Fireraiser

by Torkil Damhaug

  He didn’t turn to her until they had passed through the toll ring.

  – Sorry.

  A word he didn’t intend to use too often, but right then it was the best he had, even though he didn’t quite know what he meant by saying it.

  2

  Sigurd Woods always took a walk around the hall before a lecture. He spoke to as many as possible of those who had turned up, got some idea of who were the sceptics, and who would be the most easily persuaded.

  – How many people here want to be in charge of their own lives? he said once silence had descended on the large auditorium. It was full that evening, more than seventy in the audience, and extra chairs had been brought in. The usual assortment of students, pensioners, tired dental assistants, nurses and secretaries, all there because they needed something new in their lives; a restart was the word he liked to use.

  – No one here who wants to take charge of their own life? His eyes alighted on a woman about Jenny’s age. She was suntanned, too much peroxide in her hair, and pink wrinkles on her chest above the neckline. She looked away, and he realised he hadn’t phrased the question properly.

  – How many of you want to earn a huge amount of money? he asked, and one hand went up, followed by a couple of others.

  – Of course you do, that’s why you’re giving up over an hour of this beautiful summer evening to listen to me. He smiled broadly. – You will not regret it.

  He looked at the woman again. This time she held his gaze.

  – And how many of you want a good income and at the same time be able to spend as much time as you like doing what you really want to do?

  He said it with just a touch of irony. A forest of hands shot up into the air.

  – I thought as much. Smart people.

  From this point onwards it would have been sufficient to proceed as he usually did, but he chose to improvise. That was why he was successful, that ability to surprise even himself.

  – My father, he said as he filled a tumbler of water. – My father owns a farm.

  As he said it, he visualised Katja. Her face as she lay in bed, divided in two by the light streaming in through the window. The thought of taking her to the farm. Showing her where he came from. Showing her the barn loft where you could stand on a chest and look down on to the grass in front of the house, see who came and went. He shook his head, shook the idea away.

  – Running a farm is a lot of hard work for very little return. He took a sip of water. – That’s a given, in a country that consists of mountains with a few wind-blown acres of arable land in between them. Everyone knows that, including my father. So he got himself a teaching qualification. Hard at it all week, with just a few hundred thousand to show for it at the end of the year. Most of it goes in taxes, the rest in expenses. He’ll carry on like that until he retires, wearing himself out for nothing. My mother is a doctor, works long hours, always having to get up in the night, and she doesn’t make much more.

  They liked this, the way he was getting personal.

  – You know what I earned last month?

  He turned and wrote a figure on the whiteboard. A number followed by five zeros. Someone in the audience expressed disbelief, and the figure was a touch too high, but not much; the last couple of months had actually been very good.

  – And I earned this much simply by doing things I like doing, he continued. – Such as standing here talking to you. I’m studying at BI; in a couple of years’ time I’ll be a qualified business economist. And I won’t owe a krone in student loans. And this is only the beginning. The two people in this country who’ve been with Newlife the longest earn the same money as me. Times ten.

  He let that sink in for a few moments.

  – In the final analysis, it’s all about one thing: time.

  He was careful to look serious now. – Your own time. Time you can spend doing what you want to do.

  He was about to go even further but reined himself in. The one word he hadn’t mentioned was left hanging in the air, because he knew it wasn’t appropriate for this gathering. He had tried it before and discovered then that it was best to leave it unsaid on the introductory night, because those who followed what he was saying so far knew that everything led up to this one word.

  Freedom.

  Afterwards he walked out on what was one of the lightest evenings of the year. It was past eight thirty, but the sky was only a slightly deeper shade of blue than it had been at midday. He had bought new shoes. They cost three thousand and weighed nothing. The wind up from the fjord carried a damp heat with it. He had made one of his best presentations, recruited a dozen new members for the network. And two days before the deadline he had handed in his exam paper on finance and economic strategies. Not exactly a masterpiece, but certainly good enough. And he wouldn’t be opening another book until the autumn. He had been checking out holiday options on the internet. Maybe surprise Katja, book something without telling her. An island off the west coast of Mexico with hardly any tourists. Katja sitting on the edge of the swimming pool, her red swimsuit soaking wet, her hair too, looking right at him, the same look as that evening at Togo. Katja wading naked out into a lagoon. He stands watching from the beach, and waits a few seconds before following her. She starts running but he catches up with her, puts his arms around her from behind, lays her down in the warm water.

  People were sitting on Aker Brygge wearing T-shirts, women in flimsy strapless dresses. Someone from BI waved to him, one of those with shares worth millions, a present from his father. He used to laugh at Sigurd’s network trading, because what was the point of working that hard for a lousy few million? What was the point of starting from scratch? And now the guy sat there waving him over. Sigurd smiled back at him. He’d started buying shares too, but using money he’d made himself. He made a sign with his index finger that was supposed to mean something like enjoy it while you can.

  The only vacant table with a view of the fjord was of course reserved, but he knew the head waiter at L’Olive, it could be fixed. Sigurd slipped him a two hundred and sat down, hung his Moods jacket on the back of the chair, stretched his legs. He was early, ordered a Bonaqua while he waited. Didn’t like waiting, but that was one of the things he intended to work on. It was always about that, about pushing forward, encountering new obstacles, overcoming them.

  After a quarter of an hour he’d worked enough on it. He drank the rest of his Bonaqua, picked up his mobile, no message from Katja. He sent one to her. Not impatient, just making sure she hadn’t made a mistake about the time and place.

  He needed to move, got up and went to the toilet. Twenty minutes now. No answer to his message. He felt something that might be anger. Decided he needed to work more on that. To show anger was to show weakness. He logged on to Facebook, scrolled down through a few dozen happy messages. Clicked on her page. Not been updated for some weeks. He’d checked out her friends there, didn’t find out much. No information about her he didn’t already know, nothing about her family. A reference to a film she was in. He’d asked her about it, she’d laughed it off.

  It had been a mistake to take her along to his mother’s birthday party. The imbalance in what they knew of each other had become even more distorted. He was behind, spending far too much time trying to work out who she was, trying to pin her down. But sooner or later he’d manage it.

  His phone rang, he picked it up, in his mind’s eye seeing the stone staircase in Togo, the fourteen steps down to the basement.

  It wasn’t her. He took the call anyway.

  Trym didn’t ring that often. Sigurd knew at once what it was about. First all those preparatory phrases. You’ve got to come back and plant the potatoes, that was one of them, an inside joke they’d kept up from childhood, from the days when their father still planted potatoes. Self-sufficiency, that was another one. Their father’s belief that a time might come when they would have to provide their own food. But Sigurd wasn’t in the mood for joking. He conveyed as much to his brothe
r, that he was busy.

  – Can you lend me some bread?

  The sixties slang was supposed to take the edge off the question, normalise the painful truth that Trym was still living up there on the farm, still in the same bedroom and almost twenty-five years old, with nothing else to do but sit in front of a computer screen, and what made things even worse: that he had to call up his kid brother and ask for a loan.

  – I already have done, Sigurd reminded him.

  Brief pause.

  – I ain’t forgotten. Just need a bit more time.

  – You’ve got too much time, said Sigurd, but then didn’t go on. Didn’t say: what you need to do is move away from your father, get yourself a job, get yourself a life. – Fuck, no, Trym. I’m not lending you any more until you’ve paid back what you already owe me.

  – I’ve got something going, his brother offered, his voice weak.

  – Sure you have. You’ve gambled away every single krone.

  For a moment he was tempted to relent. It wasn’t big money they were talking about, maybe a thousand or two. Had he thought it would help his brother he wouldn’t have hesitated, but giving him money only made things worse and tied him ever more firmly to the farm.

  Again that image: standing on a crate by the eyehole in the barn loft, peeping down at the lawn in front of the house. A car parked by the tool shed. A blue Renault. If he makes an effort he can still recall the registration number. And Trym holding him back as he’s about to climb down from the loft and do something or other, still not knowing what that might be.

  – Gotta go, he concluded. – Got someone waiting for me. Keep in touch.

  He headed towards Vestbanetorget. Needed to walk. Seven weeks now since he’d met Katja at Togo. Close to four since she’d moved in. He thought about her too much. Even when he was supposed to be working. That was okay, probably had to be that way for a while. The first phase and all that. But this was the first time she had failed to keep a date. He pulled out his phone again.

  That was when he saw her.

  She was getting out of a car, a black Audi with tinted windows. He stood on the edge of the dock. She ducked back inside again, wearing a short black dress, too short to be standing like that; he could almost see her G-string, and every guy staring over in that direction wanted to have his hands round those thighs. Maybe she was retrieving something, or saying something to the driver, or kissing him. Because it was a he, Sigurd was in no doubt that it was the outline of a man’s head he was seeing in the driver’s seat.

  She emerged again, closed the car door and started walking up along the dock, and he noticed the looks she was getting, felt certain she noticed them too, that they did something to her, affected the way she walked, the way she held her head. He ducked behind a play frame on the quayside and followed her after she passed, saw her take out her phone and start tapping. A few moments later he received her message. Delayed, sorry, something came up.

  She stopped outside L’Olive; the head waiter opened the door for her. He explained something to her, gesturing with his hands.

  Sigurd strolled up to them.

  – Back again, chief? said the head waiter.

  Katja turned and saw him, put an arm around his neck, brushed her lips against his cheek.

  Sigurd let her do it. – Is that table still vacant?

  – Sorry, chief.

  – Can you fix it?

  He moved his hand in the direction of his jacket pocket, and the head waiter winked.

  – Just give me a minute or two, I’ll see what I can do.

  After they had sat down and he had ordered a bottle of champagne, she put her hand on his arm.

  – Are you annoyed?

  She spoke differently from the way she had done in the very beginning. She adapted quickly, though her accent was still unmistakably southern Swedish.

  – I never get annoyed, he told her, touching the tattoo on her shoulder with his finger. Angry, he might have added, but never annoyed.

  She looked out across the fjord. In the evening light her eyes seemed to contain ever-deepening layers of colour. He watched them as she made her excuses. Apparently some Vanessa or other had called her, and the battery on her phone was flat, and there were other problems, but mostly it was because this Vanessa wouldn’t let her go before she’d helped her with her nails. No Audi, no male driver whom she had to bend over and whisper something or other to, maybe touch his lips, meanwhile showing off her arse to half the men in Oslo. For a moment he was tempted to ask who the man was, but decided against appearing to be a vulgar peeping Tom.

  Back home she undressed in front of the bed. The thought of that Audi had still not left him. It would not disappear as he lay there on the blue sheet, already naked, watching as her clothes were loosened and dropped to the carpet. As she bent over him, head shaking, eyes wide in exaggerated admiration, he could still see the car in his mind, and he continued to do so for the rest of the night, no longer as a disturbance but now something that fired in him the desire to conquer her, obliterate who she was and create her as something new. She showed him things he had never done with any girl before, drove him to do them. And who was it showed you? he thought somewhere inside, but he could see that it worked, twice, three times, and then for a moment it was as though the black Audi had been worth it.

  That was what he needed it for.

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