Aftermath Read online

  And she always got her way. Our uncle and aunt would seethe and fume, their sniping would become sharper and sharper, their barbs more and more caustic, and as their annual visit drew to a close, the atmosphere would become so tense and so unpleasant that they didn’t even pretend to like each other. Well aware of what would happen, Dad used to flee the house before they arrived. Normally he never took time to pursue his own hobbies, but whenever Uncle Frederik and Aunt Rebekka announced that they were coming to stay (they always came together, partly because Aunt Rebekka wasn’t well off and could save money by getting a lift from Uncle Frederik and partly because they felt that all three siblings ought to get together every now and again), he always happened to be going hill walking with his friends from the Rotary club. At the time it never occurred to me that these two things were connected and I didn’t realize that my aunt and uncle were being sarcastic when they stood there with their enormous suitcases, looking flabbergasted because their visit had clashed with Dad’s trip with the guys yet again. No-oo, surely not, had they missed him again? It became a standing joke, repeated year after year, but until I was well into my teens, I thought they were serious and I clearly remember going out of my way to make excuses for Dad: he was really sorry not to be here, I would say, he’d been so looking forward to seeing them.

  Actually, writing this, it strikes me that the ironic stance Mom adopted toward Aunt Rebekka and Uncle Frederik is yet another example of how hard to fathom she could be. The way she turned into a caricature of the person they accused her of being shows how elusive she was. When Uncle Frederik accused her of being lazy and Aunt Rebekka accused her of being arrogant, she simply rendered herself so lazy and arrogant that anybody in their right mind could tell it was an act, thereby taking the sting out of their accusations: it was all so silly, she seemed to be saying. Mom simply could not be pigeonholed, she was always something more, always somehow different, always somewhere else.

  She was much the same as a mother in fact. Not that she wasn’t nice and kind and loving. She comforted Rikard and me when we needed comfort and helped us when we needed help. She listened and never judged when we told her things we were ashamed of and every single night, until we were well into our teens, she would come into our rooms and tell us that she loved us. But she would also laugh and joke about that side of herself, in such a way that she seemed almost to be making fun of her own mother love. That was how it sometimes felt to me at any rate. I think both Rikard and I knew deep down that she loved us, but when, for instance, she said “I love you and all that” and not just: “I love you,” I was left with a sense that the love and the care that she showed us were some sort of compulsory exercise that bored her. And if Rikard or I went to her expecting a pat on the back for something or other, it was much the same story. She would shower us with praise in a way that was quite out of proportion to our achievement, then she would burst out laughing and say: “Oh, listen to me, laying it on too thick again,” and this, in turn, left Rikard and me feeling that we really didn’t deserve any praise at all. She didn’t mean it, she was just pulling my leg, I would find myself thinking. It was exactly the same when Rikard or I was sick or in pain. Again, she would overdo it and act far more worried than the situation called for and then, as soon as she saw herself from the outside and realized this, she would burst out laughing and make fun of the way she had suddenly gone all maternal—which of course made Rikard and me feel that she wasn’t actually sorry for us at all. Even though we knew at heart that she was, that was how we felt.

  In other words: she also seemed reluctant to wholeheartedly embrace her role as a mother. Here too she felt the need to maintain a certain distance, the need to be exempted. I could get both angry and upset when she sowed doubt, as it were, on her own mother love in this way, but I think it was probably worse for Rikard, who was bullied a lot as a kid and had, therefore, even more need of love and care. He was extremely sensitive to the things Mom said and did, I remember. He was terrified of being rejected and he could become positively distraught with grief and rage if Mom didn’t play the part of worried mother, proud mother, loving mother, et cetera, sincerely enough. He would run off to his room in floods of tears, lock the door, and refuse to come out until Mom had stood for minutes on end with her forehead pressed against the door, alternately apologizing and assuring him that he had misunderstood.

  In fact it was me, not Rikard, who was the bullies’ obvious target. I was tall and skinny and so pale skinned that I was sometimes stopped in the street by elderly ladies who would admonish me to take more iron (“You need to eat beets, son”), while Rikard was slightly shorter but much more robust with a fresh, healthy complexion that—when I picture him now—makes me think of cold milk, whole-wheat bread, and long skiing trips in subzero temperatures. While I was a daydreamer and a scatterbrain and equipped with motor functions so poor that I was forever tripping and knocking over glasses, Rikard was the sort of monkey-like child who could hardly pass a tree without climbing it. While I was hopeless at all sports except the standing long jump, he was strong, lithe, and fast and, as far as I could tell, an excellent winger with the Bangsund under-tens. While I was a shy, quiet bookworm, interested in things that almost no one else of my age was interested in, Rikard was bright, cheerful, and outgoing. He told jokes, laughed loudly and often, and was a definite optimist who only rarely felt down in the dumps. “What a grand boy,” as Aunt Rebekka always said.

  And yet it was he, not I, who was given the cold shoulder by the cool kids in class and at school, he was the one who was sneered at and had snide comments hurled after him in the schoolyard, the one who didn’t get invited to the class party even though everyone else in his class had been, the one who had both his bike tires slashed when he popped into the gas station to use the bathroom. And so on and so forth. I don’t know how many times Mom and Dad had to speak to the school and I don’t know how many times the school had to speak to the culprits, but it was a lot. It did no good, though. Things might be better for a month or two, but then it would be back to the same old story. “I don’t know what they’ve got against Rikard,” Mom or Dad would say. “There’s usually no rhyme or reason to who gets bullied and who doesn’t,” the headmaster and his class teacher would tell them. But even back then I knew that they were both wrong and that they both knew they were wrong. Mom and Dad and the representatives of the school were all, in fact, very well aware that Rikard was bullied because he was “a little Gandhi,” as I recall one girl in ninth grade calling him so aptly. Because as a child Rikard was the most infuriating goody-goody. He never missed an opportunity to wax indignant when he witnessed a bit of perfectly harmless kidding in the schoolyard and he and the two Christian girls in his class were the only ones to be morally outraged and offended when a classmate read out the following self-penned poem in class:

  Herpes, AIDS, and gonorrhea

  Syphilis and diarrhea

  Odd Einar is sick

  and so is his dick

  While the rest of the class hung over their desks howling with laughter and the teacher was struggling not to do the same, Rikard stuck out his chin, put up his hand, and said: “But what about people who have those diseases? Do you think they would find that funny?” That was him. If anyone vandalized the school or covered its walls in graffiti, he would get upset, then angry, and he was genuinely shocked if someone stole something from the Co-op during break. “I don’t see how you can enjoy a stolen chocolate bar,” he told the guilty parties and he not only meant it, he made no secret of the fact that he intended to tell the teacher on them before the start of the next class, “for your own good,” as he said. And when we were about thirteen or fourteen and some of the kids were starting to experiment with tobacco and alcohol: shocked then too. He just didn’t get it. Both were illegal at their age, expensive and addictive and none of the kids who tried them even liked them, he said. On the contrary, he had heard of people who thought they both tasted absolutely horrible but still c
arried on drinking and smoking. He understood, of course, that they wanted to look older and cooler than they actually were, but surely they knew that nobody thought it was cool to see a fourteen-year-old smoking and drinking, it just looked stupid.

  Since then Rikard and I have often laughed about all this and even if the adult Rikard has never exactly defended those who tormented him as a boy, he has taken much of the blame for what happened on his own shoulders. Whether this is an attempt to convince himself that he was in control in a situation in which, in reality, he had no control, and thereby regain some of the self-respect he had lost, I don’t know, but as an adult he has certainly said that there was a part of him that liked to provoke the bullying, that even wanted what happened to happen. Which is not to say that he harbored some sort of masochistic urge to subject himself to pain. Far from it. It was more as though the role of bullied victim made him feel even more morally superior than he already did. “I never fought back and that in particular made me feel like a very good person,” he has said himself. Putting up with all the taunts and sly remarks, pretending to ignore them, and simply carrying on smiling and being nice to the people who hadn’t invited him to the class party, “not sinking to their level,” an expression I remember him using when we were in junior high, gave him a wonderful sense of being better than everyone else, a sense of being “a little Gandhi,” as that girl in ninth grade had called him. And that, naturally, was like a red rag to a bull. Dad had, as I’ve said, done everything he could to ensure that Rikard and I never considered ourselves better than everyone else just because we had a lot of money, but I don’t think it ever occurred to him to immunize us against this particular form of arrogance and I believe that this actually antagonized the other kids more than any amount of expensive designer clothes or other signs of wealth might have done. Not that Rikard didn’t have some friends, he did, and the bullying he suffered was not of the worst sort, after all. But on the whole he was not well liked, it was as simple as that. Children who were normally open and friendly did their best to avoid him and children whom Dad regarded as well brought up said and did things to Rikard that they would never have said or done to anyone else. Rolf Inge Johnsen, for instance, a nice, kind, polite boy whom I remember crying openly when our teachers showed us a film about poor children in Africa, once punched Rikard when they were having words in the middle of a circle of kids in the schoolyard. Smack in the face and apparently quite unprovoked. Afterward Rolf Inge was tearful and distraught, not merely because of what he had done, but because he didn’t know why he had done it. And I think there were many who felt the same way. They didn’t realize that it was the way Rikard behaved that made them feel like bad and morally warped individuals when they were around him. Or maybe they did realize it, but as children they weren’t able to put it into words.

  Trondheim, June 24th, 2006. Plenty of matches there

  I PRESS PLAY, LOOK ACROSS at Julie as Daniel Johnston’s brittle voice fills the room. She’s sitting on the sofa, flicking through a Star Tour brochure with a big yellow sun and a red parasol on the cover, so she must be finished with the place cards, I thought she’d never make up her mind about the color and the font, but it looks like she has finally come to a decision. I pick up my coffee cup and take a sip, I suppose I ought to finish packing, although to be honest I’d rather stay home, I don’t really know why, maybe because Jan Olav and Kristian are always so cheerful, so full of life, and because when I’m with them it always reminds me of how miserable I am. It’s very tiring, being confronted with your own shortcomings for a whole weekend. Well, there’s nothing to be done about it, I can’t back out now, I said I’d bring the tent and most of the dried food and I have to leave in less than an hour, I can’t let them down at the last minute, can’t let down Jan Olav at any rate, not when I’ve been beating myself up over the thought that we’re not as close as a groom and a best man ought to be, and I’d just go on doing that if I stayed at home, these trips to the mountains are proof of a sort that we’re good pals, and right now I need that proof, it makes it easier somehow to believe that he was the obvious choice for best man.

  I turn and look out of the window, seems like the chain has come off the bike of one of the neighbors’ boys, he’s got it turned upside down and is standing watching while the old man upstairs from me tries to reattach it, laughing and chatting with the Iranian from across the yard as he works.

  “Tenerife, thirteen thousand six hundred kroner,” Julie mutters. I turn to look at her. “With a sea view and everything,” she says, not taking her eyes off the brochure. Don’t tell me she’s going to start on about a honeymoon again. I know a honeymoon is part of her idea of the perfect wedding, but it’s no good, I can’t be bothered getting into that discussion again. “That’s cheap,” she says, softly, as if to herself, but she’s talking to me, this is her way of telling me she still hasn’t given up the idea of a holiday in the sun.

  “Julie, for heaven’s sake.”

  “What?”

  “I thought we’d agreed we couldn’t afford a holiday abroad. We can barely afford the wedding as it is.”

  She puts on a face that is both surprised and hurt.

  “But—er … I never said we could.”

  “Okay,” I say, smiling at her. “Sorry, I must have misunderstood.”

  Two seconds.

  “God Almighty,” she says, eyes on the brochure again, “am I not even allowed to dream now?”

  I don’t say anything, I know this is just a roundabout way of asking if we couldn’t manage a holiday in the sun anyway, but I can’t be bothered arguing, there’s no point.

  Silence.

  “Well, I can’t face spending the entire holiday at the cottage, just so you know,” she snaps.

  I sip my coffee.

  “So what you’re trying to say is that you do actually want a holiday abroad,” I say, attempting to smile and show that I’m just joking really, but she doesn’t smile back, she gives me the same look as before, that look of surprise and hurt.

  “Would you stop being so suspicious of me all the time,” she says. “I meant just what I said. I’m not interested in spending the holiday watching you playing at being self-sufficient at the cottage.”

  “Fine, fine,” I say, putting my hands in the air as a sign to her to take it easy, stay like that for a moment, then lower them again, I don’t want us to fall out so I smile at her, but she doesn’t smile back, she’s staring at the brochure again, she’s always touchy when she knows she’s going to be home alone, but she seems even worse than usual today.

  “True love will find you in the end,” Daniel Johnston sings. And Julie looks up from the Star Tour brochure again.

  “What is it you’re actually preparing for up there, anyway?” she asks. She’s asked me this same question so many times, but she looks and sounds as though this is the first time, it’s a way of showing her contempt, implying that what I do at the cottage is so bizarre, so ridiculous, that no one else could possibly understand it, that’s what she’s trying to convey. I almost say this to her, but I don’t, it’ll do no good for me to start accusing her of not saying what she actually means, she’ll only fly off the handle: “There, what did I say, you’re always so suspicious of me,” that’s what she’ll say. I shouldn’t be too hard on her, though, she really is afraid to be alone in the house, so I’ll just have to put up with her taking her frustration out on me.

  “I’m not preparing for anything in particular, Julie,” I say.

  “Yeah, right.”

  “Julie,” I say, smiling at her. “I can’t just lie around in the sun all day when I’m on holiday, I need to be doing something, preferably something different from what I do every day … something more substantial. It helps me to relax.”

  “Exactly,” she says, picking up the holiday brochure again.

  “Aw, c’mon, Julie, don’t be like that.”

  “No, no,” she says, lowering the brochure and giving me a frosty smile
. “Having to can and store tons of meat and fish and vegetables in order to relax is perfectly normal. It’s me that’s weird, of course it is.”