The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  “Julia, he’s just doing his job. This is an over-twenty-six club.”

  “A what?” Now it was my turn under those unwinking eyes. I looked right back at her.

  “You have to be over twenty-six. How is he to know you’re twenty-nine?”

  “Indeed,” he said, with a formal little half bow, “you look much, much younger.”

  I thought for a moment she would hit him. She restrained herself visibly. “That, I suppose, is meant as a compliment. I don’t take it as such. Here is my license. If you won’t let us in here, just say so. Now give me that back and either let us by or not.”

  He gave back the license and she brushed past him. I paid and followed. The music was like a living stream, pulsing between bodies, collecting thickly in dark corners, vibrating bone so hard it might have been cartilage.

  She was already at the bar. “I ordered you beer.” She tossed down the shot next to the two glasses of beer and lifted a finger to the bartender—a big woman, all fat and muscle and chipped front tooth—who brought her another. “That pompous bastard.” She drank half the second akevit. “God, I hate this stuff,” then finished it anyway. “Why do people do that with ID? They make me feel…It’s the way they look at you, as though you’re trying to cheat them somehow. Look, look at my face. Is this the face of a twenty-four-year-old? No. Of course it’s not. It’s all bullshit, this show me your ID crap. Do I look like the kind of person who would lie just to get into this lousy club? I hate being accused of being a liar, of trying to get something I don’t deserve. And as for that crap about, ‘Oh, you look so young, ma’am…’ Ha! Compliment my ass. Why do you suppose anyone would think it was a compliment to be told you look young and unmarked by experience, that is, naive and an easy mark? Well, I am not flattered. I’ve earned this face!”

  The gorget rose and fell as she breathed through her nose; the long muscles in her bare shoulders slid over each other as she reached for her beer.

  “God, I hate this, too. Bartender, bring me a glass of chardonnay.”

  She was fierce and wild as a hawk. I could imagine her wheeling between cliffs, sun glinting from her talons, harsh skree echoing down the canyon.

  “So. You’re very quiet.”

  She would lift those wings, thrust herself from the ledge to beat the hot air, rise and rise, and when her marigold eyes caught tiny movement down below she would stoop: crack of wind under the pinions, tiny rodent squeak of terror, snap of vertebrae, then the beat-beat-beat upward, hare hanging warm and limp from her talons. And suddenly I understood all those I don’t knows. Understood why I had come with her to Norway and taken her to visit Tante Hjørdis; why I had stood in that shop and bought the gorget; why I had shown her the Munch Room. I knew how the hawk’s mate felt when she returned with the hare and they ripped its flesh from its bones and swallowed the raw muscle and skin and stared into each other’s eyes. I understood why when she had asked Am I safe? I had said I’ll protect you, because I would protect her, from anyone, anything. The realization was shocking, like the taste of a copper penny in my mouth, like the taste of blood.

  She laughed. “You have the oddest look on your face! Forget my pissing and moaning, ignore it. We’re here now. Drink some of your beer!”

  The music was sinuous, insistent. She was moving with it again, swaying silver like a sleeping fish in its current.

  “Dance with me,” I said, and held out my hand, and when she took it, it was not like before, not like the Munch Room; it was like closing a circuit and the current ran straight through my bones and began to heat my belly.

  “Ah,” she said, and a flush bloomed under her cheekbones.

  The floor was small and crowded with dancers, each their own private country as they moved belly to back, or wildly, like dervishes. Julia danced more with her body than her arms, more with her hips than breasts, and I could almost see the heat gathering below her navel, heat to match mine, like the molten core of a planet. This time we moved around a common centre of gravity that was suspended between us. It pulled us in, closer and closer, until the swell of her silver dress moved nine inches from mine, eight, seven.

  “Aud,” she whispered, “Aud…”

  I put my arm around her waist and swept her through the crowd. She stumbled once, legs uncoordinated and uncaring, all attention fixed on the heat gathering between my arm and her back, between the flats of my fingers where they curled over her hipbone and brushed her belly. I thrust two hundred kroner at the man at the door. “Taxi,” I said.

  It appeared between one moment and the next and though the cab drove fast on empty roads, inside everything was still. We hardly breathed. My arm was still about her waist but neither of us moved as the heat built.

  I must have paid him, must have ridden up in the elevator because suddenly we were in the familiar corridor and she was reaching for her doorknob and I was saying, “No, my room, it has to be my room,” and we were inside and I was locking the door.

  She stood in the middle of the room and waited. I stopped two inches in front of her and reached out with my fingertips, fluttered them across her lips, down her throat where a great pulse beat, across the bare skin above her dress, and she began to moan, a deep rhythmic moan with a huff, until I stepped closer and my thigh pushed against her belly and she spread her feet wider and groaned into my mouth. Holding her to me with one hand behind her head, I used the other to slide down her zipper. When I stepped away an inch, the dress began to slip and she started to writhe. With the same hand, I unbuttoned my shirt and unzipped my trousers and now it was like trying to hold down a hurricane, and then she was straining against me and we were on the bed.

  She was strong, lithe and fit and wild past civility. I stripped her naked and she literally tore the shirt from my back, and when I pushed her down and straddled her she had my pants yanked down to midthigh and her arms around my neck, and we were breast to breast and I could feel the muscles in her stomach flexing under mine. Her eyes were black as basalt. I ran my hands down her flank, bumping over ribs, curving over her hipbone, and then she was pushing herself up against me and the cords in her arms and shoulders stood out as she pulled me down against her, and we were moving over each other, sliding skin to skin, spinning a cocoon of wet trails, breathing each other’s breath, gazes locked, and the heat between us built, and she was muttering, “In me. In me.” And we moved harder and faster, and the heat built and built and now she was shouting and her arms were knotted behind my back and the heat was a blast furnace, red yellow white hot, and then it came roaring out over us, filling the world with hot air, hot metal, and flesh and bone dissolved to nothing in its path.

  Julia lay on her back, smiling. I stroked her head, still tasting the shock of realization. It was just like that time when I was nine years old, and I had been playing in the autumn-wild gardens of Horley House, running and jumping for the sheer joy of being alive, and my mother had leaned from one of the big sash windows and called for me and I had run and run, full of joy and energy and vigour, leaping over rocks, over low gorse bushes, over the pile of deadwood and brambles that the gardeners had pulled together for a fire. I remember the smoky Yorkshire air, the heat of my cheeks in the rushing cool twilight, the way they burned as I finally skidded to a halt in the hall, eyes bright, and my mother looked at me, went white, and said, “What have you done to your leg?”

  And I looked down and thought: Oh. My left leg was sheathed in red from the knee down, as though I were wearing a bright red sock. Then I could smell it: sharp and coppery. Blood. I twisted and peered at the back of my leg. One inch below the fold of my knee was a gaping cut.

  “Lucky you didn’t hamstring yourself,” said the young, acne-riddled doctor at the hospital as he put in the final stitches.

  I still have that four-inch scar today. I still wonder how it was that I got a wound like that—from the brambles, perhaps, or the nail in some old fencing—and not feel it, not feel the skin part, then the fat beneath it, and the plump, pink
muscle beneath that.

  Julia sighed and smiled some more. How had she managed to get inside me, slip between my ribs and rest against my heart, without me feeling it?

  I stroked her up and down; so long and slim and fine. My stiletto. This is where the fear had come from, the unconscious knowledge that I was vulnerable. “I love you,” I said. Her smile broadened: she had known all along. I laughed, and it was my laugh, not one designed to cover anything. I laughed again at the sound. She laughed at my pleasure. The world is a strange and splendid place.

  ten

  We were packed and eating our second breakfast, this time in the hotel dining room, when the hire company delivered the car and phone. I had the driver bring the papers and phone to our table. I finished the smoked salmon while Julia called Edvard Borlaug to give him the number and tell him where we’d be, “Just in case.” When she was done, I talked to Tante Hjørdis, who said she would be delighted to see us on our way out of the city.

  I pushed the food aside. “We should leave room. She said we can’t be there for an hour. She’s making koldt bord.”

  “Does that mean what it sounds like it means?”

  I nodded. “She always makes the same things, and always the same amount—whether she expects a horde or just two people.”

  While Julia oversaw the transfer of our luggage into the car, I checked us out. I had the absurd urge to lean confidentially towards the desk clerk and tell him what a marvellous day it was; to tip everyone obscenely; to sing. I restrained myself.

  The sun was hidden behind low grey cloud, but the world was still a bright and exciting place. The Audi was about two years old but its four-wheel drive did not seem to have been much abused, though the sedate drive to Ulleval Hageby at the prescribed fifty kilometers per hour was not an exacting test. Julia’s hand rested on my thigh as I headed into the suburb.

  We parked just down the street. Julia climbed out of the car and looked up into the trees. “Is it my imagination or have the leaves grown in the last three days?”

  They were bigger. Julia was beautiful beneath them.

  I knocked. Tante Hjørdis opened the door and hugged me. Just as she was stepping back she stopped and held me out at arm’s length to study for a while. Then she let go and shook hands vigorously with Julia. She gave Julia the same extra moment’s scrutiny, then opened the door wide, and said over her shoulder as she headed for the kitchen, “The sauce needs watching.” Inside, the table groaned with food, and the scent of fish and sauce drifted through from the kitchen. We followed it to find Tante Hjørdis stirring a tiny saucepan with a wooden spoon that had been old before I was born, adding flour, pouring cream. In another pan, round white balls bobbed in boiling water.

  “Fiskeboller,” Hjørdis said to Julia. “Pass me the cream, please.” Then, in Norwegian, “Aud, you can unload the tray in the dining room and bring it out.” I did. “Coffee,” she said, which is coffee in any language. I filled the kettle and put it on the modern halogen stove to heat.

  Julia was now stirring the sauce while Hjørdis fished the fish balls out of the water with a slotted spoon. “Norwegians make good spouses,” she said out of nowhere. “Tidy, sensible, efficient. If you plan and budget and work hard—but not too hard the way you Americans do—life is steady and pleasant. There! We’re ready to eat.”

  We started with the spekesild. Julia seemed to enjoy it. She told Tante Hjørdis her idea about a children’s enclave at the Olsen Glass sculpture garden. Hjørdis put her fork down.

  “Now, if he and his family were proper Norwegians, they wouldn’t be making so much profit that they had to spend it on gardens. Money, everything is money these days. Oat flour costs twice as much today as it did two years ago. Twice. And do you know how much these Greenland prawns”—gesture to the shrimp lying abjectly in their mayonnaise—“cost? And work! Work, work, work. I call your mother, Aud, and I say, ‘When do you come to visit?’ and she says, ‘Oh, Hjørdis, there’s no time for a visit,’ as though it’s me who is being foolish. No time for family. Imagine that. But at least you have come to visit. And you have brought Julia.”

  We ate salad and thinly shaved reindeer meat. Julia asked Hjørdis what she did with her day when she wasn’t preparing delicious lunches for guests. Hjørdis snorted. “I work with young people—and not so young—who should know better. Those who…” She looked to me for the English phrase.

  “Drug addicts.”

  Julia looked only mildly surprised, but her right leg, lying close against mine under the table, jerked.

  “I help with the…” Another look.

  “Needle-exchange programme,” I supplied.

  “Yes, and facts about AIDS. Though they know more than I do, I’m sure. Personal knowledge.” For a moment, her ruddy face stilled but then, with native pragmatism, she shook the sympathy away. “And I represent them, no”—this to me, as I opened my mouth again—“I advocate on their behalf with social services and so on. A lot of work, though less in summer. All this is since I retired, of course. Before, I used to work in a chemist…a pharmacist’s.”

  “She was the pharmacist at Jernbanetorgets Apotek.”

  “Yes. It stayed open all night. I didn’t have to work at night, of course, I could have asked one of the younger people, but it is only fair for everyone to take their turn sometimes. That’s when I met all the young people, so thin, so pale. So sad….” Again, that head shake. “Come along. The fiskeboller will be getting cold.”

  We ate the fish balls. Soft and milky, so unlike anything else.

  “You used to get that look on your face when you were only as tall as this table,” Hjørdis said, smiling. She turned to Julia. “She and her mother used to come here every Saturday for my koldt bord, and every holiday.” Sometimes my father came, too, but not often. “And Aud, who was sometimes not a well-behaved child, would try to steal some fiskeboller before we’d even eaten our salads. Eat, eat. I made enough for two helpings. But save some room, there is still the cheese, and dessert.”

  We started on the cheese. Julia and I sat so close our arms rubbed together when we reached for the crackers or the nuts. Her leg was still against mine. I retold the story of the Nigerian heroin ring I’d heard from Taeko.

  “Now, we need berries for the dessert. Aud”—I stood; it had always been my job, from the time I was seven or so and strong enough to carry up the big glass jars from the cellar—“a jar of…” she looked from me to Julia and back again, “the molte, I think. Yes, the special molte,” she repeated with a certain satisfaction.

  I hadn’t been in Tante Hjørdis’s cellar for years. As a child it had been a wonderland: past the laundry with stone troughs, which I imagined might have been used during the war to cut up captured Nazis; past the mysterious sheeted shapes in the storage room; to the cavern of treasures, a long room, narrow and dry, lined with row after row of shelves, each bending under the weight of pickled gherkins and canned tomatoes, of sauces and preserved berries, that glowed with muted colour—red and gold and emerald—like precious jewels under the dust of centuries. I ran my hand along the shelves, remembering being eight, fourteen, nineteen…. It was different. It took me a moment to work out that the difference was illumination: the single, swinging bare bulb of my childhood had been replaced by two halogen floor lights. It only made the colours richer.

  The last four jars of special molte were on the top shelf. I’d heard the story of their picking: during the war, when there was no sugar to be had, she had picked them and put them whole into two-litre jars with fresh water only, sealed them, and put them in a cold stream to chill. I expected to have to stand on tiptoe to reach the big jars, but that was a child’s memory; the top shelf barely came to my chin. I lifted one down, held it to the light. Fifty years old. They looked like golden raspberries. Perhaps Hjørdis exaggerated for effect and they were indeed preserved in sugar or some kind of syrup, or perhaps there was just a kind of magic in her cellar, where time and dreams stood still. I would not ha
ve been surprised to find myself three feet tall again, with both front teeth missing.

  When I got back upstairs, Julia and Hjørdis were in the kitchen; Julia poured coffee into cups, Hjørdis whipped the cream.

  “You always did spend a long time in that cellar, even as a child,” she said, when she saw me standing there with the jar. “Bring that through to the dining room.”

  I put the jar on a placemat. Hjørdis, still standing, put one hand on the glass lid and the other around the wooden handle on the wire fastening. She pulled, then pulled again more firmly. “You have to seal them tight,” she said. She had told me when I was a child that sometimes the rubber lining between lid and jar started a chemical reaction with the fruit and fused to the glass. She was having none of that. She put her strong back into it, and the lid came free with an audible pop. I shut my eyes and breathed. Lazy late summer sun, warm grass, the cold, bitter scent of the glacier half a mile away. Hjørdis ladled a good pile into a metal bowl and took it back into the kitchen. Over the sound of the food mixer, I said to Julia, “These are molte. Called cloudberries in English. Families guard the location of their favourite patch as closely as national secrets. More closely.” I dipped one out with a spoon. It lay, still and golden and perfectly formed in its pool of liquid. I held it out. “This is how your hair smells.”

  “Ah-ah,” said Tante Hjørdis from the doorway, “don’t eat that. The only way to taste cloudberries for the first time is in Angel’s Stew.” She put the bowl of sweetened whipped cream and berries on the table and plucked the spoon from my hand. “Aud, dish that out while I go get the coffee, as Julia seems to have forgotten to bring it with her.”

  We sat. I dished the delicious mixture into three small bowls. “The last time Tante Hjørdis brought out her special molte was when my cousin Uta brought her fiancé to lunch with the family and then announced she had already married him that morning. She brought out a jar, too, when my mother married my father, though she told me once she should have known he would leave her and regretted ever letting him taste them.”