The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland E-Book

Nicolai Houm

• Herausgeber: Pushkin Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Seitenzahl: 216

Beschreibung

A moving and compelling emotional mystery, by one of the most exciting new talents in Norway Her name is Jane Ashland, and her life has spiralled out of control. Moving between Jane's past and this extraordinary remote landscape, Nicolai Houm weaves a dramatic trail of suspense through one woman's life - via love, grief, and a devastating accident that changes everything. The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland is a compelling, beautifully-written tale of life at its most glorious, and most terrible. Born in 1974, Nicolai Houm has published two novels, a collection of stories and a picture book, all critically acclaimed in Norway. The Gradual Disappearance of Jane Ashland is his first book to be published in English. He works part-time as an editor in the publishing house Cappelen Damm, and lives in Lier with his wife and daughter.

Leseprobe

For Mother

Contents

Title PageDedicationThe Gradual Disappearance of Jane AshlandAbout the Publisher Copyright

SHE HAS READ somewhere that this situation usually ends with people taking their clothes off. You get it wrong that final, fatal time and then, there you lie in your underwear, your bluish-white skin stretched tight and your eyeballs frozen solid, time passes and you become covered by a shroud of new snow that has to be gently brushed away by those who find you.

All she can see through the mist is a huge boulder just an arm’s length away, and if she leans her head a little to the left, the brightly coloured tent looking like a mouldy orange under its crust of frost.

She shouldn’t have lain down. But when she tries to raise her head, she realizes that her hair has got stuck in one of the countless Velcro pads on that state-of-the-art anorak, hugely expensive but still as cold as the heather beneath her, and she cannot find the energy to do anything about it.

Now, while she is still conscious, she must lock her fingers in a dramatic pose.

Oh my God, it looks as if she tried to grab at something at the moment of death!

And the rescuers will avert their heads in distaste. Someone in the team will break the arm so that the theatrical gesture won’t be in the way when the corpse is fitted into the bag tied to some kind of stretcher or sledge so that it can be hauled down the hill.

What should she reach for, how should she make it look?

SHE HAD BEEN GIVEN so much alcohol and legroom in the plane she felt like a ragdoll left by a child in a massive armchair. They must be upgrading people to business class whenever there’s some hassle about the ticket. The guy next to her had presumably also drawn a winning number; both of them looked out of place among all the white shirts. She wore jeans and a college sweater and he, a red checked flannel shirt and hiking boots. So, here we are, she thought. And then felt uncertain if she’d actually said it out loud, because he quickly turned to her and smiled.

‘It wasn’t anything.’

‘What?’

She focused on the handbag she still had on her lap, disappeared into it like an animal digging for something. She had noticed him in the departure lounge. Thick blond hair, even though he was nearer fifty than forty. Neatly trimmed beard. Eyes so blue they might have been for decorative effect. He could easily have been the unknown fifth member of ABBA. Not her type. Though she wasn’t convinced she had a type.

She emerged from the handbag with a blister pack, twisted round to face the window and swallowed ten milligrams of Valium without water. Three baggage handlers were heaving suitcases into the hold through some hatch she couldn’t see.

‘Not keen on flying?’ he asked.

She didn’t reply and the expectation of her saying something contracted like the field of vision before a fit, growing smaller and smaller until it became as uninteresting as the noises in the cabin. Suddenly, there were clouds outside just where the men had been moving about on the rain-soaked tarmac. Dr Rice would have called it a hypnagogic state. A microsleep. A stewardess stopped at their row of seats. She asked for a whisky and a Coke.

As she leant across him to take the glass, the can of Coke and the small bottle of alcohol, she noticed him glancing down at her breasts and, in these few seconds, enjoyed the sensation of remembering something so remote she had forgotten to miss it.

‘My name is Ulf, if you want to know,’ the man in the next seat said.

‘Is that a real name?’ she asked.

She finished her drink while he told her that he was on his way home from Nunavut in Canada after completing a two-year-long research project on the herding behaviour of the musk ox. Once upon a time this would definitely have interested her; life had provided ideas for new short stories or novels, and people she met became models for fictional characters. Asking follow-up questions had become a habit. Her subjects usually grew fascinated by her eagerness to learn. Her questioning made her seem intelligent. Did you fly from Iqaluit? That part of her brain was still active and functioned independently, like clockwork without hands to move.

‘What about you?’ he asked. When he spoke, with what she assumed was a Scandinavian accent, the words came out loud and clear between his strong, white teeth.

She raised her eyes over the top of the seats, with their little white cloth squares placed there to catch businessmen’s dandruff, and looked for the stewardess with the drinks trolley. Then, she said that she wanted to connect with her roots.

‘I’ve spent some time on investigating my family origins.’

The phrase spent some time on sounded better than been totally fucking obsessed by. Just like clearing out the house, or like that online lecture she got so deep into.

After she had let him know that she came from Wisconsin, he said, ‘I assume you’ve heard about the Wisconsin glaciation?’

She shook her head. It was too difficult to work out whether he was irritating or charming. He had commandeered the armrest between their seats.

‘The Wisconsin Glacial Episode? Some 70,000 years ago?’ he went on.

‘It doesn’t ring any bells, I’m afraid. But it was rather long ago.’

He clearly didn’t find that amusing, and simply said, ‘Anyway, back in those days, there were musk oxen around in your home state.’

The stewardess with the drinks went off in the wrong direction.

‘And now you’re planning to visit your relatives?’

She tipped the last of the half-moon-shaped bits of ice from the bottom of her plastic cup into her mouth and, with her mouth full to sound more casual, said, ‘I needed to get away for a while.’

She bent forward, her head between her knees, placed the now empty cup on the carpet, and pulled the neck of a bottle of Southern Comfort out of her bag. And drank, straight from the bag, as if it had been one of these old-style hiking bottles.

‘The Inuit have this expression…’ Ulf stared straight ahead when he said this, chortled and drew his lips back, letting his row of large, white teeth light up his surroundings, ‘If you’re afraid, walk in a new direction.’

‘Here’s another one’ she said. ‘When the snow melts, you’ll see the dog shit.’

Halfway across the Atlantic, when the stewardess would no longer respond when she pressed the button, she slumped in her seat, wishing that the man next to her was not asleep. She could hear his breathing. For a while, his eyelids trembled. Once they were still again, a narrow, white slit was still showing between his eyelashes, almost as if he were awake.

‘As a biologist…’ she began to address him in her thoughts. Naturally, he corrected her: ‘Zoologist’. She rolled her eyes at that and carried on with her imaginary account of the lecture she had watched online. With his training and experience, could Ulf please make sense of these ideas?

‘You see, this famous physicist was speaking about how, among scientists, there is a growing acceptance of the notion that there’s something more than this life, than our world. Well, it’s not as simple…’

‘But a greater consciousness?’ he said, meaning to be helpful. ‘Something that is external to us, or is greater than any one individual? A dimension we don’t know about?’

‘Exactly. And might there be something in it?’

‘Yes, absolutely. It cannot be denied. By the way, you’re amazingly attractive. You still look great.’

‘Thank you.’

‘If you like, lean on me and rest your head on my shoulder. Just to feel the warmth of my body. No commitments.’

So, she allowed her hand to slide along the armrest until it touched his, pressed closer to the large, sleeping body and pretended that she, too, was asleep.

SHE HAS A WATCH. She is pretty sure it has been three days and nights so far. Sun goes up, sun goes down. The so-called comfort temperature of the sleeping bag is said to be six degrees centigrade but, as of now, there’s nothing comfortable about it. The sulphurous haze of fog is still as dense and someone up there is playing with the on-off switch for the wind. Abruptly, the tent becomes a perfect dome again and all she can hear is the pale-grey hum she has come to think of as the sound of the mountains.

He took the map when he left. Her mobile is out of juice. The only edible thing in the tent is mackerel in tomato sauce and barely half of it is left in the tin no bigger than a deck of cards. The contents have a fishy, bluish shine and taste metallic, like chunks of the actual trawler.

She needs to drink. With the sleeping bag bunched up around her waist, she crawls to the front of the tent. Once the zip is pulled halfway down, a shower of freezing rain slaps her in the face. She wriggles out of her sleeping bag, puts her boots on and, stooping, emerges into all that whiteness.

Beyond that stone begins the territory you must keep out of. Over there, the negative force can get you. That is why you have to stay on this side of the stone. Stick to the area between the tent and the stone, right? Then the puddle of water is on the borderline, kind of.

If I’ve got that right, then drinking the near-side water is fine?

Yes, only not from the other side. That won’t do.

She kneels down, as if in prayer, in front of the small, reflecting surface and looks into her own wild eyes for a brief moment before her chin breaks up the mirror image. As she straightens her back and swallows like a long-necked bird, she recalls something Hemingway is supposed to have said: Nevergo on trips with anyone you do not love.

But, then, Hemingway also said: Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death…

‘EXCUSE ME, you really must speak up.’

(…)

‘Could you possibly raise your voice, Ms. Ashland?’

(…)

‘I’m sorry. It’s just that you’re mostly inaudible.’

(…)

‘I realize that, in your mind, the sound of our voice is coming out clearly but that is not actually the case.’

(…)

‘The prosecution should postpone the hearing until the witness is capable of making her statement. I would have appreciated if assurances had been obtained in good time that Ms. Ashland was…’

(…)

‘Ms. Ashland, I must ask you to let go of the microphone and leave the witness stand now.’

(…)

‘Ms. Ashland? You can…’

(…)

‘Jane Ashland?’

AT FIRST, you will feel that constructing a wall is essential, Dr Rice had told her. A wall between yourself and all the insensitive comments made by your friends, family and acquaintances who either ought to know better, or else are simply unable to understand.

Her parents were quickly sent to the far side of that wall. Not because they said so many fatuous things – that is, apart from her mother, who kept using the term ‘accident’ in her whispering tone of voice, one of the critical factors in Jane’s decision to leave home at the age of eighteen – but because they, unlike herself, seemed to have kept the cores of their being intact. Unlike her, they had not become fearless. They never failed to lock the front door, never stopped strapping themselves into safety belts. Nor did they consistently choose to sleep on the sofa instead of in bed. They did not break plates. For them, day-to-day existence did not alternate between strict adherence to routine and being utterly adrift, without a sense of time. She didn’t think they were urging Dr Rice, or anyone else, to prescribe more and more tablets for them. As far as she knew, they sought sanctuary neither in the shower nor in the car, the only places nowadays where people can scream out loud or wail wordlessly.

True, her parents moved house. Into an apartment in a new housing development, some twenty-five miles from what had been Jane’s childhood home. The development consisted of identical rows of apartment blocks surrounded by a landscaped area rather like a golf course. There was an artificial canal crossed by a small arched bridge. Her dad had tried to catch catfish from the bridge but gave up after being soaked several times by the automatic sprinklers. They had new furniture held together with screws that forever needed tightening, and a complicated air-conditioning system that demanded much attention from her father. Jane’s mother had changed their favourite old armchair for a red wine-coloured La-Z-Boy. Sitting in it, looking out through the bay window, Dorothy had a view free from memories. The window occasionally annoyed them, though, because it didn’t face the lake as the agent had assured them it would.

Jane went to visit her parents three days before her departure. She had put on make-up. Fixed her hair. Her clothes were clean. Only her timing was wrong.

‘I thought it might be you,’ her father said as he opened the door. His eyes were mere slits, and he was in his dressing gown. Her mother, who immediately started making pancakes, insisted they been up and about for hours and tried to block the view of the clock on the stove. It showed 05.15.

‘Are you sure you’ll want to go travelling?’ she asked, keeping her back turned.

Jane didn’t have to reply.

‘Of course she’s sure, Dorothy. She bought the tickets, didn’t she?’

‘Well, you know best, Robert.’

‘You may call me Bob,’ he said. ‘After all, we’ve been married for almost fifty years.’

After breakfast, they left Dorothy in the chair by the window and took the lift to the ground floor. The sun had just risen. Jane had left her car with the trunk gaping open like a metal monster, digesting after having swallowed the remains of her life: cardboard boxes, a Fisher-Price castle, a yellowed computer monitor. How far away had she been when she selected these things to keep?

Neither of them made a move towards unloading the car. They just stood in the dazzling, diffuse morning light, arms crossed. Then, her father astonished her with a nakedly emotional outburst, something he rarely permitted himself and normally didn’t seem to need. He clenched his jaw, shut his eyes tightly and pointed to his chest as if describing a site of physical pain.

‘It hurts so much, Jane.’

She should have said something then, perhaps hugged him, but somehow did not get it together.

‘I regret all the things I didn’t do. I have had such an eternity of time on my hands. Dorothy and I, both. I cannot think now why we didn’t… take part much more.’

She just nodded.

‘Anyway, is it all right if I leave all this?’ she asked.

Her father swallowed.

‘Yes, of course. We still have the attic space.’

‘True, but somehow you…’

The high, thin pitch of their voices hardly carried and meanwhile other sounds seemed muffled, as if the world around them transmitted poorly.

‘What will you do about the car?’ Her father’s shoulders had sagged suddenly.

‘I intend to dump it in a wood near the airport and walk the last bit,’ she said.

Her father breathed audibly through his nose and looked away.

‘What, are you saying I should set fire to it as well?’

Flocks of ring-billed gulls, blown in from Lake Michigan during the night, drifted about as if baffled by the large expanses of grass. Not a soul in sight, even though it was no longer too early in the morning for retired folk.

‘Tom wanted the car,’ she finally said.

‘Tommy Belotti? That greaseball?’

Was her dad the kind of guy who said things like that or did he just make out that he was a guy who said these things? She had never worked this out. He had started on the floor at Pabst but risen swiftly through the ranks to brewing supervisor. Before his twenty-fourth birthday, he was already head of logistics for the East Coast, Midwest and Canada (as he had reminded Jane when she was the same age and had not yet completed her literature degree). For his entire adult life, he had lived in dense suburbs populated by sales people, small-time company directors and middle-management types. His wife read Walt Whitman in bed and had once, in the seventies, collected a substantial sum in support of the new ballet theatre in Milwaukee. His daughter had gone in for literature full-time, a choice he had not tried to talk her out of but had not encouraged either.

‘Tommy Belotti has always been after you,’ her father said.

‘Just in junior high.’

He nodded, still unconvinced.

‘How much is he paying you for the car?’

She knew what would come next. Her dad would bend over, seemingly to check the car’s chassis and meanwhile get into a state because she was giving away a car in perfectly reasonable condition. So she picked a sum at random.

‘Five thousand.’

It was apparently too much. He started rocking on his heels.

‘Hello, big spender. Smart move, Belotti.’

‘I’m pretty sure Tom’s feelings for me had faded by eighth grade. When I got my braces. Thereabouts. At least by the time he was best man at my wedding.’

‘Was he?’ her father asked.

‘Have you forgotten?’

THE ARRIVALS HALL with its furnishings of smooth, hygienic steel and aura of clinical severity had the atmosphere of a detention cell. She had either taken a wrong turning or purposely let herself be diverted through the duty-free shop. Ulf was waiting by the baggage carousel.

‘You again,’ he said cheerfully.

She stared at the cases that emerged one after the other from underground, and then toppled over onto a new conveyor belt.

‘You slept on my shoulder last night, I believe.’

It had to happen. And in the most straightforward way. If this had been Greg, he would surely have said something funny about dribble on his shirt. They would have laughed together. And gone to bed, and lived the rest of their lives together.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

She noticed him glancing at her again while they waited for their luggage. She considered her appearance from the point of view of a forty-something scientist. A large, straight nose. A rather more golden skin tone than her Scandinavian genes would have generated. Lips that were well-drawn examples of their kind. She would never, unlike most of Ulf’s recent conquests, end up with unkissable, bright red lines surrounded by powder. Shoulder-length, nut-brown hair (clever colouring). Her behind filled out her mom jeans nicely but nobody would have classified it as fat, surely, or what was the definition of ‘fat’? And what about her breasts, were they for real? he would ask himself. What did they look like without a bra? He would imagine standing behind her in a clean and brightly lit Scandinavian hotel bathroom, watching her in the mirror while she brushed her teeth, and then putting his arms round her, full of a sense of possession, despite not really knowing her. This feeling sustained him and usually compensated him for not falling head over heels in love any more. She looked up at him and smiled compassionately. He misunderstood the smile.

‘Look, I like you. And I think that you are… going through something.’

A glint from his massive diver’s watch as he pushed his hand through his hair where a boyish, almost white tuft kept sticking straight up. He aroused the same emotions as the countless jocks in her past. She wanted to bite his arm.

‘I know how lonely one can feel sometimes, believe you me. I’ve lived in a trapper cabin for ten months.’

She smiled sardonically but thought: he cannot have a clue how insensitive that comment is.

‘What about a cup of coffee?’

‘No.’

‘Then why not make a note of my telephone number anyway? Then you’ll have a friend to contact here. Just in case.’

It seemed easier to do as he said. They stood silently side by side for several minutes, waiting for their luggage.

DR RICE SAID that there had been no change in the grieving process. There should be a change in the grieving process after six to twelve months. It is a cause for concern if, after six to twelve months, there is no change in the grieving process. All this, according to Dr Rice.

In other words, it is generally accepted that grief should show orderly progress.

‘Now, what are your thoughts about this?’

‘I don’t think about it. I haven’t set myself any goals.’

‘I was under the impression that we had, together?’

‘Maybe we did.’

‘We have discussed the lifelong outcomes.’

Dr Rice balanced the lifelong outcomes on the palm of his hand.

‘That’s not, however, what I am talking about now,’ he said, and reached out with his other hand. His movements were swift and unusually engaged for someone of his age. ‘I’m referring to not seeing any step change, however small, in the short term. I might also consider reducing your medication.’

‘“Also”?’

‘That’s right.’

‘Also… what?’

‘Jane, I don’t weigh every word.’

His eyes were bright and quick, and surrounded by dry, wrinkly skin like a parrot’s. Sometimes, she felt she was there mostly to please him.

‘For as long as your mind is dulled in various ways, it will be difficult for you to move on, all the way from denial to acceptance.’

‘That’s the Kübler-Ross model again, right?’

Dr Rice’s smile was that of a grandfather having to cope with a troublesome grandchild. She actually felt bad about tormenting him, but the discomfort it caused was as simple and unmistakable as holding one’s hand in scalding water. In her previous session with Dr Rice, she had talked about the widespread and growing scepticism towards Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s theoretical stages of grieving, a paradigm that had dominated work with the bereaved for the last forty years. She had also referred to some of the critical articles that, a decade or so after Kübler-Ross’s death, described her as a New Age spiritualist and a charlatan whose theory was based on anecdotal observations.

‘So good to hear that you find the energy to read, Jane,’ Dr Rice had replied, quite without sarcasm.

His office smelt of tear-stained paper tissues. His creaking leather chair allowed him to swing forward and back as he spoke. The room had a window, but looking into what could be another room, or a corridor, because one could sometimes see shadowy figures pass by on the other side of its milky glass. There were no diplomas on the wall above his dry, bald head, but instead framed children’s drawings. She had a feeling that during one of her early consultations, he had spoken about his voluntary work with Somalian refugee children, including trauma management.

While he thought, Dr Rice was breathing heavily and loudly through his nose. ‘It also seems true to say that the pills don’t help to prevent your functional episodes – is that right?’

The word functional made Jane think of space-saving wardrobe solutions.

‘But, do we still believe that I want to have these episodes?’

‘I don’t think people in your situation want either one thing or the other. It is all about loss of control. Or, wanting to lose control.’

He turned and looked at the opaque window. His expression suggested a man allowing magnificent scenery to inspire new lines of thought.

‘Why don’t you write, Jane? Why not start writing again?’ She saw his rosy ideas about the author’s vocation reflected in his face. ‘After all, many have felt that writing has a therapeutic effect. And for you, it is also a profession. I see patients at your stage who simply cling to their work and find that it helps them.’

She didn’t have the strength to explain her problem. Once, back in 2003 or perhaps 2004, Jane’s editor had sent her a copy of a travelogue called Stranger on a Train by the British writer Jenny Diski. Because you think alike, it said on the Post-it note that fell out of the bubble wrap envelope. In an especially memorable passage, Diski described her last conversation with a dying friend. When Jane reread that passage recently, it had seemed to express the reason why she no longer wrote: The nonsense of language reaching towards the void it was not equipped for, developed as it was by the living for the living, made us laugh.

To make Dr Rice’s forehead smoother, she told him instead about her travelling plans. It felt as if she had held back from telling him to achieve the maximum effect.

‘Now Jane, this is…’ Dr Rice gave the thumbs up, boyishly. He couldn’t help himself. That was how his old hand would still show enthusiasm, and one of the few things in this world that were still beautiful.

‘That changes everything,’ Dr Rice said. ‘It points to what I said earlier about initiative and change. I’m biting my tongue, Jane. Norway! Now, I imagine that’s a chilly country, Jane! Just how cold, I wonder? Come on, tell me, how cold can it get?’

SHE IS SHIVERING