Tore Renberg - See You Tomorrow

But it’s strange being a Hillevåg girl now. Property prices have shot up, there’s a new road, a new shopping mall, an odd place called Hillevåg Business Park, a newly opened fitness centre, a skincare clinic and God knows what else. ‘It’s Stavanger that’s come to Hillevåg,’ Jan Inge says. ‘I’m fucking sceptical’ says Rudi. ‘View over the fjord,’ was how it was advertised the time Thor B. Haraldsen bought the house in 1971. What would the wording be if Cecilie’s childhood home was put up for sale today? ‘Attractive detached residence with huge potential, close to Hillevåg Shopping Centre, allowing partial views of the fjord and within a short distance of the city centre.’

Cecilie finds it sort of scary but also sort of nice. A central reservation with pretty trees. Clean streets. People look happier, she thinks. But it’s still safest going down to the sea. That doesn’t change. The waves come in, one after the other, and the mountains on the horizon don’t move an inch, because they belong to what is eternal, while she belongs to what will fade.

Cecilie has never had a job, never had any friends, and at times she’s felt like she can’t tell the days apart. She likes power ballads, because they make her eyes mist over and she likes fags and cinnamon buns because they help her muscles relax and she is carrying a child in her stomach. But she doesn’t know whose it is. Rudi could be the father, because she’s slept with him thousands of times, and Tong could be the father, even though she’s only slept with him four times, in the visiting room at Åna.

She’s tried feeling guilty but the bad conscience won’t come about. When Tong asked if she could wank him off or give him a blowjob, she’d only thought about it for a second or two. The thimbleweed lay in wreaths beneath the trees out at Åna. ‘Like a favour of sorts?’ she’d asked. ‘Call it whatever you want,’ said Tong. ‘Rudi mustn’t get to hear about it,’ she said. ‘Jesus,’ said Tong. And then Cecilie had felt a kind of burning in her chest and a tingling in her mouth, and she said: ‘Okay, I’ll suck you off so.’ She went down on her knees, shoved the round table to the side, opened Tongs flies as he sat on the sofa with eyes wide-open, pulled his pants down around his ankles and gave his dick a quick glance before taking it in her mouth.

She didn’t mind. He needed it, she could tell. After all, Cecilie knows something about these things, a professional insight of sorts, or whatever she ought to call it. She knows men’s bodies are bursting from within. It was nice, in an odd sort of way, sucking off someone she knew so well, someone who’d always looked straight at her but had never made a single pass at her. She thought about it while she tensed the muscles at the tip of her tongue and licked the underside of his knob, that she’d probably known Tong for close to twenty years and that he’d always behaved like some kind of soldier, pretty much like Steven Tyler sings about in ‘Amazing’, an ‘angel of mercy to see me through all my sins’. Not that she’d thought about it before, but as she’d knelt there blowing him, allowing her tongue to relax and widen, giving him wet, doglike licks, it struck Cecilie that Tong had always looked after her. He’d always watched out for her, in an entirely different way from either Rudi or Jani.

Could it be that Tong had always liked her and she hadn’t noticed? Was that possible?

Cecilie stroked him gently with her fingers while she tongued him, tightening her grip now and then, listening to him gulp and breathe, noticing herself becoming aroused, becoming warm at the thought of one of the guards passing by out in the corridor, pulling the curtain in the window on the door aside and seeing her like this, on the floor, with an inmates’s prick in her mouth.

After that Wednesday in March she began visiting him regularly. Seeing as she was the only one in the house in Hillevåg without a criminal record it was left to her to head out to Åna, get the latest from Tong, check how he was, make sure he was staying clean and fill him in on how things were with the rest of them at home. ‘Get him to look on the bright side of things,’ as Jan Inge said. ‘Give him faith,’ as Rudi said. And after that Wednesday it seemed strange not to wank him or suck him off. After all, they didn’t have that much to talk about. Tong has never been a chatterbox, on the contrary, he ‘s always been the silent type.

Cecilie would get behind the wheel of the Volvo, drive past Sandnes, past Bryne and out to windswept Jæren. She would turn off the main road after crossing the River Hå, drive through Nærbo, over the flat expanse of Opstadsletta towards Åna, watching the old prison building rise up on the barren height, thinking how from a distance it resembled a German concentration camp she’d seen on TV. She had a strange sensation as she drove up the grand tree-lined avenue flanked by dry stone stone walls, before she drew to a halt, pressed the button and said: ‘Cecilie Haraldsen, here to visit Tong.’

She liked driving to Jæren in sunshine, in wind or rain, listening to Aerosmith on the stereo, smiling to the guards at the entrance, who began to recognise her after a while, and she liked the feeling of being a known face. It felt like they knew why she was there and that she was swathed in a kind of respect. Jealousy even. She liked nodding to the guards, feeling their eyes upon her as she walked down the hall to the visiting rooms. She liked to open the door and see Tong sitting there, see that body of his, strong from all the work-outs, with his jet black hair shining. She liked closing the door behind her, going down on her knees, sucking him and pulling him off. She got to know his breathing and his body, she saw the veins on his sprawled forearms thicken. Over time she saw a light and colour in his eyes she’d never seen before, and one day, just as he was about to come in her mouth, he said: ‘Jesus. I’d do fuckin’ anything for you.’

Rudi talked and talked and talked without stopping, never more so than when they were having sex; she was so fed up of all that blather. Tong hardly ever spoke. But when he first opened his mouth, the words that came out, they were perfect.

He just seems so bloody smart, she thought.

So why is he with us?

Maybe it’s because of me?

Cecilie hid the thought away in her heart and she looked forward to going to Åna once a week, but she never allowed Tong to touch her. She never let him undress her. That’s where she drew the line. If she took her clothes off, allowed him to see her and put his hands on her — that would be wrong. It’d be unfair to Rudi. Because no matter how browned off she was with Rudi, he is the one she loves, that’s the way she’s always seen it. Up until last summer. Then she’d sat astride Tong. She’d just done it. It wasn’t like she had her hands on the wheel listening to Aerosmith while the countryside of Jæren flew past and the thought of having sex with him had popped into her head, she had just come into the visitors’ room that particular day and done it.

I couldn’t help it, she told herself. I wanted him. It was the first time in my life I ever actually fucking wanted a cock.

Since then they’ve had sex four times on the brown leather sofa. And Cecilie has to admit that now there’s a lot going on in this life that, until recently, was just drifting imperceptibly along. The father of the child could be Rudi, or it could be Tong. She has a grown-up problem on her hands. Because Rudi trusts Tong one thousand per cent. And Rudi loves her. And Tong says he’ll do anything for her. And Tong is strong, he can smash anything with his bare hands, he’s stronger than Rudi, but the fact of the matter is that Rudi is crazier than anyone she knows and that makes him the strongest of all. If Tong wants to do anything for her, then he ought to be aware there’s also another who will, and his name’s Rudi, he’s out there and he’s got ADHD.