Medusa (6 page)

– Nothing to apologise for, Miriam. He noted that this was the first time he had used her name. – I’ll be happy to drink coffee with you another day. Unless you withdraw the invitation.

Outside the car, she turned and smiled quickly.

– I won’t do that, she said, and pushed the door shut.

A
XEL NEVER MADE
appointments at the clinic after lunch on Thursdays. With the last one out the door at 12.45, he changed into his cycling gear in the cloakroom and fetched his bike from a storeroom in the cellar. It had been washed and the chain cleaned and oiled after the last ride. Usually he cycled up to Sognsvann and rode on into the surrounding forest, but today he took the bike on the Underground with him up to Frognerseter.

By the time he reached the forest chapel at Nordmarka, it had clouded over. An elderly couple were sitting on a bench by the wall with a flask and a packed lunch. Both were wearing worn anoraks, the man in a peaked blue skiing cap. Axel said hello, unleashing in response a cascade of observations about the weather, the silence in the forest, how to keep your health. He said no thanks to an offer of coffee and a chocolate biscuit, but stood around chatting for a while. The old couple gave him a feeling of having as much time as he could want. The man put down the thermos and laid his hand over his wife’s. She had clear grey eyes and laughed with a chuckling sound, like a little stream. Him and Bie sitting like that thirty years from now, he tried to think, but couldn’t quite manage it.

He jumped back on to his bike and peered northwards. The clouds were massing. He’d intended to go all the way to Kikut, but he wasn’t dressed for rain. Another cyclist came riding up the hill. He was wearing sunglasses and nodded in greeting as he sped by. He was at least ten years younger than Axel, in shiny cycling shorts and a skin-tight top, and for an instant Axel was tempted to get after him and make a race of it, but he dismissed the thought.

On a whim, near Blankvann, he wheeled the bike off the track, locked it and began jogging along a narrow path. Not so fast that he couldn’t savour the forest around him.
Listen to Skamndros, he’s singing
,
Marlen used to exclaim every time they passed a brook in the forest. He was the one who had told her about the Greek river god, and Marlen remembered everything that was said to her. He stopped by a small tarn. One summer, many years ago, he’d brought Bie up here. It was before Marlen was born. They’d bathed. Later, he had lain her down in the heather. She’d complained about the twigs sticking into her, but he’d made her forget about that. Afterwards she called him Pan, and said how dangerous it was to go out into the forest with him. It was less than a year before Marlen’s birth, because Bie always claimed that she had been conceived that time in the heather.

He pulled off his cycling vest and plunged into the tarn. Convinced himself that the water was warm for the time of year. He dived under and swam as far as he could. He and Brede had always competed to see who could stay underwater the longest. He’d held out once for almost three minutes. It was on the beach at Oksval. Brede stayed down longer. Four minutes. That was when Axel got scared. He started shouting, waving his arms. Someone ran to fetch the grown-ups. They found Brede over by the jetty, managed to drag him ashore, pumped the water out of him, blew life back into him. Afterwards he could remember nothing; everything just vanished, he said. Several times that summer the brightness in Brede’s eyes would suddenly be gone, and for a few seconds at a time he couldn’t answer, couldn’t hear. Afterwards he would shake his head in confusion, a look of fear on his face. Someone should have realised what was the matter with him, but no one asked. That was the same summer as the thing with Balder, when Brede was sent away.

Axel dried himself off with his cycling jacket, threw his clothes on and carried on running to get his body warmth back. He came across a little trail that led off the path and in behind a thicket. Boot prints in the wet ground heading into the trees. Disappearing by a mossy hillock. He climbed up, hopped down on the other side. Almost fell into a pile of branches. He caught a glimpse of black plastic underneath. A boulder had been placed in front of what looked like an opening. He rolled it to one side, pulled away the plastic and peered inside. Light seeped down through the spruce branches that formed the roof of a small shelter, perhaps two metres in length. On a cardboard box that had once held bananas were a paraffin lamp and two candles waxed on to flat stones. Beside the box he glimpsed a bag and some empty bottles. He couldn’t resist and crept further in. The bag contained bread, stale but not mouldy. The bottles smelt of cheap alcohol. In one corner were a rolled-up sleeping bag and two woollen blankets. A book had been tucked beneath them. As he was wriggling out backwards, he pulled it out and looked at it in the grey light of day. It was no more than a pamphlet:
Dhammapada
was the title. A Buddhist text, according to the back cover. The pages were yellowed and stained. Here and there a sentence had been underlined, at one point in red:
He who in his youth has not lived in harmony with himself, and who has not gathered life’s real treasures, in later years is like the long-legged old herons that stand sadly by a marshy swamp without fish.

A movement across his neck, like a breath of wind. He turned, feeling unease at having invaded someone else’s life, whoever it might be that was living here. He put the book back where he’d found it, climbed back up the hillock and ran on as hard as he could along the track, felt the warmth creeping back into his body.

Not until he had unlocked his bike and was wheeling it back down to the path did he notice that the rear tyre was flat. He checked the valve. It seemed in order. He got out the pump. When he squeezed the tyre a couple of minutes later, it was still flat.

Approaching Ullevålseter, he saw a woman coming towards him, striding energetically along with walking poles in each hand. There was something familiar about the little figure and the determined face, and Axel greeted her as she passed.

She stopped.

– Is that you? she said.

He tried to remember where he’d seen her before.

– So you’re out keeping fit? She looked at the bicycle. – And you’ve had a puncture.

He recognised the voice. Must have spoken to her on the phone.

– Looks like it, he agreed.

– Sorry I can’t help you, she said.

– No, why would you be carrying a puncture repair kit around with you?

She laughed.

– Ask at Ullevålseter, maybe they have something there.

He was about to move on.

– Actually, I was going to ring you, she said. – Funny meeting you of all people. A referral you sent in the other day. An elderly man with problems after a back operation.

The physiotherapist. She was the physiotherapist at the clinic in Majorstua. Any moment now and he’d recall her name. Bie used to go to her.

– I doubt if I can help him much when he’s in such pain. But we can talk about it later.

He didn’t protest. Rain had begun drizzling from the low cloud, and soon it would be dark. It wasn’t every woman who would head off into the forest in the dark, he thought. Bie didn’t like walking in the forest alone even in daylight.

– Safe journey home, she chirruped, furrowing her brow sympathetically as she pointed with her stick at the punctured tyre.

T
HE EVENING HAD
turned cold, but Axel remained sitting on the terrace with the living-room door ajar behind him. He’d made a fire and put on a pullover. It was now past eleven and he had just gone in to Marlen, who had woken up and called for him. She’d been dreaming that the dead twin had been following her. Before going to bed, she’d come out to see him on the terrace. They’d sat for a while looking at the night sky together, and Axel had told her about the Ethiopian queen Cassiopeia. When she refused to go to bed until he told her one more story, he’d shown her the Twins, Castor and Pollux. He’d told her how strong and brave they were. No one could best Castor when it came to riding and taming horses, nor Pollux in a bare-fist fight. But most of all they were famed for being true to each other. They loved each other more than any other brothers loved, and nothing could part them. Nothing except death. Because the sad thing was that Pollux was the son of the god Zeus and immortal, while Castor was the son of an earthly king.
But weren’t they twins?
Marlen protested.
They couldn’t have different fathers, could they?
In the world of fairy tales such things are possible, Axel smiled. When Castor was killed in a fight, he had to go to the underworld. Pollux begged Zeus to make him mortal too, so that he too could go down to the kingdom of the dead and be with his beloved brother. But not even Zeus could arrange that. If you’re immortal, you’re immortal. Then he had an idea, and he fixed things so that the brothers could be together after all. Every other day Pollux could go to the realm of the dead and meet his twin brother, and the other days they could be together up in the sky.

Axel had told the boys the same story, but neither of them had had nightmares afterwards. Before Marlen could get back to sleep, he had to drive the dead twin away. He tucked the duvet tightly around her into a cocoon, and assured her that nobody could get at her now. On top of that, Mikk the mountain lion and Geiki the goat were standing guard around the bed. It all worked, and he heard no more from her.

Before returning to his chair on the terrace Axel had popped downstairs to have a few words with Tom. He stopped outside the door and listened to the reedy voice within. He felt as though he knew the song now, even though he’d only heard it in snatches. When Marlen was going to sleep, Tom had to turn off his amplifier, and his voice sounded even more frail against the almost inaudible chords from the guitar.

Axel had gone back upstairs without knocking. Taken the bottle of cognac and a glass out into the dark with him. Moments later Tom appeared in the doorway asking if he could spend the night at his friend Findus’s house, the lad he was going to start a band with. Axel reluctantly agreed. It was better than him sitting on his own in his bedroom all evening. After dinner he’d been on the point of suggesting they might do something together, but he’d waited too long and then it was too late. Daniel was getting to be more and more like a friend the older he got, he thought. Axel could talk about most things with him, and recognised himself in much of what his elder son said. And Marlen could always make him laugh with her strange notions. But there was something about Tom that made him hesitate to approach too close. He didn’t know what it was, only that it made him feel shy and clumsy.

He poured himself a glass and sat there inhaling the scent of the golden liquid. He’d bought the bottle on the plane back from Cyprus. They’d spent their Easter holiday there, the last holiday before Daniel moved away from home. Axel had dreaded it. And the sharp white sun and the turquoise sea had heightened his feeling of tristesse. The bus driver who drove them out to the airport was called Andreas. Axel had conversed with him during one of the outings they’d gone on. They were both about the same age. The driver had small eyes and a nose that had been broken and grown back crooked. He watched Bie as she climbed aboard in the short white frock that clung to her thighs and was almost translucent, and Marlen, Tom and Daniel as they followed her into the bus. As Axel passed him, bringing up the rear, he exclaimed:
You must be a very happy man
. He laughed, exposing brown gums. And when Axel sat down in the back of the bus, and Bie pinched his thigh and whispered in his ear that she fancied him, and he put his arm around her and looked at the desolate yellow land gliding by outside, he thought: I must be a very happy man.

The fire had gone out. He poured himself another glass, studied the dying embers as they slowly paled. He thought: I will go up to Miriam’s. I’ll sit there in her attic apartment in Rodeløkka. Sit there and not do anything but drink the coffee she makes, and talk to her.

He was on his way to the bathroom when he heard a car down in the driveway. He looked out and saw a taxi at the gate. The time was 2.15. Sound of the door being unlocked, Bie’s bunch of keys chinking against the glass top of the chest of drawers.

He undressed and stood in his boxers, glanced at himself in the mirror. He still looked like he kept himself in shape, though the line down to the ridge of the hips had acquired a tiny undulation. A few moments later she came into the bathroom and stood behind him.

– Are you still up?

He looked at her in the mirror.

– Unless I’m sleepwalking.

Her hair was unkempt and her eyes were bleary, though the make-up hadn’t run. She was wearing a dark green tight-fitting satin dress, with shoulder straps and a plunging neckline. There was a hint of green in her eyeshadow too. When she was made up like that, accentuating the slightly slanting eyes and the high cheekbones, she might be taken for five years younger. Maybe more.

He turned, inhaling. The perfume he usually bought her, the way it smelt hours later, mingling with the smell of her sweat and of other people’s cigarettes. A second, foreign perfume was mixed in with the smell of Shalimar; something a man would wear. He could follow the thought, conjure up images of who she’d been sitting with, dancing with. He took her by the arm and pulled her towards him.

– Christ, she murmured as he started to kiss her. – You’re hot for it.

Closer and closer it came, the smell of the strange, the thing he didn’t know about, that turned her into something other than the person he knew. Her tongue tasted of wine, but vodka too, or gin. It was not often she could be persuaded to drink spirits, and when he lifted her skirt and took hold of her naked buttocks, she groaned and began to pull at his boxer shorts.