Per Petterson - I Refuse

‘Sometimes he comes a bit later, at around six. Then he only stays an hour. He’s restless.’

‘Is he.’

‘Yes, he is.’

‘You’re not restless then.’

‘No,’ the man said.

Right, he’s not, Tommy thought, and then he said:

‘Around six, but that’s now, isn’t it.’

‘I guess it is,’ the man said.

‘Thank you anyway,’ Tommy said.

‘It’s a waste of time,’ the man said.

‘What is.’

‘Being restless. It’s a waste of time.’

‘You’re probably right about that.’

The man saluted with three fingers to his hat, like a Boy Scout, and turned to the railings where his line was and pulled hard on the bait rig twice, as if to make up for lost time.

Tommy walked to the mainland and the lay-by at the foot of the hill to the right, where there was a car the day before. There was no car there now. He leaned against the rock face. It felt cold against his back through the classy jacket, and he looked at his watch, and it was six exactly, it was still dark, only the bridge was distinct, shining a ghostly white, and he thought, damnit, Jim, you can’t not come. You simply cannot.

JIM WALKED FROM Lillestrøm town centre to the square behind the old brick building with the new fitness centre called SATS inside it. His car was parked by the railway lines that came shining out of the dark tunnels from Oslo into Lillestrøm station, and only a hundred metres away, the Nitelva river flowed, just as shining, into Lake Øyeren. As he came walking up to the car he could see a parking ticket wafting like a pennant from under the windscreen wiper. But I paid for twenty-four hours, he thought, it costs twenty-five kroner, and that’s what I put in the machine and I placed the ticket on the dashboard under the window so it could easily be seen from the outside, but when he opened the driver’s door the ticket was on the floor in the footwell. It must have blown down when he slammed the door, nothing else could explain it, and he suddenly felt desperate, and he thought, I can’t afford this, I haven’t even got a job, but he calmed down, just as quickly. He took the fine from under the wiper and went up the embankment and stuck it under the tall wire-netting fence by the railway lines, at the bottom with the cold grass against his fingers and the cold plastic cover, and then walked back down to his car, got in and turned the key.

He leaned forward and looked through the windscreen, up at the sky. It was late afternoon. The Social Security office and the Job Centre and every office for just about everything had closed their doors. It was time to go home. There was a stream of people coming up the high street, around the bend by the Art Centre and past Doktorgården to the station on their way from Lillestrøm centre, and another stream of people came down from the the platforms in annoyingly slow clusters to the station concourse and there they split into two directions, one to the left towards the city centre, the other to the right towards the car parks at the back, and the river, the Thon Hotel and the Exhibition Hall. But he couldn’t go home now, as the others were, he hadn’t been at work like they had, and anyway it was too early, and there was nothing at home that made him feel at home. There wasn’t one object in the flat he felt was his. Not any more. There were all his books, but they didn’t show him the way like they used to. When he opened one, nothing fell into place. What was the last one he read. It was the fifteen volumes about Maigret he had bought at the door from the man with the trolley exactly one year ago, and he had read them in a flash. He was hardly out of bed before the last one was finished. What shall I do with myself, he thought, during these hours.

There was nothing to do but wait, pass the time. So he drove to Enebakk again, as he did last night, along the 120, and it would be easy to turn off towards Oslo at the Tangen Bridge, if he wanted to, on the Oslo road from Outer Enebakk and drive in from that side, from the south, which he also did last night, or stop at the little shopping centre there and go back again, it didn’t really matter. Twenty years ago he had a girlfriend at the other end, and then he often drove that way in his old car, and she drove the opposite way in hers, and it was so good when she was suddenly there, ringing his doorbell, and sometimes he waited a little so he could see her first in his mind’s eye, from her feet up to her hair, to her eyes, and he would keep them locked in his while he could still not see her, to find out if they were eager, keen, and then open the door to have his guess confirmed. That she wanted to drive such a long distance to sleep next to him, to lie in his bed, to make love to him and wanting only him and no one else and wanting him without reservation made him feel proud and amazed, that’s our road, they said, route 120, they called it the Lifeline. That was long ago now, but when he thought of her, from time to time, he couldn’t hear a false note. He had liked her so much and had liked the forty kilometres between them that gave him space and time to think about her in every possible way and every possible situation as he drove, while the evening settled into its deep blue above Lake Øyeren, and he sang when there was music on, when the stereo played an album from the early years, by Led Zeppelin, maybe, ‘ Good Times, Bad Times’, he would sing at the top of his voice behind the glowing speedometer, and it was not her fault that it all came to an end.

At Flateby he drove into the petrol station and parked in the shade of the shop around the corner by the compressed-air machines. He sat there for a few minutes. He wasn’t sorry about anything. He thought hard, and he wasn’t sorry, and he felt warm too, in a pleasant way, he felt excited, impatient. He felt like eating, but the late lunch in Lillestrøm was still heavy in his stomach. He looked at his watch, and less than two hours had passed.

He got out of his car and walked around the corner and into the shop. There was a girl standing behind the counter. She was taking a plastic bag of frozen sausages from the freezer, and with wooden tongs she was putting them on the grill. She had long, dark hair that fell into her eyes when she bent over, and when it fell she straightened her neck and flicked the hair back with her thumbs and tucked it behind her ears, and then she bent forward and it fell down again.

When she heard him come in she looked up, tucked her hair behind her ears and smiled:

‘Hi,’ she said.

‘Hi,’ he said, and he may well have smiled back. She seemed nice. She was good-looking too.

He picked up a Dagbladet and a Verdens Gang from the stand by the door and studied the front pages and put the Verdens Gang back, but it could easily have been the other way around. From one of the shelves he took a Freia Melkesjokolade, the big bar that cost twenty-five kroner, and put both on the counter, and she said:

‘Is that everything.’

‘What else would there be,’ Jim said.

‘Something to drink maybe.’

‘Maybe so,’ Jim said.

He walked over to the cooler cabinets and took a bottle of Coke, the biggest, the one-and-a-half-litre version. It was pointless, what would he do with one and a half litres of Coke. How long was it supposed to last. But he put it on the counter, and she smiled, maybe realising how random his choice had been. Then she rang it all up on the till, and Jim said:

‘Flateby.’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘Do you live here.’

‘I do,’ she said.

‘Is it any good living here.’

‘Good,’ she said. ‘Not good perhaps, but it’s all right.’