Per Petterson - I Refuse

Tommy came in to Mørk a few more times, in January and February, but this spring, in 1970, I had barely seen him and, to be honest, I had grown used to him not being there. I did miss him of course, it wasn’t that, but the missing had no shape any more, we were no longer a couple, not like before, not the way Tommy wanted, if that was what he wanted, we were older now, and everything was different, and I couldn’t look in two directions at the same time. It just didn’t work. I had to move on.

I put my jacket on at full speed, glanced at the clock, and Jesus, was I in a hurry, Tommy, Tommy, why do you have to come just now, and then I ran down the stairs in stockinged feet as quietly as I could, because Lydersen was home from work already, and we’d had dinner, and now he was lying down in the best room, which was warm and not like in winter when it was closed, and he would have a nap there as he always did after dinner, and I didn’t know if he could hear me on the stairs. I hoped not. I was down in the hall and put on my shoes and rushed out of the door and dropped my gym bag on the doorstep so I wouldn’t have to go back in for it, but then I turned and picked it up and peered over the neighbour’s hedge as I ran, and his car was parked with its nose in the garage, and I thought, how is it possible for a car to look so Christian, surely they don’t make them like that in the factory, as though they had a large cross pasted to the windscreen, a transparent cross, or did it have something to do with heredity and environment, which we were learning about at school in the biology lessons, could you say the same about cars, could they change according to their owner, although cars, strictly speaking, had nothing to do with biology. It was just rubbish, what I was thinking, but it’s what ran through my head.

I came out from the alley and I wasn’t running now, but walking slowly across the road to the petrol station, where Tommy was standing. He saw me at once and as he straightened up, he squared his shoulders, he was such a stylish, dark, mysterious boy, I had always thought, and I wondered, how could it be possible for Tommy to just appear in Mørk when it suited him and be standing by the petrol pumps expecting me to spot him, however long it was since we last met, and then for me to come over and talk to him and follow him down behind the Co-op. But I did, every single time he came to Mørk, I left the house to meet him, but I could just as easily have been somewhere else. He was lucky. I was often on the move, there was so much to do, I had new friends to meet. And then it struck me. That it was exactly what I had been. Somewhere else. Perhaps many, many times. And he had been standing here, waiting, and I hadn’t realised, and he never mentioned it later because he was proud. How could I have been so stupid as to think he came to Mørk only the few times I was in the right place to make him visible. As though we were on the same wavelength. But that’s what we were not. We had been, I knew, but we weren’t any longer.

I was across the road. I felt very seen , and he stood where he stood, and when I walked over, the tarmac felt like air beneath the soles of my feet, and there was a physical pull I had forgotten he had, but I didn’t touch him, I stopped a few metres away. I was out of breath. I tried to hide it by closing my mouth, but that made it worse.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Have you been waiting long.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’ But it wasn’t true, he had been here for quite some time, I could see it from the way he was resting his body, first on one leg, then the other, as you do when you have been standing for too long. Like behind the counter in a shop.

‘Are you in a hurry,’ he said. It was so strange, his voice was so formal, every word was given its full pronunciation, even the ‘are’ was long, and it didn’t bring us any closer.

‘A little,’ I said, and he didn’t ask why, and I was glad he didn’t. I had nothing to hide, he just didn’t ask, and that was fine. But I stood there shifting from one foot to the other.

‘Is it very important, Tommy,’ I said. ‘It’s true, I’m in a hurry, honestly,’ and I was listening for the sound of my neighbour’s car, and I thought I heard footsteps across the flagstones and someone knocking at a door, maybe our door, well, Lydersen’s door, but that wouldn’t be possible from this distance.

‘I think it’s important,’ he said.

‘All right,’ I said. ‘What is it then, Tommy.’

He cleared his throat twice. Is he going to give a speech, I wondered, like you do at confirmations, he was that formal, he didn’t even swear, as he nearly always did, but I didn’t invite him to my confirmation. Lydersen had said no, point blank, he didn’t even want to talk about it, but later I realised I had given in too easily.

‘This is just between you and me,’ Tommy said.

‘But, Tommy, that’s no good. It’s not just the two of us any more. It’s not like it used to be.’

‘So I have gathered,’ he said, in a very formal tone. He hadn’t said ‘gathered’ once in the whole of his life, we always said: did you ‘get’ me or did you ‘get’ that, and it wasn’t easy for me to see what his feelings were, whether it was all right for him that it wasn’t us two any more, or whether he was still upset.

‘I just wanted you to know,’ he said, ‘that I’m going to burn our house down. Very soon.’

‘Which house,’ I said. We weren’t on the same wavelength at all. He just looked at me. The sun was shining. There was a smell of petrol. It was so quiet around us, the air wasn’t moving, no cars were on their way in or out of the petrol station, not a sound. Just outside the silence a man was standing on the church steps, in jeans, Wranglers probably, you couldn’t get anything else around here. A distant tractor drove into a field, and a cock crowed.

‘Oh, yes. Our house,’ I said, ‘the house that was our house, I mean, before’, and I listened again for the neighbour’s car, and now I was certain it had started. I was desperate. Tommy, Tommy, I thought, and was standing there shifting my feet as if I had to go to the toilet, why did you have to come now.

‘Burn it down. What are you saying.’

‘Yes, I’m going to burn our house down,’ he said, and then he said: ‘Because it’s standing there, just like it was.’

‘Is it,’ I said. I hadn’t been there once since I moved out, and I hadn’t given it a thought in a long time. But it was probably just as we had left it. I hadn’t heard anything else. ‘Yes, I suppose it is,’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It is. We’ve been there and looked inside. I pulled off all the boards over one window. It was easy. They were rotten through.’

‘Who’s we,’ I said. ‘Jim and you.’

‘Yes, Jim and me,’ he said. ‘What other we would that be.’ And then he said: ‘Inside the house it looks exactly as it did when we lived there. Only us , not when Dad was there.’

That was probably true, but it was a strange thought. I hadn’t heard about any new people moving in, a new family, but it felt odd that everything was as it had been then, in the living room, the other rooms, on the stairs, for nothing felt now as it felt then. Everything had changed. But inside the house everything had stood still. It made me uncomfortable thinking about it.

‘Does it,’ I said. I repeated myself. It was embarrassing. But I couldn’t concentrate, I had to go.

‘Yes it does,’ he said. ‘And I can’t help thinking about it. I can’t sleep at nights. I’m fed up. So now I’m going to burn the crap down. You can come with me if you like. That’s why I’m here.’

‘What. No, no, Tommy, I can’t do that, are you out of your mind. It’s a crime. We would be arsonists. We could be arrested and put in prison. You could, Tommy, please don’t even think about it.’