Freeman's

by John Freeman

  But I won’t be here then. No one knows, because I haven’t told a soul that we’re moving in a couple of weeks. Leaving Norway for good. I should have, and I had every intention of doing it, at least telling Stig and Andri. But I just haven’t, I’ve been pretending nothing is up, even when we talk about what classes we hope we’ll be in that fall and the welcome letter from the middle school that I lie and say I received, too. I’ve put it off and put it off so long that I’ve started thinking it might be best to just disappear one day.

  The first two weeks of that summer. They never end. They crawl along through the scorching June days. Hiding behind the curtains in my room, I slowly pack my things and my life thus far. I have the two boxes my parents gave me that I can bring to the United States and many boxes I’m supposed to fill with everything else I “want” to give away, donate to the Salvation Army or wherever it ends up. Actually, it’s strange that no one has asked us what’s going on, because there’s no doubt some of the neighbors must have noticed all the activity at our place, the heavy velour curtains in the living room being taken down and the trucks being filled one by one with our furniture and driven away the closer we get to our departure date. Maybe people think we’re remodeling or redecorating or something. Most of our furniture is from the sixties anyway and I suppose people do fix things up in the summertime.

  And then suddenly the day arrives. I should be home already, but I don’t want to go. I’m sitting on top of Ulsberget with Stig and Andri, the gravel sports field is behind us and if we want we can just barely see the eleven-year-olds who just started training track and field, running back and forth across the short side of the field while the coach, probably the father of one of them, yells at them to run faster, better, cleaner, with more control—but we’re facing away from them so we just hear them, as if from far away, the yelling and their feet running back and forth across the gravel and in front of us, below us, is Forus, with its factories and gas stations and the Scania plant, rows of trucks parked for the night, and I should have been home already, but I’m here. I don’t want to go, I want to keep sitting here, because it’s a hopelessly nice night and we’re sitting together on top of Ulsberget with Forus below us and it’s starting to cool off even though the sun hasn’t set yet, it won’t do that for another hour, and maybe how nice it is doesn’t have anything to do with the whole thing, maybe it’s not the kind of night where it matters what the weather’s like. Maybe it could have been raining and I’d have been just as happy, I don’t know, I just know that it’s an almost uncomfortably nice evening and I don’t want to go home, but I have to, because everything that’s not packed and ready, labeled with my name, and placed in the specified locations before my dad goes to bed for the last time in our house will be left behind.

  Tomorrow at 6 a.m. it will be too late.

  We’re leaving then. For good. Before the neighbors are awake. A taxi will pick us up at 5:50 a.m. and after that all traces of us will be removed, as if we’d never been there to begin with. A moving van will park where our Mazda has parked all these years, and men none of us know will unlock our house with the key my father gave them, carry box after box with our names on them out into the van and make sure that they’re sent to our new address. Soon new people and new voices will fill our rooms, they’ll bring their own furniture, their own curtains and habits, their lawn mowers and clothes to dry on the clothesline and a totally different car in the garage. And the neighborhood around the house, the streets and roads, the factories and the North Sea oil offices, the traffic and the woods, the railroad and the rocky outcroppings, the shore and the fjord, none of it will be mine anymore, other people will take it over, I will have only the memory of once belonging here, to this exact place, where the summers are humid and unreliable at best and the winters never completely cold, with sideways rain and forecast storms with incessant sleet and sporadically icy streets from November to April.

  And I’ll lose my two best friends. That’s why I haven’t said anything to Stig or Andri.

  It’s after ten. It’s starting to get colder, I zip up my jacket, pull my knees in closer even though the sun is still in our eyes. It’s one of the first days in July. There’s usually bad weather when everyone’s on vacation, but a lot of things are wrong with this summer. Just hours before we walked down the hill to the fjord, down to the wharf behind the Sønnichsen metal tube and fittings plant where Andri usually goes fishing (even though there’s no way what he catches there can be all that healthy to eat); we strolled over to Gausel Beach and went swimming in water that was probably slightly too cold, but Stig believes it’s important to swim in the summer, it’s good luck, and I know he just made that up on the spot, but I stagger along after them across the rocky intertidal zone with goose bumps all the way up to my face and I step on a starfish before it’s deep enough to switch to swimming and make my way out into the fjord, swim hard enough to warm up, and think that if nothing else at least I can swim better than all of them. I swim the seven hundred meters around the little islet of Gauselholmen, where three boys and three girls in their mid-teens sit barbecuing and smoking, they’ve set up a silver-colored tent and will surely spend the night out there, it looks nice, I envy them, and one of them, a guy with shoulder-length hair in a wool sweater and bell-bottoms with a freshly rolled cigarette hanging from his lips, stands up as I swim past them, smiles and cheers me on, and for a second I almost think he looks like me, but then he turns and says something to the others, they laugh, I can’t tell what at, and I swim back toward the shoreline below the big houses where Stig and Andri are sitting by the edge of the water, throwing rocks at the crabs to break their shells and waiting for me to come ashore. We sit there and dry off without saying much and afterward we retrace our steps back up the same hills, just walking, we roam around in Forus, down Storaberget Terrasse to Heddeveien, down Kviestølen and Bamsefaret, Ulsbergbakken, Petroleumsveien, and Løwenstrasse and back again, I don’t remember what we talk about, I just remember that it feels like a procession, all of it, like the end of something that was meant to last much longer and along the way, by the grocery store in Kviebakken, we run into several of our former classmates who will be in class with Stig and Andri in the fall; I enter the store instead, walk back and forth between the shelves to kill time while they chat outside, and I don’t go back out until I see that they’re alone again. Afterward we each buy a bottle of Coke and a big baguette that we eat plain, sitting with our backs against the warm, red bricks on the store’s facade. Then we keep going, as if we’re busy, and we are, too, we cross our own tracks and enter the woods behind the big residential area, up on Ulsberget, the highest point we can find, that’s where we sit down, that’s where we’ve already been sitting for way too long before I finally say it:

  “I’m moving away tomorrow.”

  There’s a long silence before Stig says, quietly, “I knew something was up. Have you known for a long time?”

  “A while.”

  They nod slowly.

  “I guess we’re not all going to end up at the same school in the fall after all,” Andri says. “The trio and all that.”

  “Looks like you guys are going to be just fine,” I respond.

  “Well yeah, but . . . I mean, the three of us were supposed to . . .” He doesn’t finish the sentence. Instead he says, “Where are you moving, anyway?”

  “To America. Long Island.”

  All three of us are shocked as it sinks in, just how far away that is.

  “Is that . . . in California?” Andri asks.

  “No, I think it’s near New York City.”

  “California would definitely be cool, Hollywood. Maybe you could go there sometime?”

  “Maybe.”

  And then we talk about California for a bit and what we think it’s like there, since there’s no point talking about Long Island which we don’t know the first thing about, and Andri says that in California people sometimes get killed right in their cars if they’re
driving too slow in traffic on the freeways, shot right through the windshield, he says, Andri read about it and it’s probably true. But at the same time, we tell each other that the U.S. also has movie stars and money and the best bands and enormous helping sizes no matter what you order, and we all totally agree that America is cool, nothing wrong with the U.S., we can all picture ourselves living there, moving there and living exactly how we want. Someday. But not right now, not tomorrow. It’s just too darned soon.

  “This is for us,” Andri says and looks out at Forus.

  “Huh?”

  “I said that this one time to some lady who came to our house and rang the doorbell, I think it was sometime last year, she only spoke English and was looking for Ullandhaug, I guess she was trying to get to the university or something like that, and then she asked: Is this Ullandhaug? so I told her it was Forus. But I guess it came out wrong, I think she misunderstood me, because she seemed offended and turned around and left.”

  “This is for us,” I repeat.

  “And in a lot of ways that’s true,” Andri says.

  “This place sucks,” Stig says. “Look around, would you? I don’t get it. How the hell can people even stand to live here?”

  “But it’s our sucky place,” I answer.

  “The Nazis were the ones who made Forus livable, did you guys know that?”

  We did not know that.

  “It’s totally true,” Stig says. “Nobody talks about that out loud, but it’s the truth. The Nazis saved Forus from sinking.”

  “I don’t buy it,” Andri says.

  “Oh yeah, it’s true. Even Satan has one good turn in him,” Stig says. “They came up the coast in 1940, crawling inland over the sandy beaches along Jæren and they moved north from there into the countryside. Until they got here, to Forus. I think they picked the place sight unseen. They must have. If they’d only taken the trouble to check the eta . . . etamolo . . . molotology—”

  “E-ty-molo-gy?”

  “—behind the name of the place first, they would have realized that Forus means swampy terrain. And that spells trouble, right? But they came, the Third Reich waded into the swamps and decided to locate the headquarters for their fighter plane forces right in the place with the region’s most hopeless wind and weather conditions. They built concrete runways and a five-kilometer-long taxiway, shatter-proof hangars, they floundered around in the mud wreaking havoc, then they finally built solid, efficient channels and drained the swamp water out into Gandsfjord and Hafrsfjord and shored up the soil in Forus forever. And then they flew away, which must have been the only time the runways were ever used.”

  It’s easy to picture. That first and final sortie. If you blinked you would surely miss the Messerschmitts departing Forus in a bright steely swastika formation in the sky.

  “Later,” Stig continues, “thirty years later, after the oil started gushing and the high housing prices crept outward from downtown Stavanger and became insurmountable for most people, a few took their Sunday walks out to what had once been pure farmland to see if maybe Forus might be a place where they could put down their roots.”

  Easy to picture that, too: My parents, Stig and Andri’s and everyone else’s, how they all drove out here, independently, and studied the real estate prospectuses and the lots with skepticism or enthusiasm, discussed among themselves and spit into their fists, stuck the shovel into the dirt and called the bank to set up a meeting about a mortgage loan. We put down our roots here, tentatively and hesitantly at first, eventually with increasing conviction. And those of us who stayed, among the factories and the industrial buildings that rose around us on all sides, we bore our belonging to Forus like a badge, proof that people can survive in any kind of conditions. We were citizens. We were in the house. In the burbs. With dry feet in the swamp.

  “Well, just tell them you don’t want to move,” Stig says. “Say you refuse to go.”

  “Don’t you think I’ve tried?” I respond.

  We’re quiet again, it’s not so easy to think of anything else to say about it.

  “But we can come visit you, right?” Andri says, trying to find something positive. “Maybe we could come for summer vacation next year. We could stay until school starts again.”

  “Of course,” I say.

  But that’ll never happen.

  All three of us know that, we just don’t say it out loud.

  Instead I tell them about the reorg at SAS and how my father got a tip that American Airlines in New York was looking for pilots, and I tell them that American Airlines has those really big planes that my dad has always dreamed of flying, the jumbo jets, Boeing 747s, and that that’s why we’re moving, so he can fly longer, bigger planes, earn more money, have more predictable work hours, and maybe we’ll move back again after a few years, that could happen, I say, but mostly because I want it to be true, and I talk and talk about the differences between the Boeing 737 and the DC-9 and the 747 and the other types of planes I know about, all to keep silence away, and we agree to at least write letters, of course we can do that, I promise to send them my address as soon as I can, and we make plans to see each other the following summer, as if that were realistic, and by then it must be getting close to 11 p.m., we finally get up and come down from the rocky knoll, through the woods, and we say goodbye to each other on the gravel path between the soccer field and the houses, they each shake my hand as if I’m leaving for some official mission. I turn my back to them and walk home, hear them parting ways a little behind me, each walking off in his own direction after having agreed to meet up the next day, maybe go down to the beach if the weather is nice, you never really know how long the nice weather will last after all, it’s usually always raining in this cruddy town, and it’s not cold anymore, the heat is coming back, it’s humid now, my sneakers stick to the asphalt on my way home and I swear the thunder and lightning started that night, a terrible storm over the entire Stavanger region, which probably lasted until well into August and gave way to an unseasonably early winter.

  Ross Raisin is the author of three novels: A Natural, Waterline, and God’s Own Country. In 2013 he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists, and he has been the recipient of several other awards, including the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award and the Betty Trask Award. He has been short-listed for various others, including the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Guardian First Book Award. He has recently written a book on creative writing, Read This If You Want to Be a Great Writer, to be published in 2018. He has written short stories for Granta, Prospect, the Sunday Times, Esquire, BBC Radio 3, among others, and has contributed to anthologies such as Best British Short Stories. Raisin teaches creative writing at Goldsmiths University and as part of the UEA/Guardian Masterclasses programme, and is a writer in residence for the charity First Story.

  Bearded

  ROSS RAISIN

  The changing room is loud, chaotic. A swimming lesson of young boys charged in just before you and the tiled space resounds with the noise of shouting and lockers and wet slapping feet. You give a little smile to the teacher as you come past him, and he acknowledges you with a shake of his head before going to deal with one large boy who is moving away from the others, padding off towards the other end of the room.

  You collect your belongings from the locker. The swim has done you good. The anxiety that you felt on waking this morning has eased, lost to the water, the hurtle of oxygen. Seventy lengths. After all those summer swims in the churning outdoor pool, and the reluctant switch back to the leisure centre now that the weather has turned, it was easier than you had anticipated. The extra lengths have left you invigorated, clear. Two more, you told yourself at each of those last turns beneath the lifeguard’s twitching feet—enjoying, every time you breached the surface, the flat blue glare of the sun through the far glass wall. You open the door of an unlocked cubicle, to find a boy inside. He is sitting dripping in his trunks, looking at his phone. You begin automatically to
apologise, but stop yourself. ‘You must lock the door, please,’ you say.

  He looks at you for a moment, bewildered, then goes back to his phone.

  As you continue to search for an unoccupied cubicle, the thought of this morning’s meeting rises again. You look for a clock on the walls—and see, up ahead, a young Asian man in front of the mirrors, using two hairdryers at the same time to dry a beard that hangs almost to his nipples. The spectacle of it halts you. You sense the opportunity of a photograph. It will not be possible, however, without offending him.