Issuu

PART ONE

There is no reason to be afraid of death – when we exist, death is not; and when death exists, we are not. This, roughly, is how Epicurus put it a long time ago. I tend to think of it as like sharing a flat with a lodger you never see. The flat has two rooms, and two doors. Whenever you go through one door, the lodger goes out by the other. You might hear him moving about from time to time, but the moment you go in, he’ll go out to where you just came from and start moving about there instead. This is how we live our lives, with death on the other side of the wall. The day we meet him in the doorway, it’s over. The sly thing is that we never know when it’s going to happen, only that sooner or later it will. Of course, if we want to, we’re free to take the matter into our own hands and provoke the encounter.

Which is what I’m intending to do.

Perhaps the above sounds like I find there to be something casual about it all – a flat, an encounter with a lodger – but the lightness belongs to the language, not to me. If I could articulate what I’m feeling as I sit here, the despair that night and day rips and tears at me, the bottomless darkness, you would understand. But I can’t, for in language there is hope, in language there is light. The night is without language. And language is always directed towards another. To convey loneliness by means of language is therefore impossible. Where there is loneliness, language is not; where there is language, loneliness is not. In other words, then, I am ‘lonely’. And I am going to ‘take’ my own life.

But first I’m going to write this. Every day, in the weeks to come, I’m going to wake in the room upstairs, come down here, make coffee, and

sit down at this desk in front of the window; I’m going to look out on the little harbour, and beyond it to the sea – which at this time of the year is mostly greys and blacks; I’m going to drink my coffee, smoke and work away at this story until it is finished. Why, I’m not entirely sure. Is it to do with how everything that happens just peters away into nothingness, and that this basically makes every event meaningless? The way it’s all to no avail? If those events are written down, they at least will exist somewhere. As for whoever may read what I now write, I don’t care. Perhaps it will be you, Emil, since you’re the owner of this house I have appropriated for the purpose. If so, I hope you can forgive me – I trust at least that I’ll have made sure to tidy and clean the place when I’ve finished with it and that you’ll find it in a better state than when you left it. Or perhaps it will be you, Yelena – in which case you need read no further: you know what’s coming. Perhaps it will be you, a local policeman, searching the place after my corpse has been found washed up on the shore somewhere close by. Or drifting on the sea, discovered by a fisherman or by the crew of one of the big container ships that plough back and forth off the coast here and whose passage I follow through the windows every day. I don’t know, and I don’t care. I’m writing this for myself. Or rather, for ‘my self’. The two words that contain everything we ever were, are and will be. Sitting here, at this particular moment, I am just a fraction of all that, perhaps only a few thousandths of it, while the rest, the bulk, lies stored in my cells. Some of it I am able to activate of my own accord – it’s called remembering – though most of it comes and goes as it pleases. So it is for all of us, presumably also for cats and dogs. As creatures they are superior to us – not only is much of their sensory apparatus more highly developed than our own, they have also had the nous, in what can only be described as an evolutionary stroke of genius, to halt the advancement of their conscious minds at the ascertainment I am here, rather than proceeding, as we have done, to the question of why.

Procrastination, this is called. I don’t want to think, I don’t want to know, I don’t want to understand. And yet I must. Must I not?

Yes.

I don’t want to write about what happened to me. But then again, I don’t want to die before I’ve done so.

So where do I begin?

At the beginning, perhaps. *

The first time I came across the name Christopher Marlowe was in August 1985, the summer I moved to London, where, much to my surprise, I’d been offered a place to study photography at an art school. Apart from music, I knew practically nothing about British culture, so one of the first places I visited was Foyles, the bookshop on Charing Cross Road, where I bought ten contemporary British novels in paperback, and then the collected works of Shakespeare, as well as a non-fiction book about creativity. I began with Shakespeare, but his plays were as good as impenetrable to me, so I returned to Foyles a few days later and bought a biography of the man and a book about the age in which he lived, to see if they might become more accessible to me. I dropped the books into my bag and walked towards what I now knew to be the Bloomsbury district, continuing on to Camden Town, where I sat down with a pint outside a pub and began skimming the biography. The very moment I set eyes on the name Christopher Marlowe, I looked up and saw in front of me a big lorry with the words Marlowe Removals along the side, green lettering against a white background. As if that wasn’t enough, I then read that Marlowe had been killed in Deptford – the same district I’d moved to only a few days earlier. Someone was pointing, but I didn’t look. I just closed the book, put it back in my bag and tramped off in a northerly direction, in the gigantic metropolis in which I now lived. Lectures didn’t start until three weeks later. I knew nobody, and so I bought a bicycle and started to familiarise myself with the local area, at the same time as I took loads of photographs, always uncertain as to whether my work would be good enough to meet the school’s standards. The bedsit I rented was small and sparsely furnished – a bed settee, a desk, a bookcase – and so I spent as little time in it as possible. The neighbourhood wasn’t exactly charming either – the riverside area was run-down industry, disused warehouses, old factory

chimneys, broken windows, piles of rubble from buildings that had been demolished and not been replaced. Chugging lorries here, scrap merchants there. And if in places a patch of green had grown up in all the colourless grey, rubbish would seemingly always be dumped on it. The shops in the streets had long since gone to seed. Often, they’d be selling a clutter of different goods, mostly things that I imagined could have been sold in the shops back home in the 1960s, things that looked so outmoded I’d never seen them on sale anywhere before. The signs above the doors of these places all seemed to stem from the previous century, or at least the 1920s or 1930s. There were cafes with handwritten menus and net curtains in the windows; a bakery, a butcher’s shop, where those behind the counter wore white, blood-spattered aprons. In this world behind the times, there was a brilliant record shop called Solid Cut, it was only small, but they had really good stuff, and I spent more than a few quid there during the first couple of weeks. There were foreign shops too, I guessed at African – one sold wigs, hair extensions, colourful fabrics, and I photographed the place from the pavement. I wanted to go inside and take pictures there as well, but I held back, unsure of how to go about things yet.

In the evenings I’d sit drinking over a book in the nearby pubs –there was practically one on every corner, the smoke-stained interiors unchanged in decades. The people there laughed a lot more than I was used to at home, and the bar staff called everyone love. The England I knew from the NME and Sounds was nowhere to be seen here – the odd young guy in a long overcoat with a cool haircut might go by once in a while, a group of goths might be sat in a corner one night, and a jukebox would occasionally play the Jam or U2 or the Alarm (I remember hearing ‘Into the Valley’ by the Skids once, and ‘Teenage Kicks’ by the Undertones), but that was just the area, Camden and Soho were different altogether.

It’s weird – a few nights in a row in the same place and you start recognising people, someone might acknowledge you with a nod, you get talking, and if it happens more than once then all of a sudden you’re friends, perhaps even for life, without either of you having intended. That was how, in those first few days in London, I met Hans, a Dutch artist ten years older than me. He wasn’t the only artist living in the

area, I soon found out – everything was so run-down around there they could afford to rent studios as well as somewhere to live. There were a lot of drugs about compared to what I was used to, and plenty of dreams that came to nothing, or at least were radically scaled back. Even the strongest, most determined of wills could be ground down in the space of a few short years. By what? it might be asked. What forces are powerful enough to wear out a human life? Biologically, it’s obvious enough – our physical decline begins in our twenties, it’s a process that ticks away in us all. But what of psychological erosion, what governs that? This is fate, of course. All those thousands of chance occurrences that lead you to one place rather than another, to people whose wills and dreams and abilities collide with the prevailing conditions there. That’s why artificial intelligence, AI , will never be able to think like us. Even if the machines are self-teaching and able to adapt according to experience, the parameters are still rational, the machines will necessarily and for always be remote to the deep, slow-shifting layers of reality where fate is at work, and therefore they will always be remote to us. Even as simple a thing as coming up with a random number turned out to be far from straightforward for a machine, for in any circumstance there was always a program in the background that first had to define the algorithm, whereby all randomness was cancelled out. The solution was to connect the machines to other, chaotic systems in nature and allow what occurred there to govern the selection. But the issue of chance and fate appears considerably more complex to artificial intelligence than to us, because in the human world chance is often charged with meaning, beyond our control, often beyond our understanding too. How do we give the machines access to something whose nature is unknown to us?

I’m sounding like Hans now. Machines that communicate with each other and interact with the world around them, that was his domain. Of course, I knew nothing about anything like that the first time we spoke. Probably he knew little more – in the late summer of 1985, machines that could think on their own were still basically science fiction. But he was already there, at the interface of biology and technology, with his own particular ideas.

I’d noticed him the night before, a tall, skinny man with big hair

the exact colour of which was hard to determine, a chiselled chin and narrow eyes, wearing a pair of faded jeans that looked like they’d once been black and at any rate were too short in the leg, a thin blue knitted jumper with a greenish pattern across the chest. He was a head taller than everyone else in the place, I suppose that might have been why I noticed him, but he was loud too, playing pool with his mates, all of whom were considerably less vocal, and so untidy in his movements. I assumed he’d had a few pints and was a bit drunk, that his mates were just lagging behind. He looked a bit gormless as well. That particular night I was sat reading one of the English novels I’d bought when a voice in front of me suddenly said:

‘Did you just move here?’

I looked up and there he was, the lanky rake.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Tourists never come here. You can’t be visiting someone either, or else you wouldn’t be sitting on your own reading. At least not every night. So all in all there’s only one possibility. Where are you from?’

‘Norway.’

‘Yeah? Are you into speed skating?’

When I shrugged rather than actually saying no, he asked if he could buy me a beer. Normally I’d have found a way to get out of it, it wasn’t my style to sit and curry favour with people I didn’t know, but I hadn’t spoken to another person in days and, anyway, I’d tired of my reading, so I reckoned it wouldn’t do me any harm, and a minute later he was sitting at my table, his big hands curled around his pint, probing me about my knowledge of Norwegian speed skaters. I’d sat in front of the television watching the skating with my dad on many a winter’s afternoon when I was a kid, but I definitely couldn’t claim to be an ardent follower. Of course, I knew the four S’s, even if I did only remember the names of two of them – Sten Stensen and Kay Stenshjemmet.

‘Odd that you remember Stensen of the four,’ he said. ‘He was the most anonymous, and a long-distance specialist, so he hardly won an all-round title after the others came through. Are you the sort who always roots for the underdog?’

‘I don’t usually root for anyone.’

‘The two others are Jan Egil Storholt and Amund Sjøbrend. Sjøbrend’s

interesting. Always underestimated. His technique was sublime, far better than the other three’s. His angles were near-perfect, no one negotiated the bends like him, and his timing was spot-on, always. He didn’t win a lot, though. How come, if his technique was as good as I say?’

He fixed me with an intense gaze.

‘No idea,’ I said. I was trying to sound as uninterested as I could in the hope he’d take the hint.

‘He was unlucky. Some people are, much more than others, you know. Strange as it seems.’

‘I see,’ I said, and downed a mouthful of the pint he’d put on the table in front of me. The beer was on him, only now it appeared I was being made to pay for it anyway.

‘All outdoor sports contain elements of unpredictability, especially winter sports. It’s a matter of chance whether it’s going to snow when you’re out there, what the visibility’s going to be like. In speed skating it’s not just the weather that’s changeable, it’s the quality of the ice too. But that’s all going to be made a thing of the past. They’re already building an indoor arena back home, it’s set to open next year. It’s going to revolutionise the sport. And then things will get interesting.’

He paused, presumably to allow me to ask in what way.

‘Actually, I think skating’s a bit boring,’ I said. ‘It’s so monotonous, the same thing all the time.’

‘Exactly!’ he said. ‘And now it’s going to be even more so. You must think of speed skating as a closed system, where the decisive factors are the ice, the track, the skates, the skaters and the laws of physics. Previously, the track and the skates were fixed elements, and the laws of physics etched in stone of course, whereas the ice and the weather were variables. Once the sport moves indoors, they too become fixed, which means all of a sudden there’s an approachable ideal – think of a speed-skating robot taking all the bends optimally, the perfect balance of speed, gravity and centrifugal forces. The only variable then will be the skater. He’s characterised by his biological unmanageableness. That makes every race a contest between the imperfection of biology and the potential perfection of the system. But what is perfection? What does optimal actually mean? Why is there a point where you can go no further? Even more interesting perhaps is that we can build machines

that can attain optimal efficiency, whereas we ourselves can’t. Speed skating illustrates, no, speed skating is that very contest between man and the forces that constrain us. And that, my friend, is neither monotonous nor boring!’

‘I get the feeling you’ve thought a lot about this,’ I said. ‘There can’t be that many people in London you can talk to about speed skating.’

‘More than you think,’ he said. ‘But not many, no.’

‘What are you doing over here, anyway?’

‘I keep myself busy. How about you?’

‘I study photography.’

‘Oh!’ he said and began immediately to talk about photography as a medium. The pictures didn’t interest him, but the technology did. It was one-way conversation; the words came so thick and fast it was impossible to get one of my own in edgeways. By the time he got to his feet a quarter of an hour later, I still knew no more about him than that his name was Hans, he was from the Netherlands, and that he had a theory about speed skating. Of course, I was slightly more enlightened about his personality and realised now that he wasn’t nearly as gormless as he looked. He was the type who liked to hold forth, to lecture, to come across as a thinker, albeit, preferably, an unorthodox one. He believed himself to be more interesting than he was – but then who didn’t? Did I know anyone who genuinely thought themselves uninteresting?

No. A person who didn’t understand much wasn’t likely to realise it either, they’d be content with what little they knew, which to them was all there was. That’s how people were wired.

I saw Hans a couple more times in the weeks before term started, we said hello and exchanged a few words, I wasn’t interested in a new lecture and he didn’t embark on any either, and then when autumn came he was gone. Not that I noticed to begin with, he was just a guy I’d spoken to now and again, and anyway I had more than enough to be getting on with in commencing my studies. So it wasn’t until I ran into him again in the same pub, it must have been mid-December by then, that I even remembered he existed.

‘How’s the photography going?’ he said. ‘Good.’

‘Are you going to let me see?’

‘See what?’

‘Your photos.’

I looked at him in surprise. He smiled faintly and hooked his thumb and index finger around his chin.

‘What would you want to see them for?’

He gave a shrug.

‘Photography interests me. Where do you keep them?’

‘Some are at the school, some at home.’

‘Are they big?’

‘No . . . no, they’re not.’

‘Why don’t you come over to my studio and bring them with you? You can have a look at what I do while you’re there.’

‘OK ,’ I said, taken aback by him going straight to the point, missing out all the steps in between like that. I was surprised, too, that he had a studio and was therefore, apparently, an artist – nothing about him until that point had suggested anything of the kind. Nevertheless, the following Friday I found myself placing a pile of selected photographs carefully in a cardboard box I then wrapped into a carrier bag – it was pouring down outside – before slipping it into my backpack, putting on my rainwear and carrying my bike down the stairs and into the street. His studio was out towards Peckham somewhere, no more than fifteen minutes or so from my place. It was dark, the rain was heavy, the traffic dense. Cars glistened in the headlights of those behind, horns were tooted impatiently, engines revved, red rear lights like lanterns in an inky asphalt sea. It was a joy to be able to slip past them all, feeling the rain as it battered my face, every sound made dull and underwaterlike by the protective hood of my anorak.

The place was quite hard to find, he’d said, so we agreed to meet in a cafe opposite the train station. He must have seen me through the window, and came out just as I was about to lock my bike.

‘Kristian,’ he said. ‘Did you bring the photos?’

I nodded, and patted my bag.

‘Shall we go, then? Or do you want a coffee first?’

‘No, let’s go. Is it far?’

‘Ten minutes.’

On the way, he told me he’d first arrived in London when he was the same age as I was now. He’d been a ‘photographer’ too, he said, and put air quotes around the word. He’d only been thinking of staying a few weeks, crashing on the sofa at a friend’s place, but the city had enchanted him – that was the expression he used – and so he’d stayed.

‘Do you still take pictures?’ I asked, wheeling the bike alongside him. I’d pulled my hood down now, so I could hear what he was saying. My hair was sopping wet already.

He shook his head.

‘What sort of pictures were they?’

‘Pictures.’

‘You mean, “pictures” pictures?’ I said, repeating his air quotes.

‘You get me, I’m glad,’ he said with a laugh.

Of course, I’d wondered why he’d asked to see my work, and what he even wanted with me – we weren’t exactly friends, far from it, we hardly knew each other – but the fact that he’d been into photography himself and had come to London at the same age as me explained a lot. No doubt there was a sense of commonality too in the fact that we were both from abroad.

We turned down a little side street that broke the near-endless line of brick buildings. Around us now, abandoned industrial premises decayed behind wire fencing, grass and shrubs peeping up wherever they could get a foothold.

‘This is it,’ he said after a couple of hundred metres, halting outside what looked to be a disused garage. A graffitied metal roll-up door; flaking, white-painted concrete. He gestured dismissively as I made to lock my bike.

‘Just bring it in with you.’

He unlocked a door round the side and switched on the strip lighting. Yes, it had been a garage, the grease pit was still there in the middle of the floor. Opposite, some stairs led up to a room where a window looked out onto the main garage space, presumably there’d been an office there once.

‘A big place you’ve got,’ I said. ‘Is it all yours?’

‘I don’t own it, if that’s what you mean. But yes, I’m the only one who uses it. Do you want a drink?’

‘Thanks, I wouldn’t mind.’

‘Have a seat,’ he said with a nod towards a cluster of furniture over by the wall – an old sofa, a coffee table, a chair, next to which three buckets were lined up catching fat drops of water from the ceiling.

While he disappeared through a door over at the other side of the former workshop, I took off my anorak and rain pants and draped them over the bike, then took the parcel of photos from my bag. I was standing there holding it out in front of me when he reappeared with two bottles and a couple of glasses he put down on the table.

‘You first or me?’ he said, pouring vodka into the glasses – at least I assumed that was what it was, the bottle had no label.

‘Makes no difference.’

He topped the drinks up with pink tonic and handed me mine. We chinked glasses. The alcohol was strong and pinched at my throat.

‘I make it myself.’

‘Seriously? It doesn’t taste like home-made.’

‘I know. Years of experience. Anyway, let me see what you’ve got.’

I sat down on the sofa and took the box out of the carrier bag, then removed the lid and the semi-transparent tissue paper.

‘Anyone would think it was a holy relic you’d brought,’ he said. ‘Are your pictures holy to you?’

‘Not at all,’ I said, and felt myself blush. Until that point, I hadn’t cared what he might say about them. Now, I was nervous all of a sudden in case he didn’t like them.

I handed him the pile.

‘Can I use your toilet?’

‘Through the door over there,’ he said with a nod.

Why should I care what he thought, I told myself as I pissed into the bowl. The actual room was as cramped as a cupboard and there was no towel, so I pulled off a length of toilet roll and used that instead. My photos were good, they weren’t going to become bad just by him saying.

They were already stacked on the table again when I went back in.

‘Not bad,’ he said.

‘You think so?’

‘Yes. You’ve got talent.’

He made it sound like an insult. I picked up the pile and started looking through them myself. I’d photographed different people at different times in exactly the same place. For instance, five – in this case Helene, my mum, Filip, Joachim and Elise – were sat in my chair in my old room, five more were naked in my bath, another five were seated at the kitchen table, and so on. All were adopting the same posture, even the clothes were all the same, so everything was identical apart from the faces. This was the series that had got me into the art school.

I straightened the photographs, folded the tissue paper around them again and returned them to their box. Hans was watching me.

‘Yes, they’re not bad . .’ he said again.

‘But?’

‘But they’re very much the expression of an idea. Once you’ve grasped the idea, there’s nothing else there. The pictures in themselves have no value. They’re connected to an idea, instead of the world. You could just as well have written a sentence: “People look different, but their lives are the same”, for example.’

‘I don’t agree. These are photos of people. If that’s not connecting with the world, then I don’t know what is.’

He smiled, but said nothing.

‘What did you want to show me?’

‘I hope you’re not offended? Come on, drink up. I’ll show you the studio in a minute.’

He replenished his empty glass. I poured some more tonic into mine. The situation had become awkward, but he didn’t seem to mind, he just sat there on the sofa looking like he was absorbed in his own thoughts. His square chin jutted slightly, making him look vaguely like a fish, it was what gave him that gormless look of his, I supposed, and I found myself wondering why, what it was that made the unconscious mind connect a certain kind of jaw with a certain kind of intelligence. Then I started thinking about what kind of an artist he might be. Up until then I’d seen no sign of anything in the way of visual art – nothing on the walls, neither of the workshop space nor the toilet. The place was just green-painted floor, black walls, bare concrete. Maybe he was an ‘artist’?

The thought made me smile, which returned him from his thoughts with a slight start. He took a good swallow of his drink, placed a hand on each knee and fixed me once again as he leaned forward.

‘We need ideas, don’t get me wrong. But even ideas have got to have some form of physical expression, don’t you agree? Nothing can exist beyond the physical realm. Your photographs are physical objects. You can hold them in your hands. The people you photographed, they’re physical beings. Their transformation, from human being to image, is a physical process. Light photons are physical, they have weight.’

‘But not ideas.’

‘Oh, but yes! They must exist somewhere, otherwise they couldn’t exist to us at all. That’s the point! Everything we know and think has to be physically grounded somewhere. Be it Marxism or the belief in eternal life, it has to exist somewhere, in some physical form.’

‘In the brain, you mean?’

‘For example. Thoughts, ideas, conceptions are all encoded in neurons.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Is it obvious? Well, maybe it is. Only I don’t see any of that in your pictures. Those photographs separate everything into different compartments. Photography here, subject here, idea here. It’s all right that they’re not changing the conversation, because you’re only starting out, but you need to think about why they’re not changing the conversation. If you don’t, you might as well start taking photos for your local estate agent. Don’t you agree?’

I didn’t know what to say. All sorts of feelings were tearing around inside me, and none was of the good kind.

‘Of course you don’t agree!’ he said, and let out a laugh. ‘You want to defend your work, as fiercely as you can. But it’s not just you. It’s our entire image culture – all it is is perpetuation, preservation of the same thing.’

‘Which is what?’

‘A space! A conceptual space! Haven’t you ever thought about it? All photographs possess a certain perspective, which someone, the photographer, has selected. So what you’re seeing, in the main, is intention. The photographer’s intention is what you see, and the photograph is

an image of that intention. How do you get rid of the intention? As a photographer you need to think about that. Yes?’

‘I’d like to have seen your own photographs.’

He laughed again. Apparently, this was hilarious.

‘My photographs were like yours! Of course they were! But forget about that, I’ll show you what I do now.’

He stood up and I followed him into a room out back. Strip lighting flickered a few times, ripping the darkness and allowing glimpses of a room crammed with stuff from floor to ceiling, until the place was flooded with light and details could emerge. The first thing I noticed, unavoidably, was a line of mannequins that were stood up against the back wall with their arms outstretched. They looked like they were waiting to receive infants. The longer walls were lined with shelving. Here was a collection of stuffed fauna, there various rocks and stones, and big seashells too. Further along, a number of animal skulls. Elsewhere, heaps of dried reeds, piles of twigs, ferns. There were two television sets, one whose casing had been removed to reveal the insides, and I counted three computers. A lathe occupied the space underneath the window, while a metal bench ran underneath the shelves along one wall – on it were soldering irons, odds and ends of wiring, and items of electronic equipment. Beside the mannequins, a number of planks were leaned up against the wall, tools hung too, like in a garage, and as well as tubes of oil paints I saw several large tins of what looked to be regular decorating paint.

But there was nothing he appeared to have produced. No pictures, no sculptures.

The rain lashed against the windowpane, which threw back a reflection of the room and the two of us in it.

Hans went over to a wooden crate, maybe two by two metres, that stood on top of a table.

‘This is what I call my Rat Run.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a labyrinth. Come and have a look.’

I stepped closer. The crate was open. Inside, a number of thin partitions indeed appeared to form a labyrinth.

Then, he took what looked to be a stuffed rat from one of the shelves

and put it down inside the labyrinth at one end, before flicking a switch on the side of the crate. A second later, the rat scuttled cautiously forward through one of the narrow corridors. Reaching the end, it stopped with a bump, scuttled back, and tried the next available passage.

It was unsettling. The rat was lifelike, it looked almost to be thinking too. I had to keep telling myself it wasn’t alive.

But apart from that, what was the point of it?

It certainly had nothing to do with art.

Every time it came to a dead end, it went all the way back and started again, remembering where it had already been, gradually working its way further and further inside the labyrinth.

When eventually it found its way out, it pressed its nose against a switch. A light flashed and a bell rang.

Hans laughed.

‘I can’t get tired of it,’ he said. ‘But tell me, what do you think?’

‘Not bad,’ I said. ‘You’ve got talent.’

‘Oh, come on!’ he almost shouted. ‘You’re not still moping about that, are you? Tell me the truth, for fuck’s sake!’

‘Which would be what?’

‘You’re deeply impressed, fascinated, and a bit scared!’

He flicked the switch into the off position, picked up the rat and returned it to the shelf, putting it down between a cat and a badger.

‘What’s it made of?’ I said.

‘It’s not made of anything. It is a rat. Stuffed, of course.’

‘Sorry, but who cares?’

He looked at me astonished.

‘Is it a work of art?’ I said.

He shook his head and stared at the floor a moment, as if he couldn’t believe I could ask such a stupid question.

Instead of answering me, he lifted his head, looked me in the eye and put a hand on my shoulder, the way a father might have done when sending his son to war.

‘Let’s have a drink,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll show you my turtles.’

‘You’ve got turtles?’

‘I have indeed. What’s more, I made them myself.’

Back in the main garage space he filled our glasses again.

‘Do you know anything about computers?’ he said.

‘No, nothing. Do you?’

‘Do they interest you? Are you curious about them?’

‘Why should I be?’

‘No, why indeed?’ he replied with sarcasm. His vodka was powerful stuff, it had already smoothed away some of the edges inside me, freeing me up to some extent, but also narrowing my outlook in a way. My eyes followed him as he crossed the floor and went towards the back room again, and for some reason I found myself thinking about my sister, Liv. Nothing deep, or even pertinent, just something I’d seen once and now remembered – she’d gone off to school one day with a puppy inside her coat, and it was that image I suddenly recalled, one body, two faces, hers and the dog’s – yet it was enough for my eyes to not really be seeing as they followed Hans’s movements. Or rather, my eyes saw him, but my thoughts were detached from them, so what I saw almost didn’t seem to be happening at all. A moment later, he was standing in the middle of the room holding something heavy in his hands, which he then put down.

Was it a turtle?

He went away again, and came back with another. Then another. He beckoned me closer.

‘What’s this?’ I said.

‘These are my home-made turtles.’

He kneeled and tipped up the rear of one of them and put his hand in under the shell. He returned it to the floor, and with a hum the turtle began to move forwards. He did the same with the other two, then got to his feet beaming a wide smile. The first turtle reached the grease pit, where it stopped and turned, then continued along the edge. The second one was headed towards the wall, but halted before bumping into it, then likewise spun round to carry on in a different direction.

‘Are they a kind of robot?’

‘Call them what you like. But now look.’

He killed the ceiling lights and we stood in near-darkness for a few seconds before he switched on a torch. He shone it up into his face, mwahahaha! he said and grinned at me like a demon, then turned the beam to the floor.

‘Come on now, my little turtles,’ he said. ‘Come to Daddy.’ And, weirdly, that’s what they did. Slowly, all three oriented themselves towards the light, and when he moved the beam, they followed.

‘It does look like they’re alive,’ I said.

‘I know! Now look.’

He shone his torch directly on a turtle and immediately it backed away. He laughed loudly. Switching the lights back on, he then went and sat down while the three turtles trundled slowly around the room like ancient trilobites.

‘What do you say now?’ he said. ‘Still not interested in computers?’

‘Not in the slightest,’ I said.

He smiled.

‘Nice little playthings. I can’t say I get why you’re wasting your time on them, though.’

‘The Romans were familiar with the steam engine. But they just used it as a toy. They couldn’t think of any other purpose for it.’

‘So you’re saying these turtles can be put to better use than just amusement? What would that be, then?’

‘This lack of imagination’s starting to bring me down. Let’s go back to some drinking. A couple more and I’ll be as stupid as you!’

When I got home, well drunk, I discovered I’d forgotten to switch my record player off, the LP I’d been listening to was still spinning on the turntable, the stylus clicking endlessly in the run-out groove. I lifted the arm, put the stylus down at the start and turned the volume up. First and Last and Always, I could listen to it for the rest of my life without ever getting tired of it. I ate a couple of slices of bread, gulped some water, made my bed up, turned the record over, switched off the lights and lay down. I liked falling asleep to music, the way my thoughts melted into the sonic darkness from which, before long, they could no longer be separated. I didn’t care about Hans’s criticism. He couldn’t go down in my estimation, for the simple reason that I hadn’t held him in any esteem to begin with. Besides, it wasn’t hard to parry what he’d said about my pictures. He was a nobody. That stupid rat of his, what was that all about? A labyrinth with hidden tracks, something anyone with even the slightest bit of technical know-how could have rigged up.

Nevertheless, what I’d seen at the garage left an impression on me and kept reappearing in my mind during the weeks that followed. I wasn’t consciously returning to it, somehow it just wouldn’t let go of me, as though my subconscious knew something my conscious mind did not, and now, in annoyance, was trying to make it understand. But the conscious and unconscious minds don’t operate on the same wavelength, they’re two different systems, mutually impenetrable. So it stopped there, at images from a disused garage. Hans, seated on the sofa in front of me, my photographs in a pile on the coffee table, standing in the back room at his Rat Run, the three scuttling turtles on the floor of the garage space. These images came with a certain mood, December gloom and pouring rain, a glare of strip lights, water dripping into plastic buckets, stuffed animals, mannequins and computers. What kind of a mood was it? It was a sense of something being awry, crossthreaded. But none of this was manifest to me in the form of thoughts, it was all just a feeling – vague and unclear, all of it. That wasn’t the case, though, when it came to what he’d said about my photos and what, in his opinion, they were lacking, the thrust to ‘change the conversation’. This was something I thought about actively. And what he’d said about perspective, about the photographer’s intention being more conspicuous almost than the subject itself, was suddenly at the forefront of my mind whenever I considered visual material. It was distorting my view – this was now all I could see. As such, his problem became mine. But only I was tormented by it; he was no longer a photographer.

The Christmas break began early, I had ten days on my own in my bedsit before I was due to fly home, those of my fellow students I hung around with had already left town, and so I thought about giving Hans a ring. He’d given me his number, which I took to be a fairly unambiguous sign that he wanted us to stay in touch. But that was his initiative. As for myself, I was in two minds, if not to say reluctant. Still, I phoned him from the pub one night after a few pints, the beer possibly clouding my judgement. Not that I went around with his number on me. No, I knew it off by heart – I could remember any number, not only his. But he didn’t answer, which, when I woke up the next day, I was relieved about.

And then I went home for Christmas. My parents picked me up at Fornebu, were waiting in the arrivals hall when I came through customs with my suitcase. So happy they were to see me! All hugs and beaming faces, the moist eyes of my mother.

‘Anyone would think I’d been away twenty years,’ I said. ‘In China or somewhere.’

Dad resolutely took my case, while Mum, as easily moved as she was domineering, as befuddled as she was stubborn, began with all her questions even before we’d got to the car. It was new, I saw when we halted beside it. No surprise there. Dad liked to have a new one every two years.

‘How come you didn’t say you’d got a new car?’ I said anyway.

‘You’ve not exactly been phoning . . .’ Dad said with a smile.

It was how he always criticised – with a smile and a pleasant tone of voice. Only people who knew him well were aware that the main thing was what he said, not the way he said it.

The sky was black and full of stars as we drove north, the landscape covered with snow. I was amazed at how empty it was. In London there were buildings everywhere, mile upon mile in every direction, and people wherever you looked. I hadn’t thought about it much while I’d been there, but now, as we drove through the wide-open land, where houses could be kilometres apart, it struck me forcefully. It felt impoverished. London was impoverished, it was ugly and run-down, and full of human misery, but the city was rich in people and occurrences. Here was as dead as the grave.

The heater whirred. The radio gave out cosy, low-voiced chat. My parents sat motionless in comfortable silence on the front seats. I leaned my head against the window and slept, waking only as we passed through the gate and climbed the hill to the house. The snow was thicker here. Dad had cleared a gleaming lane with the tractor’s snow blade.

I went upstairs and unpacked. My room was good and warm; Mum had obviously turned the radiator on for me that morning, and likely hoovered as well.

I put my boxes of photos on the desk. I’d have plenty of time to myself in the next few days, so I was planning to work on the book I

wanted to put together. I hung my shirts up in the wardrobe, put the rest of my clothes in a drawer, then stood at the window and stared out. In the daytime you could see for miles; now, everything was blacked out, apart from the outbuildings, which were all lit up. The outdoor lamps gave the snow beneath them a wash of yellow. A sick colour in the night-time, I’d always thought.

The room felt like a skin I’d sloughed. A snake could surely feel no less for its former skin than I did for my old room.

‘Kristian?’ my mother called up the stairs. ‘Coffee and cake!’

She’d set the table, with a white tablecloth, the good china and cutlery, and lit the advent candle. A fire crackled in the fireplace.

‘I always forget you’re so traditional,’ I said. ‘How do you reconcile that with being such a radical, exactly?’

‘There’s no conflict between wanting things to be cosy and having a sense of justice,’ she said.

‘How’s the school going, anyway?’ Dad said. ‘Are you liking it?’

‘I am, yes. There’s a lot to do. A lot of new things to learn.’

‘Are you going to show us some of your work? Have you brought anything?’

‘I have, as it happens. I’ll bring it down later on.’

‘Have you made any friends over there yet?’ Mum asked.

She used the Danish yet, rather than the Norwegian – endnu, instead of ennå. Although she’d lived in Norway more than thirty years, her Norwegian was still tinged with Danish words, intonations and pronunciations. For the same reason, my friends had never really taken her seriously. Mothers had to speak the mother tongue; if not, they couldn’t be proper mums, they must have felt.

‘A few, yes. Those on the course, and the odd one or two besides.’

They’d asked if they could come over and see me, they loved to travel, but I’d said no, I needed to settle in a bit more first. I’d nothing against them, in fact I liked them well enough. But if people were houses and could see each other through the windows, and communicate by opening their doors to give out sounds, our own houses were facing each other and wide open at the front, meaning we could tramp in and out of each other’s lives at will whenever we were together. I didn’t care for that.

When my maternal grandmother died, Mum said that part of the grief was in losing a witness, someone who’d known her all her life and who knew who she was. I was only fifteen at the time, but I remember feeling a reaction, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want others to witness the things they went around saying and doing. And who felt like having their ten or twenty-year-old self thrown back at them the rest of their lives?

‘How have things been here? Anything new?’ I said, and popped a gingerbread biscuit into my mouth. It was baked in the shape of a pig.

‘I wouldn’t say so, not really,’ Mum said. ‘We’ve booked a trip to Jerusalem in February.’

‘Jerusalem?’

‘Yes. I’ve always wanted to go there. It is one of the most ancient cities in the world.’

‘How about you?’ I said to Dad with a smile. The corners of his eyes creased as he smiled back, his head big and unwieldy-looking.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said.

‘The hotel we’re staying at is where the Swedish emigrants Selma Lagerlöf wrote about lived in that colony,’ said Mum. ‘Have you read it? Jerusalem?’

I shook my head.

‘It’s over there on the shelf, if you get the urge.’

‘Thanks, maybe I will.’

‘We’ll fetch the tree tomorrow,’ Dad said.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Will Helene and Liv be coming?’

‘Helene is. We’re hoping for Liv,’ Mum replied.

She filled my cup with coffee from the jug, which she held aloft, then raised slightly as she tipped, allowing the dark liquid to descend in a plume through the air before putting it down again on the table. The red gemstone of her ring gleamed in the light, as did, when I looked up at her, the matching one she wore around her neck.

‘Always good coffee here,’ I said.

She smiled at me. It was as if she had two different ages. One young, in her eyes. Another, older, in the rest of her face.

‘You must taste the smultringer, too. I made them this morning.’

‘I’d rather wait until Christmas Eve, if that’s all right.’

‘Oh, I almost forgot,’ she said. ‘Vidar rang. I said you’d ring him back once you got home.’

‘What if I don’t want to?’

‘Vidar’s a good man,’ Dad put in.

‘What if he is?’ I said. ‘I don’t need to look up every good man I know, just because I’m home.’

‘You can do as you like,’ Mum said. ‘Only don’t say I didn’t tell you!’

It wasn’t until I went back upstairs that I remembered that Vidar had started at NTNU, the science and technology university in Trondheim, and knew about computers. I wouldn’t have minded a beer, now I thought about it. The freezing cold air would be good, too.

I kneeled down in front of the old crates I kept my records in and started looking through them. Now I felt at home. I’d spent long hours arranging them in the perfect order so that each one gave something to the next. I could choose between two ways of approaching any selection. First, there was what I called flow , where each album had something in common with the next, added something new and pointed ahead to the next after that, meaning that after a while you suddenly found yourself somewhere else entirely in relation to your starting point. For instance, you could follow pathways leading from Bowie’s Lodger and Talking Heads’ Remain in Light , both of which were collaborations with Brian Eno and featured Adrian Belew on guitar, moving via Eno to Jon Hassel, who played on one of Eno’s ambient albums, then on to David Sylvian, on whose Brilliant Trees Hassel played trumpet. From there, you could then pick up on Mick Karn, for example, progressing onwards to Bauhaus, since Karn formed his band Dalis Car with Peter Murphy, or you could follow Karn in a different direction and end up at Ultravox, New Order, PiL, Can and Holger Czukay. Of course, from Bowie and Byrne you could choose to follow Belew instead of Eno, in which case you naturally ended up somewhere different altogether, for instance at Shriekback, XTC or the Police. If you didn’t fancy flowing like that, you could do the opposite and go for contrast in allowing very different records to meet. This was the second option, and the more demanding, for the albums selected still had to complement each other in some way – the radical combination still had to feel right, natural even. Regardless of

which method you chose, the aim was to constantly breathe new life into the collection, to make it explode with meaning. And it could actually be done, to bump up the standard of even a mediocre record collection containing a number of poor albums. It was all a matter of curation, of selecting the playing order. I’d become rather adept at it. And as a photographer I didn’t really come good until I understood how to exploit those same ideas in terms of my pictures too. The principles were the same – pictures could flow, or they could clash surprisingly.

I paused. Seventeen Seconds came after Revolver, which was all wrong, even if I did remember the thought behind it – the Cure weren’t nearly as gloomy and industrial as was normally held, there was a pop group hidden away in their experimental sound, whereas in the case of the Beatles, the experimentalism was folded into the pop, this being abundantly clear in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ – and it was just as incongruous that what followed was Hüsker Dü’s Zen Arcade. These were glaring errors. What had I been thinking?

Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I flipped through in search of others. The problem, of course, was that I couldn’t remove an album without it leaving a hole that would then have to be filled. Ideally, I’d be looking for a straight swap.

I hesitated at Lodger. It could possibly slot in before Seventeen Seconds, but definitely not after. Well, not even before, once I started thinking about it. I moved on. How about NEU !? No, that would shut things down, not open them up.

But if I went for flow instead?

That would involve massive upheaval and hours of work. But why not? It was Christmas, a succession of long and otherwise uneventful days.

I’d have to give Vidar a ring before it got too late. At the same time, it was hard to tear myself away from my collection like that when now I’d discovered something that so obviously upset the balance.

What about simply having Faith and Pornography following on, intensifying the depressive aspect, and then proceed to Bauhaus? Then the Birthday Party after that? And then, Hüsker Dü could come in! The Birthday Party were both bleak and noisy, they’d be the perfect transition

from Bauhaus to Hüsker Dü. A bit like the missing link between humans and the apes.

With the idea now in my head, I got to my feet and went downstairs to phone Vidar. He must have been sitting waiting for it to ring, because he answered straight away. We agreed to meet at the Station in half an hour. I went back upstairs and took my old coat from the wardrobe, found one of Dad’s scarves on the peg in the hall, and put my shoes on.

‘I’m going out,’ I called.

‘All right,’ Mum called back.

The cold hit me as soon as I opened the door. The snow creaked underfoot as I went down the drive to the road. The sky was clear and starry. I wanted my photographs to be like this: cold and crisp, vivid sparkles of light that could never be grasped, only seen.

Conscientiously, my eyes scanned my surroundings as I followed the combined pedestrian and cycle path, for my eye was, if not my weapon, my instrument, and like any other instrument it was essential it be kept in good working order.

The path had been diligently cleared, even though hardly anyone ever used it; the marks left by the snow blade could still be seen. A low bank of snow separated it from the road, muffling the sound of the occasional passing car. I’d divided photographers into two schools: those who photographed the world the way it was, and those who sought to magnify what was in it. Made it monumental, sculpting with light, drawing forth the dramatic in objects, landscapes and people. I’d wavered a bit, but was now increasingly convinced that my future lay in the monumental. Magnifying the world, not dissolving it. For instance, seen in isolation, one of the light poles that lined the road here could take on a strikingly imposing appearance, its gleaming metal perhaps coated with ice, the light it shed suspended as if frozen in the darkness. What would be the point in underlining ordinariness, everyday utility? My series of different people in the same settings leaned in the same direction, the information it conveyed wasn’t gathered, cloaklike, around the subject, it was dissipated, and thereby weakened, but it was that very idea that made the images come across so powerfully and unified them as a series. The school’s admission committee had

seen that. It didn’t matter in the slightest that the Dutch quasi-artist hadn’t.

When I got to the Station, the cereal farmer’s son was already sat waiting. He lit up when he saw me, got to his feet and gave me a hug, even let out what sounded like a laugh.

‘Great to see you,’ he said.

‘Likewise,’ I said, unwinding my scarf and stuffing it into the sleeve of my coat, which I then slung over the back of a chair. ‘How’s things, all right?’

‘Good, thanks. Came back yesterday. When did you arrive?’

‘Just got here, basically. I need a beer.’

The bar, which had opened in the old railway station building, was about half full. I looked around as the bartender poured my pint. Fortunately, there weren’t that many I knew. Some I recognised from my old gymnasium school, then were was a group Helene used to hang around with. At the table behind theirs, three girls were sitting; one, short and pudgy, though with delicate, rather attractive features, met my gaze, and when I sat down next to Vidar and cast another glance in her direction just to check, she did it again. In both cases, she made sure her mates didn’t notice, which told me she wouldn’t be averse to leaving them on their own.

‘How’s London?’ Vidar said with his usual wide-open expression.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘How’s Trondheim?’

‘Good, yes.’

She was maybe four or five years older than me.

‘Cheers,’ he said.

‘Cheers,’ I said.

We chatted a while about what we’d been up to since the last time we saw each other, while around us people kept trickling in. It turned out he’d moved in with a girl up there, Wenche, her name was, and he produced his wallet to show me a photo of her. A big, round, matronly face, narrow lips, a commanding look in her eyes. She’d take care of him all right, I thought with a smile, and congratulated him on his catch. He smiled at me proudly as he put it back.

‘I met this weird guy in London and was wondering,’ I said. ‘He’s some kind of artist, works with computers and stuff. He showed me

this labyrinth he’d made, with a rat in it. Would that be something you’ve heard about?’

‘A physical labyrinth?’

‘Yes, in a wooden crate. I can draw it for you, if you like.’

I got my notebook out and made a quick sketch.

‘That looks like Claude Shannon’s maze.’

‘Who’s he?’

‘A computer pioneer. One of the scientists who laid the foundations for digital computers in the thirties and forties. He was actually an electrical engineer for a telephone company. Bell, if you’ve heard of them?’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, he constructed something exactly like that. Shannon’s rat, it’s usually called. He cobbled it together at home using telephone technology, if that’s the word.’

‘What was the point of it?’

‘The point was that the rat possessed memory. It could remember things, and learn from experience. So whenever it went the wrong way, it would go back and try a different route. What he did there was massively important for what’s happening today.’

‘So why would anyone want to do it again now?’

‘No idea. Anyone could, it wouldn’t take much.’

‘Could you?’

He laughed.

‘Of course I could. The principle’s really simple.’

‘He showed me these little robots too, that could steer their way around obstacles and could follow a beam of light.’

‘They’re from around the same time. Walter’s turtles.’

‘So they’re a thing, that people know about?’

‘Oh yes.’

‘So this guy I met is basically just copying what someone else invented decades ago?’

‘Yes. It’s all classic stuff.’

I could tell that Vidar was pleased with himself at being able to impress me a bit. It didn’t happen often, he was very much the quiet, unassuming type, and I don’t suppose I’d ever shown that much interest in anything he was good at. It probably went back to when we

were kids together. He’d always been so gullible, so easy to deceive – I remember once having told him he’d get big muscles from pushing the soapbox car we played with for a while, especially if it was made heavier by me sitting in it, and so he’d kept pushing me up the hill while I sat there like a king. How old had we been then? Six, maybe, or seven. He believed anything I said. I told him I dreamt the next episode of an ongoing dream every night, and he believed me and would listen avidly as I recounted it to him on the way to school every morning. When we were a bit older, I sent him to the shop one day with a note I’d written in his dad’s name saying he was allowed to buy cigarettes for him, and so great was the sway I held over him that he didn’t even snitch on me when he got caught. In gymnas, I’d get him to lend me money he’d never see again – all I had to do was keep saying I’d pay him back next week, until at last he decided to forget about it, always shying away from any conflict. Sometimes, of course, I did pay him back, and occasionally I’d let him come with me to a party he otherwise wouldn’t have got into, so there was at least a measure of balance in our relationship.

The pudgy girl was standing at the bar.

‘Fancy another?’ I said to Vidar, and drained my pint.

‘I wouldn’t say no,’ he said.

I went up and stood next to her. She had this little black handbag that dangled from her shoulder, and rummaged around in it, the bartender stepping away a moment to take another order. There were two glasses of red on the counter. She found her money and without looking at me held out a note for him. He took it and handed her the change, which she simply let drop into her bag, and then when she picked up the two glasses and turned to go back to her table, she just couldn’t resist, and looked up at me.

Oh my days. Her eyes were dark with longing and a serious intent, it was obvious she meant it. She was looking for adventure. If she wasn’t, she’d never have held my gaze those extra three seconds.

Vidar’s guileless, fleshy face lit up as I put his pint down on the table. He was the salt of the earth. But how exciting was that? It never took him anywhere, just kept him away from everything that could possibly ignite into something interesting. There was no edge to him, so he never really engaged with anyone. As such, you could say niceness

was an egotistical quality, it never lit a spark in the world, and was sufficient unto itself.

‘Where’s Wenche now, then?’ I asked. ‘Not here, I take it?’

‘No, she’s spending Christmas with her family. They live in Kolvereid.’

‘Kolvereid?’

‘North Trøndelag.’

‘She’s a Trønder, then?’

‘That’s right.’

‘How do you tackle that? The dialect, I mean. Isn’t it a bit of a turn-off?’

‘Not at all,’ he said, and looked down at his feet.

‘You’re not telling me you think it’s sexy?’

He looked up again with a smile.

‘You must be in love,’ I said, and laughed.

We sat and chatted a while, kept a conversation going rather than saying nothing at all – he even asked if we’d put the tree up yet at ours. I went on the vodka, just to inject some life into things, which worked up to a certain point: time stopped flowing and instead started shifting sequentially, while the room we were in, soft human bodies among hard surfaces, the sheeny wall behind the bar, with its mirrors and bottles and gleaming lights, became cut off in its connections to the world outside, and was eventually all there was. It was as if the bar and everyone in it were floating in space. The girl appeared from out of the toilets. I got up and blocked her path. We stood there for a long while, chatting in the middle of the room, until at some point we went and sat down at a table and carried on. I’d forgotten all about Vidar until someone touched my shoulder and I turned to see him standing there in full winter garb, hat, scarf and gloves, saying he was off home now and thanks for a good night out.

‘Say hello to Stina before you go,’ I said. ‘Stina, this is my good friend, Vidar.’

‘Hi, Vidar,’ she said. ‘Haven’t see you for ages!’

‘You two know each other?’

‘I’m friends with Maria. How’s she doing, anyway? Is she home?’

‘She is, yes,’ said Vidar.

‘Then say hello from me!’

‘I will,’ he said, and left.

I wasn’t that keen on her knowing Vidar’s sister, it connected her to my world in a way I wasn’t sure I wanted, but in the broader scope I didn’t suppose it mattered that much. Nor, in fact, in the narrower scope, where she and I were now, sitting close together as I ran my hand up and down her thigh under the table. We’d entered the zone where no error could be made – whatever either of us did now it simply fed into our mutual lust.

She was eager, and fast in everything. Speed-talking, a constant flutter of eyelids, she seemed only to want to follow her impulses, even the oddest of them, like when, before we’d even kissed, she suddenly buried her nose into my armpit in an urge to discover my smell. She was five years older than me, as I’d guessed, had lived here all her life, qualified as a nurse from the Høyskole in Elverum, and was now working in the home care services. She said she’d seen me before, quite a few times, and had always liked what she saw. I told her I liked what I was seeing too, and leaned across to kiss her. She responded greedily, curled her hand around my neck, and smoothed my cheek when eventually I drew away.

‘Shall we go?’ I said softly, stroking her thigh again.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I just need to tell the others.’

I looked away as she went over to her mates, drained my vodka, which the melted ice cubes had watered down considerably, and then scanned the other tables to see if any other girls had come in.

‘They asked if I’d started cradle-snatching,’ she said as we went towards the door.

‘What did you tell them?’

‘I said you were mature for your age.’

She laughed. Then, noticing that I didn’t, she squeezed my hand.

‘Had you going there, didn’t I?’ she said. ‘Only joking.’

I felt my excitement drain away. It didn’t matter that she hadn’t meant anything by it.

We went down the steps outside. The street lamps yellowed the snow.

‘Is there something wrong?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Why, should there be?’

She led me into the entrance of an adjacent building, then lifted her face to look up at me. An air vent hummed in the wall behind her.

‘Kiss me.’

Hesitantly, I did.

She opened her eyes.

‘Properly.’

She held me tight and pressed her body against mine. This time we kissed the way she wanted. She was intense.

‘Where do you live?’ I said.

‘Nordåsen.’

‘Shall we go back to yours?’

‘Can’t we go to yours instead?’

‘You must be joking! I’m staying with my parents, I told you. I can’t go bringing women home with me. We’ll go to yours. It’s not that far.’

‘Einar’s there.’

‘Who’s Einar?’

‘My son.’

‘You’ve got a son?’

‘He’s two and a half. My mum’s babysitting for me while I’m out.’

‘She doesn’t live there as well, does she?’

‘No! No, she doesn’t.’

‘And she’s not going to be staying the night?’

‘No, she’ll go home again once I get in.’

‘Then what’s the problem? I’ll make sure I’m gone before he wakes up. Come on.’

She pondered a moment, then nodded.

There were still people hanging around outside the Station, the odd car still cruising up and down the two streets that made up the centre of town, music thudding dully from their stereos. She took my hand and kept looking up at me. The flat was in one of the blocks at the top of the hill. Her frosty breath puffed in front of her face as she opened the entrance door in a glare of outdoor lighting. The building was nearly as cold inside as out. She took off her hat in the lift and glanced at herself in the mirror before gripping my coat and pulling me towards her.

We stepped out onto the sixth-floor landing and she gestured to

indicate her door. Inside, a kid’s sledge cluttered the cramped hallway; coats bulged from the pegs.

I was already wishing I hadn’t gone with her.

‘Hi, Mum. I’ve brought someone home with me,’ she called out.

The mother had thin, frizzy hair and from the bewildered look on her face when her daughter opened the living-room door and she stared at first her, then me, she must have been asleep where she sat on the sofa.

‘This is Kristian,’ Stina said.

‘Hello there,’ I said, smiling as best I could.

There was an empty bottle of wine on the coffee table, another half full next to it. A big ashtray was overflowing with cigarette ends – Prince Mild, if the packet was anything to go by.

Stina removed the bottles and took them out into the kitchen.

‘What time did he fall asleep?’ she said as she went.

‘Eight,’ the mother said, teetering a moment on her feet before making towards the door. I stepped aside to let her past. She didn’t even bother looking at me. Stina followed her into the hall. I went over to the window, and heard their low voices. A big hideous poster covered the wall above the sofa – a kitten peering up out of a basket. The sofa itself was black imitation leather, while the small coffee table in front of it was on castors. An obtrusive TV cabinet took up the opposite wall.

The front door clicked shut, and Stina came back in. She smiled at me, turned the big light off, fetched a fat candle from the kitchen, lit it.

‘Do you want to see Einar?’ she said. ‘His bedroom’s in there.’

‘No, it’s all right.’

She looked at me quizzically.

‘I’ve seen sleeping kids before.’

It wasn’t just the cheap and tacky furnishings, it was the inhospitable feel of the place.

She stepped up and put her arms around me, and reached to kiss me. Her mouth was wet, her tongue as eager as a dog’s.

‘Let’s go to bed,’ she said softly. ‘I want you.’

I pulled away.

‘Actually, I think I’d better go.’

‘Go?’

‘It doesn’t feel right, that’s all. Nothing personal.’

I went out into the hall. She stood in the doorway and watched me put my shoes back on. I straightened up and took my coat from the peg, and she stepped up close again.

‘Come to bed with me,’ she whispered. ‘I want to be naked with you.’

‘No, thanks,’ I said, turned, and opened the door with one hand as I threw my scarf around my neck with the other. Outside again, I waited a few minutes to make sure I wasn’t going to bump into her mother. The stars shuddered in their firmament. I gauged the temperature to be around minus fifteen, the freezing air assailed my cheeks, and as I walked home, down the hill, through the town centre, already emptier now, and onwards from there, my skin became more and more numb, the muscles of my face stiffened and lethargic. The long walk nullified the effects of the alcohol and by the time I let myself in I was stone-cold sober. For good measure, I gulped down a couple of glasses of water before going upstairs to bed.

The next morning, Mum had left the breakfast things out for me. She came into the kitchen and sat down while I was still eating.

‘Did you have a nice time last night?’ she said.

Koselig was the word she used. It was too Norwegian to sound right coming from her.

‘I did, yes,’ I said. ‘It was good. I was with Vidar.’

‘How’s he doing?’

‘He’s doing fine. He’s moved in with a girl up there.’

‘Oh, really?’

I nodded and took my time sipping my coffee in the hope she’d take the hint and realise I couldn’t be bothered talking about it.

After breakfast I went up and got my photos to show her. Dad was the one who’d asked, but she was more likely to understand what it was I was trying to do.

I handed them to her one by one and watched her expression as she studied them. Now and then, I directed her attention to what I considered to be an important detail, but apart from that I allowed her to look at them in her own time.

‘These are fantastic, Kristian,’ she said eventually.

‘It’s a brand-new series,’ I said. ‘Hardly anyone’s seen them yet. Do you like them, really?’

‘I do, really. I think they’re outstanding.’

She smiled at me and I took the photos back upstairs with me to my room, where I sat looking at them, trying to gauge what it was that she’d seen in them.

The series explored the idea of the vanishing point. It was all converging diagonals – city streets, tree-lined driveways leading up to country houses, forest paths, rivers, fences, stone walls. High on contrast, low on detail. I’d called it Vertigo

I imagined the Dutchman casting a cursory eye, tossing them back onto the table:

‘It’s all been done a thousand times before. Is this the best you can come up with?’

Then me, back to the wall already:

‘But that’s where you’re wrong. As a series, this is nothing but original. It’s sameness in difference. Patterns that are found everywhere, without our seeing them. But I see them. It’s my job. To see the unfamiliar in the familiar, and vice versa.’

‘Words, words, words! The truth is you haven’t an iota of talent. You’re clever on the technical side, but who cares about that?’

‘You can talk, you and your stupid rat.’

Downstairs the doorbell rang. From the voices that followed I could hear it was Helene and Ane. I put the photos back in their box and went down to say hello. Helene was already seated, with Ane snuggled up to her, meaning we didn’t have to go through the hugging routine.

‘Here he is,’ Helene said. ‘Our Londoner returned. How are you doing?’

‘Good,’ I said. ‘You?’

She smiled and winked.

‘Oh, I’m always good, as you know.’

‘How about you, Ane?’ I said.

‘What?’ she said.

I sensed she was a bit unsure of me.

‘He’s asking if you’re all right,’ Helene said.

Ane nodded. Her upper teeth stuck out, which along with her glasses gave her a rather goofy appearance. It didn’t matter now, but in a few years it would.

She let go of her mother, got up off the sofa and slipped past me to go into the kitchen where her grandmother was.

‘She’s grown,’ I said. ‘How old is she now?’

‘Kristian,’ Helene replied with ill-concealed scorn.

‘I know approximately, just not exactly. No harm in asking, is there?’

‘She’ll be nine in April. Anyway, what have you got her?’

I stared at her, confused for a second.

‘For Christmas?’

‘For Christmas, yes. You’re not going tell me you haven’t bought her anything?’

‘No, of course I’ve bought her something.’

‘What, then?’

‘You’ll see tomorrow. How’s Rickard doing? Haven’t you brought him with you?’

‘He’s working today.’

‘I see.’

The shopping centre was open and it was still early, so there was no need to panic yet.

Mum came in with Ane following closely behind her. She handed Helene a cup of coffee and put her own down on the table.

‘Do you want a cup, Kristian?’

‘No, thanks. Did you get some pop, Ane? Lucky you. What flavour is it?’

She looked at me without answering as she sucked on her straw, determined, so it seemed, to make things hard going for me.

Helene, thickset and sturdy, ruffled the girl’s hair. She was the one who resembled Dad the most, physically as well as in mind. The same calmness, the same build, only with womanly curves. The same blue eyes, too. She’d never had ambition of any sort, other than to start her own family. She’d wanted lots of kids, but had only the one and couldn’t have any more. Not even that had rattled her, at least not as far as I knew. Liv, four years younger, was her opposite in just about everything. She’d inherited Mum’s nervous energy, though not her

willpower, which meant she fluttered all over the place. I’d never had much to do with either of them. Liv had been eight when I was born, Helene twelve, so they’d been more like a pair of aunts to me.

Aunt Brown and Aunt Electric Blue.

Through the window I saw Dad come over the yard. A few moments later and he was standing in the living room, his face flushed from the cold.

‘Are you ready, Ane?’ he said.

She nodded earnestly and went into the hall to put her coat on. Helene and I went after her. I borrowed one of Dad’s padded jackets and a thick pair of mittens. I wasn’t going to be seen by anyone, so it didn’t matter what I looked like. But Helene had a dig at me anyway, not for what I’d borrowed, but for my own woolly hat.

‘You look like a condom,’ she said with a laugh once Ane and Dad had gone through the door. Annoyingly, I couldn’t think of a suitably scathing reply. Stepping out, I bent my head against the wind and went across to the barn, where Sleipner stood harnessed to the old sleigh. We climbed aboard. Helene wrapped a blanket around Ane’s legs, then offered me one too – I shook my head. Dad took hold of the reins and with a click of his tongue we pulled slowly away. The sky was grey, still keeping its cold. Tiny, whirling specks of snow swept to prickle our faces. I folded my arms across my chest and slid down on the seat. The cars on the main road slowed as they saw us; their occupants stared shamelessly as they went past. Ane waved at one of them, and they waved back. By the time we swung down the lane of a neighbouring farm I was freezing, but loath as I was to let Helene get one up on me, I left the spare blanket where it was and pretended not to be bothered. Reaching the pond, which was frozen solid, the snow whipping across its surface, we turned onto the forest track and were soon surrounded by rows of spruce, young trees some three or four metres tall, planted when I was still a little boy.

We’d done this every year on the day before Christmas Eve for as long as I could remember. Dad had done the same thing with his father, and, for all I knew, my grandfather likewise with his father too. In those days, they’d have used sleighs anyway, they wouldn’t have been the outlandish sight they were now. Now it was all just pretending. We

could have used the tractor or the pickup, as Dad would have done if he’d been doing anything else in the forest. The possibility didn’t even occur to him. But why couldn’t the song of Christmas be one of metal and combustion engines? At the end of the day, Christmas in our time was nothing but a commercial pandemonium entirely revolving around the shopping centre, so using a more modern vehicle such as the tractor would have been far more appropriate and a lot less hypocritical. All these illusions that governed our lives.

People were so gullible.

Dad drew the sleigh to a halt and jumped down, then took the axe that had been next to him all the while on the driver’s seat.

‘Can you see any good ones?’ he said to Ane as we walked among the rows. ‘One a bit taller than me, perhaps?’

‘Not yet,’ she said, scanning those closest.

‘How about that one over there?’ I said, pointing a bit further ahead. It was unusually neat, nicely symmetrical, the branches sufficiently close together without the greenery being too dense.

‘We’ll let Ane choose, eh?’ Dad said.

‘Yes, of course,’ I said. ‘She won’t find anything better than that, though. What do you think, Ane?’

She shook her head and moved on, laboriously scrutinising each tree in turn. It was all so dispiriting, the whirling snow among the low, bedraggled trees, the bitter cold, Dad and Helene allowing Ane such a free rein.

‘This one,’ she said at last, halting at a tree almost twice her height. There was no obvious reason for her choosing that particular one rather than any other. It was quite wonky, and the lower branches were vigorous on one side, sparser on the other. But Dad congratulated her on her choice all the same and set about chopping it down as we looked on.

‘Doesn’t it hurt the tree?’ she asked her mother.

‘Not in the slightest. It can’t feel a thing.’

‘But it dies, doesn’t it?’

‘We’ll give it some water when we get home and then it’ll be well again.’

There was something wonky and asymmetrical about her too, so maybe she’d identified with it, I thought, and smiled at the idea.

Dad dragged the tree back and dumped it by the side of the sleigh, then poured four mugs of steaming cocoa that we drank standing up. Helene ventured a few childhood memories to lighten the mood, how much she’d been looking forward to this, the sleigh ride into the woods was when Christmas really began for her, she said. Dad was verbally challenged as usual; talking was something he preferred to leave to others, such as Mum and Helene.

Ane kept glancing at me over the top of her mug. The look she gave me seemed hostile, but she was only eight, so it was more likely she just hadn’t got the measure of me yet. She was wrapped up in her mother’s loving care, everything in her world felt safe and familiar to her, until this uncle of hers turned up from London, representing something else entirely.

When we climbed up onto the sleigh again, I took the extra blanket for my legs, reasoning that Helene wouldn’t pick up on it now. Dad laid the tree crosswise in between the seats and we set off home. The blanket didn’t help much, the frost was in my bones. Once we were home I went straight upstairs and ran myself a bath while the others put the tree up and began decorating it. Afterwards, I lay on the sofa to read some Shakespeare. It had turned into a project without end: after five months I’d only got as far as 1593 and The Taming of the Shrew. My interest was flagging. I’d stopped consulting the dictionary all the time, realising I’d never get finished otherwise, and anyway you didn’t have to understand every word to get the gist. A trick I’d discovered was to say the difficult words out loud; somehow, they often seemed to click into place then. The spelling in those days was ridiculous, it was as if the letters were just tossed about. Occasionally, quite often in fact, I’d come across clear, transparently Norwegian words in there too; they were as if in disguise, but if you spoke them out loud, their true identity would be revealed.

The tree, decorated now, stood in its corner, glittering with fairy lights, draped with garlands of little Norwegian and Danish flags, resplendent with shiny baubles and thick, boa-like tinsel of silver and purple, as well as the paper decorations my sisters and I had made at school over the years. Mum had kept everything, there wasn’t an exercise book that hadn’t been put away for posterity in a box in the attic.

That ninety-nine per cent of it was absolutely worthless, fit only to be binned, was something she refused to listen to. Mum was sentimentality’s archivist. What do you want to keep that for? What are you going to do with it? This? Why?

Humans descended like snow through the ages. There were billions of us, we danced this way and that until our flight was abruptly over and we settled on the ground. What happened then? Billions more came falling, descending to smother us. I was one such snowflake, and I was still falling; Mum and Dad, Helene and Ane were too, along with everyone else who was alive now, there were billions of us, all falling at this single moment, and so slow was our flight that our thoughts and the things we owned seemed important to us; but the hordes of people whose descent had just begun, and those whose descent would soon begin, the enormous blizzard of the as-yet unborn, all waiting to descend, would completely smother not only us, but every sign of our lives, which thereby would become less than meaningless, would become nothing, zilch, nada. They would become snow in snow, darkness in darkness. And so would we.

No, nothing cannot become anything. If it could, then it would be something.

Nothing isn’t even nothing.

I made myself comfy on the sofa with one of the cushions for a pillow, and the woollen blanket, settled back and began to read. The voices of my mum and Helene drifted from the kitchen. Ane I assumed was with my dad, probably in the cowshed, kids loved the cowshed, or maybe in the barn. They liked that too.

The Taming of the Shrew seemed to be a comedy of false and mistaken identities: a nobleman tricks a poor drunk into believing he’s a lord, and convinces him that a male servant dressed up as a woman is his wife. It might have been hilarious once, about four hundred years ago, but it wasn’t any more. It wasn’t even amusing. And apart from that, it was totally irrelevant to anything that was happening in the world of today.

‘I’m reading as well,’ said Ane all of a sudden. I looked in the direction of her voice and discovered her to be sitting on the floor underneath the window. She was holding a book in her lap.

‘So I see,’ I said, and carried on reading.

‘I’m reading The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,’ she said.

I didn’t want to encourage her into a conversation, so I said nothing.

‘Have you read it? It’s quite good.’

I nodded without taking my eyes from the page.

‘They go into a wardrobe and come out in another world.’ Silence.

‘What are you reading?’

I sighed.

‘Shakespeare.’

‘What’s that?’

‘He’s the person who wrote it.’

‘Is it any good?’

‘No.’

‘Why are you reading it, then?’

‘It’s considered to be good,’ I said, and immediately wished I hadn’t. I’d have to explain now.

But again there was silence. After a bit I heard her disappear up the stairs. Clearly, she was used to her own company. Outside, someone opened the garage door. I’d been hoping I could borrow the car to go to the shopping centre. Too far to walk in this weather. Still plenty of time, though. I could wait until whoever it was came back. But who was it? Mum? Where was she going?

Out to get something she’d forgotten.

The girl came down the stairs again carrying a big box of Lego she then emptied onto the floor beside the sofa. It annoyed me, but I pretended not to notice.

She started playing. She was only doing it for the attention, I realised that, but she wasn’t going to get any from me. I concentrated on trying to read, and a few moments later she was as if erased from my mind.

‘Do you think it’s a good house I’ve built?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘But you haven’t even seen it!’

I cast a glance.

‘Very good, like I said.’

Again, there was a silence.

She put her hand on my crotch.

‘What have you got there?’ she said.

I sat bolt upright.

‘What are you doing? You mustn’t do that, not ever!’

She looked up at me and smiled suggestively.

‘Why not? Why can’t I touch you there?’

‘Because you can’t. It’s not acceptable. It’s not done.’

‘Why not?’ she said, and again put her hand between my legs. I gripped her hard by the wrist, pulling her hand aside as I jumped to my feet.

She laughed.

I went towards the kitchen, where Helene was still occupied.

‘Are you going to tell Mum now?’ she called after me.

‘Tell Mum what?’ Helene wanted to know as I came in. ‘What’s she done?’

As soon as I looked at her I realised I couldn’t possibly tell her. What was I going to say? Your daughter touched my dick, I just wanted you to know? Instead, I stepped past and poured myself a coffee from the vacuum jug.

‘Nothing. She emptied her Lego out onto the floor next to where I was sleeping, that’s all.’

‘Sleeping?’

‘Well, dozing – with a book.’

But if I didn’t say anything, maybe she would. I touched Uncle Kristian between his legs, she might say. Out of context, they could interpret it in the worst way imaginable.

For all I knew she could be one of those kids who made things up just to be the centre of attention.

Helene opened the oven door and took out a tray of Christmas gingerbreads, put it down on the worktop and slotted in another.

‘Do you want one?’

‘No, thanks. Well, all right. Just the one, then.’

‘Not them, silly. The ones on the rack over there.’

I took one that was shaped like a heart. It was still warm, and soft inside.

‘Did Mum take the car?’ I said.

9781787304208

THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT

THE SCHOOL OF NIGHT

KARL OVE KNAUSGAARD

PART ONE