Tore Renberg - See You Tomorrow

When Jan Inge made it home that afternoon, he was greeted with the spectacle of Rudi and Cecilie lying on the sofa snogging, practically eating each other’s faces, in the old way, a sight he had not seen in years; when Jan Inge made it home, his mind was really bubbling, it was as though the winds of change themselves were attempting to outrun one another up there, and it was clear to him that important matters had to be taken care of the next day. He cleared his throat in the doorway, thankful for the good atmosphere that had marked the last all-too-warm days of September, and when Cecilie had untangled herself from Rudi, sat up and buttoned her jeans, when Rudi had finished grinning, clicked his fingers a number of times and said, ‘You were seconds from viewing an adult movie there, brother,’ Jan Inge sat down in the wheelchair and said: ‘We’re going to have to make some changes here.’

Sunday dawned with a long-awaited downpour over Stavanger and an equally long-anticipated westerly wind.

The familiar sky was back, the sky people from Rogaland County are so used to it that they don’t stop as they walk along the Vågen inlet — like the tourists always do — and gape at the changing clouds, at the curious formations taking shape, scudding along before dissolving into constantly new figures. We have cats and dogs and trolls and goblins above our heads , Gran used to say to Rudi when he was a little boy, do you see them, sweetheart? But on this morning the people of Rogaland stopped, one and all, not least Jan Inge who got up before the others, went out on to the veranda and witnessed the ground beneath the scrap heap of a garden receive the wondrous drops of rain. He stopped. Now that the habit was broken, he realised that all through these white, cloudless days at the tail end of September, he’d missed the vault of the sky, and perhaps never realised how dependent upon it he’d been. His heart missed a few beats and he realised that it was because he had longed for the vast, variable and regularly stunning sky over Stavanger.

Jan Inge stood with his coffee cup to his lips and let the rain pour down on his head. He watched the water cleanse the veranda and listened to it splash and splatter against all the clutter in the garden while he marvelled at how a man like himself, so concerned with order, could have allowed such disorder to fester on the property. He breathed in the smell of wet autumn, looked up towards the sky and determined the wind direction; clearer skies lay off to the east and the gusts were carrying them this way. In a few hours, he thought, the rain will pass. He closed his eyes and pictured the days ahead in strong colours as he drank a mouthful of coffee and performed a few tentative knee bends as a foretaste of the workouts he would put himself through in the near future.

Different times, he thought.

Change, he thought.

Buonanotte is right. God’s gift to mankind.

Jan Inge went back into the living room. He put on a record by Hank Williams, the performer he and Beverly are so fond of, he pictures them listening to Hank one heavenly day when she gives him her hand. He will sit with his arm around the generously fragranced and just as generously formed woman and they will look at the opalescent flame of a candle flicker on the table before them, her blouse not quite adequate to keep her breasts concealed, and Hank Williams will sing like he sang for Jan Inge this morning: I can’t help it if I’m still in love with you.

He drank himself to death, Hank, wasn’t even thirty when he died.

Big changes.

While Rudi and Cecilie still lay sleeping, or swapped body fluids, who knows, Jan Inge went down into the basement and got out the three navy boiler suits they had knocked off from a warehouse while on a job in Nordfylket in 2007, garments which had seen plenty of use at break-ins since. He brushed the dirt off them and laid them out on the kitchen table, then he fetched the work shoes from the closet in the hall, which he lined up on the floor between two table legs, first Cecilie’s small ones, thereafter his medium-sized and lastly Rudi’s enormous pair. He went and got the work gloves from the storage room in the basement, they smelt somewhat musty, the storage room had been subject to some mould problems that they needed to sort out soon, but in spite of that they could still be used. Finally he got a roll of black bin bags — never any shortage of those in the house — placing them beside the boiler suits just as Hank Williams sang I heard that lonesome whistle blow and Jan Inge felt a lump in his throat and pushed that wondrous image of Beverly to the back of his mind so as not to allow the pain and longing to gain the upper hand on a day with so much to do.

What will it take, he thought, unable to dismiss the image, what will it take for her to be mine?

More wealth than I can offer?

A toned physique?

Once again he pushed away the picture of Beverly in his mind’s eye, now clothed in a fluttering, almost transparent dressing gown, and attempted to concentrate on what was going to take place. He went to the bookshelf and took down the Bible, the only real book there, with the exception of The Encyclopedia of Heavy Metal and Sound of the Beast: The Complete Headbanging History of Heavy Metal, a book about Lemmy, White Line Fever, and around thirty titles on horror movies; The Art of the Nasty, How to Survive a Horror Movie, The Golden Age of Crap and so on. Jan Inge appreciated the reassuring weight of The Good Book in his fleshy hands and settled into the wheelchair to leaf through the thin Bible paper. He read a few pages about Moses, the man of God, whom near the end of his life was told by the Lord to go to the top of Mount Abarim and look out over Canaan at the land the Lord had given to the Israelites, and he found himself strangely moved by the poetry that shone from the pages when the Lord told Moses, in no uncertain terms, that he would die while he looked out over the land and would not enter it since he had been faithless to the Lord. Jan Inge thumbed further and read a few pages about Saul, whom the Lord commanded to go out and punish the poor Amalekites for what they did to Israel, and it sent shivers down his spine as he read how the Lord instructed Saul not to show any mercy but kill men and women, children and infants, oxen and sheep, camels and donkeys. After that he read about Nathan visiting King David. Nathan recounted a terrible tale of a rich man who had slaughtered a poor man’s only lamb instead of taking something from his own abundant livestock, and King David burned with anger at this and said to Nathan that this man must die. But then the situation took an abrupt turn because Nathan pointed his finger at King David and said, ‘You are the man!’ and accused him of having scorned the word of the Lord and having killed Uriah the Hittite and taken his wife, and so the Lord, according to Nathan, decreed that misfortune would rain down on King David, that his wives — so he had lots of them, Jan Inge thought and again the image of Beverly came gliding into his head, this time attired in a smart waist-length jacket and high heels with golden pearls — that these wives would be taken from him and given to another man and this man would lie with them in broad daylight, because David had acted secretly, and to top it all, the son he had with Bathsheba, the wife he had taken from Uriah, would not be allowed to live. And so it was. The Lord allowed illness to strike down the newborn boy and he died, but David lay with his wife again not long after and they had another son and he was called Solomon. However, a prophet turned up who wanted to call him Jedidiah in honour of the Lord, whatever that means, Jan Inge thought, and became aware of that feeling he sometimes gets when he’s reading up on things, that he is lacking in a little knowledge here and there.