He must have thought about it often, about what I did, and surely through the days in hospital before he died, but he never mentioned it when I came to see him. I wish he had.
I left the motorway, the E6, by the Skedsmo crossroads for the second time that day and followed the loop in a large circle around the Shell station, and on over the bridge to the opposite side and then down the hills to Kjeller past the aerodrome and into Lillestrøm. I parked in the centre, by the building where the Wine Monopoly used to be. Jim and I had been looking forward to standing in the queue at that very branch as soon as we were old enough. There was no Wine Monopoly in Mørk, just the idea was absurd, so this was the nearest, but of course, it never happened.
There was a restaurant in the place now. It surprised me a little, I don’t know why. Something had to be there. Anyway, it was open, and I wondered if they served lunch. I’d just had a small something to eat before I met Jim on the bridge early this morning, and after that I had driven into the city centre in my fine car. That was a lifetime ago, and now I was very hungry.
They did serve lunch. But it was a strange restaurant. It was gloomy inside: dark woodwork and sombre corners, at the far end of the room there was a skeleton hanging from the ceiling behind iron bars, and on the walls there were oddly crooked shelves with books intended to look mouldy. When I slunk into the toilet there were posters of horror films above the urinal, and then I realised this was the thing here, a concept someone had had, to create a fun, spooky atmosphere. It wasn’t much fun, I thought, and gloom was not what I needed right now, not even fun gloom, so I went out again and across the street to the new shopping centre and in through the swing doors to look for a place where I could eat. There was a cake shop on the ground floor, but what did I want with cakes. I was finished with cakes. I felt a prickle of irritation all over my body. I was hungry, I even felt like a dram, and if I’d got my hands on one, my body would have lost its tension and quietly settled and there would be peace. If someone speaks to me now, I thought, anything might happen.
I went through the new shopping centre and out again on the other side and into the old centre and took the escalator up to Level 2 and walked along the gallery past a few boutiques, there was one called Match, it looked pretentious, but not one piece of clothing inside would ever cling to my body in a natural way. I had put on weight, and besides, the shop was too young. Everything they had in these boutiques, all the clothes, were for young people now and for older people who didn’t want to be older, they wanted to be slim, you could see it in the ads, in magazines, on posters, they wanted to ride motorbikes and play squash and do the Birkebeiner race every summer and the same race in winter, on skis, and talk about it the following Monday in the canteen and go through every single kilometre in detail and laugh at each other’s trials and triumphs and compare times and equipment, they bought bright-looking sports gear and headed for the hills. But I wasn’t one of them.
At the end, in a corner, there was a café which was open to the gallery, you could just walk straight in from wherever you wanted. It looked perfect, no fancy concept. I walked in and wrapped my coat over the back of a chair, walked up to the counter and ordered a fairly substantial lunch. Or early dinner. The woman behind the counter was friendly, and she asked me how I was. I had never seen her before, why would I tell her anything. I said:
‘Fine, thanks. I’m just fine.’ And I thought, Oh Christ, I’m so hungry, get a move on.
‘That’s good to hear,’ she said. ‘There was someone just sitting at your table, he wasn’t so happy. He often comes here. He hardly ever smiles. And he’s always alone. I try to cheer him up a bit, but it doesn’t seem to help. It’s sad to see.’
‘Yes, I guess it is,’ I said. ‘But I don’t know that man. This is the first time I’ve been here.’
‘That’s right,’ she said, ‘I’ve never seen you before. I would have remembered you, I’m sure of that,’ she said, and then, out of the blue, I said:
‘It’s not true what I said. I’m not fine, I’m not just fine.’ She stood still for a second, and then she said:
‘Oh, I’m sad to hear that.’
‘Yes, it’s sad,’ I said. ‘I wish everything was just fine, but it isn’t.’
‘What is it that’s so sad,’ she said.
‘That’s very difficult to explain.’
‘You can try,’ she said.
I looked around me. There was no one else at the counter. I looked at her. She was attractive, she was younger than me, ten years younger, or more. I could see both her hands, she wasn’t wearing a ring. But I couldn’t tell her about Jim and his blue woolly cap that had moved me so, it was especially the cap, and his worn, old reefer jacket in the dim light this morning on the bridge by Ulvøya, or about my father in the drunk tank, the colour of the walls, his sad trousers without a belt and his foot in the striped sock, like the foot of a child, no, I couldn’t stand here by the counter and tell her about that, no matter how attractive she was, hell no, I couldn’t. Besides, I was so hungry I was shuffling my feet like a little boy in need of the toilet.
‘I guess I’d better think it through first,’ I said. ‘Right now I’m famished.’
‘You go and sit down,’ she said, ‘and I’ll get the food ready.’
I paid what it cost and walked over and sat down at my table. I didn’t have a newspaper, so all I could do was stare into the air, but before I knew it she had appeared from behind the counter with a tray of food. She didn’t have to do that. She probably wasn’t supposed to, either. It was a self-service place. But it smelt good. And she smelt good as she leaned forward and put the tray in front of me on the table and lifted my plate from the tray and lifted the bread and cutlery from the tray and tucked the tray under her arm. I could see the skin on her neck close-up, and her skin moved me in such an odd way, and further down behind her blouse I could see her skin too, and it was as though I knew it from before and had touched it before, and it filled me with homesickness. She smiled. Her face was already a familiar face. She was pretty. I smiled back. She probably smiled like that at all the customers in this café, at least the male customers, I thought, and she probably smiled like that to the man who had just left and had been sitting at this very table, which was my table now, right before I came to the café in my purple coat and was hungry.