And now I had to hurry. I was lucky. It was quite a ride to Valmo, but this first time I didn’t have to cycle the long way up and the long way back down. It was fifteen kilometres in each direction. A neighbour had said he could take me in his car. He was a devoted member of the congregation, of course, and quite an important one, and also a good friend of Lydersen. I didn’t mind. He was going up that way anyhow and would come back down again at a suitable time and didn’t mind dropping me off and picking me up.
I packed my bag with my kit and trainers and a towel and a big red elastic hairband, and my hair was long now and a lot blonder than when I lived in the neighbourhood. It changed so quickly everyone could see it. Before, it was Tommy who helped me keep my hair tidy, right from the time Mum left. Dad never noticed how I looked. When it grew too long, Tommy cut it straight across at the back, from earlobe to earlobe, and we both thought it looked fine, like the pictures in women’s magazines, a little French, we thought, although not everyone at school thought the same. OK, that’ll do you for a while, Tommy would say, as hairdressers did, and he tickled my neck, and we both laughed, but now I just let it grow and wore a slide at school or tied it in a ponytail when we had gym.
I put my diary under the dresser, which is what you do, you hide it, and took my gym bag from the bed and looked out of the window one last time before leaving, and there was Tommy by the pumps. It was May and the evenings were long and it was easy for me to see that it was him. No one else held his shoulders the way he did. It had been a long time, all of four years had passed since they moved us from our house and pulled us apart, and most of the autumn and winter of that year had come and gone without us seeing much of each other, and then it was spring and summer, and autumn again and he cycled to Mørk with Christmas presents, as he had done the year before, and the year before that. He had made them himself in Jonsen’s garage, where they got up to all kinds of things except studying the engine of Jonsen’s car, an Opel something or other, what did I care, and the twins made their presents on the kitchen table at the Liens’ house. On my birthday Tommy even came up to the house and knocked on the door, but he wasn’t let in. Lydersen shook his head and said he had to stay out on the doorstep. I didn’t argue, I never argued with Lydersen. I did as he told me unless he was unreasonable. When he was, I dropped whatever I was doing and refused to lift a finger and turned my back on him, and most often he took the hint, he wasn’t all that bad, and standing outside was fine, it wasn’t so cold even though it was midwinter.
One time Tommy came to tell me that Jonsen had given him a full-time job at the sawmill. Jonsen owned it now. The man who had run it before was called Johannes Kallum, he ran the Kallum Saw Mill, as we used to call it, though in fact it had another name, and Kallum was a notorious drunkard. He had supplies of brandy hidden all around the site, in piles of timber, behind stacks of planks, and he had even buried a bottle of Brandy Special in a heap of wood chips, someone found out, and in his office too, he kept a bottle in the bottom drawer, everyone knew, and he drank without restraint during working hours and drove when he was drunk. He forgot to write down orders and forgot to pay his employees, so at the last minute Jonsen took out a loan from Mørk Sparekasse and bought the lot before it all came tumbling down, and now apparently it was going very well, Lydersen said. But he didn’t like Jonsen, he didn’t like anyone from our neighbourhood. He thought they were tinkers, or like the hillbillies in American films. Lydersen was more than fifty years old and he had never left the district, so of course he had no idea what he was talking about. But as time passed I came to think that maybe he was right.
Tommy came in to Mørk a few more times, in January and February, but this spring, in 1970, I had barely seen him and, to be honest, I had grown used to him not being there. I did miss him of course, it wasn’t that, but the missing had no shape any more, we were no longer a couple, not like before, not the way Tommy wanted, if that was what he wanted, we were older now, and everything was different, and I couldn’t look in two directions at the same time. It just didn’t work. I had to move on.
I put my jacket on at full speed, glanced at the clock, and Jesus, was I in a hurry, Tommy, Tommy, why do you have to come just now, and then I ran down the stairs in stockinged feet as quietly as I could, because Lydersen was home from work already, and we’d had dinner, and now he was lying down in the best room, which was warm and not like in winter when it was closed, and he would have a nap there as he always did after dinner, and I didn’t know if he could hear me on the stairs. I hoped not. I was down in the hall and put on my shoes and rushed out of the door and dropped my gym bag on the doorstep so I wouldn’t have to go back in for it, but then I turned and picked it up and peered over the neighbour’s hedge as I ran, and his car was parked with its nose in the garage, and I thought, how is it possible for a car to look so Christian, surely they don’t make them like that in the factory, as though they had a large cross pasted to the windscreen, a transparent cross, or did it have something to do with heredity and environment, which we were learning about at school in the biology lessons, could you say the same about cars, could they change according to their owner, although cars, strictly speaking, had nothing to do with biology. It was just rubbish, what I was thinking, but it’s what ran through my head.
I came out from the alley and I wasn’t running now, but walking slowly across the road to the petrol station, where Tommy was standing. He saw me at once and as he straightened up, he squared his shoulders, he was such a stylish, dark, mysterious boy, I had always thought, and I wondered, how could it be possible for Tommy to just appear in Mørk when it suited him and be standing by the petrol pumps expecting me to spot him, however long it was since we last met, and then for me to come over and talk to him and follow him down behind the Co-op. But I did, every single time he came to Mørk, I left the house to meet him, but I could just as easily have been somewhere else. He was lucky. I was often on the move, there was so much to do, I had new friends to meet. And then it struck me. That it was exactly what I had been. Somewhere else. Perhaps many, many times. And he had been standing here, waiting, and I hadn’t realised, and he never mentioned it later because he was proud. How could I have been so stupid as to think he came to Mørk only the few times I was in the right place to make him visible. As though we were on the same wavelength. But that’s what we were not. We had been, I knew, but we weren’t any longer.
I was across the road. I felt very seen, and he stood where he stood, and when I walked over, the tarmac felt like air beneath the soles of my feet, and there was a physical pull I had forgotten he had, but I didn’t touch him, I stopped a few metres away. I was out of breath. I tried to hide it by closing my mouth, but that made it worse.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Have you been waiting long.’
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not at all.’ But it wasn’t true, he had been here for quite some time, I could see it from the way he was resting his body, first on one leg, then the other, as you do when you have been standing for too long. Like behind the counter in a shop.
‘Are you in a hurry,’ he said. It was so strange, his voice was so formal, every word was given its full pronunciation, even the ‘are’ was long, and it didn’t bring us any closer.
‘A little,’ I said, and he didn’t ask why, and I was glad he didn’t. I had nothing to hide, he just didn’t ask, and that was fine. But I stood there shifting from one foot to the other.