Toxic, p.8
Toxic, page 8
‘You’re meeting your study group on a Sunday?’ I ask.
‘Yep, well, just for a beer,’ he says before getting up and going into the bathroom with me in pursuit.
He enters the shower and quickly slides the glass door shut, then turns on the water and without flinching as the cold water hits his body, demonstratively washes himself all over.
‘I want to know what you’re thinking,’ I say, ‘about me, and about us.’
He looks around the shower door, as if searching for a possible way out, before turning his back to me.
‘Jakob,’ I say loudly.
‘You’re fucking crazy,’ he says, leaning one hand against the tiles, ‘I can’t take any more of this nagging.’
‘I’ll stop nagging when you answer me,’ I say.
‘Okay, I think we should slow things down a bit,’ he says after a short pause, and this short pause proves that he has been thinking about it, so I get up from the toilet seat.
‘Slow things down?’ I shout. ‘Things can’t get any slower, we’re standing still, we’re not going anywhere.’
‘For fuck’s sake!’ Jakob snaps before turning round and banging on the glass door. ‘Of course we’re not going anywhere, can’t you get that into your screwed-up head?’
‘And what does that mean?’ I say, although he can’t say it any more clearly, but I want to make him say something he’ll regret even more, that will make him cringe even more when he changes his mind, as he always does.
‘You’re totally disillusioned,’ he says, pausing briefly after realising that he’s used the wrong word, ‘you’re talking like we’ve been married for forty years.’
‘Disillusioned?’ I repeat. ‘Don’t use words you don’t understand.’
‘Don’t act like you’re my mum,’ he fires back.
‘Get out,’ I say, immediately regretting it.
‘With pleasure,’ he says, but as he tries to leave the shower I block his exit, and he has to squeeze past me while I try holding him back, but he’s still wet and my grip on his upper arm slips easily as he snatches it away from me.
‘Poetic realism,’ I say while looking out at the sparsely filled classroom, where almost every other desk is empty.
Since the ten-percent ceiling on absenteeism was lifted, the Teams inbox now gets a regular, early-morning flurry of messages about headaches, sore throats and stuffy noses. By October, I’m already starting to worry about their grades, and sending out documents and assignments and reminders by the dozen.
‘We’ll carry on where we left off, by looking at the assignments you worked on in groups last Friday. So, what do you think Camilla Collett is saying in The District Governor’s Daughters?’
I see a wall of black plastic and silver, dotted with apple symbols, all the students staring into their screens, some wearing headphones, and it compounds the pervasive sense of loneliness I’ve woken up to every morning for the last few weeks. My eyes constantly drift towards Jakob’s old desk, and every day I have to suppress my resentment of poor Isak, who sits there now.
‘You don’t need to write this down,’ I say, although I doubt most of them are, they’re watching Netflix or YouTube. ‘Do you mind closing your laptops for five minutes? We’re actually just going to talk for a bit.’
Most of them close their laptops and look at me, some of them clearly annoyed, others curious, but this eye contact is worth the risk of getting a worse score on the teacher-performance survey. I breathe more easily, smile at them, enjoy being looked at.
‘But we need to see our notes from the assignments to answer your question,’ Vilde says while raising her hand.
‘No, let’s try without,’ I say, ‘it’s good to give your memory a little exercise.’
There’s a knock on the classroom door. I hold up an unnecessary index finger to the class as though asking them to wait a moment and open the door to find the college principal standing at a safe distance outside.
‘I’d like to have a chat with you,’ she says, ‘is now okay?’
It’s impossible to read the look on her face, but she obviously knows that now is not okay since she came to me in the middle of a lesson. I become nervous.
‘We were just about to discuss The District Governor’s Daughters,’ I say, ‘but it’s my last class today, so I can come up to you afterwards?’
She nods and smiles briefly.
‘Fine, I’ll see you then,’ she says, and I notice her quickly looking me up and down when she turns to leave.
When I arrive at her office thirty minutes later, the principal is in another meeting. The secretary says he has been told to ask me to wait, although he has no idea how long that might be. My nervousness grows, and it’s hard to sit quietly in the chair. I yawn three times in a row, stifling the fourth when I see the secretary looking at me. ‘You’re like a dog, dogs yawn when they’re stressed,’ Mum once said, ‘they do it to calm themselves down, or to calm their surroundings.’ Since I was a child, she has made good-natured fun of me whenever I yawn in the middle of an uncomfortable conversation or situation. ‘Good argument,’ she’ll say laughing, or, ‘I agree, let’s go home.’
There’s a film of my mother at a literary award ceremony, and I’ve seen it so many times that I know every movement, every wink, by heart. My dad is filming the whole thing, pointing the camera at her as they read out the nominees, I can see that she’s certain she’s going to win. ‘She was so good on stage, your mother, so confident and clear, she loved speaking in front of an audience, and they loved her even more,’ says Mum. As my mother walks past the camera to accept the award, she swallows a yawn, and in her acceptance speech from the stage, when she mentions my father, I’m sure that the little twitch in her throat, at the point where Mum always says, ‘Look how moved she is,’ is also a yawn she is trying to suppress.
I check my phone repeatedly, mainly to have something to turn to; I open the message thread between Jakob and me at least once an hour. I have to scroll up three times to find the last message he sent, which was two weeks ago now. Below that, the screen is filled with nothing but blue text bubbles from me, the last of which I sent at 07:45 today. Below that it says, ‘Delivered,’ confirmation that he hasn’t blocked my number, at least, which I interpret as meaning that he at worst doesn’t care, but more likely is still punishing me. Every night I decide to not contact him anymore, certain that he’ll eventually come crawling – but every morning the prospect of going a whole day without that little connection is unbearable. I haven’t seen him or spoken to him since he left my apartment that Sunday a month ago, and he has answered only three of my thirty messages: Leave me alone; Stay out of my way; and Seriously, Mathilde, I don’t want to talk to you.
A girl leaves the principal’s office looking red-faced and puffy round her eyes, as though she has been crying, but, like the girls in my Norwegian class, she makes no attempt to hide it, in fact she looks straight at me and smiles gently while sniffing and rubbing her finger under one eye as if wiping off runny mascara. I’ve become quite used to them crying, all the time, about everything, and to them being seemingly able to explain why with an impressive amount of insight and logic, quite effortlessly. I envy them sometimes, they have a far better understanding of their emotions than I’ve ever had. ‘This is, of course, something you’re real experts at,’ I’ll often say when tasking them to analyse a character or relationship in a novel or short story. Although, if they’re asked to theorise about the psychology they seemingly excelled at earlier that day, either to avoid making a presentation or being given extra help, they end up in a muddle and resort to noun stacking and mechanical answers.
When I enter her office, the principal is sitting at her desk making notes on a sheet of paper, and doesn’t look up until she has finished her sentence.
‘Take a seat,’ she says, nodding at the chair on the opposite side of the desk. ‘Would you like something to drink – coffee or tea? Water?’
‘No, thank you,’ I say, noticing my thigh muscles trembling as I sit down.
The principal gathers the papers on her desk, puts them to one side, moves them to the other side, then wraps her hands round her coffee cup. Her knuckles whiten, and she appears to be gearing up to start the conversation.
‘Yes, it’s probably best to just get straight to the point,’ she says eventually.
I feel air pushing at the bottom of my throat, and swallow repeatedly to stop it turning into a yawn.
‘I have requested this meeting because we’ve received a message of concern about you,’ she says, ‘about you and one of your pupils.’
The tension that has been sending shivers through every large and small muscle in my body subsides; my shoulders slump, my tummy presses against my waistband and my legs become heavy.
‘A message of concern?’ I say.
‘A report,’ says the principal, ‘about an inappropriate relationship between you and a student in your class. Jakob, in 3STD.’
‘Inappropriate?’
I repeat the words in her tone of voice, unable to find mine. She nods, her eyes dart left and right, and in the absence of any reaction of my own I feel sorry for her, because this is clearly uncomfortable for her.
‘He’s no longer in 3STD,’ I say quickly, ‘he’s studying political science at Blindern.’
I regret the last piece of information, her neck stiffens, her eyes narrow.
‘I understand,’ she says. ‘But he was in the Norwegian class you taught last semester, isn’t that correct?’
‘Yes,’ I say.
‘And is it correct that you started a relationship with him while he was still your student?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I say.
Her expression and posture changes. Softens. She looks relieved.
‘No?’
‘No, he started a relationship with me,’ I say.
She falls silent, puts her coffee cup down, gathers her hands and lays them in front of her on the desk.
‘A sexual relationship?’ she asks.
‘Who reported it?’ I say, feeling like the answer to that question is the only thing I care about.
‘Did you have a sexual relationship with Jakob while he was your student?’ she asks.
‘He’s over sixteen, God, he’s actually over eighteen,’ I say, ‘he can sleep with whoever he wants.’
‘Yes, he can sleep with whoever he wants, but you can’t,’ she says, looking mostly surprised and perhaps worried.
‘It’s not illegal, we’re both adults,’ I say.
The principal goes to object, but restrains herself.
‘According to the Criminal Code …’ she looks down at her notes ‘…section 295, it is illegal to obtain sexual intercourse by abusing one’s position.’
‘Obtain it,’ I repeat. ‘I haven’t obtained anything, it was a mutual relationship, it is mutual.’
She shakes her head, before tilting it slightly.
‘Oh please, Mathilde, you do understand that you can’t go around sleeping with your students?’
I resist the urge to repeat her absurd choice of words: ‘go around sleeping with’?
‘I haven’t abused my position,’ I say instead. ‘He’s not a defenceless victim, he was actively in favour of it, actively part of it.’
‘It doesn’t matter what he did, he is your student, it is an indisputable power relationship in which you have the upper hand, where you are the authority,’ she says.
I could protest, and I’m sure that several of my colleagues would agree, that this power relationship isn’t that obvious anymore; that it’s an outdated notion considering the demands and evaluations we get from the students. They are the ones with the power. Them and their parents.
‘Who reported it?’ I ask again.
I imagine Jakob’s father. They look similar to each other in the photos I’ve seen. He is only fifty-six years old. A friend of mine is with a fifty-six-year-old and they’re expecting their second child.
‘I can’t tell you that, they want to remain anonymous,’ says the principal.
‘They?’
She ignores my repetition of the word.
‘You give me no other choice, Mathilde, you can’t carry on working here,’ she says, as though there might have been another outcome if I had answered differently, if I had shown more regret, if I had shown any regret.
The maple trees in St. Hanshaugen Park are still red. I take a photo of a withered leaf lying on the asphalt and send it to Jakob. What do you think this leaf symbolises? I write. Expand, max 300 words. The message isn’t delivered, then the bubble turns green, sent as a text message.
I walk from St. Hanshaugen to Alexander Kielland’s plass, then to Grünerløkka, up towards Torshov but turn back when I realise that I’m on my way home and instead continue along the inner ring road to Carl Berner, Hasle, down to Ensjø, over Kampen, past the old house I lived in until my mother and father died. I stop where Jakob and I parked my car last spring, during lockdown, when we drove around aimlessly for hours. ‘That was my bedroom,’ I said, pointing up at one of the windows, ‘and that was the kitchen, where my dad used to lift me onto his shoulders so I could see out.’ Jakob had looked uncertain for a change. ‘I don’t know anyone who has died,’ he said.
The sight of the house, the garden and gate stirs feelings that have previously been numb, and I become scared and have to sit on the kerb; I imagine what Jakob said to his father, and his mother, I have something to tell you, what he said about me, what they answered, how they talked about us.
When I arrive home, I stand in the middle of the lounge. Every room smells like Jakob, smells like us. The apartment, rooms, items of furniture, all silent, I turn the television on, the news is repeating a government press conference about the corona situation. I haven’t checked the news all day, have gone several hours forgetting that this state of emergency is also worldwide. It’s a comforting thought, the sense of being part of a community in crisis. ‘We will fight this together,’ says the prime minister, ‘and if everyone does their bit, hopefully we’ll be celebrating Christmas the way we usually do, with grandparents and extended families.’ Despite the arrogant assumption that a normal Christmas is the common and joyful goal of Norway’s entire population, and that we all have a functioning extended family to celebrate with, I find her words comforting. Her whole speech feels like a personal pep talk.
But the feeling quickly passes, I’m unable to stay in the apartment for more than an hour, I call a friend, ask if she fancies a beer, she doesn’t want to, but says we can meet and go for a walk around the lake at Sognsvann. I’ve already walked almost twenty-thousand pointless steps today, my feet ache, but I accept her offer anyway, can’t bear to be alone, don’t dare to be alone.
‘We’ve actually just looked at a house in Rjukan,’ Andrea says with a slightly embarrassed laugh as we walk along the lakeside path.
The water is calm and black, the trees around us dark in the twilight, and as usual, Andrea talks only about herself, just as I’d hoped and expected she would when I decided to call her.
‘Why? You’ve got absolutely no connection to Rjukan,’ I say, without really knowing where Rjukan is; I recall it being in an almost eternally dark valley that gets sunlight by reflecting it off a nearby mountain using a giant mirror.
‘Yes, we do, Mikkel’s grandparents lived there, so he was often there when he was little, and we decided we don’t want to raise our children in Oslo and want to move before they start school,’ she says.
I quickly try to calculate how much time she has before they need to move, but have forgotten how old her eldest son is.
‘What’s wrong with raising children in Oslo?’ I ask.
‘There’s nothing necessarily wrong with it, but it’s just so far from the countryside, from nature, it alienates them somehow,’ she says, without specifying what she thinks they become alienated from and seeming oblivious to the fact that we currently are in the middle of the countryside, twenty minutes from the centre of Oslo. ‘You know for the price of a two-room apartment in Oslo you can get a mansion in Rjukan?’
I don’t say that there’s perhaps a good reason for that.
‘Do they have mansions in Rjukan?’ I say with a smile.
‘Smallholdings,’ she replies, ‘with gardens and apple trees. We’re going to be as self-sufficient as possible, grow our own vegetables and get a few sheep or goats perhaps. Mikkel has already been reading about organic farming, he’s really excited.’
I then remember that Mikkel, when I ran into him by chance outside the shops one day in late August, had been wearing a dark-green Farmers’ Cooperative T-shirt. I’d commented on it, asking if it was a political statement in advance of next year’s election, and he had laughed, pulling on the hem to straighten the logo on the chest while peering down at it. ‘Sure,’ he said, ‘but this autumn I’ve seen at least three other people wearing the same shirt, most recently someone handing out Conservative Party leaflets in town.’
‘Don’t you think you’ll miss Oslo?’ I ask Andrea now.
‘No, I don’t think we will actually. I’ve had enough of play areas. I’m looking forward to being able to just let the kids go out and play without worrying,’ she says. ‘Imagine all the space they’ll get to romp around in, they’ll be absolutely ecstatic.’
When a friend of mine from Voss visited Oslo with her four-year-old daughter for the first time and spent the night with me, the daughter found the concept of having an apartment totally baffling. She consistently called my apartment my ‘room’, couldn’t understand why I didn’t know all the other people who lived in the building, and on the first evening, when they were both in the bathroom brushing their teeth, I overheard the girl say, ‘Mummy, does Mathilde really live here?’
‘Yes, in Rjukan your biggest worry will probably be the lack of vitamin D,’ I say, laughing.
‘You’d understand better if you had kids,’ Andrea says, torpedoing my chances of offering any more arguments, ‘Oslo is far too cramped when you have kids.’
