by Tim Ewins
Finally, as Manjan was about to explain to Shakey how Ladyjan’s shoulder sometimes smelt after sunbathing, Shakey asked his question again.
‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘but is she fit?’ Manjan thought about this. He’d never thought about it before because to him it didn’t matter. Eventually, he concluded that she was, but he didn’t say so.
Instead, sadly, he said, ‘I guess I don’t know what she looks like now.’
‘That doesn’t matter,’ Shakey quickly replied, seeing Manjan’s seemingly new realisation. ‘How did you meet her? Why did you meet her? That matters. That might help us find her. What’s your story?’
* * *
It wasn’t that Manjan wanted to keep his and Ladyjan’s story a secret – he’d told his story to lots of people before and for the most part they had been interested, entertained and often even compassionate. Sometimes they’d buy him a drink, and sometimes people had their own story to tell in return. People liked Manjan’s story.
But Manjan had also told his story to a lot of vests. A couple of vests had laughed, some had stared blankly and not listened (although, to be fair, these vests were normally very intoxicated) and a few had simply wandered off, mid-story. Manjan now adopted a strict ‘no vest’ policy when it came to his story, but he had warmed somewhat to this particular vest. There was a chance that Shakey would listen. Manjan supposed that Shakey might laugh, but he doubted that he would wander off. In fact, he was beginning to doubt that Shakey would ever leave.
‘Sorry, can you start again? I wasn’t listening,’ Shakey said.
‘I hadn’t begun,’ Manjan replied.
‘Perfect.’
There was a severe lack of intelligence in Shakey, but there certainly wasn’t a lack of honesty.
Manjan sipped his wine and looked out to sea.
‘For the purposes of the story,’ he started, ‘let’s just assume that Ladyjan was fit.’
Part 2
7
Four foxes and a mouse
Fishton to Norway. 1970.
Jan’s mother helped Jan pack his bags. She would miss him, but he was only going to be away for a couple of weeks and at least he wouldn’t be on his own.
‘You’ll have a full bag of clothes with you this time,’ she said, ‘and not just five socks.’ Then she laughed.
‘Mmm,’ mumbled Jan, a little irritated. He’d had this from his parents on and off for the past five years. ‘I took pants too,’ he said defensively, and his mother laughed again.
‘You’d have looked a sight in Norway.’
Although Jan hadn’t properly gone travelling since his trip to, and indeed from, Fishton five years ago, he had learnt quite a lot about it. For starters, he had learnt that if you go out of Fishton via the sea and travel in a straight line, you get to Norway.
He’d also learnt the importance of planning. He’d learnt this after several nights camping in his parents’ back garden staring at a bush and looking for wildlife. After four nights he still hadn’t seen a thing. Sleepily, and smelling a little like wildlife himself, Jan went to Fishton library, where he researched what foxes ate and where they scavenged. The night after, he camped in his parents’ front garden and stared at the bin all night. He saw three foxes and a mouse. Success! That same night a fourth fox had been in the back garden looking for a bin in the same smelly spot where Jan had previously camped. This doesn’t negate the importance of planning though; it just emphasises another important lesson that Jan had learnt – the importance of washing.
Finally, Jan had learnt that to truly understand something, he must fully immerse himself into it. Since his last attempt at travelling, he had spent a long time learning the Old Fishton language. As a result, he found that the range of people to talk to in Fishton (and indeed the towns and villages down the road) had expanded. Everyone had a lot to say, but when you speak a different language, they had no way to say it. Recently Jan had been able to hear stories from perhaps hundreds of new and interesting people, not least Hylad.
It was thanks to Hylad that Jan was now packing. It had been five years since they had met on the cliff just outside the town two towns down from Fishton and now they were friends, although this friendship had started fairly one-sided. After their first meeting, Hylad (or Nigel as everyone else knew him) had found a thirteen-year-old Jan following him around everywhere, imitating the way he talked. Hylad found this more than a little annoying but because young Jan didn’t yet understand the Old Fishton language, Hylad had no way of telling him to beat it.
‘Oushna,’ Hylad had said. This means ‘beat it’ in Old Fishton.
‘Oushna,’ Jan had shouted back, and an old lady who spoke fluent Old Fishton scarpered, not wanting to get in the middle of what she assumed would be a father-and-son fight.
Eventually Hylad had gone back to 31 Western Crescent to let Jan’s father know, to let Jan know, to ‘oushna’. Jan’s father had let out a big sigh.
‘I bet he’s trying to learn Old Fishton,’ he’d said apologetically. They had a long, slow and hard-to-understand conversation on the doorstep and at the end it was agreed that Jan would meet with Hylad each week to learn Old Fishton. In return, Jan had to help Hylad speak English and then, importantly, Jan must leave Hylad alone for the rest of the week. When they told Jan this he jumped with excitement.
‘Yes, Hylad!’ he shouted, before hugging Hylad.
‘He’s called Nigel,’ Jan’s father said, but Hylad didn’t seem to mind.
* * *
Both Jan and Hylad kept their promise and over the following years they learnt how to understand one another. To begin with it hadn’t been easy.
‘How do we start?’ Jan had asked. Without any clue of what Jan’s question had meant, Hylad had scratched his large bald head and then asked the exact same question in Old Fishton. They looked at each other silently for some time after that. Then Hylad waved in greeting.
‘Alloo,’ he said slowly. Jan understood and replied with a very similar-sounding word.
After the fourth week they were both beginning to get somewhere. As it turned out English and Old Fishton were essentially the same language. Every word was accented and spelt differently, which made it difficult to learn, but when Jan and Hylad listened very closely to each other they could hear their own language lost in the heavily accented mist of the other.
By the time a year had passed Jan and Hylad were having full-on conversations in both languages. After the second year they realised that they were discussing things in a strange Old Fishton/English amalgamation that they had accidentally created themselves, and by the third year they were no longer teaching each other at all.
* * *
‘What were you doing on that cliff?’ Hylad had asked over a fish-and-chips lunch when Jan was seventeen. He’d often wondered but hadn’t wanted to ask before in case the answer was...well, in case the answer was what the answer often is when people are found standing alone on cliffs. Jan was embarrassed.
‘Don’t laugh,’ he had said, and Hylad feared the worst. ‘I’d taken a test at school and the results...’ Jan paused. Hylad worked quite high-up in the box-packaging department at Fishton’s fish factory, and so Jan re-worded his sentence. ‘The results...weren’t what I’d been hoping for and – don’t mock me when I say this but – I…was…unhappy.’ Jan said this last bit slowly. Hylad felt himself well up inside but he wouldn’t show it. He was a big man physically and he generally made a point of acting the part.
‘Aye,’ he said, without quiver or any outward show of emotion.
‘And, well, when you found me on the cliff...’ Hylad prepared for the worst, forcing a stern face and holding back any visible sign of emotion by tensing his eyebrows.
‘When you found me on the cliff I thought I was in Norway.’ Hylad’s face de-tensed and one side of his lips raised into a half-smile.
‘No
rway?’
‘Yes, although I didn’t know it was Norway then.’
‘It wasn’t Norway lad, not even close!’ Hylad said this as the other side of his lips raised into a full smile.
‘No, but I thought it was. I thought I’d travelled across the North Sea to the other side, to where I now know to be Norway. But obviously I hadn’t.’ Despite Jan’s previous request, Hylad slammed his palms hard down on the table and let out a tremendous bellow of a laugh.
‘You promised not to laugh,’ Jan complained, even though Hylad had never actually made such a promise.
After some reassurance Jan told Hylad the whole story, from the moment he saw England Man to his first opinions of the town that wasn’t Norway. Hylad had laughed at nearly every sentence, and by this point Jan had been laughing too.
Hylad had whooped when Jan was finished, slamming his hands down on the table again with joy.
‘This is ridiculous, Jan. You are ridiculous.’ But during Jan’s story Hylad had made his mind up. This boy who had been inquisitive enough to annoy the hell out of him when they had first met, but who had then also been patient enough to teach him English, deserved not to be laughed at. Hylad wiped his now red face with his sleeve and cleared his throat to calm himself down. ‘I’ll have a word with your mother and father, and if they don’t mind, and if you want to m’lad, I’ll take you to Norway.’
* * *
The doorbell rang, and Jan rushed out of his room to escape the continuing ridicule he was getting from his mother.
‘Every sock needs a friend!’ Jan’s father called out as Jan jumped down the last three steps to the hall, but Jan barely noticed – he was too excited to see Norway.
‘Ready?’ Hylad asked as Jan swung open the door.
‘Nearly. Hang on, I’ll just grab my bag,’ answered Jan as he rushed back upstairs.
‘Have you packed socks?’ Hylad called after him, ‘and then did you pack the same socks again? That’s called a pair!’ Then he and Jan’s father enjoyed a good laugh and a chat at the door while Hylad waited.
Jan picked up his bag, hugged his mother and started his way back downstairs. Then, remembering the foxes and the importance of planning, he went back into his room and grabbed his already tattered and completely read High-Tide Travel Guide to Norway.
As Jan and Hylad turned away from Western Crescent and started on down to the harbour, Jan’s mother walked downstairs, ready to enjoy a few days of peace with her husband, only to find that she wouldn’t be able to relax at all. There, on the top step where Jan had turned to collect his travel book, were three individual odd socks.
8
High-Tide Travel Guide
Fishton to Norway. 1970.
Three days is a long time to spend on a boat, especially one as minimal as Hylad’s. It was solid enough for the task at hand, and indeed Hylad was a capable captain, but when it came to passing the time the boat offered little more than a view. Jan got bored of the view about five hours after they lost sight of land. He’d enjoyed watching Fishton become England and he’d enjoyed watching England become the sea. He’d even enjoyed the sea just remaining the sea for a full five hours, but then boredom set in. Hylad was busy navigating, steering and whistling, and Jan didn’t want to distract him. Michael, the man that Hylad had bought along with them to drive through the night, was asleep in the single bed that Jan would be using later on. Even if Michael hadn’t been sleeping, Jan didn’t think he’d have made the best company. Michael had been incredibly nice to Hylad – very attentive and full of humour – but when Jan had tried to speak to him he had become defensive and short.
‘How long have you known Hylad?’ Jan had asked.
‘Yeah, I’ve known NIGEL quite long.’
‘How did you meet?’
‘Well, you know,’ Michael had started, as if he had more to say, and then didn’t say anything for quite some time.
‘Did you go to school together?’
‘I just told you, it was quite a long time ago. I dunno, the details escape me,’ but it was obvious that they didn’t.
‘But, vaguely...’ Jan persisted in the way that he tended to do when he didn’t sense that someone was annoyed with him.
‘You really don’t care, Jan. Look I appreciate you making the small talk but…’
‘I really do care,’ Jan interrupted, although by this point he wasn’t sure that he did any more.
‘Fine. Look, we met, and we tend not to talk about how, but if you must know it wasn’t really a meeting at all, it was more like we crashed,’ Michael said, somewhat cryptically. Then he’d got Hylad’s attention by touching his arm and said, ‘I’m going to bed,’ softly.
‘I’m going to bed,’ he’d said to Jan harshly.
Jan was glad that they were to have alternating sleep patterns on the boat. He was also happy to hear that when they reached Norway, Michael was only planning on eating with Jan and Hylad in the evenings, so they would have the days to explore without him. Although when Michael had told them this, the source of Jan’s relief also seemed to be the source of Hylad’s disappointment.
Jan walked from one side of the boat to the other and saw nothing but sea. He listened to Hylad’s whistling and tried to guess what tune he was renditioning, but from what he could tell there was no tune – just high-pitched notes of different lengths and tone with no noticeable pattern. These three days are going to be long, he thought as he opened the first page of his worn and already repeatedly read High-Tide Travel Guide to Norway.
Top Ten Norwegian Experiences
1.
There is nothing like sailing around the fjords in the north of Norway. The water is crystal-clear, and the peaks of land are untouched spots of beauty. Make sure you hang around for sunset!
2.
Pulpit Rock offers one of the best views that the world has to offer. It’s a gruelling hike but from the rock you’ll experience nature in its truest form. With sunset cometh the best views from the rock.
3.
The city of Oslo offers a skyscape for score skies! Watch the sun set over the rooftops while enjoying a fiskesuppe (fish soup) from one of many of Oslo’s Kafeer.
4.
The only way to explore a Norwegian city is by tram. Trams run through daylight hours and will offer you the experience of being a true Norwegian. The trams tend to stop just after sunset but it’s worth putting your day trip on hold to experience this most magnificent of times to travel!
5.
The midnight sun is a truly Norwegian experience. The further north you travel the more nights of sun you can expect but an average year offers around seventy-five nights of the midnight sun from May. The midnight sun is best experienced at sunset!
Jan stopped reading. ‘The midnight sun is best experienced at sunset,’ he read again, this time out loud. ‘Surely the point of the midnight sun is that there is no sunset for months. Then, when there is a sunset there isn’t a midnight sun. How can I see the midnight sun at sunset when the sun sets the midnight sun? And when it sets, does it set at midnight, in which case, is that still the midnight sun or the just-before-midnight sun?’ Jan’s mind was baffled. Try to focus on the south of Norway, he thought. They wouldn’t be going far north enough to see the midnight sun anyway.
6.
Why not visit one of Norway’s stunning coastal villages? Grimstad, for example, is set around many small islands, with the harbour acting host to many maritime vessels. Why not make the most of your visit with a drink down by the water at sunset?
There it was again. That word. Everything seemed to be better at sunset. Jan had seen lots of sunsets in Fishton before, and there was no doubt that he liked them, but had the sunset enhanced the fish and chips he’d eaten next to the trolleys in the supermarket car park that time? He wasn’t sure it had. And had he enjoyed lifting bricks onto his uncle’s van
more when the sun had been going down? No. It had hurt both his shoulders and his legs, regardless of the sun’s position. Maybe the sunset was different in Norway.
Jan scanned the next page of the High-Tide Travel Guide and saw that numbers 7, 9 and 10 on the list of the top ten Norwegian experiences were all ‘best experienced at sunset’. What were he and Hylad to do with the rest of their day? In fact, the only thing that wasn’t best experienced at sunset in Norway was the Northern Lights. Jan put the book down next to him with a thump.
‘But the sun doesn’t even set for half the year,’ Jan said to himself, a little indignant.
‘Will you shut up?’ came a sharp, barking noise from the single bed, ‘I’ll be up all night piloting this poxy boat, and I want to sleep now.’
‘Sorry,’ called Jan, genuinely apologetic for keeping Michael awake.
‘Are you talking to yourself?’ came another bark.
‘Yes,’ Jan answered, ‘I am. Are you sure you only want to meet up with us in the evenings when we get to Norway? You can see us in the day instead if you’d prefer.’
Jan heard a grunt from the direction of the bed that sounded a bit like the word ‘evening’, and then some more grunts that might have meant ‘thank you’.
‘You won’t miss out on much then. You’ll be with us for all the best experiences. Don’t worry.’
Another grunt, a shuffling sound and then nothing but the sounds of the sea, the boat and Hylad’s whistling again.
