have been planning the coming weekend since the summer. It was his suggestion. ‘I want you for more than a couple of hours at a time,’ he said, and I managed to resist saying that there’s an obvious solution to that. ‘Let’s go away for a few days,’ he said, ‘and we’ll also see what we’re made of,’ he added, without me understanding what he meant.
As I’m carrying my bag to the car, Johs walks into the yard. I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks, I’ve been keeping a low profile since I returned from Oslo and quit my job, and I’ve got no idea how far the rumours have spread. ‘Rumours spread faster here,’ said Johs the time we sat drinking beer all night, ‘tomorrow the whole village will know that we sat here drinking beer, and some will even know what we were talking about.’ Over the last week I feel like people have been looking differently at me in the shop, I’ve seen neighbours watching me from their windows, heard sniggering behind my back when I’m out walking. The worst thing is not knowing if anyone knows, or what they know, or what they’ve heard, what the story about Jakob has become on its journey from the sensation-craving and hormonal teenage boys to the school staff room, to the shop, to Johs, to Andres, to Signe. So when Johs comes along I look at him expectantly, but relax when he raises his hand to greet me from a few yards away.
‘Are you going away somewhere?’ he says, watching me with his back to the driver’s side of the car while I try to find room for the suitcase amongst all the junk in the boot, ‘a rolling dustbin’, Mum calls the car, ‘a rolling shed’, I tell her.
‘I’m just going on a trip to Oslo,’ I say, as agreed with Andres.
‘Oslo again?’ he says, looking disappointed, perhaps worried.
‘I’ll be back,’ I say, hearing the sound of something break as I close the boot. ‘You’re not getting rid of me.’
‘Good,’ he says, smiling, while stepping aside to open the car door for me, but just as I’m about to get in he grabs hold of me, and gives me a somewhat overly long hug.
‘Oh, someone clearly needs some body contact,’ I blurt out as he releases me, and regret saying it when I see the look on his face.
We’re not going to Oslo, Andres hates Oslo and everything it represents, and has said it so many times and in so many ways that I’m starting to wonder if it’s actually directed at me. ‘They sit there talking about the importance of self-sufficiency and Norwegian agriculture, but have any of them ever set foot in a barn?’ ‘Of course they have,’ I say. ‘Yeah, purely for show,’ says Andres.
We’re going to Steinkjer. Andres has to collect a snowmobile that he and Johs bought together. ‘It sounds really romantic, I’ve always wanted to visit Steinkjer, actually,’ I said when he suggested it. ‘It’s the only believable excuse I can think of,’ he said. According to him, he hasn’t left the county for several years. ‘Two birds with one stone,’ he said, smiling. ‘I hope I’m the biggest and most tempting bird, if that’s the case,’ I said. ‘Depends what the snowmobile’s like,’ he replied.
I park my car at Hokksund train station, then have to wait several hours for Andres, who didn’t want us to leave at the same time. When he arrives he is stressed and blames the delay on the fact that he can’t overtake with a trailer attached, ‘And because the fucking Tesla drivers think they own the roads.’ I soon discover that he is terrible behind the wheel, and drives nervously and jerkily, accelerating hard before suddenly decelerating, changing up then down a gear in one go. Had it been anyone else, I would have been annoyed. Mum thinks I suffer from acute road rage, both as a driver and a passenger. I do think I can tell a lot about someone’s personality from their driving, ‘Indecisive, impulsive, control freak, ditherer, she doesn’t have her life in order, I promise you,’ I’ll say to Mum. ‘What do you think your consistent speeding says about you?’ she’ll always reply. I put my left hand on Andres’s thigh, he removes it after a few minutes.
‘That’s not going to end well,’ he explains, smiling.
We’re spending the night in Trondheim, and Andres is nervous about where he’ll park the car, despite the fact that I called the hotel and was told that the car park has plenty of room for the trailer. I suspect that what he’s most nervous about is driving in town.
‘Imagine having to sit in a queue like this every single day,’ he says at the first traffic light we come to, only there is no queue, it’s seven in the evening and there are three cars in front of us. ‘I’m seriously never moving back to the city.’
I’ve been looking forward to eating out, but when we reach the hotel Andres is tired and wants to order room service instead.
‘It’s more private,’ he says.
‘But nobody knows us here,’ I say, ‘wasn’t the point of this partly so that we could be together without having to hide?’
I realise that this wasn’t the point for Andres. He put his cap on as we entered town, pulled the visor down as we entered the hotel reception, and let me take care of checking in.
‘We could suddenly end up on Facebook, people are totally indiscriminate with their smartphones,’ he says. ‘It’s much better to stay here, just you and me, where we can finally have the bed we were dreaming of when we were in the forest,’ he continues, before throwing himself down and opening his arms to me. I remain standing in the middle of the room.
‘Is it because you’re afraid of catching something?’ I ask in the end.
He sits up. ‘What is this? I thought we were meant to be having a nice time,’ he says.
‘I did too,’ I say. ‘But my definition of having a nice time isn’t hiding in a hotel room because you’re afraid of being seen with me.’
He shakes his head. ‘I didn’t think you were like that,’ he says.
‘“That”?’
‘I don’t know what you’ve been expecting, but I’ve got two little kids.’
