Per Petterson - I Refuse

I walked through the hall to the kitchen door, past all the debris, and into the kitchen and forced my eyes out of focus and was about to sit down when he said, be careful with that coat, Tommy, and he put a strangely untouched copy of a glossy housekeeping magazine on a stool and spread it open before I sat down.

He had put instant coffee in my cup, and the water was already boiling, it was quick, he was right about that, and then he filled my cup, and the cup could have been cleaner.

‘You’re limping,’ I said, and why on earth did I say that now, it just slipped out, and I could have bitten my tongue off, filled my mouth with pebbles until my teeth crunched, knocked my brain off its stem.

He turned his face away and looked at the wall.

‘I’ve limped for many years. I broke my leg some time in the Seventies, it was. It wouldn’t heal properly afterwards. A car drove into me and I landed in a ditch by Kløfta, and he just drove off, the bastard, he didn’t want to stop, no, he didn’t, he wasn’t bothered about me, I guess I didn’t look smart enough, he was from the inside, you know, from Oslo, that was easy to see, I didn’t get the number of the car or anything. Then I tried to go for help, but it was no good, you see, I couldn’t walk on that leg, no I couldn’t, but I tried, and I guess that’s what caused my problems, walking on that leg, so I’ve limped ever since, I have. That was in the Seventies, round about then, it doesn’t bother me at all,’ he said, but what he said was all nonsense.

I was sitting down now, but he stayed on his feet and wouldn’t sit, and it irritated me, who was in the worse shape, not me, no way, he looked as if he could snap in two at any moment, and then suddenly he smiled, he was a slyboots, he was making up stories, that’s what he did, and I wasn’t expected to believe a word of it, that was the whole point. We both knew why he limped and we had forgotten nothing, repressed nothing, but we weren’t supposed to talk about it, no, that was the trick, instead we would just look at each other with maybe a quick smile on our lips and share that knowledge, that memory, as though it was something that was ours together, his and mine, something intimate and violent, a secret, burning bond that held us together, a bond of blood.

Then I stood up. No peace, I thought, nothing that binds us together. I refuse.

IT WAS NEARLY three in the afternoon. Twice I had driven fifty kilometres north, and fifty kilometres south, also twice, up and down through Upper and Lower Romerike, of all places, a district I never went to any more, I hadn’t been there for many years. Now I was racing along the motorway at a hundred, and then some, on the way to Oslo in my charcoal grey Mercedes, and I thought, how much can a normal weekday in mid-September contain, is time like an empty sack you can stuff any number of things into, does it never go just from here to there, but instead in circles, round and round, so that every single time the wheel has turned, you are back where you started.

But that’s not the way it was. I used to be young. I wasn’t young any more. I would never be young again.

And so for the second time that day I was close to Lillestrøm, which I had left just a couple of hours ago, but this time I had no mission to fulfil there. I didn’t want to go home, and I didn’t want to go into Oslo city centre where I had my office ten floors up where I worked every single day with money that barely existed, that was liquid and flowing this way and that way at random, or so it seemed to me, and was transparent as water can be transparent, and at other times it was murky as water can be murky, yes, that most of all, and it was hard to see exactly what it was you were doing. And it came to me that I was never going back there. That was a surprising thought. I’ll be damned, I thought. No one could have imagined I would end up in a place like this. Just the idea that I would be sitting by a telephone and a computer shuffling invisible money about and earning a meaningless large sum of money in the process was embarrassing, or confusing when I thought myself back to where I started and all the way up the narrow, slippery rope from childhood to where I was now, at least it had made Jonsen confused. When I sold the mill it left him speechless and sad, but I was convinced I had to, for this I learned in the Eighties, that if you own something of value you will lose money if you don’t sell it. And I didn’t just sell the Kallum Saw Mill, I sold it to our competitor in Valmo, who immediately closed it down so he could rule over our district. I shouldn’t have done that, it changed me, but it was Jonsen himself who told me I had a head for figures. When I was thirty-five he made the mill over to me, I’ve got other things to do, he said, you’ll manage fine, you know how to do everything by now, and you can move it on, he said, much further than I ever could, just use the skills you have, he said, and move it on, but I don’t think he meant to the office block in the centre of Oslo.

He must have thought about it often, about what I did, and surely through the days in hospital before he died, but he never mentioned it when I came to see him. I wish he had.

I left the motorway, the E6, by the Skedsmo crossroads for the second time that day and followed the loop in a large circle around the Shell station, and on over the bridge to the opposite side and then down the hills to Kjeller past the aerodrome and into Lillestrøm. I parked in the centre, by the building where the Wine Monopoly used to be. Jim and I had been looking forward to standing in the queue at that very branch as soon as we were old enough. There was no Wine Monopoly in Mørk, just the idea was absurd, so this was the nearest, but of course, it never happened.

There was a restaurant in the place now. It surprised me a little, I don’t know why. Something had to be there. Anyway, it was open, and I wondered if they served lunch. I’d just had a small something to eat before I met Jim on the bridge early this morning, and after that I had driven into the city centre in my fine car. That was a lifetime ago, and now I was very hungry.

They did serve lunch. But it was a strange restaurant. It was gloomy inside: dark woodwork and sombre corners, at the far end of the room there was a skeleton hanging from the ceiling behind iron bars, and on the walls there were oddly crooked shelves with books intended to look mouldy. When I slunk into the toilet there were posters of horror films above the urinal, and then I realised this was the thing here, a concept someone had had, to create a fun, spooky atmosphere. It wasn’t much fun, I thought, and gloom was not what I needed right now, not even fun gloom, so I went out again and across the street to the new shopping centre and in through the swing doors to look for a place where I could eat. There was a cake shop on the ground floor, but what did I want with cakes. I was finished with cakes. I felt a prickle of irritation all over my body. I was hungry, I even felt like a dram, and if I’d got my hands on one, my body would have lost its tension and quietly settled and there would be peace. If someone speaks to me now, I thought, anything might happen.

I went through the new shopping centre and out again on the other side and into the old centre and took the escalator up to Level 2 and walked along the gallery past a few boutiques, there was one called Match, it looked pretentious, but not one piece of clothing inside would ever cling to my body in a natural way. I had put on weight, and besides, the shop was too young. Everything they had in these boutiques, all the clothes, were for young people now and for older people who didn’t want to be older, they wanted to be slim, you could see it in the ads, in magazines, on posters, they wanted to ride motorbikes and play squash and do the Birkebeiner race every summer and the same race in winter, on skis, and talk about it the following Monday in the canteen and go through every single kilometre in detail and laugh at each other’s trials and triumphs and compare times and equipment, they bought bright-looking sports gear and headed for the hills. But I wasn’t one of them.