Per Petterson - I Refuse

NOTHING CAME OF my sea-going plan. I had told Tommy I was going and I meant it. I had been so confident, so determined, I had felt there was no other way out, and I knew where to turn and who would help me leave. I wasn’t the only person in Mørk who wanted to go to sea, I knew several who had gone already. But I hadn’t sworn an oath.

Tommy didn’t need me, I was sure of that. So it wasn’t because of him that I stayed home. On the contrary, I think he found it harder to see me as often as he did before, because everything was different after the evening he sat beside me crying behind the Co-op by Lake Mørk in the cold and dark, and all of a sudden it was me who had to comfort him and not the other way around.

He didn’t come to Mørk on the Wednesday evening, two days later. He had said he would. I had stood by Lysbu’s green pumps waiting, and I was a little nervous and unsure of which Tommy I would be meeting, whether it was the new, sad Tommy, in which case I would have to pull myself together and show tenderness and leadership, or the old Tommy, the one standing at the helm. But I didn’t see him that evening, and he didn’t come on Thursday either. I had stood at the petrol station by the green pumps waiting for an hour every evening until the weekend was over, and at last he was there with his bike on the Monday, and we walked down to the lake as usual and sat on our rocks, but he didn’t stay long. He was restless and distracted, and the conversation we had was going nowhere. After that he came less and less often.

Time passed. I changed. I could feel it myself. From my window on the first floor of the house where I lived with the Lydersens, I could see the BP station through an alleyway between the Old People’s Home and Mørk Machinery. I saw cars driving in and out again with their tanks full and sometimes I saw old Lysbu come from the shop into the daylight or the evening’s lamplight to help drivers who were in trouble, who had never once looked under their car bonnets or changed their windscreen wipers, and then he would go out of my field of vision and return a little later, on his way to the door. I don’t know why the sight of Lysbu always had a calming effect on me, as though nothing could be all bad as long as he was here, whether it was something to do with his body and the placid, unruffled way he moved or his equally placid voice, or his gaze, and I wondered sometimes whether anyone else felt the same way about him as I did. For years Lysbu had said he wanted to move, he was truly sick of the place, he said, of Mørk, but he was still here, and it made me happy. It was hard to imagine that one day he might be gone. If you could picture Mørk as a big wheel, maybe a bicycle wheel, with its shiny spokes pointing in all directions, Lysbu was the hub. For me at least.

If someone had been standing by the pumps, waiting under those lamps at night, or in the daytime, as now, in spring, it would also have been easy for me to see them from my window.

On this evening in May I was going up to Valmo for handball training. It was my first session. It was important, I had made a lot of friends. After long hesitation and thinking about Tommy and the twins and our house and our lives in that house, I had to make a decision, and then I just dived in. Instead of going to sea when I was sixteen, I finished school in Valmo so that I could start at the gymnas in the autumn, and to everyone’s surprise, in no time at all I was top of the class, and now several of the other girls wanted me to play up front in the school handball team. And I said I would love to. I had barely touched a handball, but I knew right away I was going to be good. Everyone did. That was why they asked. For a while everything I touched turned to gold. In the playground, Jackman, our gym teacher, said to me, you’re riding a green wave now, which was supposed to have something to do with traffic lights and cars, but we didn’t have traffic lights in Mørk and never would. Make the most of this time, he said. Later in life you’ll be glad you did. And I did make the most of it. I wanted to move on.

And now I had to hurry. I was lucky. It was quite a ride to Valmo, but this first time I didn’t have to cycle the long way up and the long way back down. It was fifteen kilometres in each direction. A neighbour had said he could take me in his car. He was a devoted member of the congregation, of course, and quite an important one, and also a good friend of Lydersen. I didn’t mind. He was going up that way anyhow and would come back down again at a suitable time and didn’t mind dropping me off and picking me up.

I packed my bag with my kit and trainers and a towel and a big red elastic hairband, and my hair was long now and a lot blonder than when I lived in the neighbourhood. It changed so quickly everyone could see it. Before, it was Tommy who helped me keep my hair tidy, right from the time Mum left. Dad never noticed how I looked. When it grew too long, Tommy cut it straight across at the back, from earlobe to earlobe, and we both thought it looked fine, like the pictures in women’s magazines, a little French, we thought, although not everyone at school thought the same. OK, that’ll do you for a while, Tommy would say, as hairdressers did, and he tickled my neck, and we both laughed, but now I just let it grow and wore a slide at school or tied it in a ponytail when we had gym.

I put my diary under the dresser, which is what you do, you hide it, and took my gym bag from the bed and looked out of the window one last time before leaving, and there was Tommy by the pumps. It was May and the evenings were long and it was easy for me to see that it was him. No one else held his shoulders the way he did. It had been a long time, all of four years had passed since they moved us from our house and pulled us apart, and most of the autumn and winter of that year had come and gone without us seeing much of each other, and then it was spring and summer, and autumn again and he cycled to Mørk with Christmas presents, as he had done the year before, and the year before that. He had made them himself in Jonsen’s garage, where they got up to all kinds of things except studying the engine of Jonsen’s car, an Opel something or other, what did I care, and the twins made their presents on the kitchen table at the Liens’ house. On my birthday Tommy even came up to the house and knocked on the door, but he wasn’t let in. Lydersen shook his head and said he had to stay out on the doorstep. I didn’t argue, I never argued with Lydersen. I did as he told me unless he was unreasonable. When he was, I dropped whatever I was doing and refused to lift a finger and turned my back on him, and most often he took the hint, he wasn’t all that bad, and standing outside was fine, it wasn’t so cold even though it was midwinter.

One time Tommy came to tell me that Jonsen had given him a full-time job at the sawmill. Jonsen owned it now. The man who had run it before was called Johannes Kallum, he ran the Kallum Saw Mill, as we used to call it, though in fact it had another name, and Kallum was a notorious drunkard. He had supplies of brandy hidden all around the site, in piles of timber, behind stacks of planks, and he had even buried a bottle of Brandy Special in a heap of wood chips, someone found out, and in his office too, he kept a bottle in the bottom drawer, everyone knew, and he drank without restraint during working hours and drove when he was drunk. He forgot to write down orders and forgot to pay his employees, so at the last minute Jonsen took out a loan from Mørk Sparekasse and bought the lot before it all came tumbling down, and now apparently it was going very well, Lydersen said. But he didn’t like Jonsen, he didn’t like anyone from our neighbourhood. He thought they were tinkers, or like the hillbillies in American films. Lydersen was more than fifty years old and he had never left the district, so of course he had no idea what he was talking about. But as time passed I came to think that maybe he was right.