Paradise Rot

by Jenny Hval

  ‘We’re going for dinner, do you wanna join us?’ asked Lauren.

  I nodded, happy not to be alone.

  In the café I again ordered the dish that was easiest to pronounce.

  ‘Your English is really great,’ Lauren said.

  ‘Better than ours!’ They laughed, and she continued: ‘Have you ever lived in England?’

  ‘No, but we’re taught it in school a lot.’

  Lauren and Ella kept chatting about the night before, with big chunks of hamburger in their mouths. They spoke fast about excursions they were going on and said that the university had too little focus on sports and that the town was too windy.

  ‘Have you found a place to live yet?’ Ella asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘We’re seeing some places tomorrow. If you like you can borrow our newspaper,’ she said and handed me the classified section, dappled with coffee stains and crossings-out.

  All the students at the hostel were trying to find permanent accommodation. I spent the next three days in and out of phone boxes, scheduling meetings and visiting numerous flat shares. Mostly they were in apartment blocks, or big two-floored terraces further from the town centre. They were home to neurotic students or hippies with marijuana plants in the back garden. I ran into the Canadians again and again in different apartments. They were confident and tanned and made the tenants laugh. Next to them I felt sombre and pale – The serious Norwegian, Lauren joked. I walked like a ghost through the rooms in house after house, while the visits weaved together in my head, becoming an endless braid of faces, corridors, and small, unfurnished rooms with plaster rosettes around the ceiling lights.

  A group of art students who lived in one of the big terrace houses decided to turn their open day into a party. On the balcony a boy with bushy hair and a leather jacket read beat poetry, another served lukewarm punch, and downstairs in the kitchen a girl played guitar and sang Ani DiFranco in a shaky voice. She was wearing a bandana and her legs were unshaven.

  ‘Are you vegan?’ she asked after she had stopped singing. I shook my head.

  ‘It doesn’t matter if you’re not. But you should try.’ I nodded. The girl with the bandana shrugged and began a new song.

  In between my interviews I sat on park benches and waited for time to pass, alongside homeless people drinking cider from cheap two-litre bottles. They didn’t ask why I didn’t have furniture or how old I was or why my English was so good.

  ‘You’re young, aren’t you,’ said an older lady sat next to me. That was all. She opened a can of raspberry vodka and didn’t look at me again. Her mascara was running down her cheeks.

  The viewings continued. In house after house I left my name and the hostel’s phone number, like a dog marking lampposts. Most people said they would ring when they had come to a decision. In my notebook I jotted down names and addresses, for reference when they called. But no one did, and after searching non-stop for four days I was still without a place to live. On the way home, I caught a tram and passed several stops before I realised it was going in the wrong direction. I got off on a deserted main road and had started the walk back when I heard a deep voice shout from a passing car:

  NICE TITS, BITCH!

  And then he drove off, fast, and the ’TCH drowned in the noise of the engine. I could feel my cheeks burn and I pulled my jacket tighter around myself.

  When I finally got back to the hostel I was tired, cold and certain I didn’t want to talk to anyone, but the receptionist stopped me in the doorway:

  ‘Someone called for you and left this message.’

  She handed me a yellow, folded note. I thanked her and unfolded the paper, excited to see whether I’d been offered a room, but it was just a friendly rejection from the bandana girl:

  Dear Jo, the room in 21 Primrose St is now taken. We chose two Canadian girls. Thanks for coming.

  The Shadows

  THIS IS HOW I remember my first day at the university: my shadow slipped between big stone stairs, benches and fountains. Groups of students who already knew each other were everywhere. They talked loud and fast and showed each other books and schedules. Among these sounds, my booted steps were inaudible.

  On campus the tall brick buildings shut out the rest of town. Some had spires that looked like the City Hall clock tower. On a large lawn outside the library the student societies had put up tables and colourful banners. Join the Christian Student Organisation, one of them said in cramped handwriting. University of Aybourne Queer Society was painted on another in vivid rainbow colours.

  ‘It’s No Diet Day,’ a girl shouted after me outside the main building of the biology institute, Earth Sciences. She had dreadlocks and a rainbow-patterned T-shirt.

  ‘I’m sorry?’

  ‘No Diet Day,’ she repeated. ‘Today we celebrate the fat!’ She then handed me a sweaty chocolate muffin from a plastic tray. ‘No Diet Day,’ I repeated to myself. I continued to replay snippets of conversations that I overheard around me while I walked to the Earth Sciences department and until I got to the lecture hall door.

  The hall was a huge auditorium, filled with students. I walked between the benches looking for an empty seat. The rows slanted steeply towards the lectern at the bottom, and on the second row from the front someone finally scooted over to offer me a seat. Behind me I could hear the rustle of paper: hundreds of students leafing through information sheets from folders titled New Bachelor of Science Students – Welcome Session. One of the professors was then introduced, and he started to tell us about the university regulations, about the bachelor’s degree and about biology studies. I jotted down new magical words in my notebook: tutorial, prerequisite, curriculum, research thesis. Then I noted some academic terms: cell theory, homoeostasis, endothermic. I silently mouthed the new words, and hung on every term I recognised and almost recognised.

  During the induction day I became increasingly aware how unprepared I was to study in English. After the welcome session we were divided into small groups and asked to introduce ourselves. While I waited my turn I noticed how all the students’ voices went up on the last syllable in every sentence. Everything they said sounded like a question: My name is Alistair? Or I’m Catrìona? From Aybourne South? It sounded like they didn’t know their names or where they lived. When it was my turn, my voice was stiff and rusty. In short spurts I told them my name and where I was from, but every pause was too long and the syllables too short. The language grated on my throat. The words were wrong: Norway was not a country I’d been to, and it felt like a lie to pronounce my name as Djåoanna. And even before Johanna, when I said, Hello, my name is, I couldn’t help but think of other names, from pop songs and films: My name is Luka, I sang to myself, My name is Jonas, gurgled behind my tongue when I said, ‘Djåoanna, Djåo.’ When I finished, I was almost certain that I had said something else, a different name, something wrong. I suddenly knew nothing about myself, nothing seemed right in English, nothing was true.

  There was only one first-year at the Faculty of Science who wasn’t from the area. She was German, and when she introduced herself as Fran-ziska-from-Ham-burg, I recognised my own stiff delivery at once. Her voice had a depth that made it more confident than mine. It sounded calm and shockingly serious in comparison with the light question-inflections coming from the other students. Franziska and I walked out together after the seminar. We were both a couple of years older than most of the students, and she seemed happy to meet someone else who wasn’t a native.

  ‘Where do you live?’ I asked.

  ‘I live down on South Beach, with my brother. He’s been living here for a couple of years, so I was lucky. Where do you live?’

  ‘I’m looking.’

  ‘Did you see many places?’

  ‘Yes, no one wants me yet though.’

  ‘Most people probably want someone they know, or someone who can’t just run off. You know, back to another country. That’s what my brother says anyway. But there’s a place on campus with listin
gs. I can show you before I go.’

  It was late in the day. Most of the students had gone home. The listings were hanging in the window of a café at the far end of the campus. Lots of handwritten notes formed a city map of index cards, showing the way to abandoned apartments, dusty bedrooms and old cars. Some included colourful drawings of cute cats or lively explanations for why a new tenant was needed. ‘Are you our dancing queen?’ it said on a note stuck in the middle, and another one read, ‘Desperately seeking YOU! (If you love cats.)’

  One note stuck out, on the edge of the clump. It had no drawings, puns or patterns:

  ROOM AVAILABLE IN LARGE W.HOUSE.

  SHARE WITH 1 F.

  .QUIET.

  There followed an address and a phone number. The word QUIET, closed in by a full stop on either side, had an emphasis I liked. Quiet worked for me. I couldn’t imagine the other girl, only large rooms, unfurnished and uninhabited. And when I rang from the phone box by City Hall, the girl didn’t have a voice either, only a mechanical one from the phone company:

  You have reached the answering machine of … Car-ral … John-ston. Please leave a message after the tone, or hang up.

  While I listened to the mechanical voice, I saw a boy step through the City Hall garden, pass the sundial and head towards the phone box I was in. He was extremely skinny and an oversized windbreaker hung loose around his upper body. I stepped out of the phone box and started to walk down the street when I saw him turn towards me. He looked at me for a moment before he lifted his hands and put his index finger in a hole he had made with the fingers on his other hand.

  ‘How much?’ he asked while he continued to move the finger in and out of the hole. I felt myself become hot and cold at the same time, turned and started to walk the other way while I heard the boy laugh behind me. Then I heard another sound: the sound of someone retching. When I turned around the corner I saw him heaving into a bin. Afterwards he walked to a bench and sat there, calm and smiling, while he wiped his mouth.

  I picture my own body that afternoon, between the archways along City Hall. I imagine, more and more people between me and the boy, more and more houses that become more and more blocks, more and more songs on my Minidisc player. It doesn’t help: inside me the boy continues to put his index finger through his hand, slowly but firmly, as if he is poking it inside my body, and then he retches again. I can’t get rid of the finger, the sound, the image. It’s as if I’m the throat that makes him vomit. Long after I’ve returned to the hostel, I still see him behind my eyelids, stood by City Hall and becoming smaller and smaller, throwing up again and again.

  The Apartment

  THE HAWTHORN DISTRICT, with its old factories, was situated a little outside the town, beneath the mountains in the east. I’d seen the buildings on my walks, and they would look back at me with their grimy square windows. In the daytime the area seemed uninhabited and frozen, silent as a photograph, but when I stepped off the tram I could hear music and see light and shadow move behind the windowpanes. Behind me the tram wheels screeched against the tracks, the wheels howling as it headed for the next stop. I turned off onto a road surrounded by red-brick houses. The road led to a huge old silo complex with eight cylindrical towers that reached up to the sky like a set of massive organ pipes. I noticed a little alley among the brick houses. That was where I was going.

  The alley was unlit, and the old asphalt was full of cracks. Wet weeds were bent and then crushed beneath my shoes. I stopped in front of a big square warehouse with a flickering shimmer coming from a small window up by the roof. The rest of the wall was dark and smooth. When I knocked, the whole house was still black water beneath my hand.

  The knocking seemed unnaturally loud. The echoes unrolled slowly, in and out of the sound of the tram tracks and of a car’s engine at a nearby multistorey car park. Then it was quiet. No footsteps or voices sounded from inside. I knocked once more, a little firmer. This time a light started flickering in the window under the roof, but still no sound. Maybe Carral Johnston thought it was too late for visitors, or perhaps she’d found a tenant already. I was about to start planning my route back to the hostel when the door opened.

  The old warehouse interior had been renovated into an apartment with thin dividing walls made from plasterboard that didn’t quite reach halfway to the ceiling. The spaces behind them seemed more like booths than rooms. Carral Johnston gave me a tour of the plasterboard labyrinth. She was a slender girl, a few years older than me, wearing a tight pastel-yellow wool jumper that almost matched her pale yellow-white skin. Her yellow curls were tied up in a ponytail that rocked back and forth over her shoulders while she walked over the wooden floors with long silent steps. My boots thumped after her. Inside, too, I seemed to make unnaturally loud noises that buzzed on the tin ceiling above us.

  We wound up by the kitchen table in the middle of the building, where the yellow Carral Johnston sat with her legs up on a chair. While she told me a little about herself – that she was from Brighton, that she had been here for three years, and that she worked as an office temp – I sat and watched her feet through the steam from my tea. Her toes curled up over a small fan heater, and her arched ankles made the movement look like a ballet exercise. In my boots my own feet were arching, as if they were trying to copy her movement.

  ‘So, Jo, what do you think?’ she asked smiling and continued without waiting for my reply: ‘We have a washing machine, TV, mattresses, everything we need. Plus a whole lot of weirdness. It’s an old warehouse after all. When I first moved in, I thought it was a little scary.’

  I nodded and wondered whether I was part of this ‘we’, even though I had never been to her apartment before.

  ‘But it’s not scary, just different,’ she continued and leant towards me. ‘The house has a life of its own. You get used to it. Excuse me for a moment.’

  Carral put her arched feet back on the floor, stood up and walked to the bathroom. When she left my sight, it was as if something took over the house, and it seemed to rock. The floor panels were rubbing against each other, the plasterboard swayed like long blades of grass. The thermostat clicked on and off, unable to decide whether the room was warm enough or not. The world outside rattled against the window. From the bathroom I could hear the sound of denim pulled over skin, the sound of skin coming to rest on porcelain, and finally a trickling, increasing and eventually steady stream of water.

  ‘Sound travels here.’

  Her voice, bathed in echo, came from everywhere, as if she was speaking from the floorboards, the fan heater, the kitchen clock. The stream continued.

  ‘Luckily I’m pretty quiet.’

  Only a small drip was to be heard now, a pause, and then finally crumpled tissue being dragged against skin.

  ‘Paper-thin walls,’ Carral said and giggled, but the sound of flushing drowned her laughter. ‘As I said, that’s just what this place is like.’ She opened the door again, returned to her chair and put her feet up on the heater. The tea had stopped steaming. She put her hands around the mug with a satisfied smile, as if she had accomplished something.

  I hadn’t met a lot of girls who talked while they peed, and definitely not a lot of girls who talked about peeing while they did it. There’s usually a lull in the conversation even when you’re sat in neighbouring cubicles. Maybe peeing and talking is a bit like singing and playing an instrument at the same time, I thought, two sets of muscles having to work side by side.

  ‘Your English is great by the way,’ she said and smiled.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘we all grow up with the BBC where I’m from.’

  ‘Well, I’ve met other Norwegians. They all had terrible American accents.’ She still smiled the same interested smile.

  ‘You’re probably right,’ I said.

  ‘Speaking of you … Why did you come to Aybourne?’

  ‘I’m studying biology. Bachelor of Science, I think it’s called.’

  ‘But here? Why would you study here?’

/>   ‘I wanted to come here,’ I answered. ‘It’s a good university.’

  ‘So you’ve left everything behind to live here for three years. I hope you don’t have a boyfriend waiting for you back in Norway.’

  Carral giggled teasingly and put her arms behind her head. The thin jumper pulled over her belly and the fabric tightened over her breasts. I couldn’t see any trace of her nipples.

  ‘No boyfriend,’ I replied in the calmest tone I could muster.

  ‘Sounds good. You’re so young.’

  Later that evening, after I had checked out of the hostel and said goodbye to the wank mirror and the golf clubs wrapped in black body bags behind the reception desk, I lay awake in my new bed and listened to Carral leaf through the pages of a book. I heard her fingers scrape the rough paper, the spine creak and the binding tighten. Later when I woke up my light was out but I could make out a glimmering halo of light over her bedroom wall, and in almost imperceptible noises at night I imagined hearing the hint of her curls falling over her cheek as she turned. Later the fridge started to hum. I was sure I heard tiny ripples on the surface of the milk inside its carton.

  The Apples

  WITH ITS OPEN SPACES, ladders and plasterboard walls, the factory is little more than the skeleton of an apartment. The ceiling – which makes for a silver-grey, gloomy sky – is several metres high. By the kitchen table in the middle of the cube, an iron post runs like a spine from floor to ceiling. Under the ceiling, thick old beams are coated in silverfish and dust. On three of the room’s sides, mezzanines have been built, halfway up each wall. Two of these are small decks framed by particle board walls. They face each other on the north and south sides. On the east wall is an open mezzanine with a railing. It’s big enough to serve as a living room and contains a television, a sofa, and pillows on the floor. A staircase leads here from the kitchen. Carral stores old things under the mezzanine: stiff sheets, a dishwasher, tinned food and old broken wooden chairs. The bathroom is in the west and has a toilet and bathtub, fenced by the same thin particle board walls as the mezzanines. The boards reach just over our heads and next to the bathroom is a ladder that leads up to a small balcony on the roof of the apartment next door.