Toxic, p.5
Toxic, page 5
The next morning I’m woken by a knock on the door downstairs. On the mornings I don’t do the shed, I get up at six and turn on the lights in the kitchen and bathroom, and if like today it has snowed during the night, I’ll trudge over to the woodshed and to the mailbox, then go back to bed and sleep until at least half past ten.
I look at the clock, it’s quarter past eight. I throw on my clothes, and on my way through the kitchen open my Mac and the accounting program before going out into the hall, where I slap my face a couple of times before opening the door. But it’s not Mum, it’s Viggo. He is rosy-cheeked, his shoulders hunched, as usual far too poorly dressed for the bitter wind, hatless, open-necked, and with snot glistening under his nose. He has his fiddle case slung over his shoulder and an expectant look on his face.
‘Hi?’ I say.
‘Hi,’ he says, but just stands there, turning slightly.
‘Didn’t you get my message?’ I ask.
‘Yes, but Mum says I’m still entitled to fiddle lessons,’ he says, without looking at me. ‘Since we pay annual fees to the arts school.’
‘Yes, but there is, you know, a state of emergency right now,’ I say, smiling at him, ‘I’m sure Vivian’s noticed that everywhere’s closed due to the global pandemic.’
I’m definitely not sure that she’s noticed, and if she has, it certainly won’t have stopped her demanding her right from what she considers to be an authoritarian body.
Viggo shrugs his shoulders.
‘Besides, it’s not up to me,’ I say. ‘You’ll have to call the school and ask if you can get your money back for the missed lessons.’
‘She said I couldn’t come home without getting my lesson,’ says Viggo, locking eyes with me.
He looks defiant, mostly, but the slight tremor in his bottom lip makes it impossible not to invite him in. I look quickly towards Andres and Kristin’s house before letting him inside, and imagine Andres protesting: What, are you nuts – why don’t you just invite all of Wuhan into your living room? Viggo, of all people, from the least hygienic family for miles around.
‘Are you really still using a Mac instead of a PC?’ says Viggo as we enter the kitchen. ‘Everyone knows Macs are for people who don’t know shit about computers.’
The number of flaws and problems he points out everywhere he goes is remarkable, considering where he comes from himself.
‘Nice if you wash your hands,’ I say, nodding towards the kitchen sink; suddenly conscious of everything he’s touching as he runs his finger along the edge of my Mac. I wonder if white spirit might work as a disinfectant.
MATHILDE
I had envisioned a long weekend with Jakob in a big European city, but in the current climate it’s impossible. First of all, it would be social suicide, ‘Only selfish assholes put their travel whims before the community in the middle of a pandemic,’ said a friend about another mutual ex-friend who was planning on going to Greece. Second, Jakob seems to have stopped flying. ‘Stopped?’ I asked. ‘Yes, at least, I don’t fly unless it’s totally necessary,’ he replied. I didn’t ask where he drew the line for what was necessary. ‘Can’t we just rent a cabin somewhere on the south coast,’ he said, ‘we probably won’t do much anyway,’ he added with a smile. But since only a few morally crippled Norwegian souls chose to go abroad this summer, it’s been hard enough finding any available cabin, let alone one that isn’t totally overlooked by neighbours. In the end I booked a small cabin at Lindesnes, a few hundred metres from the sea, hidden from the view of any neighbour, but itself totally devoid of any view at all.
Jakob and I have never been together outside the classroom, or my apartment. I pick him up in the car park at Tåsen shopping centre. He makes me wait, arriving ten minutes later than the agreed time, he doesn’t even text me, he just shows up. As he walks towards the car he looks different, and for a moment I feel uncomfortable, but the feeling passes before I manage to work out why, and then he opens the door, and I can smell him.
We join the motorway and head west, the afternoon sun shining through the windscreen. Mum told me that when I was little I cried whenever we drove out of Oslo. ‘As if on command,’ she said, ‘no matter how excited you were about going on holiday, you’d start wailing as soon as we hit the motorway.’ I still hate leaving Oslo, I always feel like I’m going to miss the place at its best. And I don’t know who I’m supposed to be or who I am when I leave, I start moving differently, speaking differently, I become self-conscious and awkward without the framework I grew up with and grew into around me. But with Jakob beside me in the car it feels different, all my attention is focussed on him.
Just as we’re passing Tønsberg his cellphone rings. His left hand has been resting on my thigh since we joined the motorway, so with his right hand he turns down the radio, puts the phone to his ear and mouths ‘Dad’ to me, while smiling. Before I can object, he takes the call.
‘Hello?’
‘No, we already left, we’re in … hold on,’ he says, before turning to me. ‘Where are we?’
I don’t answer, but try to mouth ‘Tønsberg’ instead.
‘What?’ Jakob says aloud.
I point at the sign we’re passing.
‘Ah, okay, we’re almost in Tønsberg,’ he says.
I can just make out a deep voice on the other end.
‘No, we’re going to Lindesnes.’
He squeezes my thigh.
‘Yep, okay, we’re just passing Tønsberg … Just until Monday … I will. Say hi to Mum, and tell her I took her sunscreen.’ He turns to me and grimaces slightly. ‘Love you too. Bye.’ He hangs up the phone. ‘He says hello,’ Jakob says.
I don’t look at him, but see him smiling in the corner of my eye.
‘Thanks,’ I say laconically, not wanting be part of his game, not now, I want this trip to be different and real.
I have no idea what he has told his parents he’s doing this weekend, we never really discuss them, although Jakob does keep mentioning them. Among other things, he has told me that his father is a literature professor at Oslo University.
‘He mentioned your mother yesterday,’ Jakob says after a short pause. He looks at me: ‘She’s on the syllabus, did you know that?’
I didn’t know that, nor did I know that Jakob knew who my mother was, I’ve never mentioned her to him. I’ve told him that Mum is in fact my aunt, and that my parents died when I was little; the same story, told just as effectively as I told previous friends and boyfriends, and it instantly drew Jakob closer to me in every way.
I keep my eyes on the road, feeling typically unsettled by my mother’s presence, by the fact she has entered the conversation and come between us here in the car, but this feeling quickly yields to the realisation that Jakob must have done some pretty thorough searching to find the connection. Granted, I do have the same surname, but so do plenty of other people, and when I once tried googling both myself and my mother, it took a long time before I found the solitary master’s thesis in which the student had mentioned my full name in their analysis of the maternal roles in my mother’s writing.
‘No, I didn’t, but I’m sure she would have been thrilled,’ I say. ‘She would have loved the recognition, put it that way.’
‘Yeah, Dad was totally starstruck when I told him you were my Norwegian teacher,’ says Jakob, still looking at me. He smiles expectantly, or perhaps provokingly.
There’s something exciting about the way he toys with our relationship like this, the way he flirts with the outside world, seeming innocent, but in total control. This air of effortlessness and superiority makes him even more attractive. And there’s no place for me in this game, other than the role I play, which I did enthusiastically at first, but in the last few weeks, with the summer holidays and his last day at school approaching, I’ve become more reserved. There’s something feigned and transient about my part that I no longer like. A vision of us both in the distant future has wormed its way in, almost unnoticed, despite me actively resisting it for the past year.
During my first month with Jakob I thought, daily, Today I’m ending this; the following month I thought, almost daily, Next month I’m ending this; in February I thought, This has got to be over by Easter. After Easter I thought that saying no to Jakob during a pandemic lockdown would be an act of pure self-harm, especially if the world was going to hell anyway, and by May he was practically no longer my student. In June I spent a lot of time googling famous couples with big age differences, and was delighted, bordering on euphoric, when I read the story of Emmanuel and Brigitte Macron. In recent weeks, I’ve caught myself imagining the future Jakob and me as a similar power couple, me as a writer and him as, if not president, something meaningful and important – and that we are proud of our story, that we own it and tell it – ‘Love wins,’ Jakob would say, proudly raising our entwined hands aloft on all our photographs.
‘I’d be happy to meet your family and spread a little stardust,’ I say, turning my head and looking at him.
For a moment he looks unsure, then composes himself, smiles, turns up the volume on the radio, and whistles along to Simon & Garfunkel.
By the time we arrive at the cabin the sun has long gone. We park as instructed beside a dirt track and notice some flaking wood a few hundred metres away among vegetation that looks like it’s been fed steroids: gigantic ferns and lupins, dark and dense forest that smells musty and sweet when I open the car door. Jakob walks up the trail ahead of me, swiping at branches and bushes, stomping his feet to scare the vipers away, turning every three paces to check if I’m keeping up. The cabin looks smaller than it did in the photos and seems to have been painted yellow originally, but now looks mostly grey, and there’s a small wooden terrace with white plastic furniture outside the front door. I try to read Jakob’s body language, but find I can’t. He stops about twenty metres from the cabin and stands there legs apart, hands on his hips, with his head tilted slightly. He turns to me.
‘It’s authentic at least,’ he says.
I feel myself blushing as I walk past him and unlock the door, angry at myself for the whole situation, at Jakob because we don’t know each other outside my apartment, because his back, his feet and his movements are all different and alien to me.
When I wake up the next morning, he’s already out of bed. I find him in the lounge, sitting on the couch in his T-shirt and gym shorts, looking flushed and with beads of sweat along his hairline. He smiles at me.
‘There’s a cabin just beyond those trees,’ he says, pointing diagonally out the window, ‘it was full of people.’
I follow his index finger and see the wall of a red cabin and some movement perhaps two hundred metres away. I try to interpret Jakob’s tone of voice and the look on his face, he seems neither stressed nor anxious, more neutral. Nor can I interpret my own reaction; it could be fear, it could be excitement, anticipation, or a combination perhaps. I don’t answer, just wrap my arms around his neck from behind, kiss him behind the ear, wet my lips with his sweat.
‘Take a shower, and I’ll make breakfast,’ I say.
I lay the white plastic table that’s standing outside, take the radio out and turn up the volume. The sound carries well between the two cabins, the gentle wind blows random snatches of East-Norwegian voices over to us from the red cabin: a discussion about washing up, a defiant child screaming, the clinking of cutlery.
As we’re about to have breakfast a man comes walking up the path. I glance at Jakob, who says nothing, but grabs his phone with one hand while simultaneously putting his sunglasses on with the other. The man stops about ten metres downhill from us, the sun is behind him and a cap throws a shadow across his face. He’s wearing neon-pink shorts and a tight V-neck T-shirt, but the muscle and skin on the arms and legs under the shorts is middle-aged, fifty plus maybe, perhaps even older. He smiles and nods.
‘I had a feeling someone had come up here,’ he says without saying hello.
Jakob looks up and smiles briefly before looking down at his phone again. I hesitate a little, unsure if I should say hello, or if I should reply to something that wasn’t a question in the first place.
‘Yes, we arrived late last night,’ I say. ‘We rented the place from Airbnb.’
‘Right,’ he says, shifting his weight from one leg to the other, turning his head a little so that I can finally see his face.
He looks at Jakob.
‘And you’re in the cabin down there?’ I say after an unbearably long pause, I’ve never understood how anyone has the confidence to communicate like this, I despise it, but he’s the first person to witness this thing which is us – Jakob and I – so I also want to keep him here, to prolong the moment.
‘Yes, my wife and I own it, we come here every year for most of the summer, but, of course, this year we’ve been invaded by the whole family,’ he replies, ‘including my sister, who owns this cabin,’ he adds, laughing.
Jakob’s right leg is shaking frantically, like it always does in class, the fragile veranda planks are shuddering so much I can feel it through my chair.
‘Yes, renting it out this summer must be pretty lucrative,’ I say with a smile.
‘For her, yes,’ he says, laughing louder while staring at Jakob, but when Jakob still doesn’t look up from his phone the man stands up straight and clears his throat. ‘I just came to say please don’t piss in the stream, we use it for our washing-up water – and to check the gas bottle in the kitchen.’
He points at the front door and takes a step closer.
‘My sister thought the cap might be a bit loose,’ he adds. ‘And we’d rather not gas you to death.’
I get up to open the door, and the man walks past Jakob, then in front of me and into the cabin. I stand there watching as he lifts the gas bottle out from the cupboard below the kitchen counter. He twists and turns it a little.
‘Is there gas coming out of the cooker?’ he asks.
‘We haven’t used the cooker yet,’ I answer. ‘It was so late when we arrived that we just collapsed into bed.
The man glances at the wide-open door to the bedroom, where the sun is streaming onto the unmade bed with its sheets hanging over the edge, the two open suitcases, and Jakob’s boxer shorts lying on the floor just beyond the doorframe – then quickly looks down at the gas bottle again.
‘It feels tight to me so it’s probably my sister being paranoid, but it’s good to be on the safe side,’ he says, putting the bottle back.
‘Of course. Thank you,’ I say.
He doesn’t look at me or the bedroom as he leaves the cabin, but he turns his head slightly when he passes Jakob, who is still looking at his phone.
‘Minecraft?’ he asks.
c#
JOHS
‘You got rubble in yer bag?’ shouted Johannes without turning round.
He hadn’t turned round since we left the car, but Andres was, every five minutes, waving for me to hurry up. They both seemed to be leaping up the path ahead of me, light-footed and light-shouldered, while I was feeling the sting of lactic acid and the weight of my thighs and calves with every step. Even Grandma, who had set off from the car after us, had caught me up, and I could now hear her footsteps approaching.
‘Yep, I’m gonna need a break soon,’ she said quietly as she came right up behind me.
I turned and glanced at her, fully aware before I did so that she was just being kind to me, and of course she didn’t have a drop of sweat on her, she was just breathing steadily with her usual calm smile. But I didn’t smile back, and as I picked up the pace I felt the sweat trickling down my back.
Johannes stopped on top of a huge rock, where a stream cut through the path before plummeting over a waterfall into the ravine below. It was late June, but it had only recently started feeling properly warm, and the stream was brimming with meltwater. Johannes walked to the edge of the rock, waited for us with his arms folded, stomped a kind of beat with one foot, then glanced down at Grandma and me before rolling his eyes at Andres.
‘Here,’ he said, once I was within earshot, then pointed down at the waterfall, ‘this is where they fell, the two of ’em.’
He gestured towards the ravine, before shaking his head.
‘And all because of some good-for-nothing girls, can you imagine anything so laughably unnecessary?’
None of us knew who he was talking to, it wasn’t to me at least, and definitely not Grandma, but Andres had sat down on the rock and was poking at the stone at his feet with a stick without looking at any of us. Johannes firmly believed that you couldn’t learn a dance tune without knowing the story behind it, but Andres didn’t care about tunes or stories or fiddles. He was going to quit in the summer anyway, but Johannes didn’t know that, and he’d decided that Andres, and me too if necessary, should not only get to hear, but we should also get to see, the story of the Kivle girls.
I’d heard it many times. ‘You can’t grow up here without being marinated in naive mysticism,’ Andres often said, quoting his role model, Richard, who was four years older than him and moved to a bedsit in Skien the very day he left secondary school. ‘The stories lack any kind of dramaturgy,’ Andres continued, and I didn’t dare ask what any of it meant. But I loved hearing the stories, especially when Johannes told them.
‘They found them at the bottom, both of ’em, stone dead,’ said Johannes, ‘you’d think those girls might have come to meet them halfway, but no, which is typical.’
Grandma clapped her hands together and laughed loudly, as usual. Johannes straightened his posture on the rock and puffed his chest out at the response. I laughed as well.
‘Typical lazy girls,’ I said.
‘Exactly!’ Johannes shouted then laughed so much my whole body swelled with pride. ‘Anyway, now we have to move on,’ he continued while pointing up the path.
He then ran out into the stream, landing one foot briefly on a rock, then jumping onto the next before reaching the other side. Andres leapt after him. I stood on the bank and hesitated for a moment, the first stone was at least two metres away, and it was possible I would have managed it, but there was no way little Grandma would. On the other side, the back of Johannes’s checked shirt vanished over the brow of the hill.
