Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

‘Goodness me, they’ve sent us an attractive man this time.’

I blushed and tried to hide it in my subsequent actions: take off my raincoat, put cup under the big Thermos, a couple of creaking pumps, raise it to my mouth, sip the coffee, full of bubbles and froth, sit down, little smile.

‘Did I embarrass you?’ she said. ‘I didn’t mean to. It’s just the way I am. Straight to the point. My name’s Mary, by the way.’

She looked at me without smiling.

‘Poor thing. Now he’s all flummoxed,’ Eva said.

‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘I’m used to a bit of all sorts.’

‘That’s good,’ she said. ‘We need all the temps we can get. I’m the ward manager, you see. And we’ve had quite a turnover here. Well, we have a hard core, but weekend staff have a tendency to be thin on the ground.’

‘Really,’ I said and took another sip. A bearded man came in, he must have been in his late twenties, thin arms and thin legs, glasses, leftie type. His name was Åge and he sat down next to me.

‘Student?’ he said.

I nodded.

‘What are you studying?’

‘Literature,’ I said.

‘Well, you won’t need that here,’ Mary said.

‘We’ve had geologists, architects, historians, social scientists, artists, sociologists, social anthropologists here, yep, the whole kit and caboodle. Most stop when they find something better. But some hang around. Isn’t that right, Åge?’

‘Yes,’ Åge said.

‘When you’ve had a smoke come with me and I’ll show you round and take you through the routines,’ Eva said. ‘I’ll go and get the medicines ready in the meantime.’

It didn’t look good, I supposed, that the first thing I had done was to light up. On the other hand, there were still ten minutes to go before my shift started.

Mary made an entry in the logbook. Åge got up and went out. I followed him, I didn’t dare sit on my own with Mary, her presence was electric.

I recognised a great deal in the ward from my summer job, the only real difference was the residents, who were patients here and closer to the carers than they had been there. But the atmosphere was more pressurised, the silence more threatening. People stood rocking backwards and forwards by the windows, sat chain-smoking on the sofas and lay apathetically in their beds. Most had been here a long time. Hardly anyone noticed me or that I was new, they were probably used to change. I kept a low profile, did as many practical jobs as I could, tried to take the initiative but not with the patients, hoping that this would be seen and appreciated, I knew my place. I washed floors, served food, cleared up and put cups and plates in the dishwasher, kept asking the others if there was anything I could do. Time passed infinitely slowly, but it did pass. At the end of the day, when Åge and Eva had gone off duty and the patients were in their rooms, I was alone with Mary in the duty room. She lit a cigarette with little tense movements that I couldn’t tally with what she had already revealed of herself, but then, as she inhaled the smoke deep into her lungs and blew it out, waving it away from her eyes, her self-assured expression returned.

I asked her where she lived, she answered that she had a flat not very far away, near the Business School. The flirtatious tone she had used at first was completely gone. But there was something about her, the way she didn’t look at me, her sudden smiles, which were charged to a much greater degree, presumably because the flirtatious tone had been so open and hence safe, whereas this was no more than evasion and words unsaid.

She told me she was a psychiatric nurse and had worked there for five years. Her words fell like confidences.

‘Well,’ she said eventually and got up. ‘I’ll have to do my rounds. You can go if you like.’

‘But there’s half an hour left.’

‘Just go. I can manage on my own. And you’ll have some time for your girlfriend this evening.’

I turned and put on my jacket, my cheeks lightly flushed.

‘How did you know I had a girlfriend?’

She paused in the doorway.

‘Hard to imagine such a handsome man as you being on his own,’ she said and continued up the corridor.

I sat at the back of the bus and put on my Walkman, played Sonic Youth, a band I had tried to like for ages without any success, until that autumn when Goo came out. One night I had been listening to it downstairs with Espen, we had been smoking hash, and I was lost in the music, literally, I saw it as rooms and corridors, floors and walls, ditches and slopes, small forests between blocks of flats and railway lines, and didn’t emerge from it until the song stopped, it was like drawing breath because the next minute a new song started and I was caught again. The exception was the second song, ‘Tunic’, it just kept moving forward, I sat with my eyes closed and drifted with it. Strange, I thought now as it started in my headset, because the text, or at least the chorus, explicitly stated the opposite. I wasn’t going nowhere, I wasn’t going nowhere. No, I ain’t.

As Gunvor lived so close to the bus station and the next shift started at seven in the morning I slept at hers that night. I told her a little of what it was like up there, but half-heartedly, the essence of the job was atmospheres, the despair locked in these people’s bodies, and it was impossible to communicate that. Her eyes suddenly serious, she snuggled up to me, fixed them on me, and then, for a few minutes, it was just us two, there in the room with the sloping windows, the rain running down their length, high above the streets where people walked up and down, but then, as we extricated ourselves and lay on our own sides to sleep, I was alone again until slumber came and released me from everything.

I woke up before the alarm clock, almost ripped asunder by what I had been dreaming, which disappeared the instant I opened my eyes. But the mood lasted. I got up, ate a slice of bread in her cold kitchen, dressed as quietly as I could, closed the door carefully behind me and went out into the darkness and rain.

‘Sit yourself down and have a smoke,’ Mary said when I arrived. ‘Sunday is a long day here. We don’t need to exert ourselves before we have to.’

‘Sounds good,’ I said. ‘I was a little lost yesterday. I didn’t really know what to do. So could you give me a few tasks, basically?’

She smiled.

‘You can always wash some clothes. But first tell me a little about yourself.’

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ I said. ‘At least not this early in the morning.’

‘Do you know what Eva said about you yesterday?’

‘No.’

‘ “Still waters run deep.” ’

‘That was a charitable interpretation,’ I said with a blush.

‘If there’s one thing we learn here it’s to be judges of character.’ She winked at me. ‘Go and put on the washing machine. Then you can start on the breakfast afterwards.’

I did as she said. The first patients were already up and sitting around the tables in the ‘communal area’, smoking with nicotine-stained fingers. Some of them were mumbling to themselves. They were the chronically ill, Eva had told me the night before, they had been here for many years and were outwardly calm, but if something were to happen and the alarm went off I had to drop everything and run to the incident. This was the sole instruction I had been given with regard to the patients. No one had said anything at the previous institution either, but here it seemed more striking because it was possible to talk to these patients in a very different way. What should I do if they approached me and wanted to discuss something important? Play along? Say what I thought? Contact someone who had been trained to deal with this?