Zero E-Book

Gine Cornelia Pedersen

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

I tell her I've stopped taking my pills I write that I'm still not well, that it's making day-to-day life difficult That I often do things I regret, and that there's some sort of membrane between what I want to do and whatever I end up doing That I really want to be an actor, but that it's a dream that seems all too distant for the time being I tell her I use and abuse alcohol and drugs, and that I've got a death wish that sometimes becomes difficult to ignore That I don't know who I am That I change my mind as frequently as I change my socks That I'm horrible to the people around me That my sex life is depraved Gine Cornelia Pedersen's début novel won the prestigious Tarjei Vesaas First Book Award in its native Norway upon publication and went on to garner numerous glowing reviews, with major broadsheet Aftenposten declaring 'Sometimes, as a reviewer, one forgets a work's failings and mistakes and becomes completely absorbed by an insistent narrative voice. That's the case with Gine Cornelia Pedersen's début, a firework out of control: sparks fly all over the place and the rocket could strike anywhere – and does…' Elsewhere described by the Norwegian press as 'like listening to a punk-rock single', Zero finds its young, female protagonist constantly torn between hope and despair, rage and confusion, as she tries to find her place in and, eventually, far outwith, society.

Leseprobe

Published by Nordisk Books, 2018

www.nordiskbooks.com

Translated from Null, copyright © 2013, Forlaget Oktober AS

Published by Agreement with Oslo Literary Agency.

This English translation copyright © Rosie Hedger, 2018.

This translation has been published with the financial support of NORLA

Cover design © Nice to meet you

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 9780995485235

ePub ISBN 9781838074258

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.

Gine Cornelia Pedersen

ZERO

Translated by Rosie Hedger

Also by Nordisk Books

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0

I’m 10 years old

I absorb everything unfiltered

I think that God is listening when I pray

I’ve seen three dead bodies, two old and one young

I cry at night and feel as if I’m all alone and no one can save me

I feel sorry for Mum and Dad

I realise that the concept of home has never truly existed

I think about the fact that when I grow up and I’m allowed to decide things for myself, my joy will be complete

I feel certain I’m going to live forever, but I think about death almost every day

I root for the villains in every Disney film, but I don’t let on to anyone

I do the kind of things to my sister that suggest I’ve got hidden sociopathic traits

I think that one hundred kroner is a fortune

I’ve only ever smoked two cigarettes

I’ve got a newborn baby brother

I pick up a piece of gravel and scratch a car

I’ve kissed five boys

I’m going to be an actor or an artist when I grow up

I’ve got three imaginary friends

I play with Barbie when nobody’s looking

I can cycle a long, long way without getting tired

I believe in everlasting love

I think Pamela Anderson is pretty

Life is going to be good

One day everything is going to be good

One day

When I grow up

Everything is going to be good

I’ll stand on stage

There’ll be a spotlight on me and me alone

It’ll be clear for everyone to see that I’m beautiful and talented and brilliant at everything that I do

I’ll win a prize

I have to win a prize

I cry watching the Oscars

I leaf through trashy magazines at Granny’s house

Cut out pictures of pretty ladies and men with nice hair and slim bodies and stick them into notepads

I end up with ten notepads’ worth of clippings

I stand in front of the mirror for hours every day and practise my look of delight when they announce that I’ve won

Practise having my picture taken

I make a speech:

‘Thank you! Thank you all. But there’s one very special person I’d particularly like to thank. I couldn’t have done this without you, my darling husband, Leonardo DiCaprio! I love you! I always will!’

I have grapefruit for breakfast

It’s what Cindy Crawford eats when she wants to lose weight, she says

Eating grapefruit for breakfast is fun even though it tastes horrible

I’m influenced by absolutely everything around me

I need to be entertained

There’s a fire inside me

I wonder when anyone else will realise that there’s a fire inside me

I’ve got so much to offer

Nobody has any idea how much I’ve got to offer

It’s just a question of time before I’m discovered, I think to myself

I want a nose piercing

I force the needle point of a compass through my nostril and stick a safety pin through the hole

Dad goes mad when he sees it

I take the safety pin out

I smudge black makeup around my eyes

I start to feel angry

I wonder when anyone will realise just how angry I am

I’m angry

I read about Satan

Scribble his name on every last page of my school planner

All hail Satan

In Satan We Trust

I feel embarrassed that I once bothered cutting out pictures of celebrities from trashy magazines, that I managed to fill ten whole notepads with them

I burn them in a ritual for my eyes only

It’s meant to represent the start of a new era

I’ve no idea what that new era might bring

Really it just marks the end of the previous one

God knows what’s to come

Or maybe it’s Satan who knows?

It’s a hard pill to swallow when I realise that the picture of Leonardo on my bedside table has to go

It feels all wrong

He’s the only one who really understands me

I’ll never forget him

I’ll bury my dreams of our life together

Bury them along with dreams of my day in the sun

Bury them way down deep in a bottomless grave

I feel angry

Always, always angry

I don’t understand how anything works

I’ve no idea what’s going on or how things could ever change

Something tingles inside me

I’m so bored

Something tingles inside me and all I can see outside my window is fields

All I can hear is the buzzing of a fly as it attempts to escape through a closed window

I’m forever waiting for my dinner, waiting for school

SCHOOL

I’ve been left all alone

I yearn for my dad

I remember the time he let me and my sister sit on his back while he pretended to be a horse

He crawled around on his knees, whinnying

It was amazing

I’ll never forget it

I got him to drink from a bowl of water and eat an apple and a carrot

Dad will always be a hero to me

Dad wears a denim jacket and smokes Lucky Strikes and drives an old, red rust bucket of a car

He comes to pick us up at weekends

Every other weekend

We watch TV and eat pizza

I want to go with him to Oslo

I want to go home to Oslo

Oslo is paradise

Oslo is the place where everything thrives and nothing is boring and there are no fields to be seen

Just lawns and parks and asphalt

I love Oslo

Oslo is life

I can’t breathe here

I crave some kind of sound or smell

Something interesting

Anything at all

The smell of a pavement café

The smell of asphalt in the baking hot sun

The smell of saltwater

The sound of a tram going by

The sound of sirens

The sound of a weird, drunken stranger shouting at the top of his lungs

Nobody shouts out here

Nobody is weird

WHY AM I HERE

I’m so bored that I start drinking vodka

I mix it with different soft drinks

I make a bong from an old bottle and start smoking weed

Start cutting my arms

I’m just an average angry, tormented teenager

A classic case

I cry when I’m drunk

Vomit

And cry

And kiss anyone who’s up for it

I’ve got breasts now

They’re bigger than all the other girls’

I bind my chest to make them flat

I want to be flat, to be skinny

Don’t want a single scrap of spare fat on me

I just want everything to be cool

I always miss the mark when it comes to friends

The selection is inadequate

Or maybe it’s me who’s inadequate

I can’t rule that out

It’s the thought that occurs to me most often, actually

The thought that always comes to mind

When I finally escape this dump, I’ll burn the entire fucking village to the ground

The village and everyone in it

Everyone apart from Grandma and Grandad and my cousins, anyway

I’ll spare most of my family, but everyone else can just die already

I can’t be bothered caring about anything that happens at home

Mum can go to hell

She can take her stupid new boyfriend and his ugly accent with her

And my stupid brother who can’t talk and does nothing but eat and babble away

And my stupid sister who keeps her bedroom tidy and saves up all her pocket money

She must have more than a thousand kroner stashed away in a jar

I help myself when I want to buy cigarettes

I can’t be bothered caring about anything

I don’t care

About anything

And even though I feel guilty all of the time, it’s not enough to make me do anything about it

And that makes me hate myself all the more

It makes me stifle the tiny bit of integrity that’s left

And that makes me do things that make me feel guilty, things that I stifle again, and so on and so forth

I’ve built some sort of wall

I’ve made some sort of decision

I’ve got hope

And that hope is Oslo

When I make it to Oslo, I’ll be better

I’ll unleash everything inside me that’s constructive and good

I’ll get a job and pay my sister back every krone I ever borrowed from her

I’ll chase my dreams

Dare to be myself again, to be happy and strange

But until I make it there, until I make it to Oslo?

Standstill

1

I’m 16 years old

I’ve persuaded Mum to let me move out for college

I feel happy and uninhibited

Unburdened by any core

I’ve got a summer job in a waterpark

The uniform is ridiculous, yellow and blue with a baseball cap

I refuse to wear the cap

My boss tells me it’s the cap or the job

I make 60 kroner per hour

Sell ice creams as I’m forced to watch paedos in speedos pass me by

To listen as brats from Bergen beg their mothers for ice creams and hot dogs in thick, western drawls

I pocket cash from the till to compensate for the unreasonable working conditions

Fistfuls of the stuff

Feel like Robin Hood

Shove the notes inside my bra and shoes

Thousands of kroner

Spend my spoils on weed and beer and soft drinks and CDs and bus tickets

Ignore the phone when my boyfriend calls

I catch the bus to Tønsberg to see a friend

Meet others there who smoke weed too

Can’t ever get high enough

Smoke everyone else under the table

Take the bus a few more stops and smoke some more

I’ve decided I don’t give a shit about anything, I’m just going to do whatever I want

I break up with my boyfriend

We’ve been together for two years and he thinks it’s time to propose

I think he needs his head checked

He loses it and slams the dashboard

I tell him I’m too young to settle down, that it’s time we went our separate ways

He doubles over at the wheel

I ask him what’s wrong

He grabs my wrist and tells me I can’t leave him

Says he can’t live without me

Says it’s probably best we end things here and now, together

Once and for all

I tell him I’m still young, that it would be stupid to throw in the towel now

I turn to grab the door handle

He clutches at my wrist

Won’t let go

Holds me tighter, pulls me closer

I tell him he needs to let me go

He starts the engine

I ask him what he thinks he’s doing, keep my cool, ask him to let me out

He locks the door

He’s gazing into the distance, one hand around my wrist and the other on the wheel

Steering us towards the main road

We’re hurtling along at 90 miles per hour

I start thinking about the most trivial things

Like the fact there are only two cigarettes left in my pack, that I need to pick up some more before the shop closes

That I need to shower before bed tonight

That I’ll make a couple of sandwiches when I get home

I’m going to die

I grab my phone to call Mum

He snatches it from my hand and tosses it out of the window

I beg for my life

Scream that I love him, that I want to spend the rest of my life with him

He tells me that’s exactly what’s going to happen

I realise it’s too late

Can’t hear a thing above the roar of the engine

We drive past a friend’s house

The kitchen light is on

I can see the dining table and someone at the sink

I think of Mum

I scream

This must be it, my final death cry

The most primitive of sounds

The origin of everything

The end of everything

Soon there will be nothing

No sounds, no thoughts

I can’t believe my last breath will be scented with Little Trees air freshener

I realise that death is a surreal affair

I prepare myself

Let go

He screams too

I see the rock face

Bury my face in my hands

5 years old on a beach in Brazil

8 years old at a tragic funeral

10 years old on a police horse for my birthday

14 years old and losing my virginity in a field

He slams on the brakes

The car spins

It comes to a halt

My hands are still covering my face

I look over at him

He’s just sitting there

He reverses, turns the car around

Drives slowly back in the direction we came from

Lights a cigarette

I start laughing

He says sorry, that he hadn’t meant to lose it like that

I laugh

Loud and frenzied

It hurts my stomach

It freaks him out seeing me laugh like that, he says

But the whole thing is hysterical

All I can do is laugh

He pulls up outside my building

Tells me he’s going to kill himself

That this will be the last I see of him

I’m laughing uncontrollably

He rocks back and forth

I stop laughing

Take the keys from him

Tell him he mustn’t kill himself, that he can come inside with me

He can’t walk, he says

I have to help him inside

He curls up in the foetal position on my bed

I lie down on the floor

Ask him if he’s OK

‘Monster,’ he says

He repeats the word over and over for an hour, rocking back and forth

His fists are clenched

I feel sorry for him

Eventually he stops his rocking and muttering

He leaves without a word

I tear off the bedsheets

Cut them to pieces

Life isn’t logical

Life isn’t

Fuck, this isn’t

I make up my mind to remove this

It’s going

Someone else can have it

I don’t want it

I don’t want it

I’ve fallen in love with my childhood friend, Jorg