Fixed Ideas E-Book

Eline Lund Fjæren

• Herausgeber: Nordisk Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 140

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Fixed Ideas is a restless and effective tale of desire, gender and longing, about fundamental loneliness and the constant, gnawing awareness that threatens our ability to encounter one another as the person we really are. The story of a young woman and a slightly older man, both working at a newspaper in Oslo, who have a one night stand. Fixed Ideas explores how their relationship and perception of each other develops in the aftermath.

Leseprobe

Fixed Ideas

Published by Nordisk Books, 2021

www.nordiskbooks.com

© Eline Lund Fjæren

First published by Forlaget Oktober AS, 2018

Published in agreement with Oslo Literary Agency

This English translation copyright © Duncan J. Lewis, 2021

This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA

Cover design © Nordisk Books

Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 9781838074234

eBook ISBN 9781838074241

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed

with rain beating on the windows.

– Don DeLillo, Mao II

Part One

He helps her to loosen the clasp on her bra. Sweat from her back clings to his index finger. He considers wiping it on the pillow case. But he probably knows what she will think if he does this. What makes him hesitate is a sudden creasing of her brow that is visible when she sees him staring at his own finger and so catches him thinking something she does not wish him to be thinking, especially not about her body. The elasticated sheet is blue, with a couple of shiny patches at the left corner of the bottom end. She waits for him to touch her breasts. She sits on the bed and poses with the help of some gestures she has picked up from the movies and TV shows, he thinks, maybe pornography. There is something pornographic about the way she is acting; with her tits towards him, she smiles, apparently effortlessly and brightly. He kneels down next to her, crouching by the side of the bed. When she asks what he wants to do with her, his legs tremble a little perhaps, but not so much that it becomes a problem; they remain steady on the ground. He supports his left elbow on his knee. If anyone were watching them from above, they would possibly think they were witnessing a marriage proposal. His head is at the same height as her pelvis, he stares straight at her genitals, feels it is far less of a problem to stare in that direction than, for example, into her eyes. When he feels that he has kept this gaze for too long, he lowers his head and looks down at the floor. He thinks about how the muscles envelop the skeleton, how they bind and tighten. She lifts a foot and stretches her toes towards his shoulder, she is unsure of how she should act; an awareness of her own nakedness becomes at the same time an awareness in him. This position means that he can see deeper inside her. She squeezes her toes around his shoulders. A ring of muscle in her leg becomes visible as she pulls him towards her.

She doesn’t want to go down on him before she’s had something to drink, she says. The rain hammers against the windows. It’s too stuffy in here, he thinks, he hasn’t got round to buying a summer duvet. They are sweating, she needs some water. He goes out to the kitchen.

The kitchen work surface was dappled with light, it was summer and he was not in love with her, that’s not what this is about. They had been at a party for the newspaper where they both work, the boss’s enormous garden was decorated beyond all reason, with lanterns and various drapes hanging from the trees, glass bowls of punch, like something from a film. She tried to pull him into the bathroom with her, she’s that type, without quite knowing what it is he means, but it surprised him; with her innocent appearance, the round face, big, blue eyes. She’s young, but her body is that of an adult, almost motherly, that is how he would describe her, even if the thought repels him. She is slim, but with round hips and breasts. She came over to him at the party and kissed him in front of their colleagues, that’s clearly how she does it, or young women do, they “take charge,” know what they want, is it old fashioned of him to think about it like that, is it not the case? But doing it in the toilets, he drew the line there. He invited her home, suggested that they could take a taxi, he would pay, he earns more than her, something he of course did not point out other than by offering to pay. She hesitated at the suggestion, as if she really just needed a quick fuck and that it had to be in the toilets, that it was not intimacy she was looking for, something made her initiative seem mainly like a sudden impulse, almost a need and one which didn’t even seem to have anything to do with him, other than the fact that he was the youngest of her male colleagues and therefore the most compatible. He was too drunk to think it through any further.

When she saw his bedroom, she started to laugh, and he to regret it, at least for a moment. She mocked him about his bed, a single bed, he was thirty-six years old and slept in a single bed? It was humiliating, unnatural, she said, childlike. He is fourteen years older than her, she called him childlike. They were so drunk, making out for a long time without taking their clothes off, she fell out of the bed, he could see that she was embarrassed, it was so visible that she was drunk, you were supposed to hide it, just drink enough to make it possible to hold a conversation without the usual film of restraint and awkwardness, she had overdone it, had to recover herself again. Your bed, she said, I’m just going to fall out. He apologised, kissed her, guided his hand in under her shirt, caressed her breasts.

She asks him to inspect her. He knows that she has been sick, she has written about it in the paper. She is unable to check her own body, wants him to do it. To be a father for her, maybe, but to fuck her hard, to control her. She goes down on him first, for a long time, he almost comes, says that to her, and then she pulls up from his groin, kisses him on the stomach and chest, bites him on the ear, she wants him to come inside her, but from behind, she gets up in the bed onto her knees and palms, arches her back and shoves her arse towards his crotch. He’s behind her now, pressing into her, at first it requires a bit of effort, it pricks the string on the underside of his penis but then it becomes easier. She asks him to spank her, he does, smacks her on the backside, hard, until the skin turns red, he doesn’t know if it turns him on or makes him uncomfortable, both, then he grabs her around the hips, pulls her hard towards him. Then he comes. He pulls out again and wipes himself off with a t-shirt.

She lies down on the bed, his semen runs out of her, becomes a patch on the sheet. He wonders if she came, it didn’t seem like it, it keeps him awake for a while, they don’t speak.

The day after she doesn’t want either breakfast or coffee, she has to catch a bus, she says, but kisses him, more sensually than affectionately, on the way out of the door.

Over the following days, he thinks a lot about her. He hasn’t heard anything. Time goes slowly, he doesn’t write anything in particular, just notes down a couple of ideas, things he is thinking about, like being alone in your thirties, it isn’t unusual anymore, but what does it mean. The fourth day he sends a text message, she doesn’t reply. All these thoughts, how can they not reach their target, doesn’t she feel it, that he is thinking about her, wants to talk, to sleep with her again.

He is held hostage by his own phone and its clichés, about waiting. Why doesn’t she reply? Does she regret it? Is she aware of the effect it has on him, the strange transitions from hope to disappointment and back to hope? Or, worse: what if she feels used? Could he lose his job, is that what’s happening, will he get a call from the boss, what does he do then, what would he say? On the other hand, what if she was using him, a means of harming herself, is that the way she is? Was that why she drew him to her, in an attack of sexual mania, who knows how things work in there, in her head, he doesn’t know her well enough, can’t draw any conclusions, doesn’t know what motivates her. He knows of course who she is, it’s not that, at work they refer to her as the “child prodigy,” she’s the youngest of the staff, writes exceptionally well, is incredibly clever, whip smart, learns quickly. He is fascinated by her, he doesn’t hesitate to admit this, to himself, of course, he can’t talk about her with their colleagues, not in that way. It’s best to appear superior, non-threatened, with respect to a new talent, especially in a work situation, as if you give them (the new talents, that is) too much attention and wish them too much luck, even in conversations where they are not present themselves, it won’t take too much for the whole bubble to burst, for the talents themselves too. Not to mention that he would perceive it as awfully embarrassing were someone to realise what he was feeling and thinking about, because what he was feeling and thinking about was not particularly original, he knew that, falling for someone who represents something in one’s self, but that no longer exists and which you spend the rest of your life trying to win back. It is no more than five years since he himself was in a similar position, young and so-called promising and the older, more established journalists greeted him with a kind of restraint which was grounded in a genuinely special combination of fear and respect, but also irritation and arrogance. He only just remembers, as it quickly passed; suddenly he was merely one of the staff and not one to keep an eye on, to pay attention to, because his talent was not meaningful in a way that stood out thoroughly or uniquely from others, rather it was the fact that he was so young, actually the youngest to ever write full-time for the newspaper, which was incredible. And when he was no longer young, according to the hectic and ephemeral standards of the world of journalism, then it was no longer something to get excited about, he had become one of the many. He seems to recall experiencing it as a relief when he eventually understood that this was what had happened.

It’s Saturday evening, he’s drinking beers with Erik, his colleague and best friend, if that’s something you can say, again this childishness, why did she have to point that out? It’s a week since they slept together, he can’t get it out of his head. She’s still just as present, even if he hasn’t received any answer to his text message and even if he has neither seen nor heard from her in any other way and it is not that he feels stupid, more like powerless, he sees things as for the first time, with her eyes, evaluates what he sees from a completely different angle. The fact that she is in his brain, invisible to him, but just as convincing. He thinks about the power there is in remaining silent, the way she has done over the last week, how it is keeping him trapped in the vague, hazy memories from the night she spent with him, always back to that, since there has not been any change in the image afterwards, no progress, just more of the same. It surprises him that he should have become so obsessed with how she views him, just those minor contours with which she has been presented, what does she think about it, what is it she sees? Or, worse: Does he see the same, does he see it himself?

Erik gesticulates energetically, he is in the middle of a long discourse about the pseudonymous writer Elena Ferrante; the black hairs on his arms stand up straight, as if his own reading of this author gives him goose bumps, he’s utterly roused, red in the pudgy face; he is convinced that he has found something in her work that has not been picked up before, it’s not so easy to follow, everything seems to sort of stream out of his hands and onto the floor.

Erik is married and has two children; they don’t live here, but in Moss, he’s bought the apartment in Oslo to be able to work uninterrupted for a couple of weeks every summer without the children, a weekend here and there, and the rest of the year he rents it out. Erik’s living room isn’t overly inviting; a worn sofa, a leather armchair, everything in dark colours. A bachelor flat, as if to differentiate between dad-Erik and the real or former Erik. Here it has all been recreated, he thinks, this vague feeling of self which does not disappear just because a child steps into your life, it’s surely not that simple, even if everything gets suddenly turned on its head, one becomes a machine which exists to serve children, meet the demands which immediately make themselves known in the small bodies and to forget one’s own, which are less important. The floor is grubby, the shelves are dusty, sometimes the evenings here become late, that’s for sure, whether it is just the two of them or with others, friends and colleagues. That he still likes this kind of room, with emptiness and overcast skies outside, is more than anything else to do with the circumstances connected with these rooms and why he ends up there.

Everything feels easier when Erik is in town, as if the weekdays gain a foothold. They discuss books, politics, sport. They don’t talk about Erik’s family, in this room there is only space for the big subjects, ideas and theories, occasionally he finds himself thinking that there is something parodic about the way in which they converse, the things that interest them, like football and insipid but realistic left-wing politics, or authors who write about exactly that, he thinks about her again, that she would maybe have laughed at them, but doesn’t dare think the thought through, this is what they have together, he and Erik, it is enough. The petty everyday is not their concern.

When does the match start? asks Erik, he turns on the TV.

Half seven, I think.

So there’s half an hour to go, says Erik, we’ll leave it on until then. He puts the remote control down on the teak table, opens the beer bottles with the help of a snus box. Here, says Erik and hands him a bottle.

By the way, I heard that you and the child prodigy hit it off at the summer party, he says and leans back in the sofa, rests an arm over the edge of it.

So they’re talking about it at work, he thinks, it’s true, it’s not something he has imagined, or dreamt. It really happened. Emilie and he, close to each other at the party, wrapped around each other in the backseat of the taxi on the way home, later in bed, the one meant for only one person. He becomes flushed, wonders if it is visible, if he is reddening.

Emilie and I? Yes, yeah, that’s true, as such.

So, do you like her, he asks, or was it a one night thing?

Of course it was a one night thing, he says, Someone had to sleep with the child prodigy sooner or later, it might as well be me.

Erik laughs, they both laugh, that’s how their relationship is: light, effortless. Oh, how they value each other’s cynicism, he thinks. These are the things that unite them.