Could I give her a call?
She had said she would be home this evening.
But it had to be close to twelve by now. And although she didn’t mind being woken up, the rest of the family would probably take a different view.
What if the house had burned down? What if someone had been burned to death?
Oh, shit, shit, shit.
I started to walk across the lawn as I tried to push the thought to the back of my mind, ran my eyes along the hedge, over the house, the roof, to the big lilac bushes at the end of the lawn whose heavy pink blossoms you could smell right down by the road, took the last swig from the bottle as I walked, saw a couple of flushed women’s faces, they were sitting on the steps by the door with their knees together and cigarettes between their fingertips, I recognized them from the table and gave a faint smile as I passed, on through the door into the living room, then the kitchen, which was empty now, took another bottle, went upstairs and into my room where I sat down in the chair under the window, leaned back, and closed my eyes.
Mm.
The speakers in the living room were directly beneath me, and sound traveled so easily in this house that I heard every note loud and clear.
What were they playing?
Agnetha Fältskog. The hit from last summer. What was it again?
There was something undignified about the clothes Dad was wearing tonight. The white shirt or blouse or whatever the hell it was. He had always, as far as I could remember, dressed simply, appropriately, a touch conservatively. His wardrobe consisted of shirts, suits, jackets, many in tweed, polyester trousers, corduroy, cotton, lambswool or wool sweaters. More a senior master of the old variety than a smock-clad schoolteacher of the new breed, but not old-fashioned, that wasn’t where the difference lay. The dividing line was between soft and hard, between those who try to break down the distance and those who try to maintain it. It was a question of values. When he suddenly started wearing arty embroidered blouses, or shirts with frills, as I had seen him wearing earlier this summer, or shapeless leather shoes in which a Sami would have been happy, an enormous contradiction arose between the person he was, the person I knew him to be, and the person he presented himself as. For myself, I was on the side of the soft ones, I was against war and authority, hierarchies, and all forms of hardness, I didn’t want to do any sucking up at school, I wanted my intellect to develop more organically; politically I was way out on the left, the unequal distribution of the world’s resources enraged me, I wanted everyone to have a share of life’s pleasures, and thus capitalism and plutocracy were the enemy. I thought all people were of equal value and that a person’s inner qualities were always worth more than their outer appearance. I was, in other words, for depth and against superficiality, for good and against evil, for the soft and against the hard. So shouldn’t I have been pleased then, that my father had joined the ranks of the soft? No, for I despised the way the soft expressed themselves, the round glasses, corduroy trousers, foot-formed shoes, knitted sweaters, that is, because along with my political ideals I had others, bound up with music, which in a very different way had to do with looking good, cool, which in turn was related to the times in which we were living, it was what had to be expressed, but not the top ten chart aspect, not the pastel colors and hair gel, for that was about commercialism, superficiality, and entertainment; no, the music that had to be expressed was the innovative but tradition-conscious, deeply felt but smart, intelligent but simple, showy but genuine kind that did not address itself to everyone, that did not sell well, yet expressed a generation’s, my generation’s, experiences. Oh, the new. I was on the side of the new. And Ian McCulloch of Echo & the Bunnymen, he was the ideal in this respect, him above all. Coats, military jackets, sneakers, dark sunglasses. It was miles away from my father’s embroidered blouse and Sami shoes. On the other hand, this could not be what it was about because Dad belonged to a different generation, and the thought that this generation should start dressing like Ian McCulloch, start listening to British indie music, take any interest in what was happening on the American scene, discover REM’s or Green on Red’s debut album and perhaps eventually include a bootlace tie in their wardrobe was the stuff of a nightmare. What was more important was that the embroidered blouse and the Sami shoes were not him. And that he had slipped into this, entered this formless, uncertain, almost feminine world, as though he had lost a grip on himself. Even the hard tone in his voice had gone.
I opened my eyes and turned to look through the window at the table on the edge of the forest. Only four people were there now. Dad, Unni, the person she had called Bodil, and one more. At the back of the lilac bush, out of sight from them, but not from me, a man was peeing while staring across to the river.
Dad raised his head and directed his gaze up at the window. My heart beat faster, but I did not move, for if in fact he had seen me, which was not at all certain, it would be like admitting that I was spying. Instead I waited for a few moments, until I was sure that he had noticed that I had seen him watching, if he had seen that is, then withdrew and sat at my desk.
It was no good spying on Dad, he always noticed, he saw everything, had always seen everything.
I swigged some beer. A cigarette would have been good now. He had never seen me smoking, and perhaps it would become an issue if he did. On the other hand, had he not just told me to help myself to beer?
The desk, my property for as long as I could remember, orange like the bed and the cupboard doors, had been in my old room, was, apart from a rack of cassettes, completely clear. I had cleaned everything up at the end of the school year and had hardly been here, except to sleep. I put down the bottle and whirled the rack around a few times while reading the titles written in my own childish capitals on the spines. BOWIE — HUNKY DORY. LED ZEPPELIN — 1. TALKING HEADS — 77. THE CHAMELEONS — SCRIPT OF THE BRIDGE. THE THE — SOUL MINING. THE STRANGLERS — RATTUS NORVEGICUS. THE POLICE — OUTLANDOS D’AMOUR. TALKING HEADS — REMAIN IN LIGHT. BOWIE — SCARY MONSTERS (And super creeps). ENO BYRNE — MY LIFE IN THE BUSH OF GHOSTS. U2 — OCTOBER. THE BEATLES — RUBBER SOUL. SIMPLE MINDS — NEW GOLD DREAM.
I got to my feet, grabbed the guitar leaning against the small Roland Cube amplifier and strummed some chords, put it back, looked out over the garden again. They were still there, under the darkness of the treetops, which the two kerosene lamps did not dispel, but did soften, in that their faces took on the color of the light. Giving them dark, coppery complexions.
Bodil, she must be the daughter of Dad’s father’s second brother, whom I had never met. For some reason he had been banished from the family, long ago. I heard about him by chance for the first time a couple of years ago, there was a wedding in the family, and Mom mentioned that he was also there, and that he made a passionate speech. He was a lay preacher in the Pentecostal Church in town. A mechanic. Everything about him was different from his two brothers, even the name. When they, after consultation with their imposing mother, and upon entering the academic world and university, had decided to change their name from the standard Pedersen to the rather less standard Knausgaard, he had refused. Perhaps that is what caused the break?
I went out of the room and downstairs. As I came into the hall, Dad was in the room with the wardrobes, the light was off and he was staring at me.