Per Petterson - I Refuse

‘Good fishing then,’ Sandem said, and Jim said thank you, and Sandem said, ‘See you.’

Jim hung up his coat in the hall on the peg under the hat shelf that had never seen a hat, took out his wallet, took off his shoes and walked in his stockinged feet through the living room to the kitchen with his wallet in his hand and put it on the worktop and took the car keys from his trouser pocket and put them beside the wallet, and the wristwatch he took off, and he lined them all up in the middle of the worktop, and suddenly he was really hungry, it was like a blow, and he threw open the fridge door and grabbed two eggs and butter, put the pan on the hotplate, and by willpower alone, he made the eggs fry faster than they would normally have done and was on his toes when he was buttering the bread, and he only just managed to sit down at the kitchen table before he started to eat.

Then he did the dishes. And emptied the fridge. And washed it thoroughly inside and threw everything that was old in the bin and put the rest back. And he wiped down every surface in the kitchen and in the living room. And he hoovered all the rooms. And he put his books back on the shelves where they belonged in alphabetical order. In the bedroom he made the bed with military precision. At least he thought it was. He was tired again, and he was really, really tired, but he didn’t lie down. And he went back to the living room and looked slowly around him. There wasn’t much more he could do.

He sat down on the sofa with his pack of cigarettes and a box of matches, and flicked out a cigarette and a matchstick and lit the cigarette, and then he thought, but, Jim, wasn’t this the week you were giving them up. And then he had to laugh, but there was no one to hear him, so he stopped at once. He drew the smoke down into his lungs, and it tasted so good, and not once did he have to cough, and then he sat smoking until the cigarette was finished, and he crushed the butt in the ashtray with his index finger and lay back on the sofa looking up at the concrete ceiling through the blue smoke. To get something to hold in the ceiling, like a metal hook, he had to go down to the storeroom in the basement where he had his drill, a Black & Decker he was given for his fiftieth birthday, and then to find a sturdy Rawlplug he could knock into the hole he had made so the hook would stay put when he had screwed it in, but it was bedtime now for every single child in the block and they should have their bedtime stories read to them without the roar of a drill through the walls. So that was no good. It’s no good here, he thought.

JIM DIDN’T KNOW how long he had been lying like this. Time was melting. He wasn’t asleep. He wasn’t awake, he was dreaming, but he didn’t know what he was dreaming. If dreams could be empty, could be nothing but a colour, then it was purple, the dream he’d had.

It was completely dark outside now and getting dark inside in the living room, it was late, or it was early. It was night. Only the lamp in the hall was lit and it sent in a slanting white light through the living room past the TV. He could see it from where he was lying, but the TV wasn’t on. And he stayed on the sofa, staring up at the ceiling. Where else was there to look. Out of the window. Jesus, was he going to be like the old ladies sitting at their windowsills observing the lives of others.

He pulled himself up by the armrest and switched on the TV. What match did Sandem mean. Jim moved his thumb from one channel to the next. In the end he found Eurosport and the dying seconds of a football game. Manchester United versus Reading. That must have been the match Sandem had been thinking of, everywhere in this country there were people who loved Manchester United. But it looked like the replay of an earlier game, because the clock on the game and the clock on the screen showed different times. On the TV it was a quarter-past two. Anyway, the match ended in a draw, 1–1. The young boy Ronaldo had saved a point for a hard-pressed United, and here we speak of Ronaldo from Portugal, not Brazil. He was a great talent, and Solskjær was still in the team, and the fans were singing for him on the terraces, they sang, You are my Solskjær, my only Solskjær, and it was pretty moving, and he was about to cry again, and then he sat up and thought, Christ, I can’t take this any more.

He stood up from the sofa and went into the bathroom and filled the basin to the brim and plunged his face in, and the water flooded over and splashed all over the floor where he was standing in stockinged feet. He tried to keep his eyes open, but he wasn’t able to, although you could do it in the sea when you were swimming and were about to dive and you could see the jellyfish moving against the current and the seaweed swaying and the flounders rising from the bottom in a swirl of sand and settling some other place and letting the sand fall upon them and be gone. It is what it is, he thought, It’s over. He raised his head, and the water poured off his hair and down his forehead and down over his eyes and chin, and he thought, I said I would go, so I have to go. And really, it didn’t matter whether he was here or there. He dried his face hard with the towel, he felt sharper now, more alert. He pulled off his wet socks and dried his feet and found some clean socks in a basket. Then he went into the hall, and from the closet he took out the black bag and the pretty biscuit tin from Sætre Kjeksfabrikk with his fishing gear in it and put the tin in the bag, and from a hook on the wall he brought down a tow rope with a shiny carabiner at each end. The rope was old and had seen several cars come and go, so he examined it carefully, but the rope was in one piece and could take a ton or more on flat ground, though nowhere near as much when hanging from a tree, or a bridge, but it didn’t need to. He coiled it round his elbow and put it in the bag.

He dropped the bag by the door and went back into the living room and sat down on the sofa and took another cigarette from the pack and lit up and sat smoking it slowly to the end while waiting, and it wasn’t that he had changed his mind, but more that he felt relieved and no longer pushed for time. Sandem was on the late shift, so he was probably sleeping now, after the game and a couple of beers, and they wouldn’t run into each other on the stairs.

This time he coughed a little, but that was all right. He went into the kitchen, and there he washed the ashtray and placed it on the drainer to dry, and he took the cigarette ends with him on to the balcony and with his index finger he pressed both of them down into the window box and covered the hole over with soil. There hadn’t been a flower in the box for years, so there was no harm done.

On his way out of the door to the stairs he stopped and dropped the bag on the floor, and he thought, Christ, it’s the same thing every time, and hurried back through the hall to the kitchen to make sure all the hotplates on the stove were off and the oven was off, which they all were, but then he lost his composure and concentration too, and he stood leaning against the door frame, breathing in as deeply as he could, and holding his breath he counted to fifteen, sixteen, seventeen and holding it longer up to eighteen, nineteen, before slowly letting it out, and it made him feel so wonderfully hazy, like after the first beer in a café. He did it once again, and he felt calmer, and as he went down the steps to the garages he had to smile for a moment.

He opened the car door and put his reefer jacket on the passenger seat, and he stowed the bag in the boot, and of course he could have made it simple and tossed it on to the back seat, but why have the smell inside the car just because it was the last time.