Toxic E-Book

Helga Flatland

• Herausgeber: Orenda Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 397

Beschreibung

Shamed schoolteacher, Mathilde, moves to a dairy farm in the Norwegian countryside for an 'easier life', but she's soon up to her old tricks … upending and unsettling the lives of two reclusive farmers. Exquisitely written, razor-sharp and simmering with an unexpected tension, Toxic marks the return of one of Norway's finest writers… `Flatland has the gift that I most often covet in the work of other writers: the ability to make everyday events compelling … how the quietest existence can brim with urgency and drama´ Ann Morgan `Helga Flatland writes with elegance and subtle humour´ Daily Express `The author has been dubbed the Norwegian Anne Tyler and for good reason´ Good Housekeeping –––––––––––––– When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life. Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales – many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes. But beneath the apparently friendly and peaceful pastoral surface of life on the farm, something darker and more sinister starts to vibrate and, with Mathilde's arrival, cracks start appearing … everywhere. –––––––––––– Praise for Helga Flatland `The most beautiful, elegant writing I've read in a long time´ Joanna Cannon `Helga Flatland writes with such astuteness about families´ Prima `I absolutely loved its quiet, insightful generosity´ Claire King `So perceptive and clever´ Rónán Hession `Thoughtful and reflective´ Observer `A beautifully written, bittersweet, moving and poignant … a wise novel of great insight´ NB Magazine `Poignant and beautifully written … The prose and style, with the dialogue enveloped in the narrative, is intimate, evocative and moving´ Kristin Gleeson `I love the sophistication, directness and tenderness of this book´ Claire Dyer `The most satisfying book that I've read in a long time … masterful´ Sara Taylor `A moving and exquisite read´ Shelan Rodger

Leseprobe

i

When Mathilde is forced to leave her teaching job in Oslo after her relationship with eighteen-year-old Jacob is exposed, she flees to the countryside for a more authentic life.

Her new home is a quiet cottage on the outskirts of a dairy farm run by Andres and Johs, whose hobbies include playing the fiddle and telling folktales – many of them about female rebellion and disobedience, and seeking justice, whatever it takes.

But beneath the surface of the apparently friendly and peaceful pastoral life of the farm, something darker and less harmonic starts to vibrate, and with Mathilde’s arrival, cracks start appearing … everywhere.ii

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TOXIC

Helga Flatland

Translated from the Norwegian by Matt Bagguley

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CONTENTS

TITLE PAGEAJOHSMATHILDEJOHSMATHILDEc#JOHSEMATHILDEJOHSeJOHSMATHILDEAMATHILDEJOHSf#JOHSC#MATHILDEJOHSMATHILDEJOHSMATHILDEJOHSMATHILDEaJOHSABOUT THE AUTHORABOUT THE TRANSLATOR COPYRIGHT

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A

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JOHS

‘And now your feet!’

The rubber soles of my trainers felt like they were glued to the laminate floor.

‘Feet!’

I curled my toes, we locked eyes.

‘Come on Johs, your fucking feet!’

Johannes held my gaze, then stamped the hard soles of his own shoes so forcefully it echoed round the walls of the gymnasium.

The fingers on my left hand moved lightly, my right wrist was loose, light and supple, I felt the rhythm in my chest, in my stomach, in my knees and thighs, I saw it in his nodding head, in the hand tapping the front of his shirt, I felt it in both ankles. But my feet weren’t having it, not until the notes from the first string strokes had ebbed away in the large room. At which point my right foot did a couple of awkward and silent thuds, and my cheeks started to burn.

‘You can’t play the fiddle without your feet, Johs.’

4

The rhythm of four hundred feet stamping in unison sends little tremors through the building, and me. I take a large swig of beer and stare down at the fiddle still resting in its case. ‘Look how nicely Vesla is sleeping,’ Johannes would often say when opening the fiddle case. As a child I felt slightly uncomfortable about the way he referred to his fiddle, but as an adult I realised that it was because he was always drunk when he was about to play, and that he talked about her – and to her – as if she was a child, but at the same time something he desired.

All I inherited from Johannes was my name and that fiddle. He tried getting my mum to change both these things just before he died. ‘Can’t you change his name?’ he cried desperately time and again in the final months of his life. ‘He’s twenty-five, Dad, it’s a bit late for that now,’ laughed Mum while looking at me. ‘What would you have me call him?’ she asked when he repeated the question. ‘Whatever you want,’ cried Johannes, ‘anything, but he ain’t getting my name.’

‘Are you ready, Johs?’ says a voice behind me.

I bend down, pick up the fiddle, and follow the woman whose name I can’t remember out of the practice room and to the back of the stage. It smells of burnt dust and sweat, and I hear my name being announced through the stage curtain: ‘And the next person on stage is not just anybody, he is the grandchild of – and, yes, playing the very same fiddle as …’ I straighten my shoulders, smile, and walk out into the spotlight in the middle of the stage then stand there, totally calm, until the applause subsides – long enough to hear the audience twisting impatiently in their seats, just as Johannes always did in order to create a sense of anticipation.

‘Kari Midtigard,’ I finally say into the microphone, before smiling at the audience, then pausing once again, fully aware that 5my playing in no way lives up to the confidence that my pauses and wry smile might suggest. ‘Do you know Kari Midtigard from Tinn, she never lets any boys in, Kari is pretty and Kari is kind, and now this fair sweetheart is mine.’

‘They have to see the story you’re playing,’ Johannes often said, ‘they have to hear the connection between the notes and the story, which should lift each other up. Not like that,’ he would say, ‘you’re telling it like you’re going to the shop, it’s so flat, your words should dance, come on, one more time, stand up, tell us, and play as though you mean it.’

I bring the fiddle to my chest, and play the song about Kari Midtigard from Tinn.

I stopped checking the results of the fiddle competitions I enter long ago, knowing that my name will be way down the lists, but that’s fine, it’s not why I play, I’ll tell anyone who might wonder – on this particular evening it’s Ingrid.

‘So why do you play,’ she asks while trying to untie the waistcoat of my costume.

I’m too drunk to help her, and my fingers are too numb, as is the rest of my body.

‘Because it’s in my blood,’ I say, ‘do you know who my grandfather was?’

I’m not ashamed of using Johannes’s name like that, and besides, it’s perhaps one of the few things about me he would have approved of. ‘Be careful you don’t end up in bed with one of our cousins,’ Andres once said, ‘it’s more than likely Johannes had children with women other than Grandma, the way he carried on.’ ‘It helps that you’re good-looking,’ Johannes once said to me, ‘it really does, when you’re as talentless as you are.’

‘Of course,’ says Ingrid abandoning the unlacing, instead moving her hands down to the belt and finding my knife. ‘Aww, it’s so little and cute,’ she says removing it from its sheath. 6

‘I think it’s a pretty normal size,’ I say.

‘Glad to hear it,’ she says, smiling.

The next morning I wake up alone in my hotel bed. My back aches. I have to do something about it before the spring ploughing – those endless hours in the tractor seat. I find my phone, and see the giant headlines about new infections. Andres is no doubt terrified right now, he’s been worrying about coronavirus since first reading about it in December. He’s inherited Johannes’s anxiety – and all the little movements in the tiny muscles around his mouth that come with it, as well as the sceptical look and restless joints that make him look even more like Johannes than he already does. More than I do. ‘You’re like a big, secure rock, you are,’ my mum once said, ‘calm and silent, you always have been, and you should be happy about that.’ But Johannes always said the music lies in our nerves, in which case our nerves should have been distributed a bit more fairly, because Andres is demonstratively uninterested in music – in all music, but particularly folk music, despite the fact that he has almost perfect pitch. His skin prickles if anything’s sharp or flat, ‘Play the right note, damn it!’ he would shout through the wall between our rooms when I practised the fiddle as a child. I can hear the difference between a bum note and the right note, but not to the same degree as Andres, for him it’s physical, it’s in his nerves.

I send him a message saying that I’ll be home in time to do the milking. Two minutes later he replies asking if I can stop at the wholesaler on the way and pick up some garden lime. I take a shower, comforting myself with the fact that he’s still capable of looking away, for a moment at least, from all the symptom reports that accompany the headlines.

The farm that Andres and I run has been in Mum’s family since the 1600s. Mum has two older brothers, but when she was still a child Johannes decided that Mum would eventually inherit the 7farm, and no one objected of course. He was a pioneering feminist, she occasionally says. No one objects to her saying that either, but it’s at best a favourable rewriting of the dictatorial and arbitrary way Johannes governed his surroundings. He never ran the farm himself, that was done by his brother, who lived alone in the cottage while Johannes and Grandma and their three children lived in the farmhouse. ‘That’s what he wants,’ said Johannes, ‘that’s how he wants it.’ I’ve never understood how the farm’s running and its income was shared back then. I was four years old in 1987 when Johannes’s brother died suddenly and my mum officially took over. Johannes and Grandma moved into the cottage, and I moved the three kilometres from my father’s childhood home to that of my mum. ‘In the heart of Telemark,’ Johannes said, who, despite the fact that he didn’t know one end of a mower, or a cow for that matter, from the other, used the farm for all it was worth when it came to how he presented himself. He would tell stories, both on and off stage, about his family, about the farm, the people and animals, placing himself at its centre, a big farmer among other big farmers. He told so many tales about the farm and my ancestors that it’s impossible now to know what really happened – whether he rewrote and elaborated on the stories he’d heard, or if what he said was true. One of his favourite stories was how my ancestor was directly responsible for why Telemark remained terra incognito for so long. ‘He beat the cartographer to death,’ said Johannes, ‘so no one dared go near the county for years.’ It was a story he told regularly, and proudly, as if it said something honourable about the family – and he carried on telling it, undeterred, even after Andres’s girlfriend, a historian, corrected him during a Christmas dinner that everyone still remembers but nobody mentions.

The farm includes a cottage, a farmhouse, an old sheep shed that Andres is converting for meat production, and a new high-tech milking shed. In addition, it comes with four hundred acres of 8fields and forest. Andres, who is two years older than me, and has the right of inheritance, wavered and worried in typical style about what he should study and what career he should choose before deciding in his late twenties that his safest bet, after all that, was to come home and take over the farm, in line with what Johannes had already decided years earlier. I have been to agricultural college, I’ve worked as a stand-in farm manager and have been clearly focussed on eventually running a farm, be it this one or another, for as long as I can remember. It’s what I’m good at, it’s what I can do. Johannes knew it, my mum knows it. And Andres – whose refusal to make decisions means he cannot run a company that, due to the weather and wind and seasons, requires you to make decisions every day – definitely knows it. ‘I can’t do it without you,’ he said before making his mind up, ‘you know that,’ and, about the farmhouse: ‘I don’t want it … really, I’d rather live in the cottage, it’s what Kristin wants too, she thinks the house will be too big, too much to look after.’ It was impossible to know whether this was true or whether he was resigned to accepting it as some kind of penalty for having claimed his inheritance so late after I had effectively been running the farm for several years. Still, I thought it was a fair price for him to pay, and we said no more about it.

You have to run big to run profitably, my mum said throughout our childhoods, and she expanded the farm to include more and more animals and more and more machines, as well as buying milk quotas and leasing more land for grazing and for forage crops. If Johannes wasn’t exactly a pioneer, Mum in many ways has been. ‘It’s because I’m a woman,’ she has said numerous times, ‘women make better farmers, I have better intuition – and this business requires at least as much intuition as it does muscle power.’ As well as intuition, Mum has a fiercely competitive instinct, always feeling like she has more to prove, or disprove, and that in itself has probably resulted in at least half of the machinery and many of the plaques for exceptionally good milk that hang in the office. 9As I park the car in the driveway, I see Dad walking the puppies in our yard. He and Mum now live in his parents’ old house, but they are more often here at the farm than they are there. Dad is deaf in one ear and partially deaf in the other. He has a functional little hearing aid, but thinks it gets in the way of any physical activity and only uses it indoors, ‘in social settings,’ as he says. Since neither Mum, Andres nor myself qualify for what he would call a social setting, he uses the hearing aid roughly once every six months.

Dad doesn’t hear me arrive. I sit in the car for a moment and watch him through the windscreen, he is seventy-five, but still nimble and agile, no stiff joints. He bends down to pick up a toy, throws it, crouches down to say something to the three puppies, he points, laughs and spreads his arms when they instead launch themselves at him, their little tails vibrating with excitement.

He has bred elkhounds for as long as I can remember, although he stopped hunting many years ago, and I don’t think he’s ever shot an elk. He can’t do it, he’s too fond of animals, always has been, long before animal welfare became fashionable.

‘You’ll never train them to hunt like that,’ I say into his good ear when I get close enough.

Perhaps he heard me coming, or sensed it, as I often suspect he does, because he doesn’t jump, or look surprised. He smiles at the puppies without looking at me.

‘Maybe. They’re too small for it anyway, it’s mostly to give her some peace,’ he says, nodding towards the mother dog, who is sunbathing beside the wall of the shed. ‘How were the roads?’

He always asks about the snow on the roads when I’ve been out in the car, even in the middle of summer. It’s an open invitation for me to tell him how I’ve been, what I’ve been doing, or just talk about the roads.

‘They’re pretty clear now,’ I say.

‘Probably be a while before you can go out again,’ he says. ‘They say everything’s gonna shut.’ 10

‘Everything?’

‘Yep. Because of the coronavirus,’ he says drawing out the word ‘corooohna’.

‘Have you spoken to Andres?’ I ask.

‘Yes, he’s glued to the TV and the news, I told him to switch it off – that I’ll tell him if there’s anything worth him knowing about,’ says Dad. ‘But you know …’

I laugh.

‘It’ll be a while before it spreads all the way out here at least,’ I say. ‘Do you want dinner? I just bought a couple of pizzas.’

‘No, I don’t dare,’ he says. ‘Your mum’s making her fish stew.’

‘Poor you,’ I say, before going inside.

The house is just as it was when Mum and Dad moved out and Andres and I took over. It’s far too big for just me, with its three living rooms, three bathrooms, five bedrooms, basement and loft. I can feel it when the others are here, how Andres’s kids fill the room, or when Mum and Dad sit where they always used to sit at the dining table.

I was planning on renovating the place, one of the bathrooms at least, but the money went into running the farm and it seems pointless renovating just for my own benefit. Apart from the bathroom there’s not much else I can change, anyway. Large parts of the house are listed. The original log walls date back to the seventeenth century, and wall-mounted cupboards with floral decorations line the walls in all the living rooms, and there are benches, corner cupboards and four-poster beds. As a child I thought the house was ugly and old-fashioned. ‘Old-fashioned?’ my mum would repeat when I complained, laughing out loud while pressing her hand or sometimes her cheek against the round logs of the walls. ‘Did you hear that?’ she would say to the log. ‘You’re not old-fashioned, you’re just old.’

Viggo always sits waiting for me outside the community centre before his fiddle lesson. I’ve told him that he can just go in, wait 11inside, maybe practise a little on his own before I get there, but he never does. I know that he sits there on the bench for two hours, from the moment school finishes until I arrive. His whole face lights up when I round the corner, and it hurts the same way every time I see it. He cannot play the fiddle, he will not get any better. ‘Have you practised?’ I always ask. He’ll nod. And he may well have, but it makes no difference, none of it sticks. His fingers are short, chubby and never press the strings properly, it’s painful to listen to, and even worse that I find his whole appearance so desperately irritating, I can’t resist answering tersely or mockingly even, always torn between wanting to take him home for a bath and a haircut, and wanting to hurt him in some way or other.

So when I hear that the schools and all the leisure facilities, including the music school, are closing, Viggo is the first person I think of. I send him a message saying that I hope he’ll practise in the meantime, ‘Use YouTube, you’re good at that,’ I write, giving him a thumbs-up.

It’s just like any other day for me, I’m not feeling the seriousness that everyone around me seems to be feeling. Andres, who’s now too afraid to step outside the door, calls out to me just as I’m leaving to collect a hay bale.

‘You were at that fiddle competition only last weekend!’ he shouts.

I can’t help laughing.

‘It wasn’t exactly chock full of globetrotters,’ I say, stopping the tractor when I hear how afraid he is.

He doesn’t reply to my comment. ‘My throat hurts, I’ve been coughing all night,’ he says instead.

I don’t doubt him. Andres always has the symptoms of every disease that worries him, and I know better than to suggest he’s imagining it. And he usually isn’t, he can psych himself into getting a fever and a rash, and in a way this tangible, physical evidence of the illness will seemingly calm his anxiety rather than escalate it. 12

‘What are we supposed to do now?’ he says, ‘when we have to stay indoors.’

‘You’re being irrational,’ I say, even though I know it will just make him angry. ‘Besides, there’s no Covid in the cowshed.’

‘It comes from bats, Johs, animals can give it to humans and probably vice versa. Anyone could have infected the cows, like that posh fucking vet, didn’t she just get back from a ski trip to Italy?’

‘No, she was in Sweden,’ I say.

For our entire childhood Andres wanted out. He hated the village, hated its smallness, the small minds, the small ambitions; he subscribed to foreign magazines, watched Swedish television, followed the American basketball league, dyed his hair just like Dennis Rodman, was the first to buy a skateboard, a snowboard and oversized Mighty Ducks and Chicago Bulls sweaters, and went round in such loose-fitting DC trousers, he couldn’t walk up the stairs. ‘It’s so claustrophobic in here,’ he once said, ‘so fucking claustrophobic.’ ‘Your clothes don’t look all that claustrophobic,’ replied Mum. Both she and Dad let him do his own thing, explore, as she said, to Andres’s great irritation, until one morning, when he suddenly used an Oslo accent to say that he didn’t want milk for breakfast. ‘You can cut that out, right now!’ said Mum, slapping the kitchen worktop. It was evidently Dad who had insisted on the liberal approach they had taken to Andres’s rebellion, because from that point on, Mum was merciless. ‘Who do you think you are?’ she said initially. ‘I don’t know what you’re talking about,’ replied Andres, ‘I just want juice instead.’ ‘I mean it, who do you think you are?’ Mum said. Andres didn’t answer. ‘Do you actually have any idea who you are?’ she continued. ‘Do you know the history in these walls – where you come from?’ ‘I want to be where it’s at,’ Andres said finally. ‘Where it’s at?’ Mum repeated. ‘Where what’s at? The fountain of vacuous opinions? This is where it’s at, this is where everything starts.’ 13Andres shrugged. It was the beginning of a silent argument that lasted for at least three weeks, during which Mum consistently refused to answer Andres if he didn’t speak using the local accent. In the end it was Andres who had to back down, but he didn’t use his local accent with anyone but Mum for several years.

I don’t know when he changed his mind about all this, it happened gradually in the years just prior to him moving back home, one day his Facebook bio suddenly said where he was from, and he changed his cover photo to an overly idyllic photo of the village and the farm. He was visiting home more often, asking Mum about the family, our history, posting old YouTube videos of Johannes’s concerts. And since he moved back and took over the farm, he’s done a complete one-eighty, now he mocks anything that’s remotely urban, and engages in futile and polarised online debates about cities and villages, wolves and sheep, and snowmobiles and the cultural landscape. I’m not always able to stop myself contradicting him or making fun of him when he gets too opinionated. But I never comment on the obvious connection between his anxiety and his patriotism, both of which have increased at the same time.

‘You need to calm down, it’ll soon blow over,’ I say to Andres.

‘You’re wrong,’ he says quietly, ‘it’s going to blow up.’

14

MATHILDE

The northern lights wave goodbye from the east as we take off from Tromsø Airport. The Japanese tourists, fastened into their seats on the wrong side of the plane, desperately stretch their selfie-sticks across the aisle. A cellphone hits me on the forehead, and I turn angrily to the woman holding the stick’s other end.

‘What’s your problem?’ I shout, knowing full well what the problem is: the northern lights had been predicted every day for the last two weeks, without there being the slightest hint of any light moving in Tromsø’s dark and cloudy skies until the exact moment SAS started boarding flight 4424 to Oslo.

I realise that the selfie stick belongs to the woman from a couple I was chatting to in the hotel bar a few nights earlier. She and her boyfriend had taken a northern lights holiday to conceive their first child. ‘Children conceived under the northern lights are especially gifted and beautiful,’ she explained to me, placing her hand on her lover’s thigh. ‘I know that,’ I replied with a smile, ‘I actually was conceived under the northern lights,’ I said, flinging my arms in the air triumphantly. At first the woman looked disappointed, then I think she decided she didn’t believe me, although she did laugh out loud and said something in Japanese to her boyfriend, who immediately burst out laughing too. ‘It’s true,’ I said, and I think it actually is true, although I can’t be certain, of course. I was so acutely envious of their open-hearted love for each other, so full of longing, that I couldn’t bear sitting with them anymore.

Whenever I fly the length of Norway, or across it for that matter, and look down on the endless square miles of mountains and 15uninhabited forest, I always think exactly the same thing: how many more people we could accommodate in this country, and how easy it would be to hide a corpse here if you really bothered to make an effort – and if I’m flying during daylight hours I’ll follow the power lines while thinking about all the work this infrastructure requires; the tree felling, the shipping and construction, the maintenance and upgrading, the machines and the muscle. And then I’ll fall asleep. To completely surrender control, turn off my phone, be out of reach, is the only antidote for my lifelong insomnia. It might of course be the sense of being rested that triggers the euphoria I then feel as the plane approaches Gardermoen, but floating slowly over the treetops or Lake Mjøsa always fills me with calm anticipation. Then there’s the train ride through Romerike past the farms and fields, the Hammering Man sculpture and the mural for Lillestrøm Football Club, and onwards through Vålerenga and Kværnerbyen, before the tunnel that comes out at Oslo’s central station. A friend of mine who commutes between Zurich and Oslo thinks the final stretch, from the central station to home, is always the longest. ‘In my mind the journey feels like it ends on the train, but then you realise there’s still one part left,’ she says. I don’t agree, I’m unusually fond of all the city’s public transport, and getting on the bus or tram outside the railway station is a highlight, to be alone yet surrounded by people absorbed in their own business and on their way to whatever it is that’s theirs.

When I enter her flat, Mum is sitting at the kitchen table in front of her PC, drinking tea and reading the online news, its red capital letters glowing at me.

‘How was Tromsø?’ she asks without taking her eyes off the screen.

‘It was nice,’ I say, ‘but it’s good to be home again.’

She doesn’t ask any more about it, fortunately. 16

‘Ten people in Norway are infected with this Chinese virus now,’ she says.

‘I saw that,’ I say, taking a mug from the cupboard, then pouring some tea from the pot and sitting down opposite her.

‘Weren’t you on the plane with a bunch of Chinese?’ she asks.

‘No, they were Japanese, Mum,’ I say.

She breathes in and stays quiet for a bit too long.

‘Are you about to say it’s the same thing?’ I ask, laughing.

‘You’re so stupid,’ says Mum, taking off her reading glasses and looking at me. ‘My God, you look an awful lot like your mother today.’

Her eyes well up with tears, which she dabs at exaggeratedly. Mum, who is actually the sister of my biological mother, took custody of me thirty years ago when I was four, after both my parents died in a car accident. I only have vague memories of them, sensing them occasionally when I’m half asleep, or reminded by a smell or a sound or a touch. Mum remembers them, of course, especially her sister, the grief permanently at the forefront of her mind. It has become a project, a lifestyle, a personality trait, to mourn her. And by extension to put her on a pedestal; no one can live up to the image Mum has created of my mother, least of all me. Over the years I have realised, with a degree of sadness, but also with relief, that my mother was more than an exceptionally gifted saint. Nevertheless, it is this exalted impression of her that lingers.

Mum has been determined to bring me up in a way she is convinced my parents would have. There have been classical piano lessons, books she would never have read herself, and trips to the theatre and opera. Her own interest in art is supposedly limited, ‘I’m more of a pragmatist,’ she’ll say coquettishly. And I’ll often point out how that isn’t necessarily a contradiction, only to be dismissed: ‘Your mother was the 17artist in our family,’ she says. But it’s just her way of protecting her own artistic ambitions; as a child I once found a whole box of watercolours bearing her initials under her bed, and I remember how beautiful and magical the paintings were, but I never saw them again, and I never dared ask about them.

I have often accused Mum, during some of our uglier arguments, of adorning herself with grief, of using it, of abusing it, of hiding in it, and I still stand by much of this, but what she has never adorned herself with – which really would have been something to flaunt – is the unwavering and dedicated care she has shown me, all the help given and effort she has made.

‘Are you worried?’ I say now, nodding towards the news stories on the computer screen.

‘No. I doubt it’ll really turn into anything,’ says Mum.

By mid-April, the half-second video lag has become unbearable; by the time they appear on screen the looks and expressions on my students’ faces are no longer happening, every reaction lacks momentum, it’s all out of sync. I put my finger on Jakob’s thumbnail window; he looks bored, like the twenty-four other faces around him.

My head aches, the light from the desk lamp I put just behind the screen is almost blinding me.

‘So why do we think, or at least what’s the most important reason, that the use of New Norwegian declined after the war?’ I say, stroking Jakob’s cheek with my fingernail.

No response.

‘Hello, people, you might get this in your exam,’ I say. The word ‘exam’ sharpens their attention, and several hands go up.

‘Yes, Anna?’ I say, expanding her thumbnail.

Anna is sat in a large room in what must be a house, not an apartment, since there is unobstructed light streaming from all the windows behind her. The online lessons have given me an 18unusual and sometimes disconcerting insight into the students’ homes. ‘Could you perhaps move to a slightly quieter room?’ I once asked Sigve without thinking after insisting that we have our evaluation meeting on Teams – there were so many loud voices and children crying and shouting in the background that I had to turn my computer volume down. Sigve had then fallen silent, before nodding and taking his machine into a cramped bathroom. I’ve been amazed at what the students choose to show in and of their backgrounds: towers of unwashed plates, expensive works of art, Christmas decorations still hanging in the window in April, IKEA posters above the sofa, dirty aquariums, unmade beds in typical teenagers’ bedrooms, instruments, terraces overlooking the Oslo fjord. I actually spent a whole day moving furniture, and positioning the screen, to make my background as unrevealing as possible and create an illusion of space in my tiny apartment while simultaneously ensuring I had flattering natural light on my face.

My apartment in Sagene was bought with the money I inherited when my parents died, which I got access to when I turned twenty-five. Buying that place was the proudest moment of my life, although buying a flat with money you haven’t lifted a finger for isn’t exactly something to be so proud of, my ex-boyfriend said during one of our many arguments over what he thought was my careless spending, and what I thought was his obsessive and pietistic level-headedness. I was never able to get really angry during those arguments and would often point out the irony of him standing in my paid-off apartment lecturing me about finances, when he still lived in a flat-share with four other people. ‘And then there’s your stupid aunt, who left that money to rot in a bank account for over twenty years,’ he once shouted, ‘imagine the apartment you could have bought if any of you had an ounce of financial sense.’ Personally I never even think like that, it doesn’t even 19occur to me, because I absolutely love my apartment in Sagene; every square centimetre of it.

‘Is this something we might get in the exam?’ says Jakob three hours later, kissing my lower back.

‘Yes,’ I say, lying totally still on my stomach with my arms crossed under my head.

‘And this?’ he says, kissing me even further down.

‘Especially that,’ I say.

He laughs before changing position, lies on top of me, supporting himself on either side of my head, his forearm muscles flexing right before my eyes; I want him so much, even more of him, that I could sink my teeth into those muscles, it’s an inexhaustible craving, I cannot get enough.

‘Have you got anything to drink?’ he asks afterwards. We’re still in bed, it’s early afternoon, and I’ve not yet started preparing for tomorrow’s class.

‘Anything?’

‘Yeah, a cola zero, for example, would be awesome right now,’ he says. ‘Or some fruit maybe?’

‘I don’t think so, but see what you can find in the fridge,’ I say.

He gets up, walks naked into the kitchen, and I watch him until he disappears round the corner into the hall. I remember how, when I too was eighteen, I would pull the duvets or blankets around me if I left the bed naked, even after being in a relationship with Karsten for over a year. Jakob, however, is totally brazen, happy to wander naked around my apartment while making coffee or checking his cellphone at the kitchen counter. The confidence is attractive, but I sometimes wonder if it actually says more about the physical hierarchy between us. His well-formed, symmetrical physique has evoked both 20shame and confidence in me, but he can pick and choose, I will often think at night, he can have whoever he wants, and there is no doubt that he wants me.

He comes back in holding two glasses of orange juice.

‘Did you check the sell-by date on that juice?’ I ask.

‘No, should I? It was the only thing you had in the fridge,’ he says. ‘Maybe you should join one of those food-box schemes?’

I laugh.

‘I mean it, they do them for single people too,’ he says, downing his glass in three large gulps.

I strain to keep smiling. He picks up his boxer shorts and starts getting dressed.

‘Aren’t you going to have a shower,’ I say quickly.

‘Absolutely not,’ he says, smiling, before pressing his nose against his upper arm and inhaling my smell while looking at me.

‘Can’t you stay a bit longer?’ I ask.

‘Didn’t you say you had loads of work to do? I’m expecting a thorough report on the outline I gave you,’ he says, laughing.

‘Not funny,’ I say.

He raises his hands defensively. We have a long-standing agreement to never discuss school or schoolwork, but he always breaks it, and each time does so with the same expression on his face. It’s now dawned on me that he’s doing it on purpose. ‘Why do you have to ruin it,’ I’ve asked several times. And he’ll always laugh and say, ‘Relax, I’m just kidding,’ or he’ll sometimes say, ‘It just makes it extra nice, you know, the illegality of it.’ ‘It’s not illegal,’ I’ll say every time.

One afternoon last autumn, just after I took over as the Norwegian substitute teacher for class 3STD, he was standing on the steps outside school as I left to go home. ‘It was 21interesting what you said about Hamsun today,’ he said as I walked past. I stopped. ‘You think so?’ I said. ‘Yes, very interesting,’ he replied, ‘although I’m not sure if it’s that relevant for the exam,’ he continued. ‘No, but you might just have a life beyond the exam,’ I said, instantly regretting it, but I was so tired of the constant talk about the exam, as if it was the endpoint for all learning.

I don’t remember if it was like that when I attended high school, but I do know that I had no idea what the curriculum was. Some of my students refer to it continually, raising a hand to ask if something is in the curriculum when, from the look in their eyes and confident tone, they clearly know the answer. They behave like aware and demanding customers. ‘It makes me so fucking stressed,’ said a colleague over a beer one Friday after work. He also told me that I’d been hired as a substitute because the previous Norwegian teacher had gone on sick leave after the whole class signed a complaint about her teaching programme, stating that they would fail to achieve their learning objectives with such poor supervision.

‘Maybe, but it doesn’t feel like that now,’ replied Jakob. ‘Don’t you think the lesson will be more interesting if you think beyond the exam,’ I continued. He shrugged impatiently, before smiling at me. ‘You’re making it more interesting at least,’ he said, ‘see you tomorrow.’ And at that point I think he already had me, although it’s hard to know, I’ve forgotten what it’s like not to have him constantly dominating my thoughts. Perhaps it wasn’t until a few weeks later, when he wanted to talk about his in-depth study after class, when I sat on his desk, in front of him, and noticed my thigh pressing against his trousers as his eyes roamed all over it. That evening, I searched for him on every online platform, a grey silhouette on Facebook, a private account on Instagram, just a blurry photo of him playing football aged twelve on Google image search. 22That photo made me shut the laptop; he was twelve years old in 2014. I don’t know any children, the only other twelve-year-old I can think of is me when I was that age, but I remember thinking about Nora, my friend’s seven-year-old daughter, and how he is closer to her age than mine.

He began staring at me in class, and I began thinking about how I looked from behind. I would turn and continue writing on the whiteboard. He raised his hand, asking questions I later found out he already knew the answer to, and smiled. After class he waited for me, keen to discuss the topic in greater depth; he’d decided to write about allegorical literature. ‘I was really inspired by the way you talked about The Seed,’ he said, ‘it was amazing.’ One morning in early December, I woke up to a message from him on Teams saying he was going to the dentist and would miss Norwegian class as a result. I tried to reschedule, but couldn’t, unfortunately, he wrote at the end, with an old-fashioned wink emoji. I was surprised by my disappointment, and surprised by how disengaged I was for the rest of the day. Did I miss anything important today? He wrote that evening. Of course, I replied. The assignments are in OneNote, I added. I don’t understand the last one, about that Obama speech, he wrote ten minutes later. Can I call you?

Jakob rang my doorbell after we’d talked on the phone for an hour and a half. ‘I don’t think this can be explained over the phone,’ he’d finally said, referring to what was a simple task about rhetoric, ‘can I come over to yours instead?’ I remember genuinely believing that he wanted help with his assignment, and that my internal reasoning concerned teaching and competence goals. But when he rang the doorbell fifteen minutes later, he had no laptop with him, not even a notebook. It was he who moved closer to me on the sofa, it was he who touched the back of my neck, who held my gaze, who ran his other hand along my thigh, who kissed me. I don’t remember what I was 23thinking, if I objected at all, but I do know that I was sitting motionless on the sofa with my arms in my lap until he kissed me, and that I reflexively put them around his neck. I know that I didn’t undress him, that he undressed me first – all I remember thinking is, If he doesn’t know how to undo my bra I’ll stop this – and then he stood up and undressed himself.

‘I’ve fancied you since the first Norwegian class in early autumn,’ he said that night in my apartment. ‘You’re eighteen, you fancy everyone,’ I replied. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t fancy anyone normally, I’m extremely sexually selective by nature.’ And although I’ve grown used to his entire generation talking about themselves in this same effortless and matter-of-fact way, almost regardless of what it concerns, I still thought he was joking, or that he was at least trying to pay me some kind of compliment. But when I turned and saw the look on his face, I realised he’d meant it as a purely neutral statement.

Nobody would ever call me selective, I’ve got no idea what I’m attracted by, there are no clear similarities between Ulrik and Karsten and Vegard, and all those in between. ‘No, that doesn’t make sense,’ said Maren, my best friend, who was doing a one-year psychology course when we talked after Vegard and I broke up. ‘The common denominator is that none of them were actually interested in you,’ she said, ‘I think you’re subconsciously seeking rejection, because your parents rejected you in many ways.’ ‘They didn’t reject me, they died,’ I said. ‘Yes, and there’s a hole in your life that needs filling,’ she said confidently, ‘you’re always going to be looking for compensation for your parents, subconsciously looking for the rejection they subjected you to, always trying to fill the space they left.’ ‘One size fits all,’ I replied, ‘the answer is in your childhood. I must say it’s quite incredible what you’ve picked up after three months of psychology class. But there you go, 24everyone wants what they can’t get,’ I continued, ‘you don’t need to study psychology to know that.’ ‘No, but not everyone becomes as desperate when they don’t get it,’ said Maren, ‘and most people learn from their mistakes.’

I don’t know how to learn to stop being attracted to someone who’ll eventually reject me. ‘It’s not something you can smell on people,’ I said. ‘It kind of is,’ said Maren. ‘You could smell the narcissist on Ulrik from the other side of town, and Vegard, honestly – a guy who does extreme sports? – that speaks for itself, Mathilde.’ ‘I wouldn’t exactly call ski touring an extreme sport,’ I said. ‘No, maybe no. But he was still more into his skis than he was you, from the very beginning,’ she said. ‘And at high school you practically forced Karsten to be your boyfriend, my God, how many evenings did we stand outside his door waiting for him to show up? Didn’t you physically put your foot in his door once,’ Maren continued, laughing. ‘It worked, at least,’ I said.

Nor do I know how to unlearn the feeling of unadulterated despair, the bottomless abyss opening beneath me when I think that someone is about to leave me. All my instincts demand that I fight back, I lose my sense of rationality and impulse control, it embarrasses me to think of all the things I’ve said and done, like the time I physically clung to Karsten’s leg when he broke up with me and was walking out the door, and when I broke into Vegard’s place, and all the things I yelled at Ulrik.

During free periods I can stand for a small eternity at the staffroom window, looking down at Jakob; at the way he carries himself, at how elegantly his neck and back moves when he laughs, his blonde hair; I look at his arms, his wrists below his coat sleeves, his hands, and then I have to adjust my frame of reference. He is objectively attractive, I can see it in the eyes of those constantly surrounding him, he is pleasant to look at for a long 25time, not one asymmetrical blemish to disturb or unsettle, and yet there is nothing mild about him, he is sharp and direct.

I shouldn’t be a teacher, I’m not meant to be a teacher, I’m not a teacher. ‘You can’t afford to be so childish,’ Mum says, whenever she suggests that I study education and I reply by saying that I’m not going to be a teacher. ‘You are a teacher,’ she’ll say, not quite understanding my defiance along with the directionless and sky-high ambitions she instilled in me throughout my childhood. She was convinced that I should do something artistic, like my parents, which has left me with an unshakeable sense of restlessness and impatience, nothing feels meaningful enough, big enough, real enough. ‘You know everyone feels like this,’ says Maren, ‘it’s a generational phenomenon, it has nothing to do with your parents. You’re not unique,’ she says, with the best intentions. I protest internally, but the fact that Mum seems to have given up on her ambitions for me too, that she now seems content as long as I’m doing something, makes me even more determined to prove them wrong. Last autumn, I was finally accepted on the writers’ course in Tromsø after being rejected by every writing school in the country for several years in a row. But I haven’t told Mum, I can’t bear her expectations and comparisons in addition to my own.

My mother published her first book when she was twenty-five, and managed to publish seven novels before she died. In one of my clearest memories of her she is sat writing, inaccessible, wearing a pair of large headphones connected to the old Discman. I have never read her books, although for years almost half the bookshelf at Mum’s house was taken up by all the Norwegian and foreign editions – an English version of her fifth and best-selling novel always sat on the little side table in the lounge, as a kind of coffee-table book. My mother was unable to write for three years after having me, and there are 26several paragraphs in her third book about the ambivalence of having children, ‘But it’s not about you,’ my mother said, ‘you’re not even mentioned in some of the books.’ I’m not mentioned in any interviews with her that I’ve read either, except for a short paragraph in a profile interview for Aftenposten, where she explains why four years elapsed between the second and third book. ‘Your mother was unsentimental,’ Mum often says. I wouldn’t say that’s an entirely adequate description, but I’ve stopped asking questions about her. I’ve learned to live with the fact that there are no questions or answers, or words even, that could satisfy my hunger for her, to know her every little movement. My impression of her changes from one day to the next; from someone who was appreciative and praising, to someone critical and condescending. I realised long ago that she cannot be trusted, although I believe in that condescending look when I’m in the classroom trying vainly to motivate the students – and I am not a teacher.

‘It’s like being released from a digital prison,’ says Jeanette, a colleague from school, one May evening while we’re having a beer to celebrate the school’s reopening and the beginning of the end of the pandemic. ‘We’ll always remember this spring. It’ll be like, “Where were you on the twelfth of March, 2020?”’

I nod. My only memory from 12 March was the realisation that I wasn’t going to see Jakob every day in the weeks to come, and the message he sent me that night saying that he was in retroactive quarantine because of that trip to Copenhagen the previous weekend, which he signed with a laughing-crying emoji. I know he only uses emojis ironically, deliberately out of place, but his lack of concern for what it meant for us left me feeling desperate.

‘I couldn’t think of anything but my poor students having to isolate at home,’ continues Jeanette, ‘with all that I know about 27some of those families … and all that I don’t