The Blue Place

by Nicola Griffith

  “I was still holding the flashlight. I flicked it on. It worked. The gun was in his hand, his left hand, but it wouldn’t do him any good. He was staring at the ceiling, head bent sideways—the expression on his face was odd, a kind of gentle amusement. All of a sudden I couldn’t get my breath. There was a dead man in my bedroom. My first night in a strange country and there was a dead man in my bedroom. I’d killed him, and I didn’t even know his name. I remember staring at the flashlight, at the light streaming through my fingers, making them blood red. I turned the flashlight off. He disappeared. I turned it back on again. He reappeared. This time he seemed a long way off. ‘This is my apartment,’ I told him. ‘You had no right.’ The light shining on the carpet began to wobble. I was shaking. My breath came in little pants. There was a strange noise coming from the living room. Ringing. The phone. I walked across the carpet of the bedroom, the tiny hall, the rug in the living room.”

  I could still feel the carpet on my feet, the different textures of the two acrylic weaves, and the new smell of rubber carpet pad and harsh, foreign cleaning fluids.

  “The phone was on the pass-through counter between the dining room and the kitchen. It felt slippery and big, difficult to hold in my left hand. A voice at the other end said, ‘Is this Aud Torvingen?’ and I said yes, and he went on to say that he was Lieutenant Wills, of the Duluth Police Department.” I closed my eyes again. “‘Please listen carefully,’ he said. ‘We are aware that you are probably speaking under duress. We are in control of the situation. Please remain calm.’ It was a very soothing voice. ‘Now, if you can, ask him to talk to us on the phone.’

  “‘He can’t talk to you,’ I said. I felt dizzy. Blinding light filled the apartment. Then there was another voice from outside, with a bullhorn, harder, eager, you could hear the adrenalin in it, shouting that the building was surrounded, that he should pick up the phone. ‘No, you don’t understand,’ I said, but then realized I wasn’t holding the phone anymore. The receiver dangled from its cord, near the floor. I picked it up. ‘You don’t understand. He can’t talk to you because he’s dead.’

  “There was silence, then a faint muttered conference on the other end, then, ‘Ms. Torvingen? There have been no reports of gunshots in the last half hour.’

  “‘What?’ I said. I had no idea what that had to do with anything.

  “‘Ms. Torvingen, if he shot himself we certainly would have heard it.’

  “‘He didn’t shoot himself,’ I said.

  “‘No,’ said the soothing voice, only now it was full of the there-there syrup of a parent talking to a child. ‘Ms. Torvingen, can you speak English well enough to understand what I’m saying?’ I said yes, then thought: Haven’t I just been speaking English? ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Now, are you all right, Ms. Torvingen? Can I call you Aud?’

  “‘No,’ I said, and then he got all urgent.

  “‘How are you hurt?’

  “‘No,’ I explained, ‘you can’t call me Aud because I’m eighteen and you’re treating me like a child and not listening to anything I’m saying. The man is dead. I killed him with my flashlight. He had a gun and I killed him. He’s in my bedroom. He had no right. He still has his gun but he’s dead. I’m fine.’

  “This time the silence on the phone was longer and I wondered if I’d been talking in Norwegian after all. ‘Aud, Ms. Torvingen,’ he said, then sort of trailed off. He cleared his throat and started again. ‘You say he’s dead, that you killed him. Are you quite sure?’ At least he didn’t sound patronizing anymore.

  “‘Well,’ I said, ‘his eyes are open and his neck’s bent, and he hasn’t moved from my bedroom floor,’ but all of a sudden I thought: What if he isn’t dead? What if this is like one of those horror films and he’s lurching to his feet, covered in blood, and bringing his hand up with that gun, with an evil lopsided grin. I dropped the phone and ran back to the bedroom. He was still there, of course. Still dead.”

  Julia’s hand crept across my stomach to find my hand.

  “The police arc lights had bleached his face white and a pool of urine and faeces spread under his body. The whole scene was grainy, like an old black and white newsreel. I noticed that his hair was thinning on top but in that light I couldn’t tell the colour of his eyes. It bothered me. Then I thought: the gun, they’ll believe the gun even if they don’t believe me. So I squatted by his gun hand, but the weird thing was I couldn’t make myself let go of the flashlight first. I tried, but my fingers wouldn’t move, so I had to fiddle for a while with just my left hand before I could pull the gun away. I went back to the living room, all bright now with the police lights, put the gun down on the pass-through and picked up the phone. ‘I’ve got his gun,’ I said. ‘I’m going to open the sliding glass doors in the living room, step onto the balcony, and toss the gun down onto the grass.’

  “‘Aud, I think—’

  “This time I put the phone firmly back in its cradle—I was getting sick of that syrupy voice—and picked up the gun. I walked towards the sliding doors and would have stepped out there naked if I hadn’t seen my reflection in the glass. Oh, I thought, I’ll have to do something about that. The police lights didn’t reach inside the bedroom closet and I tripped over one of my suitcases just inside the closet door. I had to put the gun down on the floor to pull on jeans one-handed. The flashlight wouldn’t fit through sleeves, so I chose a vest. When I was done, I stuck the gun in my back pocket. It felt good. The flashlight felt better.

  “The glass doors slid open easily. The balcony was one of the reasons I’d chosen that apartment. Three hours earlier the night had been quiet, soft with fountain spray drifting over the lake. Now the night gleamed with light and metal and well-polished boots. I stood up there and looked at the revolving lights, at the trees and lake beyond them, and thought: This is my new country, new apartment, new life; all stained, like my bedroom carpet. I took the gun out of my pocket and threw it into the crowd below. Then I leant over the rail and vomited on their heads.”

  Julia put on a towelling robe and made us blackberry tea. I drank mine in the bath, she sat on the floor and stroked my arm, shoulder to elbow to wrist to fingertips and back again.

  “You’ve never told anyone about this before, have you?”

  “No one. I suspect my mother was briefed on the situation via the consulate, but we’ve never spoken of it.” I remembered the ambulance ride, being met at the hospital by overly polite administrators, and knowing that someone somewhere had gone beyond the call of duty and found out who I was, or at least who my mother was.

  “Take me there.”

  “To Northwoods Lake Court?”

  “Yes. Take me there when we get back.”

  It was such a private thing. No one even knew I had ever lived there, never mind what had happened, or how it looked. Such a beautiful place. “I was only there a few days.”

  “Take me anyway.” Her hand came to rest just below my triceps. “Promise me we’ll go when we get back.”

  “Very well. I promise.”

  Her hand resumed its stroking. “So who was he? How did the police know he was there?”

  “The police had had a call from the apartment complex half a mile down the road, an intruder. Apparently they had a car in the area and followed him to Northwoods Lake Court. They did a foot search and saw my front door ajar. His name was Tim Schultz, an out-of-work carpenter. Married, two children, but separated. He was thirty-four years old. No one could tell me why he did it.”

  I soaped myself thoughtfully.

  “I thought knowing the details was important, but it isn’t really, because the important part wasn’t what happened at the apartment, it was what I realized later, on the way to the hospital. The police and EMTs came bursting into the apartment and bundled me up in a blanket without so much as a by-your-leave and threw me in an ambulance. I was in a daze. I remember the police sergeant and EMT were arguing about the flashlight—the sergeant was saying it was evidence, the EMT said I was in
shock, that if holding it made me feel better he wasn’t going to take it away from me. That’s when I realized: the shivering and vomiting had stopped, and the strange detachment I felt wasn’t shock but the dawning realization that this was real, that I had killed someone. I had taken a life. He had had a gun, I had had a flashlight, but I had taken him, and in the moment of doing so I’d felt faster, denser, more alive than ever before. Killing him had burned me down to a pure, uncluttered core, to my essence. It was all real and it felt…Well, you tell me how it felt when you hit that man at Honeycutt’s house.”

  “Good. It felt good. I felt…bigger.”

  “It’s the adrenalin. When everything slows down and my muscles are hot and strong and the blood beats in my veins like champagne I feel this vast delight. Everything is beautiful and precious, and so clear. Light gets this bluish tinge and I feel like a hummingbird among elephants, untouchable.”

  She reached out and flicked water against the pink welt that ran over my lower ribs. “But you’re not.”

  “I’ve played with adrenalin, almost every dangerous sport you can imagine, but that’s not the same as violence, not the same as coming up against someone who wants you dead, where there’s no room for one misstep, where it’s all or nothing. Feeling that bungee cord whip you up just two seconds from the ground is one thing, looking into the eyes of a man with a knife is another. It’s the ultimate competition—there’s one life between us, and it’s mine. You feel how fine life is. It’s a sort of possessiveness. A bit like sex. Just as you can’t suddenly rip someone’s clothes off in public when you have the urge, you have to train the urge to violence. It’s like always singing sotto voce when all you want to do is take a great breath and let it rip. Violence feels good. It’s so simple and clear. There’s no mistaking the winner. I like it, but I avoid going there, going to the blue place, because I think I could get lost, might not find my way back, I wouldn’t want to find my way back because it’s seductive.” I dabbled my fingers in the warm water. “I said before that I left the police force because I didn’t want to work for anyone else. That’s true, but it was also because the blue place called too strongly. It had become all I wanted, all there was.”

  She sat back on her heels and studied me with cool, slatey eyes. “Past tense?”

  I thought about the blue place, about my life then, about Julia. “Past tense.”

  She kissed me. I unfastened her robe. My cup fell in the water. We ignored it. I wanted to be inside her.

  Later, when she was sitting between my legs and I was soaping her back with the washcloth, she put the soap back on its sturdy wooden shelf and said, “So what happened in the ambulance with the flashlight?”

  “I hefted it in my hand—”

  “Bet they edged away.”

  I smiled, remembering the EMT’s undignified scramble to the back of the ambulance. “Yes. I hefted it. It was heavy and smooth and, Oh, I thought, so is the oxygen cylinder by my stretcher, so is the drip stand, the officer’s baton. I was surrounded by objects I could use as weapons. I told the sergeant he could have it. And I’ve never worried about carrying a weapon since. They’re everywhere.”

  “Mostly, anyway.”

  “Always.” I dipped the washcloth in the water, folded it over and over on itself lengthwise, doubled that in on itself and twisted it, but not hard enough to get rid of most of the water.

  “That?”

  “Instant blackjack.” With one flick of the wrist I smashed the wooden shelf off the wall.

  She grinned. “Now you’ll have to fix it.”

  “There’s still soap on your back,” I said, and changed the blackjack back to a washcloth by dipping it in the water.

  I woke in the dark with Julia’s hand on my shoulder. “Aud, it’s all right. It’s all right. Wake up. It’s just a dream.”

  “I’m awake.” The dream images began to drain away.

  Her breath was soft and sleepy on my face. Her hair fell across my throat. I breathed in the scent of cloudberry and violet and warm woman. “Do you want to tell me about it?”

  “It’s a recurring dream. About a dead woman in the bath. Her eyes are like unpolished marble and she is still. So very, very still. The water is still, too, and cold. And then I realize I’m not breathing, my heart is not beating. I’m still, and I’m cold, frozen. I’m dead.”

  Julia slid on top of me. “Feel. That’s my heart. It’s beating. Yours is beating. Wrap your arms around me. There. Feel my ribs move up and down. I’m breathing. You’re breathing. It was just a dream. We’re alive. Just listen.”

  I did. I listened to the fist-sized muscle that beat valiantly in her chest, lub-dub lub-dub, atrium-ventricle atrium-ventricle, pumping thick red blood through her arteries, sucking it back tired and thin, sending it out again refreshed, over and over, like some comfort-station cheerleader at a marathon handing out water and banana chips to exhausted runners and sending them on. Alive.

  twelve

  The stave church of Urnes, the oldest in Norway, lies five kilometers south of the seter. We tramped along the grass and through the flowers, water glinting green and glassy below and to the right.

  I pointed down the slope. “There, between that rock to the left and the treetops, that’s the spire. We can either walk round, which is another kilometer or so, or we can head straight down.”

  We scrambled down like children before they realize they are mortal, when the worst thing they can imagine is falling down and someone kissing everything better, maybe the smell of antiseptic and a Band-Aid—or, even better, the glory of a white bandage—but nothing permanent, nothing real, and like children arrived at the bottom red-cheeked and feeling physical, in charge of the world. There was no one else there, not even anyone coming or going from the handful of village houses clustered west of the tiny churchyard.

  “It’s smaller than I expected.”

  The church, even without its spire, was taller than it was long. The churchyard, bounded by an ancient stone wall, was a lopsided rhomboid half the size of a soccer field. The grass was smooth, as if cropped by sheep, and two large birches shaded part of the northwestern wall. Three or four dozen headstones on the north and south sides were all very plain. One was quite recent. It was quiet enough to imagine the soft hiss of worms gliding under the turf and old bones settling. It was the perfect place for a church, high above a headland that jutted out into Lustrafjord, and before Christianity it had probably been the site of the village hov. In the ninth and tenth centuries, womenfolk would have gathered on the headland, looking south, eager for the boat bearing their menfolk returning from a-viking. They would have seen the sail first, a faded yellowish white where once it had been bold blue stripes, taking the left fork from Sognefjord and into Lustrafjord, perhaps parting from a companion boat that would go on up Årdalsfjord to the women of Naddvik and Ofredal. Then the whole boat would be visible, and you would count the shields, look for the familiar crimson boss or the green rim, and you would run with the others down to the jetty, hoping some brother or son would bring back a fancy armring, or a bolt of fine Irish linen, but mainly just that he would be there with his familiar laugh and smile, not the awful strained blinking and bloody stump like poor Unn’s son, the winter before last….

  “Aud?” Julia, on the bottom of the five steps leading to the door. I joined her.

  Urnes church smelt of wood, old but hale Scotch pine, beeswax, and fresh flowers. Light shimmered through windows three stories up, drenching the upper tiers of wood, turning them to gold, softening the second tier to rich honey, and dimming on the dark, massive uprights of the bottom tier. Here and there red or yellow or blue or green paint caught the light where centuries ago craftspeople had painted the carvings for the greater glory of god.

  “I had no idea wood could be so beautiful,” Julia said. “So simple and pure. And it looks…well, it doesn’t look a thousand years old. I can’t see any cracks or woodworm.”

  I laid my hand on one of the massive
staves. “The people who built these churches understood wood, and they were not in a hurry.” Carpenters would have gone into the forest to select several Scotch pines, but they didn’t fell them, just cut off the tops and branches. While the trees still stood, the outer sapwood was scraped off. The trunks were left standing for five to eight years. The trees died gradually and the remaining heartwood became impregnated with resin—proof against damp and pests and aging. They built to last, which is why everything is made from wood. The brackets between stave and plank are made of birch. Most of them are taken from where the root joins the stem, so the curve in the grain is natural, and very strong. All the pins and other connectors are juniper, a dense softwood. There is no iron to rust and to rot the wood. I thumped the stave. “This church has stood for a thousand years and there’s no reason it should not stand for a thousand more.”

  Julia looked at the flowers, at the new hymnal someone had left on one of the pews. “It’s still used.”

  “Hjørdis brought me here to services several times.”

  She sat at the end of a pew. “I can’t imagine how it must be to grow up with history all around you. To walk the same path your fifty-times great-grandmother walked, to baptise your child where you were baptised, and your mother, and her mother. To see life continue so clearly, to know that your child will see the same tree, fish in the same fjord, pick the same flowers at the same time of year.” She reached for my hand. “Most of us stumble along, making up the rules as we go along, but we’re missing so much…. When I was little, the Tutankhamen exhibit came through Boston and I went to see it. Wow, I thought, look, those pieces of jewellery are thousands of years old! I couldn’t even touch it, but it thrilled me to know that people whose bones turned to dust and blew away and was maybe reincorporated in some tree that died hundreds of years ago to make some boat or other, had made something I could look at. But this, this is something else. It’s part of the everyday, it’s part of ordinary life.” She turned my hand palm up, traced the lines there. “I’m beginning to understand, I think. All those things that make you you, your clarity and solidity and certainty, come from this. You can actually reach out and touch your past. It’s in the wood, in the cold, clear water of the fjord and in the hard rock of the mountain. And the wood and the fjord and the mountain are in you, clear and strong and massive.” She looked at me then, reached to trace the line of my cheekbone, my nose, my jaw. “Aud, Aud, Aud.”