Tore Renberg - See You Tomorrow

Eventually he turns. She looks shattered, and he says: ‘Don’t poke me.’

He takes a step towards the Suzuki, takes it by the handlebars, kicks the stand up and points to the entrance. ‘Will you get the door?’

‘Daniel, you have to remember to think straight. I understand that you’re angry, I understand that you’re afrai—’

He merely continues to point and Veronika doesn’t say any more. She does as he signals. Walks to the door, opens it and lets the September light in.

‘You’re not easy to understand,’ she says. He can see she’s trying to make eye contact, but no fucking way is he going to let her.

‘I haven’t asked anybody to understand me.’

She reaches her hand out, but he ignores it. ‘Only a little while ago you said we should stuff everything. We should just leave. Together. But now — what is it you want to do now?’

He doesn’t reply.

‘Daniel, things change so quickly with you.’

‘Right,’ he says, feeling power in his own self-contradiction.

He sees her let out a heavy breath. He can see she actually wants to crack. But he can also see she’s restraining herself. She nods. Smiles.

‘Where are we going?’ she asks. Her smile is feigned, but he likes the fact that she makes an effort.

‘Are you one of those people who need to know everything?’

He sees her eyes mist over.

That brought her right back down.

Are you going to cry, deaf girl?

‘Didn’t you understand what I said? Did you not manage to read my lips, thought you were a world champion at it? A-r-e-y-o-u-o-n-e-o-f-t-h-o-s-e-p-e-o-p-l-e-w-h-o-n-e-e-d-t-o-k-n-o-w-e-v-e-r-y-t-h-i-n-g?’

She continues to look at him. But she doesn’t begin to cry. She folds her arms.

‘Answer me,’ he says. ‘If you’re the kind of person who goes on and on asking questions and needs to know everything and can’t trust a guy, then you can just forget about me, got it?’

‘Daniel, I—’

‘I asked you a simple fucking question. Can you not answer?’

Veronika brings her hand to his face, letting it rest there until his breathing regulates.

‘Yes, I can,’ she says. ‘I’m not the type who needs to know everything. Take me with you, wolfman.’

‘What the hell is with the wolf stuff?’

‘That’s what I like to call you,’ she says and lets out a laugh, intended to lighten the atmosphere, like her mother always does when she and Veronika argue. ‘Where are we going?’

‘A place.’

‘Okay. But you know that right now we ought to stay put? That there’s probably lots of people looking for you and me at the moment—’

He doesn’t listen. He wheels the Suzuki out into the light, wishing it were deadly. He wished the light would bring a violent end to Daniel William Moi, wished the rays of the sun were like scalpels, making an incision in his skin, folding it aside and opening into a snapping, chomping, howling mouth, and he wished it caused unparalleled pain.

Daniel tosses her the keys and climbs on to the moped. She locks the door, then gets on behind, putting her arms around him.

‘Daniel?’

He turns his head.

‘Are you going to see her? I’m up for anything, but I won’t go along with that.’

He puts the key in the ignition.

Veronika narrows her eyes. ‘Do you love her?’

Daniel feels his fists tighten on the handlebars. ‘There’s someone I need to talk to before it’s too late,’ he says.

It’s just a normal day all around us, thinks Daniel, trying to relax his grip on the handlebars. He tries thinking about how he doesn’t need to hit her. He sucks on his tongue, as though it were a damp cloth or a snowball.

‘Veronika,’ he says. ‘I’m never going to tell you or anybody else what happened to me. If I do, it’ll happen again.’

They ride up the hill from the bomb shelter and he swallows back saliva while he lets his gaze sweep over the housing estate they’re leaving behind, the little houses that grow smaller and smaller the further away they get. There are people inside them. Some of them are off school sick. Some of them are asleep, because they’ve worked a nightshift or couldn’t sleep the night before. And maybe somewhere, in one of those terraced houses, there are people in bed together, in the middle of the day, in the bright light, and maybe somewhere there’s a person daring to raise a gun against all that light that’s just too strong.

Daniel deals with it. He doesn’t hit her.

The ambulance travels at speed as it drives up to the front of the school, and Tiril feels a bolt of guilt slide back in her head as the sound of sirens fills the air. It’s as though a closed fist is pounding at her from within. The very thing she denied and dreaded has come to pass.

Sandra.

When someone like her is brought down, things are bad.

And it’s her fault.

Tiril isn’t the only one peering out the window at the ambulance that’s come to a sudden stop outside the entrance and thrown open it’s back doors, at the medics readying a trolley stretcher, at the headmaster and deputy head running out, at Frida Riska gesticulating and taking control; the entire class has got to its feet. Mai has put down the book she was holding, a murmur spreads through the classroom, eyes wander, and hands and feet shift and shuffle: ‘What is it?’ ‘What’s happened?’ ‘Jesus!’ ‘No way?!’ ‘What are they doing?’.

Tiril knocks over a chair on her way out of the classroom. Mai casts a wavering glance in her direction, but refrains from saying anything. Tiril runs out into the corridor, hating the linoleum under her feet, hating the stupid charts along the walls, hating the framed photographs of past pupils, hating the teachers, hating everything that’s happened and is going to happen, hating The International Cunty Wankskop and hating herself as she emerges into the strong sunlight at the same moment that Frida Riska shouts: ‘Tiril Fagerland! Can you please move!’

The flash in Frida’s eyes: ‘And someone will be speaking to you afterwards. You and Shaun and Malene.’

Tiril moves to the side and is almost mowed down by the ambulance crew wheeling a stretcher. One of them, a young woman with a ponytail and a hawk nose, holds an oxygen mask over Sandra’s face; a white face, thinks Tiril, a white face with dead eyelids. The woman says something as the stretcher is rolled into the back of the vehicle, but she can’t make it out, and just as quickly as they arrived, they’re off again: the double doors slam shut.

Frida Riska stands in front of the headmaster, nodding, ‘Yes, of course, I’ll call the parents, right away,’ and she takes out a mobile phone.

Malene comes over to Tiril and puts her arm around her, but doesn’t say anything. Shaun shows up — or has he been there all along? She looks dejectedly at the glue-sniffer she’s fallen for, who all of a sudden doesn’t seem so attractive, standing there, nodding, unable to meet her eyes, looking like that squirrel in Ice Age , Scrat, with his hands in the pockets of his hoodie and nothing at all to say.

‘Frida?’

Frida Riska presses the buttons on her phone. ‘I can’t get hold of them…’ She turns, visibly irritated, to Tiril: ‘Yes?’

‘Yes?’

‘What happens now, I mean, like—’

‘We don’t know, Tiril.’

‘But… she’ll live?’

‘We don’t know that yet,’ says Frida, and then fixing her eyes upon her: ‘All you should be thinking about is that it’s time you started telling the truth, and stopped playing with somebody’s life.’

Then she hurries off.

Tiril feels her face smarting from Frida’s words. Malene runs her hands up and down her back and says: ‘Guess we’re the ones who need to breathe easy now, aren’t we?’