Tore Renberg - See You Tomorrow

Rudi begins to hurry along the path. He glances about him again, feels the surroundings sucking him in. Then he comes to a halt.

‘Hm,’ he says, almost loudly.

‘Pål,’ he says.

‘It’s as if … there’s something about that name. It … shit … it calls something to mind! But what? Hm? Pål, Pål, Pål…’

Rudi walks on. We’ll soon see, he thinks, who you are and who you’re not, Pål. You called me. You’ve reached out your hand. And who are you? I’d love a cigarette now. If I’d known it would be this hard to stop then I never would’ve quit. Women. It’s not bloody easy. You’ve got to be a sly eagle with a good Aerosmith trick in order to be supple enough to get around their corners. Except for Gran. She had her head screwed on. Skål , you old jelly roll.

Rudi, without even being aware of it, raises his hand, puts it to his forehead and salutes, while he strides across the forest floor.

Good thing Tong’s out on Friday, he thinks. Not the same when the gang isn’t together. He brings in good money, Tong. He puts Chessi in better humour, he’s always been able to do that. He’s a psycho all right. But he’s always ready for action.

Pål, Pål, Pål.

Have you taken a beating from me? Is that it?

Are you out for revenge? Is that it?

Are you the devil, Pål?

120 kilos now. 120 on the nose. 120 on board.

Jan Inge has been holding the telephone in his hand for almost a minute. He has been standing like a statue on the living-room floor with the phone two feet from his stomach and his eyes turned to the ceiling. Typical me, he thinks, lost in thought. That’s what everyone says, that he has great concentration. And no one dares disturb him when he’s thinking, there’s no one who lacks respect for JANI WHEN HE’S THINKING.

He pictures it like that. In big letters.

Like those neon signs in small American towns beset by gruesome atrocities.

Jan Inge has always been like that, with his head full of big letters.

He puts away the phone. Jan Inge misses the old house telephone. He nods, making the fat on the back of his neck wobble. Grey with red numbers. That telephone worked like a dream, but hi-tech advances meant they had to throw in the towel. So much new technology at the moment that it’s becoming a problem. Mobile phones are okay, with top-up cards at any rate, but all this pressure on you to use the internet, it’s not good. It’s not like it was in the good old days.

There it is again. THE GOOD OLD DAYS. You can’t say it without big letters.

Jan Inge glances at the wheelchair at the far end of the hall.

120 on the nose.

It’s important Rudi doesn’t screw this up. He needs to see through the fog. But if there is one thing Jan Inge has learned, it’s that where it seems most foggy, that’s where the gold might be, and if you want to get your hands on the gold, you have to venture into the fog. As long as Rudi keeps his wits about him and doesn’t start blabbering.

Jan Inge takes the inhaler from the pocket of his jogging pants and sucks. He shuffles across the floor in felt slippers, down the long hallway. He stops in front of the wheelchair.

120 on board.

He has always been fat. Or at least thickset and chubby. So was Mum, may you rest in purgatory, you detestable person. There have always been a few surplus kilos on this body, always a little extra to offer, but 120? He was weighing in at about 100 for a number of years. Nice round number. Easy to relate to. It accorded him a little class, some executive authority. It’s only right for a boss to be a few kilos heavier than the others. Rudi, lanky though he is, weighs ninety-five after all. But after a while it started to rise. An occasional check on the scales now and again. Oops. 105. Down to 100. Oops. No, seems to have gone up, this … 110 … Jani 110, since when?

It rhymes, Tong said, just before he went inside.

They had done a job in Jæren, a clean break-in, got lots of computers, just easy-to-sell stuff that would mean clean cash from Buonanotte. Well planned, well executed. Keys, swipe cards, the whole shebang. There had never been a single mistake on Tong’s watch, never been anyone sent down. If there is one man you can count on, it’s Tong, because he doesn’t count on anyone. Thank Christ he’s getting out on Friday. He carried out the job itself perfectly, but then? You’d think he had suddenly become an amateur again. Thirty-five years old, tonnes of experience, and he ends up doing something like that? It’s the drugs, Tong. Jan Inge has told him a thousand times. You think your senses are sharpened. But that shit has chomped lumps out of that brilliant brain of yours. We have a policy in this company, we rack up a few lines before we go to work, to get our heads up and running, but we don’t degenerate into a gang of junkies. But what do you go and do, Tong? You hit a party in Orre after the job, you stuff your nut full of speed, and God knows what else, and you know how horny that coke makes you, and then you’re pulled in for intercourse with a minor. A month later you’re in the dock, faced with two fuming parents and a sobbing girl, all pointing the finger at you, and you claim you had no idea that she was only fourteen.

Jan Inge has said it a million times: listen to me, you horny Korean, the coke has gobbled at your brain, and I know what I’m talking about — my mum drank five bottles of spirits a week and she went as mad as a March hare and as empty as a drum upstairs, and she was a terror and nobody, neither man nor beast, misses that old bitch. Well, all right, Chessi … poor bag of bones … maybe she … no, Chessi remembers shag all. She was only little when Mum died. She can’t go around missing someone she practically never set eyes on.

But me, I remember that sicko, and I’ve nothing good to say about her, no wonder Dad took off when he got that job in Houston.

Jan Inge has spent a good deal of time thinking about it. Thinking about what exactly was wrong with her.

And he has arrived at the conclusion that she lacked something.

That she quite simply didn’t have it in her to love people.

And that’s why Jan Inge has drawn his own conclusions about what is important. To find your own people. To find your own family. To hang on to them. To love them long and love them right. No matter if they make a major blunder that lands them back inside Åna, and no matter if they take 120 kilos on board.

Dad heading to Houston was of little consequence. At least he always sent money, give him his due. Sent money right up until Chessi turned eighteen. And Christmas cards. Or that time in 1985, Jan Inge thought his heart was going to burst out of his chest: a package arrived from Dad in the USA, a package in the post. A SodaStream!

And a huge box with a BETAMAX VCR and a pile of videos.

Love from Dad.

He still has the SodaStream. It’s down in the basement somewhere.

Doesn’t work any more. But it worked back then. Every kid in Hillevåg was at the front door slavering after home-made fizzy drinks. They could pick and choose who to let in. Those were the days. Won’t ever throw it out, that SodaStream is a trophy. They were over in Houston a few times, him and Chessi, travelled halfway round the globe on their own; she was so small the first time he had to hold her by the hand for hours. Jan Inge can still remember how clammy their hands got, but forget about trying to let go, then she just wailed as though the plane was going to crash. No, Janinge. Those were some trips. Just him and Chessi. Just him and her up in the clouds. Are we flying now, Janinge? Yeah. Are we flying into the sun, Janinge? It’s a great country, the US, free and easy; Dad took them to burger joints, let them do their own thing, watch films and that, while he was at work. As for going back to Norway; that was never going to happen. He was clear about that, they could come and live in the USA, but he was never going back home to Norway.