This summer, Mum said that she didn’t think my mother regretted anything about her life. We were sitting on the steps outside, watching the swallows as they flew high above the rooftops then swooped at regular intervals towards the ground, then up and under the eaves of my outhouse. ‘Can you believe they can do that,’ I said, ‘how do they know where they live?’ ‘I read that they have a built-in compass, they always know where they’re going and where they belong,’ Mum replied. ‘But it’s nice, I think,’ she continued, ‘the thought that your mother died without any regrets,’ which sounded unlikely to me but I didn’t say that. I just smiled. ‘Do you regret anything?’ I asked. ‘Plenty of things,’ said Mum, laughing, but I’d sooner regret what I have done than what I haven’t done,’ she said. ‘Oh, you should really post that on Facebook,’ I said, smiling, ‘What do you most regret?’ She then became serious, pulled her wool coat more tightly around her. ‘That you never had any siblings,’ she said after a while, ‘I think that would have been good for you, having a proper family, more anchoring and direction. A compass,’ she added.

  On our way back from Steinkjer with the snowmobile on the trailer, Kristin calls Andres, exactly two hours after I messaged her. Andres’s phone, sitting in a holder on the dashboard, flashes with her name, first once, then once more. There’s then a one-minute pause before she rings four times in a row.

  ‘You can answer it,’ I say.

  ‘I’m waiting,’ he replies.

  Andres pulls into a lay-by just before Oppdal, grabs his phone and exits the car. He then looks around, probably for somewhere to stand where I can’t see him, but, with no nearby buildings or vegetation to hide behind, he walks behind the trailer. I see the back of his head in the mirror, cellphone pressed against his right ear, and wait, imagining the conversation, the confrontation. I don’t regret it.

  JOHS

  One day at the beginning of August, when I was standing in front of the garage changing the blades on the ride-on mower, Viggo came cycling past on the street. He didn’t stop, and he didn’t look at me, just sped by on his little BMX. Ten minutes later he returned, but once again rode straight past without saying anything, without looking at me. I didn’t call out to him either. About an hour later he rode past me again and as I watched him from a distance through the trees, I saw him stop at the top of the small hill, then look towards me, before racing down and cycling past at high speed. I was hunched over the mower and raised my head, but didn’t manage to say anything, so I wiped the oil from my hands, and went and sat near the road on the edge of the barn ramp. As he rounded the bend on his way back, I stood up and walked out in front of him. There was a screech of brakes, before he looked up at me proudly. ‘Hi, Viggo, looks like you’re busy today,’ I said. He didn’t answer, just stared into the field beside us. ‘Do you think you could give me a hand?’ I asked after a short pause, nodding towards the mower, and he looked happy as he parked his bike by the ramp. ‘Perhaps you can hold this for me while I screw it in,’ I said, and he gripped the wrench tightly, concentrating. He asked a couple of questions about various living and dead things, curious to know which ones the blades could cut through, but was otherwise silent until we were finished. ‘Thanks, you’ve been a really great help,’ I said. He stood there kicking at the gravel, twisting left and right while I packed away the tools and drove the mower into the garage, and it was only when I’d closed the garage door and was about to say goodbye, that it came out: ‘I have to stop playing,’ he said quickly, his face bright red. ‘Oh no, that’s a pity,’ I replied. ‘Why?’ ‘We can’t afford it anymore,’ he said, ‘we have to prioritise, after all, food on the table is more important than my fiddle lessons,’ he continued. ‘Of course it is,’ I said, ‘but it’s just a shame now that you’ve become so good.’ He went silent and stood there without looking at me, I felt so sorry for him that I couldn’t let it go. ‘Perhaps we can find a solution,’ I said, feeling like I was saying it just as much for myself.

  Now we play once a week, at my house, and he has borrowed one of the old flat fiddles that Johannes left, it was Mum who found it and had its strings changed when I told her about Viggo. ‘Of course he’s going to play the fiddle,’ she said, ‘and he’s welcome to use that one there.’ It was the same fiddle I’d asked about giving Mathilde as a birthday present in April, but Mum had then claimed she had no idea where it was; besides you can’t just give Johannes’s fiddles away, they’re of highly sentimental value, she said. Viggo didn’t want the fiddle. At least, he wanted her, but he didn’t want to take her with him, ‘There’s so little room at home,’ he said, ‘there’s nowhere to put her, so perhaps she can stay here for now.’ I nodded. ‘Of course she can stay here,’ I said without mentioning how that would make it impossible for him to practise.

  One Saturday in October he arrives even earlier than usual, soaking wet from the rain, he always arrives early.

  ‘You should have your waterproofs on in this weather,’ I say.

  ‘Yes,’ he says, before removing his hoodie and kicking his sneakers off in the hallway, feeling quite at home, and I smile as he runs in and flops on his back on the four-poster bed with his hands behind his head.

  That he’s been unable to practise is evident, and he clearly isn’t that interested in playing either, and after twenty minutes of practising the same introduction we began learning last year, he gives up.

  ‘Can’t you just play instead?’ he asks.

  I’m tempted to make the most of having an audience, but the last few times I’ve played for him he clearly hasn’t been listening. He tries to look interested but manages no more than half a minute at a time, his entire body trembles with impatience, he interrupts and fumbles and is afterwards unable to tell any of the tunes apart. He sits with the fiddle on his lap, and looks down at it while picking at the bridge.

  ‘Perhaps we should do something else today,’ I say.

  He looks up, and the expression on his face is worth more than an entire year’s salary from the arts school.

  First I take him out to the shed, teach him how to swap the milk filters, show him how the robots work – he’s not the least bit impressed and thinks the technology involved should have come a lot further by this point – and I let him pour milk from the tank into a jug, which we bring inside to make waffles.

  Viggo is full of confidence while making the waffles, but when we sit down to eat, he seems unsure suddenly. He has gained a few pounds over the last year, and grown taller, no longer youthfully chubby, he now looks overweight. He tears off a small piece of waffle, helps himself to a tiny spoonful of jam, which he spreads thinly while glancing a few times at me and what I’m doing. I’m not sure how best to proceed, feel angry more than anything – at what, I don’t know, and it’s of course pointless as far as Viggo is concerned – but I deliberately take an entire waffle and smother it with sour cream and jam.

  ‘Pussy’s waffle,’ I say, nodding towards his plate.

  He then grins, lightens up, starts talking about some crazy guy on YouTube, and piles his next waffle up with toppings. Just as he’s eating his fifth, there’s a loud knock on the door.

  My instinctive reaction, the soft feeling in my diaphragm, attests to my hope that it’s Mathilde, because that’s how she knocks. Did knock. But it’s been several weeks since she came to my door, and besides, I know she’s in Oslo this weekend, her windows were dark this morning, so she hasn’t come home. This passing thought about her also fills me with shame, about the way I hugged her before she left, surprising her and especially me, I don’t know why I did it, but I couldn’t help it. She felt stiff in my arms, yet I didn’t let go, but maybe that was precisely why I didn’t. She has become distant and aloof, totally different to when she first arrived, when she was openly flirting. ‘She just wants to be friends,’ said Viggo two weeks ago as we waited outside for his lesson and Mathilde passed by on the road, greeting us cheerfully but without stopping. I hadn’t said a word about her to him, but he nudged me in the ribs and said: ‘You have to play hard to get, women don’t want what they can have, everyone knows that.’ To be receiving love advice from Viggo seemed absurd, but there was something about what he said that made me feel desperate.

  Before I manage to go and open it, Kristin walks through the door. She looks a mess, as usual, wet from the rain too, with her hair hanging loose, and wearing sweatpants, flip flops, and Andres’s overly large cardigan. She stares wide-eyed, but doesn’t seem to have noticed either Viggo or me, just stands there for a moment without saying anything, then looks around the kitchen and slumps onto a chair.

  ‘Has something happened?’ I say.

  ‘Your brother,’ she says.

  I freeze, imagine Andres lying in a wrecked car, as lifeless as the time I thought he was dead after rolling the tractor over while crossing the large ditch at the bottom of the north field. ‘Collect the bales yourself,’ I’d said, ‘if you insist on using that idiotic system. Putting them there makes no sense.’ I was tired of spending several extra minutes fetching the round bales that Andres refused to leave on this side of the ditch, simply because it would mess up his internal system. Andres is a terrible driver, he drives with his nerves, as Dad says, and I know it. And I knew that he was going to have trouble manoeuvring the tractor over the ditch, finding a grip in the porous soil, especially with an extra half-ton on the front loader, which he always raises way too high. He didn’t protest, although I could see that he was stressed, too proud to ask me to do it, especially because I’d said it while Mum was standing with her back to the office and could hear us. Far too much time went by before I drove out looking for him, which was hard to do after making such a big deal of it in front of both him and Mum. I’d probably waited forty-five minutes when he really should have been home after fifteen. The sight of the tractor, with its large rear wheel in the air, flashing its undercarriage, while Andres lay crumpled against the shattered window in the driver’s cabin, the blood and muddy water, remained for years a picture of who I actually was. I crawled down to him while waiting for the ambulance, but didn’t dare try and move him, just held on to his foot, the rubber boot, and imagined life without Andres. It didn’t exist, it doesn’t exist.

  ‘What’s happened,’ I say in the end, barely hearing my own voice over the hissing and ringing in my ears.

  Kristin turns and stares at me, finally seeming to notice that I’m there.

  ‘Do you know where he is?’

  ‘Yes, he’s in Steinkjer,’ I say, becoming angry and impatient, ‘but Kristin, just tell me what’s happened!’

  ‘Do you know who he’s with?’

  It takes a couple of seconds before my body realises that the danger is over. I take a deep breath, and all my muscles relax.

  ‘No,’ I say, ‘I thought he was going on his own.’

  ‘Yes, that’s what he said. A little breather, he told me and the kids,’ says Kristin, her eyes narrowing, ‘a little breather, my ass,’ she continues.

  Viggo turns away while covering his mouth to stifle a laugh, even he can tell how furious Kristin is.

  ‘Let’s talk outside,’ I say to Kristin, before getting up and smiling at Viggo. ‘Maybe you can finish off those waffles while I’m gone,’ I tell him.

  Kristin stays put.

  ‘Do you know how many breathers he actually gets? How much the kids and I tiptoe around him, how considerate we always are towards his moods, anxiety, neuroses, and everything he takes for granted?’ she says.

  ‘Yes, I know,’ I say, ‘I know how much you do for him. Everyone knows that, Kristin.’

  ‘Everyone?’ she says loudly, mockingly, looking at Viggo, who now seems a little nervous. ‘Not everyone knows that, Johs, because Andres clearly doesn’t.’

  ‘Can’t we go outside and talk, and you can tell me what’s happened,’ I say, but she remains slumped on the chair.

  ‘Do you know who he has taken with him on his little breather?’ Kristin repeats. ‘Do you know what’s been going on?’

  I feel uneasy, although I don’t know why.

  ‘No,’ I say.

  ‘That fucking slut,’ says Kristin, ‘that phoney, perverted fucking cockwhore.’ Viggo stops chewing his waffle, nods, impressed, seemingly enjoying himself. I too have to stop myself smiling. Kristin comes from an extremely religious family, and although she’s not particularly Christian I’ve never heard her say anything worse than ‘crikey’ and even then she always looks guilty afterwards.

  ‘Who are you talking about?’ I ask after a short pause.

  Kristin stares right at me and in a flash Stine pops into my head, Andres and Stine sneaking past my bedroom, Andres and Stine shushing and laughing and pointing at my door.

  ‘You know who,’ says Kristin.

  MATHILDE

  What is going on in your head, what on earth do you think you’ll achieve, what are you thinking, my God what got into you? Variations on a theme. While I look at Andres in the rear-view mirror, I hear the resigned, incredulous, angry voices of everyone around me. It’s always the same with you, you never learn, you really need to learn how to stop, take a breath and think about it. If it seems like an equally good idea tomorrow, I won’t stop you. Write it down in the Notes app on your phone, but before you send the message you’ve got there, sleep on it, promise me. Think about it.

  I wrote the message to Kristin last night, while Andres lay sleeping with his back to me at the far end of the hotel bed. I wrote it in Notes, then turned off my phone.

  Andres grinds the phone against his ear, then bends forward, vanishing below the bottom of the window. I crane my neck in an attempt to see him, but he stands up again, shouts something I can’t hear, starts walking away from the car, turns abruptly, takes a few steps back before turning again and walking towards the road.

  I warned you, I think to myself. And I had. The night before. When he refused to leave the hotel room, said I was ‘like that’, shattered all my illusions – ‘two small kids, I’ll never leave Kristin and the kids, sorry if I gave you the impression that this was something else’ – my arms and legs began to tingle. I was trembling with fear and rage and adrenaline, He’s going to leave you, leave you behind, my whole body was in fight mode. ‘The impression,’ I repeated aloud, throwing my arms out in the little hotel room, ‘what do you call this?’ A short pause. ‘Fuck, I’ve been so wrong about you,’ he said. ‘Yes, you were wrong about me, you’ve been so fucking wrong, and I’m going to show you exactly how wrong,’ I said. ‘Are you threatening me?’ he said. ‘Not at all,’ I replied, ‘I’m just telling you that I’m going to explain the impression you’ve given me to Kristin.’ This made him so furious that I was initially shocked. I’ve seen hints of his anger in the past, directed at a sheep that ran off the trail, at a rusted nut on a car wheel, at a questionable penalty given during a football match on TV. I’ve seen him scream, swear and curse, suddenly and explosively, but he would then calm down again just as quickly. ‘He’s just a bit on edge,’ Johs said one day this spring as we stood outside the Johannes house and could hear Andres shouting angrily from across the yard. Yesterday he didn’t calm down, he got right up in my face, but I didn’t back down, and I felt his breath and drops of saliva hitting me when he screamed about how I could just try it: ‘Just try it! Who the fuck do you think you are? You think you can threaten me, you sick fucking cunt? Shut up and fuck off back to the hole you crawled out of in Oslo, and never come near me again, you fucking nutjob!’

  When he woke up this morning I was sitting in the chair by the window. I saw that he didn’t immediately realise where he was, raised his arm to his forehead for a moment, then lifted his head, glanced at me, before getting up and walking into the shower without speaking. I turned my phone on and sent the message to Kristin.

  I’d thought about it, all through the night, and it still seemed like a good idea, especially when Andres came out from the shower with a towel wrapped demonstratively around his waist, and didn’t say a word to me, unrepentant. I don’t know if it was the idea of revenge, or the hope of what it would lead to that felt best, but it was a win either way.

  Andres lowers the arm holding his phone, puts the phone in his pocket and walks towards the car. I straighten up in my seat. He walks around the bonnet without looking at me, then opens the door on my side.

  ‘Get out,’ he says. He doesn’t scream, but says it in a neutral tone of voice.

  I remain seated. ‘I’ll get out of the car when we’ve talked,’ I say.

  ‘Get out,’ he repeats, without looking at me.

  ‘When we’ve talked,’ I say, placing a hand over the seat-belt lock on my left side, which is tightly fastened.

  ‘We’ve got nothing to talk about,’ he says.

  ‘We’ve got everything to talk about,’ I say.

  He grabs my upper arm and pulls it before realising that I’m wearing my seat belt. He lets go of my arm and leans over me, I get a whiff of his hair, grip the belt lock with both hands, but he tears them away, unbuckles the belt, straightens up and grabs my arm again.

  ‘Get off me,’ I say as he pulls me out of the car, I fail to get my legs out properly, fall onto the asphalt and graze my elbow.

  He stands there watching me as I get up, and I feel so humiliated that I’m almost in tears. I then stand while he fetches my suitcase from the boot, wondering if I should get back in the car and lock the doors, but before I have the chance he throws the suitcase at my feet, grabs my handbag from under the car seat and throws it towards me, sending keys and lozenges and make-up items flying as it hits the ground. He then walks around the car, sits in the driver’s seat and drives off without looking at me.

  I sit on a bench in the lay-by for two hours, waiting for Andres to come back, before realising that he won’t. I call him perhaps fifty times, but it goes straight to voicemail. While I’m googling to find the number of a local taxi, a Volvo stops right in front of me. A middle-aged woman opens the driver’s door and jumps out, I don’t think she notices me, anyway she runs past and down to the bushes behind me, where she pulls her trousers down and squats, I can hear the sigh of relief all the way from here. While she’s still crouching she notices me. I turn my head away, but in the corner of my eye see her raise her hand and wave. I stare straight ahead.

 

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