“What would you like?” says a voice behind her. She turns back to the counter. It’s not the young man, this one’s older. In his fifties, she thinks.
“It was someone else before,” she says.
He peers at her and raises his left eyebrow. He puts both his hands down flat on the counter and leans forward. The backs of his hands are covered in dark hair, his forearms too, though the hair on his head is grey. His fingers are thick and stubby.
“Are you having anything or not?”
His voice is calm and steady. Vibeke thinks he sounds tired.
“I was going to ask the young man from before something.”
“I see.”
There’s a lull and she can no longer sense the couple who are eating, she thinks they’ve probably stopped to hear what she’s talking to the man about.
“It doesn’t matter,” she says.
“I don’t suppose it does,” says the man. He rearranges some pastries on a plate so they overlap each other in a circle.
Vibeke turns around and goes back toward the heavy glass door where she came in, pushing it open and stepping outside. She breathes the cold air in through her mouth, scuttles back to the car and climbs in.
The car slows down and pulls up next to Jon. He looks at the driver, it’s the man with the close-cropped hair. The man looks back at him. The engine idles, puffing its exhaust. Jon feels its warmth against his lower legs.
HE’S TURNED THE ENGINE off but left the ignition on, the heater’s running and he’s switched the radio back on, the same channel as the one in the café. Now he’s asleep. She tries not to slam the door in case she wakes him up. He’s put his head back against the headrest. His mouth hangs open, she sees a dark coating on his tongue. From smoking, she guesses, and turns away. She looks out the window on her side. A couple emerge from a place further down the street, they stop, the man puts the woman’s head in his hands and bends slightly at the knee as they kiss. Vibeke wonders if there’s a coating on her own tongue. She pulls the visor down and looks at herself in the little mirror. She needs to get close up to see properly and shuffles forward to the edge of her seat, balancing awkwardly at an angle. She thinks she can see a dark patch toward the back of her tongue, but it’s hard for her to see in such dim light. She investigates with a fingernail, retrieving only slime, and shifts back into her seat. Maybe the place that couple came out is somewhere we can go, she thinks. A warm light seeps out through the door opening. She peers toward it and sees a sign hanging at a right angle to the outside wall. It seems to be a pub of some sort. She turns toward him to wake him up and suggest they have a look. He stares at her with eyes half shut. She wonders if he’s been asleep at all, maybe he’s been watching her like that all the time. She puts a hand to her hair to see if there’s still some bounce in it or if it’s collapsed.
The man in the car rolls his window down.
“I know the area,” says Jon. “If you’re lost, that is.”
The man smiles. His teeth are small and even. Jon realizes it’s a woman, not a man at all.
“Ah, a local.”
She keeps smiling as she speaks. She’s got an accent, maybe she’s from Vestlandet, Jon thinks to himself. He smiles back. He doesn’t know what to say, she doesn’t seem to be looking for an address after all.
“Hop in,” she says with a nod at the empty seat next to her. “It’s far too cold to be talking to someone through an open window.”
He walks around to the other side and gets in beside her. He glances around the interior. On the back seat is a big, floral cushion and a long white wig. On the floor at his feet is a soft bag made of purple leather. He sits there with his hands on his lap looking straight ahead.
“Aren’t boys your age supposed to be in bed by now?”
Her voice is dark and she speaks slowly. It’s like she smiles when she’s talking, but when Jon looks up at her she goes serious.
“I’ve locked myself out and there’s no one in. My mom’s going to be back soon though. She’s been baking a birthday cake for me and there was something she’d forgotten to get, so she had to pop out.”
“Your birthday soon, is it?”
“Yes, I’m going to be nine tomorrow.”
She looks out the windshield at the yellow beam of the headlights in the snow. She clicks her tongue a couple of times, he thinks it’s like she doesn’t know she’s doing it. After a second she leans across the seat where he’s sitting and opens the glove compartment.
“There might be some sweets in there somewhere.”
She starts rummaging among the pieces of paper, tissues, and some packets of hard candy that seem to be empty. He sees several pairs of sunglasses of different kinds.
“Didn’t your mother ever tell you not to go with strangers?”
She rummages on as she speaks.
“Why not?”
“Not everyone’s as nice as me.”
She looks at him and smiles again. Her teeth are really quite small. He gets an urge to feel his own and compare.
“My mom says everyone’s good on the inside.”
She rummages still. He studies her. Her clothes are white. Her sweater is made of some kind of soft material, he thinks it looks like the fur of a rabbit. It’s a very long sweater, a bit like a dress. She has white tights on, and white lace-up boots. He feels hot and takes his knit cap off.
She slams the glove compartment shut, making him jump.
“Nothing there, I’m afraid.”
She looks at him, narrowing her eyes while she thinks.
“We’ll go and get some.”
She throws the car into gear and swings out into the middle of the road. Jon feels himself thrust into the corner of his seat. She puts her foot down and changes gear. He looks at her hand on the gear lever and thinks how thin her fingers are. He looks at his own hands, they’re even smaller than hers. They tingle as the warmth returns to them.
VIBEKE FOLLOWS HIM INSIDE, the smell of his leather jacket filling her nostrils when he stops abruptly and she walks into the back of him. Rather a strong smell, she thinks maybe it’s a new jacket. He glances back over his shoulder with a smile. It lifts her up, she feels herself smiling too as she looks around the room. The place is small, the bar cramped and full of customers. On a narrow stage to the left, a couple of steps up from the bar, a band is playing. There are three seating areas to the right of the bar, with brown leather sofas pushed against the wall and wooden chairs facing out. All the seats are taken. Those with nowhere to sit stand with their drinks. The place is so packed it’s hard to tell where one group ends and another begins. So this is where people come, she says to herself.
Five girls have sat down on the steps up to the stage. They look like they’re having an important discussion. The speakers are right behind them. Vibeke wonders how they can hear each other. She thinks maybe they’re deaf and can lip-read, and tries to figure out what they’re saying. She can’t, and gives up. She wonders what type of music the band is playing. A kind of soft rock perhaps. It’s an all-girl band. The bass player’s got thick red hair. The singer is short and thin and looks like a child, with a small, round face, big front teeth and black bangs that get in her eyes. The rest of her hair is dreadlocks, all the way down to her waist. They send each other looks as they play, a wry smile at a catchy riff, little nods and gestures to signal the changes. The drummer sits at the back and is ordinary looking. Vibeke thinks if she saw her on the street she’d never believe she played in a band. She looks around, but can’t find him. There’s a couple having an argument, the girl ranting, the man occasionally managing to get a word in that only sets her off again. She decides not to look. She doesn’t want anything to spoil the happiness she feels, the great, unbridled calm inside her. She stays put, standing behind two strapping men with bulging biceps who are sitting on stools, shouting to make themselves heard above the music. She waits for a gap so she can get to the bar and order, trying to make up her mind what she wants, her eye
s running down the list on the wall. Something bubbly, she tells herself with a smile, to fit the mood. The men in front of her are talking ice hockey, both seem to be players themselves, they’re unhappy with their new coach. Their clothes are the same, red plaid lumberjack shirts and blue jeans. Suddenly one of them twists around and wants to know what’s she’s staring at. Vibeke is so astonished she can’t think of what to say before he’s picked up his beer and swivelled around to face her. He rests his elbows on his thighs and gives her a lecture about how he hates being checked out by women standing there ogling, waiting for him to take the initiative; how sick to death he is of eyes all over him, and how she might as well stop gawping, because it doesn’t matter how she goes about it, it won’t cut any ice with him.
“Hi.”
He’s standing right behind her, she feels his breath against her hair. He speaks into her ear and makes her smile, picking her up again, restoring the mood, gathering her in. The ice-hockey player turns back to his friend and carries on their conversation as if what he just said to her wasn’t an interruption at all but part of a chain of connected events.
“I bumped into some others from the fair.”
She turns around and looks up at him. He’s sparkling in a way she hadn’t seen in the trailer or in the car, he’s like a different person. He probably feels more at ease with me now, she thinks, he’s starting to relax. She realizes she doesn’t know his name and asks.
“Tom,” he says. “What’s yours?”
“Vibeke.”
His eyes wander around the room.
“I need a beer.”
“The convenience store shuts at ten,” says Jon. “After that there’s only the gas station in town.”
“Is it far?”
Her dark voice is smooth. Jon thinks she’s nice.
“Twenty kilometers.”
The heater blasts out hot air. Jon unzips his coat. He unwinds the scarf from around his neck. He sees the big, glassy ring on her middle finger. He wonders what it would look like through the microscope. There must be lots of bacteria on it, he thinks.
They pass under the road lighting as they head along the highway, away from the village. Jon holds his breath for as many lights as he can. He tells himself that as long as he can hold his breath then every light they pass will mean a thousand people get to avoid being tortured. He’s read about some methods at the library. For instance, they can hold your head in a bucket of ice-cold water and electrocute you through the tongue. Or else it can be like the picture in the magazine he saw, where they hang you up by the arms and make you pee all down yourself. He tries to imagine how it must feel. The longest he can hold his breath is seven in a row. He thinks maybe he should start practicing so he can manage a bit longer.
The forest around them is dark and dense, the road flat with wide bends. It feels like driving at the bottom of a shaft. Or through a tunnel without a roof, or a deep valley in a model railway landscape.
“What’s your name?”
He can tell from her voice she’s fed up.
“Jon.”
He thinks it’s unfair. He never asked to get in. He wasn’t pestering her. He only wanted to help, because he thought she was lost.
She drives fast. They enter a bend and the glove compartment drops open. He sees the sunglasses. The nearest pair are big and round, with a thick white rim made of plastic. He gets them out and puts them on. They’re far too big for him, he can feel the cold plastic on his cheek. She looks at him, then back at the road. The sunglasses make the beam of the headlights look green. Suddenly he feels sick. His stomach cramps up, his mouth fills with spit. He doesn’t think he can keep it in.
“Can you stop?”
“What for?”
“I feel sick.”
She drives a bit further then pulls in to the banked-up snow at the roadside. The landscape is flat and open. Jon pulls the door handle and staggers out.
VIBEKE SEES A FACE she recognizes from the Culture Plan presentation, one of the two women from social security. Vibeke had them down as a pair of old hens. Now she’s piled on the make-up. Vibeke can see she’s with a man, low of stature and thickset, his hair thin and grey. It strikes her they look like they’re swing dancing. She laughs. No one else is dancing, there’s no room. She sees that the man is drinking water. He must be driving. She looks past them at Tom. He’s standing with his back to her at the bar. She can tell he’s been served, but he’s still chatting with the young barmaid, leaning forward over the counter. The loud music means he has to use his body to make himself understood, and he gestures exaggeratedly with his arms. She supposes he’s telling a joke or something. It feels nice, watching him without him knowing. She needs to give him time and space, to be sensitive to the fact that they’re two individuals.
“Hi,” says the woman from social security. “This is my boyfriend, Evald.”
They’ve come up without her noticing. She didn’t think the woman would acknowledge her, they’ve never spoken before. She’s quite drunk. Her boyfriend smiles at Vibeke.
“You’re new here,” he says.
He bends forward as he speaks, the woman smiles stiffly at Vibeke or something else just beside her. Vibeke nods in return. They must be about sixty. She thinks they’re a bit old to be somewhere noisy like this. Or maybe I should think again about older people, she says to herself. She smiles apologetically, indicating the bar with a jab of her thumb and making her way through toward Tom.
The woman tears some paper towels off a roll. He already wiped his mouth on his coat sleeve when he was out of the car, his mouth and face feel dry. He sits there with the paper towels in his hands. He feels the relief of having thrown up, the travel sickness subsiding. She starts the car and pulls away again. She drives slower now.
“You do something with your eyes,” she says.
“I know,” he says.
They fall silent again. He forgets it shows. But then he gets reminded. All the time, reminded about things. He wishes no one noticed and that what was wrong with him was under his clothes or inside him.
“Well, if you can’t help it.”
Jon thinks: No, I can’t. He stares out at the road in front, feeling the muscle around his eye tighten and release faster than he can think, over and over again. He twists sideways in his seat, putting his chin against his chest and pulling his legs up as far as he can without dirtying the seat with his boots. He closes his eyes and pretends he’s the passenger in a spaceship on his way to another planet.
“Don’t go to sleep. If I can’t sleep at nights, you better not either.”
He opens his eyes and looks at her sideways. She’s joking, he says to himself. He asks why she can’t sleep. She tells him she doesn’t know exactly. Something gets in the way, that’s all. It feels like something important isn’t there when she closes her eyes, she just isn’t tired. I sleep fine, says Jon. My mom says anyone can sleep whenever they want, all you’ve got to do is learn to relax the right way.
He closes his eyes again while she carries on talking. He imagines the squiggles of light he sees behind his eyelids to be undiscovered galaxies. He tries to figure out what to do, whether to land somewhere or be heading into battle, preparing himself for the enemy’s onslaught. His neck itches, but it’s too much effort to scratch. She hums a song. It distracts him, he tries to ignore it and concentrate on summoning a force. But then his spaceship explodes in a galactic storm and he disintegrates into cosmic dust.
“Great band,” says Tom.
She nods. The girl behind the bar puts the beer down in front of her and Vibeke hands her the money. His glass is nearly empty. She looks at him as she sips the froth. It dissolves on her lips. His eyes are big and kind. He’s got sleep in the corner of one of them. His mouth is narrow, but it looks so soft and tender.
He turns around and leans back against the bar. He looks down into his beer and a curl of blond hair falls against his cheek with an affirmative bounce, a little yes. She pictures them r
unning toward each other across a city square, a gravel-covered ground, along some disused railway track; he lifts her up and swings her in the air, they laugh together, and the day is bright and soundless. She looks down too; part of her wants to tell him, another part wants to keep it inside. I musn’t spoil the mood with talk, she tells herself.
The floor is wooden, it looks old. It’s been sanded down and varnished, a reddish brown. His boots are black with heavy-duty soles. Someone lurches into her, almost knocking her down, and she stumbles toward him, dropping her bag on the floor. Her cheek presses into his sweater, her lower arm forced against his thigh. She can feel his penis, hard and stiff inside his pants. She bends down to pick up her bag, and he does too, and they knock their heads together. He lifts her chin and turns her face toward him. His eyes are so close to hers.
“Did you hurt yourself?”
She shakes her head. Her eyes blink and she looks up at the ceiling.
“What’s the matter?”
She hears concern.
“It’s a lot of things,” she says meekly.
She feels herself to be on the verge of telling him, her truth. The stillness. What it means to her to be with him, the way he lifts her up.
“Say again?” he says, lowering his head toward her. “Speak louder.”
She tells herself to wait, she wants to hold on to what they’ve got, she mustn’t prick a hole in it. Not this time. I can wait. I’ll sheathe us both in speechless intimacy, until we’re ready for the abruptness of words.
“It’s the smoke, that’s all,” she says, looking at him, trying to tell him what she wants to say with her eyes. “I’m not used to so much smoke.”
Jon is woken by warm air against his face. It smells nice and he opens his eyes. The woman in the white clothes is leaning over him, is almost on top of him; it’s her breath that feels so warm. He senses the car has come to a halt, it’s dark everywhere, so dark the snow looks luminous. His eyes adjust. He thinks to himself the darkness is actually quite light.
Love Page 7
