I lay back on the bed. Read some comics, got up, and flattened my ear against the door to hear if anything was happening in the living room, but not a sound, they were still outside. My grandparents were visiting, so it was unthinkable that I wouldn’t be given any supper. Or was it?
Half an hour later they came upstairs. One of them went into the bathroom, which was adjacent to my room. It wasn’t Dad, I could tell that from the footsteps, which were lighter than his. But I couldn’t tell whether it was Mom, Grandma, or Grandad, until the flushing of the toilet was followed by a loud banging from the hot-water pipes, which only Grandma or Grandad could have caused.
Now I was seriously hungry.
The shadows that descended over the ground outside were so long and distorted that they no longer bore any resemblance to the forms that created them. As though they had sprung forth in their own right, as though there existed a parallel reality of darkness, with dark-fences, dark-trees, dark-houses, populated by dark-people, somehow stranded here in the light, where they seemed so misshapen and helpless, as far from their element as a reef with seaweed and shells and crabs is from the receding water, one might imagine. Oh, isn’t that why shadows get longer and longer in the evening? They are reaching out for the night, this tidal water of darkness that washes over the earth to fulfill for a few hours the shadows’ innermost yearnings.
I looked at my watch. It was ten minutes past nine. In twenty minutes it would be bedtime.
In the afternoon, the worst part of being grounded was that you couldn’t go out and you stood at the window watching everyone else outside. In the evening, the worst part was that there was no clear dividing line between the various phases that usually constituted an evening. After sitting up for some hours I simply pulled off my clothes and got into bed. The difference between the two states, which was normally so great, was almost completely eradicated when you were grounded, and that led to my becoming aware of myself in a way that I normally didn’t. It was as if the person I was while doing whatever I was doing, such as eating supper, brushing my teeth, washing my face, or putting on my pajamas, not only revealed itself but also filled my whole being, as if all of a sudden there was simply nothing else. I was exactly the same person when I was sitting on the bed fully dressed as I was lying in it without my clothes on. In fact, there were no real dividing lines or transitions.
It was an irksome feeling.
I went to the door and placed my ear against it again. At first it was quiet, then I heard some voices, then it was quiet again. I cried a few tears, then I took off my T-shirt and shorts and got into bed with the duvet drawn up to my chin. The sun still shone on the wall opposite. I read some comics, then I put them on the floor, and closed my eyes. My last thought before I fell asleep was that it hadn’t been my fault.
I woke up, looked at my wristwatch. The two luminous snakes showed it was ten minutes past two. I lay quite still for a while in an attempt to work out what had woken me. Apart from my pulse, which throbbed as if whispering in my ear, everything was silent. No cars on the road, no boats in Tromøya Sound, no planes flying overhead. No footsteps, no voices, nothing. Nor from our house.
I raised my head a little so that my ears weren’t touching anything and held my breath. After a few seconds I heard a noise from the garden. A noise so high-pitched that at first I didn’t catch it, but the moment I became aware of it I was terrified.
Eeee-eeee-eeeeee-eeeee. Eeeeeee-eeee-eeeeeee. Eeeeee.
I sat up on my knees, drew the curtain to the side, and peered through the window. The lawn was bathed in a weak light: the moon above our house was full. A gust of wind made it look as if the grass were racing away. A white plastic bag caught on the end of the hedge was flapping, and it struck me that someone who didn’t know that wind existed would have thought that the bag was moving of its own accord. As though I were perched high above the ground, the tips of my toes and fingers tingled. My heart was beating fast. The muscles in my stomach tightened, I swallowed, and swallowed again. Night was the time for ghosts and apparitions, night was the time for the headless man and the grinning skeleton. And all that separated me from it was a thin wall.
There was that sound again!
Eeee-eeeeeeeee- eee-eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee-eee-eeeeeee.
I scanned the gray lawn outside. Over by the hedge, perhaps five meters away, I caught sight of Prestbakmo’s cat. It was lying stretched out in the grass and smacking something with its paw. Whatever it was smacking, a gray lump, like stone or clay, was thrown a few meters closer to the window. The cat rose and followed. The lump lay still in the grass. The cat tentatively hit out at it a few more times, moved closer with its head, and seemed to nudge it with its nose, then opened its jaws and took it in its mouth. When the squeaking started again I guessed it was a mouse. The sudden noise appeared to confuse the cat. At any rate it tossed its head and flung the mouse in the air. This time it didn’t stay where it landed, it made a headlong dash across the lawn. The cat stood watching, motionless. It looked as if it was about to let the mouse go. But then, just as the mouse reached the bed by the gate to Prestbakmo’s garden, it set off. Three bounds and the cat had caught it again.
In the room beside mine I heard Dad’s voice. It was low and mumbling, without beginning or end, the way it often sounded when he was talking in his sleep. A moment later someone got up from his bed. From the lightness of foot I realized it was Mom. Outside, the cat had started jumping up and down. It looked like some kind of dance. Another gust of wind swept through the grass. I looked up at the pine tree and saw its tender branches bending and swaying, slim and black against the heavy, yellow moon. Mom opened the door to the bathroom. When I heard her lower the toilet seat I put my hands over my ears and started to hum. The sound issuing from her after that, a kind of hiss, as if she were letting off steam, was awful. Usually I shut out Dad’s thunderous torrents, too, even though they weren’t quite as difficult to endure as Mom’s hissing. Aaaaaaaaaaagh, I said, slowly counting to ten and watching the cat. Apparently tired of the game, it grabbed the mouse in its jaws and dashed through the hedge, across the road and into Gustavsen’s drive, where it dropped the mouse on the ground by the trailer and stood staring at it. The mouse lay as still as any living creature could. The cat jumped onto the wall and slunk toward one of the globe-shaped sundials on the gatepost at the end. I took my hands away from my ears and stopped humming. In the bathroom the cistern flushed. The cat turned sharply and stared at the mouse, which still hadn’t moved. A jet of water from the tap splashed against the porcelain sink. The cat jumped down from the wall, strolled into the road, and lay down like a small lion. Just as Mom pressed the handle and opened the door a twitch went through the mouse, as though the sound had released an impulse in it, and the next moment it set off on another desperate flight from the cat, which had obviously reckoned on this eventuality as it required no more than a fraction of a second to switch from resting to hunting. But this time it was too late. A sheet of white Eternit cladding left lying on the lawn was the mouse’s salvation as it squeezed itself underneath a second before the cat arrived.
The animals’ fleet movements seemed to linger on in me; long after I had gone back to bed my heart was still racing. Perhaps because it, too, was a little animal? After a while I changed position again, put the pillow at the foot of the bed, and drew the curtain to one side so that I could look up at the sky bestrewn with stars, so like grains of sand, a beach with a perimeter, invisible to us, against which the sea beat.