It all went quiet. He stood with his hand clenched white with expectation around the top of his trousers. What should I do now. And the policeman was waiting. I couldn’t even hear him breathing. He looked up at the ceiling to leave us in peace during this embarrassing moment between father and son, and he tried to make himself invisible, inaudible, but I didn’t want to be left in peace with my father. I didn’t want to be there at all. And yet I couldn’t leave without him. Anything else was too late.
‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Come on. I’ll drive you home,’ and I heard the policeman slowly let out his breath, and my father put on a broad smile from behind his beard and said:
‘What a fine coat you’ve got, I’ll give you that. It has style. I’ll bet it cost you serious money.’
‘Yes, it did cost serious money,’ I said, and turned and walked out of the cell, and my father came out after me, clutching his trousers and then the policeman locked the door behind us. We walked down the corridor and into another room where his possessions were returned to him, and, because his hands were shaking so badly, I had to sign for each item as he was unable to do it himself, and for his shoes and his belt I had to sign, and for what was left in his wallet, and the pocket knife, I think we’d better hang on to that, the policeman said, and I said, that’s fine, just keep it, and then I signed for the jacket. I could have sworn it was the same jacket he was wearing the last time I saw him by the railway station only two hundred metres from this large house that didn’t exist then, in front of the old, heavy, stone-grey station building, and not the modern one that was put up beside it.
The policeman let us out of a door at the back of the building. Then we didn’t have to push our way through the crowd with their passports and tickets and A4 police checks, and I could see my father was limping on his right leg as we crossed the first car park and then the second one over to my new, grey Mercedes with the tinted windscreen, and he said:
‘Oh, what a car, it’s nice, and the coat, and the car, it must have cost serious money, that car,’ and I said:
‘Yes, sure, it cost serious money.’
‘But I can’t sit in that car with these clothes on,’ he said, and I looked at his clothes, and he did have a point.
‘Just get in,’ I said, and he opened the door at the back, and I said:
‘No, you sit in the front.’
‘Ah, but, I can’t, can I.’
‘Yes you can, for God’s sake, just sit in the goddamn front, come on, you cannot sit in the back. Jesus Christ.’ And very carefully he sat down in the front, trying as hard as he could to leave a thin layer of air between his backside and the fragrant, immaculate leather cover I had taken the plastic off only a few days ago. Then we turned out of the car park in front of the building they called Justisen, and I left Lillestrøm the same way I had come and drove up the E6 and past the turn-offs to both this place and that place and all the places I couldn’t give a damn about or who lived there and on up past Mørk station.
I turned into the drive of the house he claimed was his. I had never seen it before. It was north of Mørk, and a little to the west, and the railway line wasn’t even close and never had been. The bus stop was a kilometre’s walk, and there was only one bus a day, except at weekends when there was no bus at all. That was the kind of place it was, meaningful only for those who lived there, and barely that. I had cycled past with Jim a couple of times in my childhood to go fishing in a little river even further to the west. There was a waterfall and a pool with good fishing. It was Jim who liked fishing, but I always went along, he was my best friend, so at Christmas I wished for a rod with a spinner and all, and Jonsen gave me one, he was the one who listened, and no one else. And then the local council got it into their heads to build a dam, and the waterfall stopped falling, and we stopped going there. We didn’t care, there were other places we could go.
He got out of the car under his own steam, he didn’t need any help, he felt better now, he said, with the belt back on his trousers.
I got out too, on my side, thinking, I’ll complete this mission, and then I’ll be off, I won’t stop down here by the road, I’ll follow him to the door, and then I’ll be gone.
There was a man on the steps of the house next to my father’s. He was smoking. He looked at us as though he wanted to tell us something, and I looked back at him and was ready to hear what he had to say, he was my father’s neighbour and he gave a slight nod, and then he wasn’t interested after all and turned away and stared up the road.
‘I’ll walk you to the door,’ I said.
‘Oh yes, that’s nice,’ he said. ‘You walk with me, that’s good, that’s how it should be, a son walking his dad home, that’s it, and you can come in and have a cup of coffee as well, of course you can, that’s how it should be, I’ll put the kettle on, it’ll be ready in no time, but you know, I’ve only got instant coffee, you probably don’t drink instant coffee any more, not like you used to, not with that car and all, you probably drink something French, what’s it called, café crème, or something it’s called, you do that, don’t you.’
It was true I drank coffee when I was a boy, he forced me to when I was ten, and I became addicted, he mixed it with sugar and milk and sat watching me as I poured it down, have another cup, he said, and I still drink coffee that way, with sugar and milk, but I couldn’t remember if what we drank was instant coffee, if someone had invented instant coffee by then, I didn’t think so, and if they had, it could only be in America, so back then I was sure my father made the usual boiled coffee.
We were up by the doorsteps. He had staggered and limped over the flagstones, but he wasn’t drunk now, there were just these rubber legs, he was so thin, and I said:
‘That’s it then. Is your door unlocked.’
‘Sure,’ he said, ‘it’s unlocked, but you must come in and have a coffee, it’s all wrong if you don’t come into your dad’s house and have a cup, we haven’t seen each other for such a long time, but you’re the same, I knew you would be, Tommy is the same boy he always was, I said to the police,’ but we hadn’t seen each other for forty years, and I didn’t know how he could say something so ridiculous, the boy with the bat then, but I had changed so much and was changing by the day. I was changing fast, and not for the better.
And then his door wasn’t unlocked, and he suddenly looked confused, and his eyes grew big and round, and he looked scared and began to rummage through his pockets, but he didn’t have the keys in his trousers, nor in his jacket, perhaps he had left them in Lillestrøm, on a shelf somewhere in Justisen, or he had lost them when he was drunk, wherever he had been drunk, but that he couldn’t remember.
I stepped back a few paces and walked round the house to see if maybe a window had been left open that we could crawl in through, it was a single-storey house, and I could do that, I wasn’t an invalid, but all the windows were closed. My father stood on the steps, almost paralysed, he had no ace up his sleeve. I walked down the footpath staring at the ground all the way down to the postboxes and back up again, and I could see the man from the house next door slowly making his way to the hedge that separated the small plots. I held back for a second, I didn’t like the man, didn’t like his eyes, but then I went over to the hedge anyway. He stopped, the hedge reached up to his crotch and was meticulously trimmed on his side, his half of the hedge, while on my father’s side it was untended and reached up to my waist, it looked stupid, looked petty, and he said: