“Have you looked in the bedroom?”
“Yes. In both cupboards. Nothing.”
I went into the bedroom. It was like a double cabin. A bed next to each wall with a narrow gangway between them, and I recalled a joke I had heard in the Boy Scouts almost thirty years before. The Scoutmaster said: My wife wants two single beds because she needs something in between sometimes, and I want a double bed because I want to get my something between sometimes too, and I blushed as I would have done then if it had made any sense to me. I was ten years old and after four years at Sunday school, as innocent as a nun. I kneeled down and put my cheek to the floor and looked under my father’s bed.
“It’s crammed in here.”
“With bottles?”
“No, with shoes.”
“Get them out. Make it snappy,” my brother said. He opened the window, he took the first pair and threw them on to the lawn. I heard them land and a shiver ran down my spine. I crawled further in and lay flat under the bed and pulled the shoes out, one pair after another, and some of them were old and some were brand new and had never been used. There was a strong smell of leather under the mattress there, and I recognised that smell from when I was small, on my way down the dimly lit stairs to the cellar where he stood at his workbench with rough leather in his rough hands and shiny tacks in his mouth, the yellow light and eerie shadows, and I do not know what we were up to, my brother and I, but I could not stop. My chest was bubbling, I felt like singing. I lay on my side and chucked the shoes as hard as I could along the floor, and my brother fielded them and hurled them on out of the window. At last there was nothing left under the bed. There had been twenty-five pairs in all, I had counted them, and every one was welted. He would never wear anything else. He hated cheap shoes. I backed away from the bed, stood up and went to the window and looked out. They lay on the lawn in a heap looking like something in a picture from Auschwitz.
“Did you find anything?” my brother asked. I blinked in despair and stared at him, and then I realised he meant the liquor. I had forgotten about that. I lay down again and looked. All the way in beside one leg lay a full bottle of Famous Grouse. I grabbed it by the neck and crawled out with my behind in the air, proudly holding up the bottle.
“Yess. I knew it,” he said.
But of course it was I who had known, and for a second I felt completely without hope and did not understand why we were there just then, that I should not drink, it was the wrong moment, but I wanted a drink so badly. We went into the living room and I put the bottle on the table. He fetched glasses from the cupboard over the worktop and what was left in a litre bottle of Farris water we had bought at Svinesund on the border with Sweden. The fridge was still on, there were ice cubs in the freezer and a lonely Toblerone on the bottom shelf. He poured two stiff shots, then filled up with ice and a drop of mineral water.
“Skål,” my brother said, raising his glass. I gripped mine and took a big gulp, staring at the oilcloth thinking I wanted an end to this, I couldn’t take it any longer. I did not want to think about it any more.
But that’s what I am doing now. I rise from the table with the cup of coffee in my hand, walk over to the window and look out into the dark. I have been far out of this world, I do not know where, and now I am back, and I can’t stop thinking. I remember my thirty-fourth birthday in that very room, in the cabin where my brother and I sat drinking, in the far north of Denmark. It was four years earlier and darker then at the end of July, the bottles were on the table, and the lamps shone on the windowpanes. It was warm even though the door and several windows were open. I sat rocking on a chair in only a T-shirt, with my back to the kitchen counter. My mother and father had been there for several weeks, my brothers had come with their wives and children and sleeping bags and lilos. Not because it was my birthday but because it was summertime, and it was no longer a secret that a writer was what I wanted to be. My first story had been published in a magazine no-one had heard of before, but they had all read it anyway and were a little confused and uneasy because it was about my father. No-one was divorced yet, no-one had died, we went by boat as we had always done and slept through a familiar night. Lanterns and lighthouses lit our way from the fjord across the open sea and down past Skagen. Behind the boat the strip of wake lay foaming white and lifeline-like until it disappeared into the darkness. Now my father sat in a corner drinking. I had not seen him drink before. Not like that. We had not seen each other for a long time. He seemed smaller than before, but he was still strong, and I don’t think there was a time in my life when he couldn’t beat me with one arm tied behind his back. But he had never hit me, I had never even had a slap on the cheek except the once when he was trying to teach me to box and I refused to hit him and he became so annoyed that he slammed me on the chest and I fell over and landed on the floor and rolled under the sofa.
He stared into the glass in his hand, then rose unsteadily and said: “Well, well, Hemningway, so you’re a writer.” He didn’t look at me but past me at something on the wall, or maybe he looked through the wall, and he smiled with his mouth only. I didn’t like that smile. He wanted me outside with him, I realised that, but I didn’t want to go. I was happy where I was, and so he went out alone. He had forgotten the cabin was a new one with an inside toilet, so he went outside as he had always done, across the lawn to the little outhouse and round the corner to the gap between the wall and the fence along the field. I saw his back in the dusk. Maybe it wasn’t that strong any longer. He leaned heavily against the wall before straightening up, swaying a little, and trying to lean back again. But then his body sailed in the opposite direction, and he lurched out to steady himself with his hands, clutched the fence and slipped before he had a good enough grip and clung there until he got his balance back. Then slowly he straightened himself and let go of the fence. I didn’t give it a thought until he came in again. That the fence was a barbed wire fence. His arms hung straight down and both palms were covered with blood. I was the only one who saw it. The others were chatting and laughing and celebrating my birthday, but between him and me there was a tunnel of silence. He paid no attention to his hands, just looked at the wall behind me and smiled in the same way and said: “Well, well, Hemningway, so you’re a writer. Good for you.”
I didn’t know what to say. “Yes,” I said, but that wasn’t much, and no-one could hear it anyway. He stopped by his corner, picked up his drink and emptied what was left. When he put it down there were red smears all round the glass.
“We must have some beers, Hemningway,” he said, and he turned on his heel and almost fell over, and then he walked across to the door, with full concentration, and went out and around the corner. The Tuborg bottles we kept in an outhouse called the Pigsty because it was used for pigs when we first came here. The outhouse was built of brick and we had put electricity in to keep two fridges going. To get there he had to go around the cabin and across the lawn. He walked close to the wall to support himself in the dark, I watched him through the curtain going past the big window, and then he disappeared from view and then I heard a thud. The others stopped talking for a moment and looked around before going on with their conversation. I sat waiting. After a while he came back with a bag full of bottles. His hands were still bloody and he was bleeding from a fresh cut on his forehead. The new windows tilted straight out, he had not seen them in the dark. The blood ran along his eyebrow down over his cheek and dripped on to his shirt collar. He was still smiling, rather stiffly now, and the room fell silent, everyone looked up, and yet only he and I were there. As he passed me on his way to the kitchen nook, he narrowed his eyes before he glanced sideways down at the chair I sat in and said: “Now then, Hemningway,” and then he stumbled over the rag rug. The bag of bottles hit the bench and there was a sound of glass smashing. It was a film in slow motion. I saw his face on the way down, an incredulous expression in his eyes, before he landed flat on his chest with the bloody hands out to his sides. Now he will die, I thought. Everyone shot up from their chairs and the chairs crashed over, and I didn’t want him to die, but I couldn’t get up. I sat glued to my chair. I saw him lying with his back on the floor between the worktop and the wall and the beer running out of the bag over the newly varnished floor towards my chair. It was so hot in the room that the air turned misty and then into fog, and I saw everything through that fog: the furniture, the orange oilcloth, the photographs on the wall with the whole family history, curtains and lamps and my father on the floor in a lake of beer, and I didn’t want him to die, I wanted to be ten years old again and have the smell of leather tickling my nose on my way down to the cellar, I wanted all that I looked upon to have a meaning and to surround and embrace me, and all that had happened to be gathered into one now and give me peace. I wanted my father to say Hemingway, not Hemningway.