Per Petterson - I Refuse

He got out of the car under his own steam, he didn’t need any help, he felt better now, he said, with the belt back on his trousers.

I got out too, on my side, thinking, I’ll complete this mission, and then I’ll be off, I won’t stop down here by the road, I’ll follow him to the door, and then I’ll be gone.

There was a man on the steps of the house next to my father’s. He was smoking. He looked at us as though he wanted to tell us something, and I looked back at him and was ready to hear what he had to say, he was my father’s neighbour and he gave a slight nod, and then he wasn’t interested after all and turned away and stared up the road.

‘I’ll walk you to the door,’ I said.

‘Oh yes, that’s nice,’ he said. ‘You walk with me, that’s good, that’s how it should be, a son walking his dad home, that’s it, and you can come in and have a cup of coffee as well, of course you can, that’s how it should be, I’ll put the kettle on, it’ll be ready in no time, but you know, I’ve only got instant coffee, you probably don’t drink instant coffee any more, not like you used to, not with that car and all, you probably drink something French, what’s it called, café crème, or something it’s called, you do that, don’t you.’

It was true I drank coffee when I was a boy, he forced me to when I was ten, and I became addicted, he mixed it with sugar and milk and sat watching me as I poured it down, have another cup, he said, and I still drink coffee that way, with sugar and milk, but I couldn’t remember if what we drank was instant coffee, if someone had invented instant coffee by then, I didn’t think so, and if they had, it could only be in America, so back then I was sure my father made the usual boiled coffee.

We were up by the doorsteps. He had staggered and limped over the flagstones, but he wasn’t drunk now, there were just these rubber legs, he was so thin, and I said:

‘That’s it then. Is your door unlocked.’

‘Sure,’ he said, ‘it’s unlocked, but you must come in and have a coffee, it’s all wrong if you don’t come into your dad’s house and have a cup, we haven’t seen each other for such a long time, but you’re the same, I knew you would be, Tommy is the same boy he always was, I said to the police,’ but we hadn’t seen each other for forty years, and I didn’t know how he could say something so ridiculous, the boy with the bat then, but I had changed so much and was changing by the day. I was changing fast, and not for the better.

And then his door wasn’t unlocked, and he suddenly looked confused, and his eyes grew big and round, and he looked scared and began to rummage through his pockets, but he didn’t have the keys in his trousers, nor in his jacket, perhaps he had left them in Lillestrøm, on a shelf somewhere in Justisen, or he had lost them when he was drunk, wherever he had been drunk, but that he couldn’t remember.

I stepped back a few paces and walked round the house to see if maybe a window had been left open that we could crawl in through, it was a single-storey house, and I could do that, I wasn’t an invalid, but all the windows were closed. My father stood on the steps, almost paralysed, he had no ace up his sleeve. I walked down the footpath staring at the ground all the way down to the postboxes and back up again, and I could see the man from the house next door slowly making his way to the hedge that separated the small plots. I held back for a second, I didn’t like the man, didn’t like his eyes, but then I went over to the hedge anyway. He stopped, the hedge reached up to his crotch and was meticulously trimmed on his side, his half of the hedge, while on my father’s side it was untended and reached up to my waist, it looked stupid, looked petty, and he said:

‘Nice weather we’re having.’

I looked up. The weather had been fine this morning, but right now heavy clouds hung over the countryside.

‘Not really,’ I said.

‘Is that right,’ he said, and I thought, he is a sly bastard, I know his kind. I can’t deal with that now.

‘They’re in the postbox,’ he said.

‘What,’ I said. ‘In his postbox.’

‘No, in my postbox, the keys, that’s where he put them.’

‘Why didn’t you say that straight away. We’ve been going round looking for them. You saw us.’

He didn’t answer.

‘Why didn’t you put them in his postbox so he could find them.’

‘Why should I.’

‘No, why should you,’ I said, and I turned and walked down to the postboxes, and behind me he muttered, goddamn drunk, why the hell should I, but there were lots of postboxes, not just the two, and down the road there was a whole row of houses one after the other, and the postboxes were all in a line, and the next-door neighbour hadn’t told me what his name was, so I didn’t know which box to look in, and it was the same as always, I had to put my hand in every damn box all the way along before I found the keys, and with my finger through the keyring I went back up, and the man was standing behind the hedge with a broad smile on his face, and I crossed the lawn to the hedge and stopped close to him and said to his face:

‘You prick,’ and he said:

‘Always happy to lend a helping hand,’ and put three fingers to his temple like a Boy Scout, grinned and walked up to his house, and I heard him muttering, goddamn drunk, and I walked towards my father on the doorstep, put the key in the lock and opened the door.

I had never seen anything like it. This was not good. He forced his way past me and kicked the cardboard boxes and rubbish and all sorts of unspeakable things to both sides, clearing a path, and kicked the worn-out, paint-stained shoes at the wall, and the clothes lying on the floor he also kicked away, and they were filthy clothes he hadn’t worn for a long time, and even though his gait was unsteady, there was still a snap to his kick and a good technique, it was a gift from heaven, that kick, or from hell, and also there was an unusually large number of scuffed shoes lying around in the little porch and most of them were old with their tips worn thin, and what was he collecting them for, right inside the door. And everywhere there was rubbish in plastic bags which had never got across the doorstep nor down to the road, and most wasn’t even in a bag but was tossed around, so the floor was covered with litter, and an evil smell drifted in through the open doors of two other rooms, from the bathroom and what must have been the room where he slept with the windows closed, and it was disgusting to think that he could sleep in that room, and the worst was the foul, numbing, ominous stench wafting in from the kitchen, where my father stood by the door waving me in, saying:

‘Come on then,’ he said. ‘Come in, coffee’s on its way, I’ve put the kettle on, it won’t be long before the water’s hot, I’ve got this really good stove, you know, you can have it like you did when you were small, take off your coat then, oh, it’s elegant, it is, it must have cost serious money, Jesus Christ in Heaven, you can’t deny it,’ and I thought, yes, yes, it did cost serious money, and in fact a good deal of what I owned cost serious money, lots of money, that’s how it had turned out, and most things I bought, they gave me nothing, I just bought them, and now there were two or three of them in every room, there were paintings I never noticed hanging on the walls in the house where I lived alone, and I had the latest fashion in furniture, and antiques, and designer jugs made of glass or steel or both, and blenders, Italian ashtrays, and I didn’t see them, not a single one, and I didn’t use any of them and couldn’t even remember where I had bought them. But I kept my coat on. I was not staying in my father’s house.