Tore Renberg - See You Tomorrow

Cecilie doesn’t have the energy to reply. She misses Dad. That Houston doofus, why did he have to leave? He ruined everything and she’s furious with him, but still misses him. You hear me, Dad? You just left, and here I am with Jani and Rudi. What if I want a life as well? Did anybody think of that?

Kids? A house? Some normal stuff?

‘Hey? You know, as far as I’m concerned it isn’t Rihanna or Michelle Williams that’s the hottest chick of 2012! It’s you!’

That’s what life served her up: sitting at Jani’s watching horror movies. Living in the same house for the fortieth year in a row. With a basement smelling of rot, paint peeling off the walls and mouldy old carpets. That’s what she’s been dished up: being the girlfriend of a guy, two metres tall, with ADHD and bomb-crater skin, who drives around in a stupid Volvo, does break-ins on speed, talks the face off people and has an insane relationship with his family. That’s her life: not to have a life of her own.

Cecilie swallows phlegm and exhales.

‘Hey, baby, remember the first time? Eh? Twenty-seven years ago, and it’s still as good! Eh, why so quiet, Missy Cissy! Heh heh! Do you get it? Cissy?’

Poor Jan Inge. 120 kilos now. That’s way too much. Poor, fat boy. He is keeping the house and the business together, but he has little, frightened pinhead eyes, and he is my brother, she thinks. He’s never been quite right in the head. People don’t know him. They think he’s an asthmatic loon with a twisted childhood, and they hear rumours about all the things Videoboy has done, and then they think he’s a psycho who just sits there watching horror movies.

But that’s not the whole truth.

They don’t know what a big heart he has.

It’s big enough to beat for the whole world.

‘By all means, Chessi. It’s up to you! As long as you can suck cock, I won’t complain about the lack of words coming out of your mouth. Heh heh, you can say what you want, but we can hold our own, youandmeagainsttheshit! Just take a look around, and I mean right outside the window here, you’ve got the internet and divorces all day and all night.’

Cecilie looks at Rudi’s bobbing head, his hands tapping on the wheel. She knows every inch of that scarred body. Now and then she thinks Rudi is a country and she’s a settler there. Sometimes it’s a pleasant thought, sometimes it’s terrifying.

To think it’s possible to loathe a man like I loathe him, and love a man as much as I love him. It doesn’t make sense.

Months and years have gone by without anything happening. Days have come, days have gone, and she’ll be forty in December. She can’t remember the last time she felt something was happening. But now something is. Something is going on inside of her, and something is going on out there: Tong is getting out on Friday. Cecilie is the one picking him up outside the gates of Åna. Half past eight. Tong. Not the way it was supposed to turn out now, was it?

‘Ooh arr, like the farmer said, looks barren ’ere. You’ll have to make your own fun.’

She pushes the image of Tong aside and runs her hand under her eye. It feels wet, she sits up, looks at her face in the rear-view mirror to the right of Rudi’s head. That vole face of mine. What am I crying for? Look at my make-up. She takes another drag of the cigarette.

Her skin is going to look like ash soon. She is going to be ash soon. She smokes too much. One day she’s just going to lie there. What’s that? A pile of ash. What was it though, before it turned to ash? Dunno, no one remembers.

‘Baby? Have I ever told you that if the sun went down, and I mean burned out and died, then I wouldn’t give a damn, as long as I’ve got you to light up the house? Eh?’

Cecilie sniffles. He is my snatchpuss, she thinks, no matter how things are. It’s Rudi and me. It really is. He is snatchpuss 4 ever.

Coldplay. She saw him. He was sitting there getting into Coldplay.

I hate Coldplay, she thinks.

I want a life, I want a real house, I want a proper man, one who doesn’t talk a blue streak and keep spinning like a wheel, I want to hear heavy ballads round the clock, I want my days to feel golden.

Cecilie sighs. ‘Rudi boy,’ she says, ‘we’re almost there. You need to get to work.’

I don’t know anyone but me who cries from just one eye.

Zitha tugs at the leash once they’re outside the house. He can feel how primed the dog is, and he lets her strain forward with her snout to the ground. She needs to be driven by her instincts, needs to live and breathe by them.

The day has been unusually warm, but now night has come and the autumn cold is here again. It’s in the air all around him, crackling almost delicately; in a couple of months it will have transformed into winter.

Pål walks over to the rubbish bins. His feet feel heavy, his head feels fried. Is it the green one today? Black? Brown? He looks down the street at the rows of brown bins lined up on either side outside each house, like podgy soldiers. He wheels the bin out in front of the hedge and starts walking down the road with Zitha hurrying ahead of him.

He’s been at this so long he’s not afraid any more. The most surprising thing is how proficient you become. Living with all the lies isn’t difficult. Neither is living with all the covering-up. It’s the wide-open world that’s difficult to live in.

He comes to Norvald Frafjords Gate and sees the blocks of flats rise up into the sky. The sight of the high-rises has had a hold on him ever since he was little. All the people inhabiting them, all the people living their secret lives, all the people trying to get on. When he was a child and passed them on his way to school — to think it’s over thirty years since he did that for the first time — he imagined that everyone living there would one day be pressed out, like meat from a mincer, their eyes, their ears, mouths and hands.

Yeah. That’s how it is.

The wide-open world, where nothing is hidden, hard to live in it.

What is with my eyes?

Imagine. These eyes will be forty in a little under a month.

Pål checks his mobile. Soon be nine o’clock. He feels Zitha tug at the leash.

The gap between who he is and what people see has grown so big. It’s a strange feeling. Everyone can see him but no one has a clue who they’re looking at. They see that guy who’s always lived here. Some of the elderly people in the area probably remember him from when he was a kid. They probably recall a normal enough boy, quiet type. The carpenter’s son. Yeah, they’d say. Pål Fagerland? He grew up here, nice kid. People his own age might remember the woman living here a few years back. The wife, they’d say, Christine, left him and the kids. Career woman, they’d say. Statoil, made good money, she was a real go-getter. Must have got tired of him. He was a bit humdrum for her, they’d say, strange the pair of them got together in the first place. But what is it they say — opposites attract? She was the one with the money. But imagine leaving the kids, eh? What kind of woman does that? Yeah, times have changed. Mind you, she was generous enough, went to Bergen but let him hang on to the house and that. Poor guy. Works for the local authority, doesn’t he? Caseworker or something.

Yeah.

That’s probably what they’d say.

Poor guy.

And what is it they see?

A man of average height, dressed in regular clothes. Greying at the temples, round cheeks, childlike skin, hardly any beard and a bashful look in his eyes. His wife was forever saying it, Pål, can you try looking at people when you’re talking to them, it makes them uneasy when your eyes are flitting all over the place.