The Wolves of Eternity, page 14
‘Great stereo you’ve got.’
‘It’s not bad, is it?’
He turned the volume up, a picky guitar came in, followed by some piano, then all the floaty bits came tightly together as bass and drums were introduced.
‘What sort of crap’s this you’re playing?’
‘Don’t you know it? “Telegraph Road”. Dire Straits.’
‘I see.’
‘Perfect road music.’
He hummed along for a bit, tapping his thumbs against the steering wheel.
‘Do you reckon I could get a job at the factory for a few months?’ I said.
He looked at me.
‘I doubt it. I can ask, if you want.’
‘I wouldn’t mind.’
‘Aren’t you going to uni after the summer?’
‘I don’t know yet. Probably.’
‘It’s not always a good idea, you know, starting work in those circumstances. You can soon get used to earning a wage, money in your pocket every month. Good money, at that.’
‘Boring work, though.’
‘It’s not that bad, if you ask me. I could think of a lot worse.’
‘Like what?’
‘Teacher, maybe? How much of a laugh is that?’
‘You’re right.’
‘Dentist.’
‘Nope. No laughs there either.’
‘Dental receptionist.’
‘I take your point,’ I said. ‘There’s a lot of boring jobs out there.’
‘I’ll have a word with them tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Don’t build your hopes up, though.’
‘I won’t.’
We crossed the bridge, and for some reason I thought about Gjert’s girlfriend. It wasn’t beyond the realms of possibility that he’d end up with her. He was a determined sort, but he never took on more than one thing at a time. A bit like a badger that wouldn’t let go. He looked a bit like a badger too, come to think of it, with that slanting brow and those piercing eyes of his.
‘Anyway,’ said Terje, ‘see you Saturday, then.’
‘Thanks for the lift,’ I said, unclicked my seat belt and opened the door. The cold air outside streamed into the car. ‘And thanks for asking about the job for me.’
‘No problem. See you!’
He reversed a bit, swung round and drove off again. I noticed the lights were on in the kitchen and the living room, before I looked up at the sky. It was full of stars.
When I went inside, Mum was standing in the hall.
‘Where have you been?’
‘At Tor Egil’s.’
I bent down and undid my shoes.
‘Are you drunk?’
‘Drunk? Of course I’m not drunk,’ I said, concentrating as best I could on keeping my balance. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘You reek of it.’
I straightened up and took my coat off, hung it on the peg.
‘We were watching videos and had a few beers. But even if I was drunk, there’s no law against it. I’m over eighteen, in case you’d forgotten. You’ve got no right to decide over me.’
‘Joar was on his own here.’
‘What about when you’re normally at work in the evenings? He’s on his own then, isn’t he?’
‘Yes, and I only wish he wasn’t. But now you’re here he doesn’t have to be. You can understand that, can’t you?’
‘I’m not his dad,’ I said, and went up the stairs. ‘And unlike you, I’ve got a life to lead.’
* * *
*
I woke up the next morning feeling strange. I was trembling inside, the way you do before a test. It was as if my body knew something I didn’t.
I hadn’t dreamt anything I could remember. I pulled my trousers and T-shirt on while looking out the window. There was a fog on the fields. The trees over by the barn were like dark, slender figures reaching their arms into dismal sky. The fields beyond were quite invisible in the fog.
Everything I saw was radioactive.
Maybe my body was reacting to it. It was only natural if I was a bit scared.
Or else it was Dad. The way he’d said in my dream that things weren’t good between him and Mum.
In a dream.
How could that be?
I went downstairs and had some breakfast while I thought about what I was going to do. One thing was certain, I couldn’t just sit there and do nothing. I didn’t want to be in either when Mum got back. At the same time, I didn’t have the car before then. I didn’t feel like cycling. Maybe go somewhere on the bus?
Not into town again, though.
The moped!
I’d be able to get it going, surely?
I put my boots on, grabbed my anorak from the peg and put it on as I went over to the garage. Switched the light on and wheeled the moped out. Wiped away the cobwebs from it, and all the bits and debris that had collected in them. Fetched a bucket of water from the house and then washed it down. Cleaned and lubricated the spark plugs. I’d always enjoyed tinkering about with it, and Mum never chucked anything out, so everything I needed was there: motor oil, oil filter, cable grease and brake fluid. Once I’d changed the oil, I cleaned and lubricated the chain and adjusted the slack, before greasing the cables and eventually putting some petrol in the tank.
It started third go.
Vroom vroom!
I killed the engine and went back to the house, put a thick sweater on and a set of waterproofs, wondered for a moment if I should leave Mum a note, but decided she didn’t need to know, took the crash helmet from the nail on the garage wall, kick-started the moped again and wobbled slowly out into the yard.
It was a model from the late sixties, but so simply and solidly built that it was running just as good twenty years on. Or maybe good was pushing it a bit; on the steeper gradients it could only just make it over the top.
My helmet was a black full-face job with a tinted visor; I’d thought it made me look hard when I was sixteen, completely unaware of how comical it actually came across, that cool helmet with such a feeble machine. Now of course, as I chugged across the flatland, I didn’t think it was funny. The fog clung to the green spruce on the hillside across the river, making the top of the hill invisible. It looked as if the world came to an end there. Ahead of me, it was draped like a curtain at the end of the plain, the cluster of buildings that were the former shop, the garage and the disused petrol station seemed like the final outpost.
But once I’d gone past and up the short, steep climb that followed, a new world opened out, of spruce and heather, moss and upward-reaching deciduous trees, though it too was bounded by fog, and after the bend another, this one comprising a timber merchant’s and a plant-hire firm in whose shared car park there stood three cars, gleaming with moisture, and an orange forklift backed up against a corrugated-metal fence.
I didn’t know where I was going, I was just riding around. When I got to the bend where the main road entered the woods, I turned off for some reason down the narrow road to the right that led to the flatter bit where the church was.
I hadn’t been there for ages. Probably not since my confirmation. But I could see nothing had changed when the church came into view ahead of me with the river grey and heavy behind it.
Dad was buried there. And Gran and Grandad on my dad’s side. And Grandad’s two brothers and their wives.
I hadn’t thought about it when I’d turned off the main road, so that wasn’t why I was there. But now that I was, I could just as well go over and pay my respects, I thought, and pulled in by the stone wall, turned off the engine, kicked the stand out, hung my helmet on the handlebars and went into the churchyard.
The oldest graves, from the end of the previous century, were those nearest the church itself, while the most recent were furthest away, Dad’s right over by the wall at the far end.
On top of the hill was the old people’s home. I couldn’t help but smile when I saw it. They looked down on the churchyard. What had they been thinking, whoever’s idea that had been? And what was it like for those who lived there to look out on a churchyard every single day, knowing that before long they’d be ending up there themselves?
Eww!
In the ground right under my feet lay the dead. In their hundreds.
Hey, there’s one just gone over there, mate. Get her in the soil, then.
Hey, there’s another. Get him in there as well.
Shovel plenty on top, and we’ll say no more about it.
Again and again. Not just over the course of a few years, but hundreds, thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of years. Non-stop. Dead, dead, dead. Soil, soil, soil. No prayer ever a help, there was no way out: bang, stop. Dead, soil, dead, soil for all eternity.
And we just accepted it.
Bloody hell. It was terrible once you got thinking about it.
It wasn’t at all out of place, that question Joar had asked.
Why do we die?
Well, Dad died because he was driving too fast on a slushy road, the car skidded unfortunately, and unfortunately went over the kerb and ended up in the water.
There’s always some explanation.
Every single death has its own explanation.
But not death as a whole. That has no explanation.
I stood in front of the headstone that had his name on it and looked across for a moment at the river that came gliding by, wide and calm after the rapids further upstream. The trees in the background were so still it was almost scary.
Syvert Løyning
1940–1977
A car engine sounded, and as I turned round I saw a red Toyota pull up behind my moped and could just about see the faces of an old man and an old woman through the windscreen.
I tried telling myself that red didn’t exist, but it seemed so incomprehensible, seeing the red Toyota standing out so brightly in the grey surroundings.
The grave wasn’t untidy, but it wasn’t exactly immaculate either, which in a way was all right, I thought, and started to go back to the moped as the two old people with their white hair and moist-looking eyes came towards me.
I had a clear recollection of what Dad looked like, even with my eyes open I could picture him quite clearly. He was stored as a certain combination of electrical signals in my brain. A pattern of a kind, which didn’t alter, a bit like the pattern in a rug.
That was basically what was left. A pattern in the brains of those who’d known him.
‘Afternoon,’ I said.
‘Afternoon,’ said the man, and his wife gave me a silent nod. He had a little rake and a trowel in his hand, while she carried a plastic bag that I took to contain flowers or a plant.
As I came round the other side of the chapel, I looked at the church itself with its thick white walls of stone, its green spire. I definitely hadn’t set foot in there since my confirmation. The centre of false hopes, as I’d called the church in an essay I’d written when I was at gymnas. I should never have been confirmed, but none of the others had been opposed to it, and of course there was the money everyone gave you. What sort of fifteen-year-old could turn that down?
He rose from the dead on the third day, to return and judge the living and the dead – who actually believed that?
It was an insult to those left behind. Instilling such unrealistic hope in weakened souls should have been against the law, the same as telling cancer sufferers they’d get well again if only they’d swallow a spoonful of ash-tree essence.
I stopped at the moped, wiping the moisture absently from the saddle with one hand as I put my helmet on with the other.
I’d been fifteen years old, so it was only understandable I’d sold out for the money. And it was because everyone else was getting confirmed too, and because there was a camp afterwards, and everyone said it was the highpoint of eighth.
But I wasn’t fifteen any more. I could choose to opt out.
I ought to opt out.
I fastened my helmet and got on the moped, started the engine. But then I switched it off again.
I could opt out now, while I was here.
I looked over at the clergy house. The lights were on.
Why not?
I crossed the road and went towards the house. My footsteps crunched in the still air. The house was whitewashed like the church, squat and big, with a garden that ran all the way down to the river, full of leafless old fruit trees and bushes.
I opened the gate, the black wrought iron was freezing cold to the touch, and went up to the side entrance where the pastor had his office. I rang the bell.
He took his time in there, but eventually he came to the door and poked his saggy face out.
‘Hello, Syvert, is that you?’ he said with a smile.
I was surprised he remembered me, my confirmation was years back, and he’d have instructed lots of candidate groups since then.
‘Hello,’ I said. ‘I hope I’m not interrupting?’
‘Not at all. Come in!’
He opened the door wide and stepped back. He had a grey cardigan on over a black shirt, and a pair of grey trousers. His feet were in a pair of thick, grey-white woollen socks that looked like they were home-knitted.
‘You can hang your coat up over there,’ he said, indicating with a nod the coat stand in the corner.
‘I won’t stop long,’ I said, but took my coat off anyway; it was wet.
‘Something to drink, perhaps? Coffee?’
‘No thanks.’
‘In that case, let’s go inside, shall we?’ he said, and showed me into a room leading off the hall. A pair of sofas were positioned either side of a low table on a thick red patterned rug, and a desk stood in front of the window with a view of the church and whoever might be coming or going along the road. There was a fireplace too, with a fire burning in it.
‘This is very homely,’ I said. ‘You could almost live here in this one room.’
He smiled.
‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I almost do, the time I spend here. Have a seat!’
‘I won’t stop long,’ I said again, sitting down on the nearest of the two sofas.
‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ he said.
‘No, not at all. Smoke all you like.’
He went over to the desk and came back with a packet of cigarettes and an ashtray.
‘You haven’t exactly been pounding on the door since your confirmation, Syvert.’
‘I’m impressed you could even remember my name,’ I said. ‘You must have had a hundred kids in through the door since then.’
‘But not many as eager as you to discuss everything.’
He lit a cigarette and the smoke curled into the air in front of him. He seemed livelier than I remembered him, more present, in a way. At the time of my confirmation there’d been something a bit listless about him, as if it had all been a dull routine. Someone said he was probably still depressed after his wife had died two years before.
That would be her standing beside him in the photo on his desk.
He looked at me without saying anything.
‘I was thinking . . .’ I said.
He raised his eyebrows slightly.
‘The thing is I don’t believe in God or Jesus, or any of that stuff. So I was thinking it’s a bit hypocritical of me still belonging to the Church of Norway. Don’t you agree? That it’s hypocritical to stay a member?’
He nodded.
‘That’s fair enough, certainly,’ he said. ‘But what is it you don’t believe in when you don’t believe in God?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘I’m just curious. What is it you don’t believe in when you don’t believe in God?’
I shrugged.
‘I don’t believe there’s anyone behind it all.’
‘You think it created itself?’
‘Yes.’
He nodded a couple of times without saying anything.
‘So, is there a form I need to fill in or something?’
‘There is, yes,’ he said. ‘But is it so very urgent?’
‘I wouldn’t say it was urgent as such,’ I said. ‘But now that I’m here, I might as well get it done.’
‘When you say there’s no one behind it all, what do you mean by that exactly?’
‘A god.’
‘Would that be a person? Or a higher power of some sort, perhaps?’
‘It wouldn’t be a person, at any rate. But it wouldn’t be a higher power either. That’s what you worship, isn’t it, a higher power? Or is it a father in heaven?’
‘If there were no higher power, how then was the world created?’
‘Big Bang.’
‘You mean the entire universe came out of nothing?’
‘Yes.’
‘But why? And how?’
I shrugged again.
‘A chemical reaction.’
‘So the cat over there . . .’ he said, nodding towards a cat I hadn’t noticed that was lying stretched out on its side on the rug. ‘Billions of years ago there was nothing, and out of that nothing the entire universe came into being in an enormous explosion? Which all on its own then led to a creature as advanced as that cat asleep over there, and not least to the two of us sitting here chatting? Out of nothing? An explosion out of nothing?’
He looked at me with a smile. His saggy cheeks made him look a bit like a dog.
‘You’re a pastor,’ I said. ‘It’s your job to make people believe in fairy tales.’
‘Doesn’t Big Bang sound rather like a fairy tale, too?’
‘It’s science. It’s proven. The world consists of atoms. That’s what I believe. And I don’t think I need to convince you I’m right just to opt out.’
