The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland

by Nicolai Houm

  Eva stared at her, looking bewildered. Then she firmly shut the door to her daughter’s room before vanishing into the bathroom without another word.

  *

  ‘Such a pity that you didn’t bring any of your books,’ Lars Christian said. ‘They should be translated! Listen, Camilla…’ and he bent over his daughter who was doing splits on a shaggy rug and touched her lightly with his foot. ‘Didn’t you say you’d order Jane’s books on Amazon?’

  Camilla looked up at him.

  ‘Yes… I thought maybe The Age of Plenitude. They have it in paperback as well.’

  ‘No need for you to worry about the price, Camilla,’ Lars Christian said. ‘We’ll pay. Of course. Besides, it will be good to have the proper bound volumes. Then Jane can sign them. Is that all right?’

  Hearing this must have made Eva consider the possibility that Jane would be staying as long as it would take to send a parcel from the USA to Europe.

  ‘We were thinking of a trip in the car this weekend,’ Lars Christian said. ‘Once Martin is back home. We could visit some things worth seeing. Is that OK with you?’

  ‘Yeah!’ Camilla said.

  Jane looked across to Eva, who nodded agreement. Ever since Jane had arrived, the family had been worrying away about their immediate surroundings: would she find them disappointing? But she hadn’t expected to find majestic peaks rising above ice-blue fjords – it would be like believing that the Grand Canyon could be viewed from a suburb in Washington (DC).

  ‘That sounds very nice. Even though I’m perfectly happy with this,’ she said and gestured towards the caravan.

  ONCE INSIDE THE DOOR of the motel room, she crashed on one of the beds and drew her knees up to her chest. And moaned.

  ‘The whole bed is moving.’

  ‘It’s because I’m pushing at it,’ Ulf told her.

  ‘Why do you want to bring me along to go camping?’ she said. Her mouth was buried in the pillow and her voice had the tone of someone about to lose a wrestling match.

  ‘It’s not camping, it’s research.’

  A long silence, apart from the sound of alcohol-thinned blood being pumped through her ears. She realized that her question hadn’t been answered and repeated it with her eyes closed.

  ‘Because I’m your friend in Norway,’ Ulf replied.

  Jane made a dissatisfied noise into the pillow.

  ‘Because I like you. I told you so on the plane.’

  He reached above her to open the window. A mild-mannered breeze blew down from the hillsides, entered past the gingham curtains and touched the crest of her hip, where the sweater had slipped up. Ulf went to the bathroom and stayed in there for a long time. She assumed that he followed some elaborate evening ritual; he had a large toilet bag for a man. Then he came back and sat down on his bed, which was separated from hers by a wooden board that cut her line of vision. To see him, she had to raise the leaden weight that was her head. His eyes were two blue fishes, each one immobile inside its individual glass bowl within a red plastic frame.

  ‘Ulf, I’m a sixteen-year-old girl, totally inexperienced. And terrified. You won’t even get to undo my bra before I start screaming.’

  ‘So, I won’t try.’

  He stroked her hair. It was nice for as long as the window stayed open.

  ‘You know, I like you, too, I think.’

  ‘But?’

  She inhaled, quickly, deeply.

  ‘But you have no idea what it feels like to admit it.’

  Dombås looked like an administrative outpost in Alaska with a tourist market thrown in. The sun beat straight down onto the sidewalk and filled the shopping street with still, amber light. Jane’s state was such that she needed an effort of will to place one foot in front of the other. Ulf, on the other hand, seemed unaffected by the day before. He was wearing a slightly fitted anorak and tight, dark-blue cargo trousers. She had glimpsed his back last night: slim and shadowed by muscular ridges.

  ‘Do you know what the Inuit call a musk ox?’ he asked.

  ‘Surely they have seven hundred different names for it?’ Jane said.

  She had wanted to make him laugh.

  ‘No, they don’t. A musk ox is Umingmak. The bearded one.’

  ‘So, should I call you Umingmak?’ She felt herself blush as she said that. Without planning to, her voice had gone up at least half an octave.

  She followed Ulf across the parking lot. As he entered the sports shop, an electronic bell pinged. He held the door open for her. A small, silver-haired man wearing a cardigan stood behind the shop counter, so he was probably the owner. A blond woman in her twenties was unpacking clothes and placing them on a table. Jane assumed that the young woman was the owner’s daughter. Ulf chatted in Norwegian with her while she measured Jane. He might be telling the assistant all kinds of things about Jane.

  Finally, the assistant said in English, ‘I think we had better begin with the first layer. The innermost one.’

  She ushered Jane to a wall with a pegboard that displayed a collection of thick, well-designed cardboard containers, each one with its own illustration of models in underwear standing with their legs apart against a mountain backdrop. Men, women and children, like an extended family of stunningly beautiful, weatherbeaten superheroes.

  Ulf’s family.

  ‘Wool or synthetic fibres?’ asked the assistant.

  Ulf was full of good advice at times. At other times, he seemed to be arguing with the people in the shop who presumably knew a thing or two about sports equipment but lacked his hillwalking experience. But Ulf lost interest once Jane had chosen the most expensive set of underwear in merino wool and, then, the most expensive rainwear. He hung around while she bought a sleeping bag, an inflatable pillow, a tent, freeze-dried foods, a set of pans, a knife, a hat with mosquito net and a couple of aluminium bottles.

  The owner helped with choosing the right rucksack. The system of straps must be adjusted to fit her back, which was, he suggested, particularly nice and straight. It felt good to be prepared for all eventualities. It occurred to her that she had always been ill equipped. Always missing something, whatever she set out to do.

  ‘Musk oxen? Then you must bring binoculars.’

  Gosh, she should’ve thought of that herself.

  Now and then, a price tag would lie belly-up. The cost of everything seemed perverse. She went to the changing rooms with a down-filled anorak under her arm, sat down on the stool and took two pills before confronting her face in the mirror. She suddenly remembered a red-haired mother of two in the therapy group Dr Rice had practically forced Jane to join – at the time, it was a fact that the red-haired woman had only one child, but it was usual for the members of the support groups to include the dead in their narratives, as if to make it clear that they had not been forgotten:

  I had an old photo on my driving licence. I know it was old because of my eyes. I was someone else before Alison’s death.

  When they got to the footwear, Ulf rose from the Nike chair to let Jane sit down and went to stand by the till to chat with the owner. They glanced at her while she tried walking on the felt carpet in a pair of tall boots.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she asked.

  But now Ulf was preoccupied by something the owner was pointing at outside the shop window.

  She turned to the right to see herself in profile, wearing the hunting trousers and the walking boots: she could have been the first woman to cycle to Nepal in order to climb Everest without oxygen. Her mood grew still more elated as she produced her Visa card. All this gave her a quite different sensation from drifting on a river of alcohol. Pleasure was welling up from a glandular depth somewhere and wiped out the awareness of just how shallow the cause was – shopping.

  The payment did not go through.

  The sound of a terminated transaction brought the daughter to the counter. She stared searchingly at the card reader, as if the snag could possibly be due to it.

  ‘Maybe there’s a limit
?’ Ulf suggested.

  ‘There might be,’ Jane admitted.

  It was much more likely that she had emptied her account. She hadn’t checked the balance for months. There was a bundle of Norwegian bills in her wallet and she put the whole lot in front of the man behind the counter.

  ‘Will this do?’

  ‘You’ll even get one of these back,’ he said and handed over a crumpled green bill from the till.

  It didn’t matter.

  ON HER FOURTH NIGHT with the Askeland-Nilsens, Eva was due at a meeting of the parents’ association at Martin’s school. Lars Christian was off to repair something or other in the neighbourhood along with some of the other fathers. Who would take Camilla to her training session? She offered.

  At dusk, as they smoothly joined the winding coastal road, she believed all would be well. The windscreen looked out onto a rosy dream and she relaxed into a tourist’s sense of alienation. Kept her eyes on the road. Kept breathing.

  Camilla asked, ‘Shall I put some music on?’

  ‘I haven’t got any CDs here,’ Jane said.

  ‘CDs?’

  With one sweep of her index finger across the screen of her mobile, Camilla made the stereo in Jane’s rented car play songs by American ‘R&B queens’. Jane suppressed a question about how this could work wirelessly – she had struggled even to switch on the interior lights. She forced herself to focus on what she could see and keep her mind from picking out the trigger words in the lyrics, silly truisms about love and loss that all the same could feel like messages meant just for her.

  ‘Turn left here.’

  The girl’s raised hand briefly appeared in Jane’s field of vision. While Camilla looked the other way, Jane turned the volume down.

  ‘Asker is the only town I can remember the name of,’ Jane said. ‘If you say it quickly, it sounds like ask her! And if you say it slowly, like ass care.’

  The girl laughed and Jane took the chance to look at her. She acted the ultra-cool teen, glancing out from under heavy eyelids, blowing a strand of hair out of her face in the way of fourteen-year-old girls. But only from the neck up. Underneath the gym club’s leotard, Camilla’s muscles were hard as raw vegetables, proof of a willpower and discipline that Jane herself had not felt a whisper of since she was in her thirties and determined to survive as a writer. Where Camilla’s long, blond hair didn’t fall across her face, her skin glowed, spotless and faintly blue in the light of an oncoming car. The girl had no idea how much she mattered. Even if one told her repeatedly just how precious she was, the awareness would never truly reach someone so young. Her parents had to carry that burden.

  Jane drew breath, as if she had been under water for a long time.

  ‘Do you like it?’ Camilla asked.

  ‘Like what?’

  Camilla pointed at the car stereo. Jane nodded stiffly.

  ‘Mummy only listens to Bon Jovi.’

  ‘Oh… I see.’

  ‘Only when Daddy isn’t at home. And she sings along. It’s so-o embarrassing.’

  She had a vision of Eva. The little red O in her freckled face. The glass of wine on the kitchen worktop.

  ‘I want to lay you down, on a bed of roses…’ Jane sang. She tried to put on a Norwegian accent but it came out like the Lone Ranger’s Indian friend. Tonto, that was his name. Camilla laughed and snorted as she breathed in and then laughed even more at how bizarre it all sounded.

  The oncoming traffic was moving slowly now. She felt that someone might suddenly open a car door or cut in ahead of them.

  ‘Is it true that supermarkets in America keep these electric wheelchairs for customers who’re too fat to walk?’ Camilla asked, her mouth hanging open as if Jane had just produced this remarkable piece of information.

  ‘Yes, it is. More or less.’

  Camilla sat very still. Jane tried to imagine the girl’s vision of the States.

  ‘How long are you staying for? Are you leaving after the weekend?’

  ‘I’m not quite sure,’ Jane said.

  ‘Mum and Dad are much nicer when you’re here.’

  ‘Really? How come?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s like, they’re less stressed.’

  She could see it from their point of view. The relief when a guest broke the everyday monotony. How a stranger might, for a few hours or days, change the perspective on your immediate surroundings and on who you are. But she chose to say, ‘I suppose they sometimes can be a little… intense?’

  Which was true, too, and anyway not necessarily a negative judgement. Eva and Lars Christian took turns to go out jogging so that one of them would always be there for the children. Lars Christian worked with people, as he put it, but was just as competent when dealing with the world of things. It was he who had taken the subtle, black-and-white photographs of running streams and fir forests that hung on the sitting room walls. She had watched as he changed the tyres on two cars within half an hour, using his own compressor and pneumatic wrench. Apparently, there were no cable guys in Norway. Anyway, Lars Christian had himself run fibre optic cabling into the house and set up a Wi-Fi network to which the family’s many devices were connected. It was obviously just lack of time that had made him delegate tasks to the young Polish couple. Eva knitted sweaters that might have been machine-made. She had also seen Eva do cartwheels on the newly sown lawn to demonstrate a move for Camilla.

  Jane had become used to people who, at best, had one talent, one gift that might be taken as God’s justification for placing them on Earth. The Askeland-Nilsens excelled at all they undertook. She speculated about Martin, as yet an unknown, wondering if he would provide a natural balance. She had a vision of him: Martin would have a squint and some chronic breathing condition so they’d let him join the school football team only because it was in line with a gentle, embracing Scandinavian norm.

  At the highway exit ramp, the queue of cars crawled at a snail’s pace past the place where she had met the Askeland-Nilsen family on the first day. There were five cars scattered around the parking lot now, all with condensation covering the windscreens and generally in much worse shape than typical Norwegian cars. Four pale, heavily built men stood talking in a cloud of frozen breaths next to a rusty, once-white van surrounded by empties and plastic bags. Camilla saw her looking.

  ‘They’re from Eastern Europe.’

  ‘Do they live there?’

  Camilla shrugged. ‘They won’t have work permits, I think. Or whatever.’

  There were aspects of life in Norway that reminded Jane of stories told to her by a couple of friends who had lived in the Middle East.

  On the highway, Camilla fell asleep with her head dangling between the seats. Jane gently pushed her back until she was supported against the backrest and then allowed her arm to lie for a moment across the girl’s chest. She could sense the beating of Camilla’s heart beneath the paper-thin material of her tracksuit. It felt as if she’d catch fire if she kept her arm there too long.

  And then everything went to pieces. When they arrived at the sports hall, she was reminded of how stupid she could be at times. So dense, it was a miracle that she had managed, over and over again, to convey the opposite to her readers and the literary critics. The moment she swung the car into the parking place, it was obvious what kind of situation she had put herself in. She saw the clusters of giggling girls disappearing in through the wide glass doors. Some of them were as young as five. She clutched the steering wheel and could feel her pulse beating under her nails.

  The tablets were in her suitcase. In the guest room.

  ‘I’ll wait here,’ she said.

  Camilla said, with her head tilted sideways, ‘You can’t wait here. I’ll be training for two and a half hours.’

  ‘No problem at all.’ She sounded as snappy as if at a public reading and the organizer had forgotten to provide water.

  ‘No, please. Come in and watch – you must. You’ll get icy cold in the car.’

  ‘I’ll be fine,
just fine. I can listen to your music.’

  Jane looked at the recess on the dashboard. Camilla’s mobile was no longer there.

  Camilla took the phone from her pocket and handed it over.

  ‘It actually has the songs for my training programme but I guess that’s all right. Usually, they’re on the CD player as well…’ She stopped and then went on. ‘Don’t you want to watch me?’

  Jane swallowed several times before she met Camilla’s eyes. Smiling seemed to rip her face apart.

  ‘Yes, of course I do.’

  BY EARLY SPRING OF 1996, the year Jane met Greg, more than thirty churches with predominantly black congregations had caught fire in the Southern states. In February, the Washington Post reported that the majority of these incidents had indisputably been cases of arson. NationsBank, the savings bank based in the South, had offered half a million dollars to anyone providing information that led to the arrest and sentencing of the perpetrators. In June, President Clinton called for action: We must all do our part to end this rash of violence and went on to say I have vivid and painful memories of black churches being burnt in my own state when I was a child (later, doubts were raised that there had in fact been any outbreaks of racially motivated church arson in Arkansas during Clinton’s childhood).

  New York University, where Jane was enrolled as a student of literature, was far from Tennessee and Alabama, but a combination of opportunity and an attack of bad conscience meant that she was swept along in a peaceful march of anti-racist demonstrators on their way to the United Nations building. She and her friend Alice had been to a Gustav Klimt exhibition at the Frick. On the walk back to her rooms in Broome Street, she found herself going against the flow of the march and felt like a distressed fish swimming against the shoal. For a while, she zigzagged along the sidewalk, pressed herself against the walls of buildings and stood for quite a long time behind a fire hydrant with a growing sense of being somehow in the wrong, just because she wanted something different from everyone else. That very morning, she and Alice had had a philosophical discussion over breakfast – a familiar mix of Sunday morning gloom and youthful self-absorption – and had agreed that they were both creatures of the Western world, self-centred and privileged people who never helped anyone but themselves, and hardly even that.