Thomas Enger - Scarred

As expected the morning started slowly after she came home late from work last night and found Mattis asleep on the sofa under a blanket. On the table stood a bottle of red wine that he had clearly consumed single-handedly because his dry cracked lips were stained blue. Next to the bottle was a note saying ‘Wake me when you get home…’ followed by three x’s – as if the first hint could be misunderstood.

But she didn’t have the energy. A long night shift at the airport had worn her out. The luggage belt had broken down – again – which meant it took longer to check in passengers, whose bad mood increased in line with Emilie’s. When she finally got home, well past midnight, she had only one thought in her head and that was to go to bed. So that was what she did. She fell asleep the moment her head hit the pillow.

Mattis was woken up by his mobile, which on weekdays makes an infernal noise at quarter to six in the morning. She heard him get in the shower, but when he returned to the bedroom to get dressed, she pretended to be asleep. She didn’t really know why she did that. He came over to her just before he left, but by then she had buried her head under the duvet and curled up in a ball.

As usual Sebastian woke up around seven o’clock and Emilie plonked him in front of the television for an hour, expertly ignoring all the voices in her head that called out: you’re a bad mother, you’re a bad mother , and went back to bed. She set the alarm for eight o’clock and woke up with a panicky feeling of being late for something. Fortunately she found Sebastian right where she had left him with his Lightning McQueen car in his hands and the remote control right beside him.

Television.

The world’s best invention, surpassed only by a baby’s dummy and the dishwasher.

But the mood of the day changed completely when she remembered that she was going to Oslo to have lunch with Johanne.

Emilie thinks about her friend’s gentle face as she leaves the nursery and walks out into a day that is waiting just for her. She is so looking forward to seeing Johanne again, hearing the latest news in her life since they last saw each other, what she did last summer, if she has met a new man, what’s going on with her.

Emilie drives towards the motorway while she wonders about Mattis. If anyone can make sense of the thoughts and feelings that have started to appear about the man she thought she loved, then it has to be Johanne. She has always given her such good advice.

He blinks and carefully opens his eyes.

It is a new day. It means he only has two days left.

The realisation makes him feel dizzy. The pills he took last night always have that effect on him. They slow him down. But the thought of what he is going to do today makes him leap out of bed and go over to the computer. Has she told the whole world where she is? And what she is doing?

Of course she has.

He goes to the bathroom and washes his face. Puts on his clothes and gets ready. Takes some pills with him, different ones that make him stronger. Then he goes outside. Out into a day, the number of which is decreasing.

But it makes no difference. All he can think about is how it will feel. If he’ll be there this time, all of him. When the light goes out.

Henning made a point of asking if the rental firm had a yellow car, but had to settle for a small white vehicle that hasn’t even clocked up 3,000 kilometres. Now it has clocked up another forty and his first stop is Jessheim School – one of Erna Pedersen’s former employers.

It’s more than sixteen years since she stopped working there and Henning realises there is a limit to what he can hope to achieve in just one morning. Even so he parks the car and enters the school’s playground, an area that has changed considerably since Henning was last in Jessheim. He played a football match here when he was in Year Five. It was a big deal at the time for a class from Kløfta to come all the way to Jessheim to play. It was rivalry at its best – and at its worst. On the lumpy pitch behind the school they played two halves of twenty minutes each and won 5–2. Henning scored three of the goals. He can still remember being lifted up on the teacher’s shoulders after the match.

If Tom Sverre Pedersen was right and the school walls used to be covered in graffiti about his mother, there is no trace of it now. The paint on the walls look fresh and the school has been extended since Henning took part in the legendary football match back in the eighties.

He walks around to the rear of the school. Everything looks much better than he remembers it. Back in his day the place was unloved and filthy. Today there are green areas. A new volleyball sand court. The football pitch that Henning used play on now looks like something a reasonably well-off football club would use for training purposes. It feels a little odd to be retracing his footsteps now that the past has been erased and replaced with something better. But he tries to visualise them, the pupils who detested Erna Pedersen, what they did, what they thought. The graffiti on the walls would probably have been removed as soon as it was discovered and the culprits probably wouldn’t have been hard to find. But would the kid who hated her most have done something quite so obvious?

Maybe. Maybe not. People differ. But if Henning had wanted to hate, he would have picked a spot where he could nurse his hatred. A specific place that no one could destroy, erase or restore.

Henning looks around. None of the pupils is outside. The sun shines on the school’s windows, but he can see activity behind them. There are some trees at the end of the playground close to the fence separating it from the grey high-rise buildings on the other side. Trees of various heights. Trees you can climb.

Henning studies them as he walks over to them. The branches stretch up high and spread to the sides, some of them have become tangled up in each other. He reckons there are ten or twelve trees clustered together.

He looks around for the thickest branch, tests it and starts to climb. He can find no carvings in the tree trunk after the first or the second metre, so he climbs back down again and tries the next tree. Same result. An elderly woman with a Zimmer frame walks past on the pavement outside the fence. Henning smiles to her before he scales yet another tree; he manages to climb quite high; he swings one leg over the biggest, fattest branch, leans into the tree trunk and looks around.

No.

Nothing.

And yet somehow he feels closer to the killer, or at least he can imagine having a place like this, a place where you can sit and think and feel and hate. The school photo that was removed from Erna Pedersen’s wall and the word ‘fractions’ that she uttered in horror the day before she was killed both suggest that someone truly loathed her. And that her death is linked to her job as a teacher.

Henning climbs back down again and goes inside the school just as the bell goes for break; a small boy helps him find the head teacher’s office. The head teacher isn’t there today, a helpful secretary tells Henning, but perhaps she can help?

‘Yes, perhaps,’ Henning says and smiles to the friendly woman with the long, black hair. ‘Tell me, how does it work – do you keep old yearbooks here?’

‘Yes, indeed we do,’ she smiles. ‘But we don’t have very many of them. We didn’t start producing yearbooks until the mid-noughties, I think.’

‘So if I were to ask you to find me a school photo that includes Erna Pedersen then you wouldn’t have it?’

The secretary’s smile freezes.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘So that’s why you’re asking.’