Day was slowly breaking. I had been standing there for more than two hours and hadn’t had a single bite. It annoyed me, but frankly, fish wasn’t my favourite dish any more. Not like it was in the past. The fish I did catch, I always gave away.
As a rule I drove home before the first cars came down the hill towards the bridge, but today I had frittered my time away. I hadn’t even started to pack my bag, and the cars that were coming were classy cars, expensive cars. I turned my back to the road, my frayed navy blue reefer jacket wrapped tightly round me. I’d had that jacket ever since I was a boy in Mørk, and only one of the old brass buttons was still intact, and I had a woollen cap on as blue as the jacket, pulled down over my ears, so from behind I could have been anyone.
I tied the bait rig to the railing, turned round and crouched down to take a cigarette from the pack I had in my bag. I really ought to stop smoking, I had started to cough in the mornings, it was a bad sign, and then a car stopped right in front of me with the window on the driver’s side level with my face. I had the cigarette between my lips, and as I stood up, I lit it with a match behind my cupped hand. I always used matches, I didn’t like that plastic.
It was a grey Mercedes, brand new, and the paintwork was shiny as skin can be shiny at certain times, in certain situations. Then the window slid down without a sound.
‘It’s Jim, isn’t it,’ he said.
I knew him at once. It was Tommy. His hair had thinned and was greying. But the horizontal scar above his left eye was still evident, white, luminous silver. He was wearing a purple coat buttoned to the throat. It didn’t look cheap. He was the same, and yet he looked like Jon Voight in Enemy of the State. Leather gloves. Blue eyes. Slightly out of focus.
‘I guess it is,’ I said.
‘Well, I’ll be damned. How long has it been. Twenty-five years. Thirty.’ And I said:
‘About that. A bit more.’
He smiled. ‘We each went our separate ways that time, didn’t we.’ He said it neither this nor that way.
‘That’s true,’ I said. He smiled, he was happy to see me, or so it seemed.
‘And here you are on this bridge, fishing, with your cap on, and here I come, in this car. It didn’t come cheap, I can tell you that much. But I can afford it. Hell, I could have bought two, or more, if I wanted, cash down. Isn’t it strange,’ he said with a smile.
‘What’s strange.’
‘The way things can turn out. The opposite.’
The opposite, I thought. Was that it. But he didn’t say it to put me down. He never would have, not if he was who he was when we were young. He just thought it was strange.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘You may be right. It is pretty strange.’
‘Fish biting,’ he said.
‘Not worth a shit,’ I said. ‘I guess it’s not my day.’
‘But you don’t need the fish, do you. I mean, for eating or anything, you know what I mean.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘Because if you did, I could help you,’ he said, and I said nothing, and then he said: ‘That was badly put, I’m sorry,’ and his face went a bright red, and it looked like maybe he drank a little too much.
‘That’s all right,’ I said.
It wasn’t all right, but he was so important back then. We went through thick and thin.
More cars came down the hill towards the bridge, there was only one lane, so they queued up behind him, and inside one car someone leaned on the horn.
‘It was really good to see you, Jim. Maybe another time then,’ he said, and I felt a little uncomfortable when he said my name, like having the beam of a torch straight into my face, and I didn’t know what he meant by ‘another time’, or what would happen if there was. Then the tinted window slid up. He raised his hand, and the car set off, picking up speed over the bridge, and turned left at the other end, heading for the city. It was almost day now. It would be a clear one.
I wound the line round the bait rig as clumsily as I’d unwound it and tucked the last hook inside the roll and walked by the railings with the weight dangling and flicked the cigarette I had barely smoked over the edge, over the cable, in a glowing arc towards the water and put the rig in my bag and the bag in the boot and closed the lid and walked round to the passenger side, by the bushes, right at the end, and fell to my knees and wrapped my arms tight round my body and tried to breathe slowly, but I couldn’t do it. I started to cry. I held my mouth wide open, the noise wasn’t as loud then, and the air flowed easier in and out, and I didn’t groan so much. It was a bit odd.
It took time for the rushes of pain to subside, I had to get exhausted first. So I let it take its course. It’s strange what you can teach yourself. Finally I stood up with one hand against the car door, wiped my face with the other and walked back around the car. The others on the bridge were busy with their own affairs. Three of them were about to leave. I got in. I was the only one of us with a car. I didn’t know where the others lived, but I guessed it wouldn’t be too far away if they could walk. Or maybe they just took the bus, if there was one. One time I asked if anyone wanted a lift, and they all said no.
Across the bridge, I chose the shortest route home, which was straight through Oslo city centre although the queue was building up on Mosseveien. Then I had to go in through the toll gates, it cost twenty kroner, but if I had taken the simplest route to get to the bridge instead of the detour I now preferred, there was a toll gate on that side too, coming in from the east, so it was even money.
I drove out of town in the opposite direction to the one I came in, and in my lane, heading east, there was hardly any traffic and little competition for space. In the opposite lane they were all going in to the city centre, bumper to bumper, links in a chain, barely moving, while on my side I was driving into the tunnels by Vålerenga, Etterstad, and then out into the morning light along the E6 and off to the right towards Lillestrøm, past Karihaugen, and the entire Lørenskog area was under reconstruction, had been demolished and razed to the ground and was now being hauled up again with shopping malls and multi-storey car parks, and there were bottomless craters everywhere and cranes and hillsides sliced off like pieces of bread after the Solheim crossroads. And it was autumn already, September, well into it, and the few trees that were left in scattered clusters either side of the motorway glowed dimly red and yellow, and cold, damp air came rushing in through the open window on my way towards Rælingen Tunnel.
From the garage I walked the stairway two floors up to the ground floor and unlocked the door to the three-room apartment where I lived alone. I was tired. I stretched my neck and a few times rolled my head in a circle and took off my shoes and placed them with their heels against the skirting board, right below the coats hanging from their pegs on the wall, and hung the reefer jacket on one of them and put my fishing gear in a large metal box with a picture of a good-looking rooster on the lid, which had once contained a selection of the finest biscuits from the Sætre Kjeks factory and pushed it on to a shelf in the closet and went to the bathroom and filled my hands and carefully washed my face. I studied myself in the mirror. The skin was dark under my eyes, and my eyes were red in the corners by the bridge of my nose. I must have been driving under the influence. It didn’t strike me until now.
I rubbed my face hard with the towel and walked in my stockinged feet through the living room to the bedroom and peered in. She was still asleep. Her dark hair on the pillow. Her unfamiliar lips. I stood on the threshold waiting. One minute, two minutes, then I turned round and walked to the sofa and sat down at the coffee table and lit a cigarette. I could only smoke half of it. I would have to give it up soon. I could try this week.