Long Live the Post Horn! Read online

  ‘I’m finishing off the next issue of ByggBo,’ I said, ‘but more importantly, I’m putting together the pitch for the Real Thing – that American chain of restaurants. You’re the trade union expert.’

  ‘I guess I’ll have to do it then,’ he sighed.

  He left and I was troubled by the thought that there was just the two of us now, it had been better when we were three. React appropriately, I thought, be flexible, I thought, I opened a window to get some fresh air and tried to remember which month it was. October, of course, but it could have been March. Although the light is different in spring. This light was bright. There was something in the air. Perhaps I was allergic to it.

  Stein turned up unannounced that evening. Or rather, he rang to ask if it was convenient to drop by. I was surprised, but I said OK, I wondered what he wanted, after all we had already paid for the tickets for our weekend break to London.

  Had he heard about Dag? When he arrived, he was restless; he sat down in front of the television with the remote control, but found nothing that met with his approval. He asked if I had any wine, I went to the kitchen and opened a bottle while I waited for him to start talking. I thought: Well, he won’t be driving home tonight.

  We went to bed and had sex, he never said why he’d come over, he slept heavily or so it seemed to me. He put his arm around my back in his sleep, then it was as if he woke up and withdrew it. His breathing deepened once more. I looked at his face and thought that if I stared at it hard enough, he would wake up. But my staring didn’t work. I tried to picture his body without clothes, but couldn’t. It was only the man in the suit who appeared in my mind’s eye. I wondered if he ever thought about me naked. I had no wish to snatch the duvet off him to see. I got up as quietly as I could, moving stealthily like a thief. In the hall I sat on the chair where he had left his clothes. Should I go through his pockets? I really am losing it, I thought. I’m going down the rabbit hole. There’s no way out now, I thought. But if I don’t scream, it’s not happening to me. If I scream, it’s over, I thought. But maybe it’s over even if I don’t scream, I thought.

  I told myself to get a grip. My breathing settled down and I slipped back into bed as quietly as I had sneaked out. He hadn’t noticed my absence.

  ~

  When I woke up next morning, he was gone. I looked for a note but couldn’t find one. I don’t know why I had expected a note, and incidentally expected is too strong a word. Then again I didn’t have a pen, I reminded myself. The one I found yesterday I had put in the kitchen drawer.

  I worked on the issue of ByggBo all that week but didn’t get very far. I sent what little I had to Rolf on the Thursday, so he could review it over the weekend and offer suggestions. He left the office early, he was going to his cabin and taking his boat, when he said the word ‘boat’ he ground to a halt, but didn’t mention Dag. When I heard the sound of his car leaving, I printed out my draft and sat down in the chair by the window to read it. There were numerous typos. Tool had become fool, boss loss, light fright, power slower, I put down the pages and checked the computer, but there was nothing wrong with the word processing software. I was tempted to call Rolf and ask him not to open the document, but that would only make him want to. I wrote a restrained email saying I had accidentally sent him an old version and that the right one was on its way. I proofread the text again, there were even more errors than I had first noticed, and sent it to him an hour later.

  As I was about to drive home, something weird happened. I turned on the ignition and the radio came on, loud music from P4, a station I never normally listen to. I switched it off, and it fell silent. The multi-storey car park was empty. I got the feeling that someone had been in my car. But who and why? Nothing was missing and yet I couldn’t shake off this sense of an alien presence. Was it even my car? I looked for my gloves, they weren’t there. I locked the doors. Had I even worn gloves that morning? I tried to recall my morning, but it was difficult, I’d had coffee and eggs for breakfast, or had I?

  It was dark outside. The red and amber traffic lights seemed blurred. I need glasses, I thought, and was overcome by an urge to abandon the car, but that was impossible, of course. Dag didn’t call. Was I expecting him to? Dag in a suit with files under his arm, walking up the stairs in the morning, walking down them in the afternoon, I tried to visualise him, curly greying hair over glasses, coat collar turned up against the wind, on his way to the point where he had had enough. I wanted to delete his number, but I couldn’t find my phone. It wasn’t in my handbag or on the passenger seat, had I left it behind? Would I have to drive back? Then it started to ring, it was on the floor in the back and I couldn’t reach it without letting go of the steering wheel, it’s Dag, I thought. I pulled over in a bus lay-by and managed to grab it, it was Rolf wanting to talk about the ByggBo text, I understood what he said. He had sent me an email about the postal directive, the meeting with the head of Postkom was scheduled for after the weekend.

  I counted traffic lights for the rest of the drive, that helped. Once home I parked almost calmly and almost calmly went up the stairs and opened the door just as calmly. I made myself a cup of tea, sat down, then opened my email with some trepidation and breathed a sigh of relief. The EU’s third postal directive was about allowing competition for letters weighing less than 50g. It didn’t sound like a big deal. Kraft-Kom had been hired by Postkom, the Norwegian Post and Communications Union, to help them fight against its implementation. The first and second directive had been passed by Parliament with no objection, and the third one was bound to go through, also without objection, but we had to give them what they were paying us for.

  I turned off my laptop and stared into the darkness. Who wouldn’t rather be in the south? How long would it take to sail to the Mediterranean across ever warmer waters, then drop anchor by a Greek island, and live on what?

  Letters weighing less than 50g. Dag had sat in his office next to mine with his head in his hands and his curls poking out between his fingers, having thrown in the towel as far as Kraft-Kom was concerned. Then he made a secret plan, he jumped ship and left us behind. One day he might even send us a 40g postcard with a picture of a woman in a bikini. Dag, you bastard, I thought.

  London didn’t disappoint. Stein and I had both been there before and knew where we were going. When we landed back at Gardermoen airport, it was noticeably cooler than when we left. We talked about going somewhere warm in the winter. The darkness was the worst, we agreed. It won’t be long now, Stein said. I could feel the cold in my flat when I let myself in.

  The night before the meeting with the head of Postkom, I laid out the clothes I would be wearing the next day. When I woke up too early the next morning, I decided to wear something else. It troubled me that I couldn’t trust last night’s decision. It was so dark that it might as well be night. I checked the time repeatedly to make sure that it really was morning and I continued to have doubts, but the traffic was morning traffic. Cars moving slowly bumper to bumper, the drivers invisible in the darkness. It got into your bones, I could feel my mood darkening. I tried to think about the sunny destination Stein and I had talked about going to in January.

  Rolf was wearing a camel-coloured coat, and so was I. Under his coat Rolf wore a grey suit, under my coat I wore a beige skirt and jacket. We walked through the centre of Oslo towards the rough side of town. The pavements were crowded, the people looked ill, the number of Romanian beggars multiplied, unemployed, dark-skinned immigrants hung around on street corners, every ten metres a junkie was selling the Big Issue. We’d never had a trade union client before. This is exciting, Rolf said. An inappropriate word, I thought. He asked how London had been, I couldn’t find the appropriate adjective. The entrance to Postkom’s offices in Møllergata number 10 was cold and dry. Rolf led the way, he’d been there before. Now all will be revealed, I thought. Dag, I thought. Rolf knocked on the door and a voice called, ‘Come in!’ The man behind the desk got up, greeted us and led the way to a meeting roo
m where coffee and sandwiches had been set out, but which no one touched during the short meeting. The man said he had enjoyed working with Dag and thought it strange that Dag had left the project, as every study they had commissioned had come to the conclusion they had been expecting it to reach, namely that implementing the directive was bound to lead to social dumping. He proceeded swiftly, as if we were already up to speed. Several trade unions had agreed resolutions opposing the directive. He was hoping the Trade Union Congress would also agree a resolution against the directive. The danger was that the Labour government might simply wave through the directive without debating it before the party’s annual conference. We would need to work quietly with the party’s grassroots and make sure that the issue was raised at the annual party conference in April. That was the plan. OK? Rolf made notes. Labour’s local and county branches, he said, sliding two thick files across the desk, and asked Rolf to condense the most important information to an A4 fact sheet which could be distributed to trade union representatives. We would also need to hold a two-day media training course before Christmas. Rolf nodded. We got up and said goodbye. Back in the street, Rolf asked what I thought, I shook my head. Ah, well, he said.

  Rolf had more meetings, so I walked back to the office on my own and sat down at my desk. It was growing dark, a mistake, surely? A thunderstorm was approaching. I saw it when I went over to the window and wondered whether I ought to unplug the computer. A charcoal sky was fast approaching and I felt a rush as I watched it. As if I welcomed the storm, then it passed, no thunder, instead it started to rain. The windscreen wipers on the slow-moving cars in the street below me struggled to keep the water at bay. I sat down again to start work on the pitch for the American restaurant chain, but to no avail. I didn’t want to go home and decided to stay at the office overnight. I felt relieved once I had made the decision. I wanted Stein to call so I could tell him about it. I got up with renewed vigour, made tea, then thought that perhaps I ought to go home after all; there was nowhere to sleep at the office apart from the floor. I could do whatever I wanted, I told myself, and that was what made it so liberating. Exhausted I went home.

  On Friday my writer’s block lifted and I wrote a whole page of the Real Thing restaurant pitch, I wrote about all the things that were real and trendy these days, perhaps I’ve recovered, I thought. That evening I was due to visit Stein. He called in the early afternoon; when I saw his name, I thought: He’s going to cancel. He postponed our date by one hour.

  When I turned up, he hugged me almost solemnly. I had only been to his home a few times before because of his son. He was with his mother tonight, in the hall was a picture of a boy I presumed was him. A small, serious-looking boy on a tree stump in a forest. Stein had cooked a three-course meal. When we reached the coffee, he looked at me for a long time and said he had a present for me. It sounded odd, even he could feel it, I pressed the soles of my feet against the floor. He’s nervous, I thought. He produced a square box from his jacket pocket. It contained a ring, I thanked him for it, and put it on my finger. What does it mean, I wondered, what’s he saying, but I couldn’t ask and I couldn’t tell him about Dag either. So I told him that Margrete was pregnant, but regretted it immediately because what did that imply? He said he thought that was great news. We went to bed and had sex, using protection. I wished we had been at my place.

  In the morning he drove me to Majorstukrysset so I could catch the Metro home; he was going to a football match with his son. I didn’t catch the Metro home. I bought a latte and sat in a café reading old newspapers, I ought to buy today’s papers, except they would be at the office, I thought about going there. Instead I walked towards the city centre. My new ring got caught in my knitted glove and I had to take off the glove to disentangle it. The new ring didn’t match the ones I already had, I took off all my rings and put them back in new combinations, but the old ones had sat too long on the same fingers and wouldn’t fit anywhere else. I was thinking about getting rid of all my old rings and just keeping the new one when I realised that I didn’t know where I was, apart from near the city centre. I had veered left in order to avoid the streets with the most traffic. Around me neon advertising glowed and flashed in every colour, shapeless and hideously dressed people with strands of hair sticking out from under their hats and laden with bags were rushing in and out of shops, their faces grey. I aimed for Egertorget and the Metro station, the train for Bergkrystallen would be arriving in four intolerable minutes. Glum people in cheap clothes poured out of the carriages, unkempt and limping, clutching scruffy bags. Where were they going and why, dusty one-bedroom flats in cursory tower blocks filled with junk, crumbling houses between petrol stations and warehouses, pedestrian tunnels under train stations overflowing with rubbish, the unemployed, the undocumented. Obese people with crutches and hearing aids and sores on their faces, what kind of life was this? Being dumped here without ever having been asked, without wanting to, but to whom should I report my lack of interest, to whom should I complain?

  I yearned for a breakdown. To surrender to it and be carted off to a quiet and balmy place far away where the pace was slow. The train arrived, I got on and moved as far into a corner as I could. An unknown woman touched my shoulder and said my name. We had been at primary school together, she declared, now she worked in the head office of the Post Office and had come across my name in a memo about a media training course. I said she must be mistaking me for someone else, got off the train too soon and walked through empty Saturday afternoon streets and saw blue screens glowing in the windows. There was a lid over the world. As in Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar, I thought. I wondered if I should read it again, but surely it would only intensify my sense of isolation, I punched my fists into the air as if to smash the glass, but nothing happened. Where are the others, I thought. If it’s true, as it’s claimed, that other people really exist. I’m swimming underwater, I thought. They scream and shout and carry on on TV, but what for? Anyone can work out that life is ultimately a losing game. Dag, I thought. The postal directive, I thought.

  Once I got home, I turned on my laptop to work on the issue of ByggBo with Rolf’s comments in mind, but that only made things worse. Sandals had become scandals, predecessor processor, idealist nihilist, exam amen. I tried to read the texts as if they hadn’t been written by me and I didn’t know what they were about, and they made no sense. I need to bin my old clothes, I thought, and buy new ones in different colours. I got rid of quite a lot, but not the most expensive pieces. At least I haven’t lost my mind completely, I thought.

  Stein called around ten o’clock that evening. I was surprised, but then again, he had given me a ring. I wondered if I should tell someone, but it didn’t feel right. He asked if I fancied going for a walk tomorrow, which was a Sunday. But don’t you have your son tomorrow, I said. He did, but said he wanted the three of us to go for a walk together.

  I slept badly. When I got up and had showered, I realised that my outdoor clothes were at the bottom of the bag of clothes I was going to get rid of. I didn’t want to have to take them out, but I had nothing else suitable, so I retrieved them, put them on, then took them off again. They lay on the floor and had managed to infect me, I had to shower again. So I put on a pair of jeans I had never worn before, and a jumper I hadn’t worn either because it wasn’t ‘me’, and a random jacket and got in my car. Margrete rang to tell me she had miscarried. She sobbed and was dreading telling Mum. I didn’t know that she had told Mum about not getting her period, I tried to comfort her and said that she was bound to get pregnant again and decided not to say anything to Stein. His son would be there so it was the right call. I dreaded meeting his son. It was a long time since I had last spoken to a child. I dreaded it even more the closer I got, in the end I had to stop at a petrol station, go into the loo, sit down and lower my head to stop feeling dizzy. After several minutes I stood up, held my wrists under the cold tap and felt the cold rise up my arms. I tried not to look at myself in the mirror, but
couldn’t help it and was shocked by what I saw, I looked as if I had dressed up for a part. Someone tried the door handle to the cubicle I was in, if there had been a window I would have climbed out of it. Back in the car I called Stein and told him I didn’t feel well. He asked what I meant, I had no reply. I’ll have to think about it, I said. Aha, he said. I told him I would call back in five minutes. We’re waiting by the kiosk, he said. As I got out of the car, I saw them by the kiosk just as he had said. Stein in hiking clothes with a small boy holding his hand. Stein’s son. Should I say hi to the boy or shake his hand? I stuck my hand far enough down for him to reach. He looked at it and at Stein, who nodded, then he held out his hand, it was limp and small. I said my name, he didn’t say his. Stein said: This is Truls. Then we started walking, slowly, of course. Truls seemed subdued. I wondered if I should say something to lighten the mood, but what? Stein said they had taken part in a football match the day before, and I asked who had won.

  ‘Truls scored lots of goals,’ Stein said and smiled, they both smiled because he clearly hadn’t. I didn’t know how old Truls was and by now it was too late to ask. I knew that he was at school because Stein went to end-of-year celebrations. Stein was brave. My guess would be that Truls was in Year Two, but perhaps he was in Year One, I didn’t know how big children were these days. The last stretch up to Ullevålseter where the slope was steep, everyone overtook us. Perhaps they thought I was the boy’s mother, their faces seemed to suggest it. I felt an urge to say that I wasn’t his mother. Everyone probably feels that way, I thought. Or else they could easily tell that I wasn’t his real mother, that I was an outsider. That had to be it, the real mother would walk alongside them, the three of them would be together, I was the outsider. It was weird to think that he had been married before. He really has a bad habit of wanting to be married, I thought, and glanced at him without recognising him, I would have to break up with him. Once we reached Ullevålseter he bought waffles with strawberry jam for us all, he treated us, it was all too much. I said I needed to work that evening because I had a meeting about the postal directive the following day. I had hoped he would ask what the postal directive was, in order to work out what I would reply, but he didn’t. He nodded and said that he understood. He needed to drive Truls to his mother’s after dinner. Truls had decided what they would be having for dinner. So what are you going to have, I asked. Yes, what did you choose, Truls, Stein said, would you like to tell Ellinor? Truls would clearly prefer not to, but he didn’t dare say so. Tacos, he said. So do you like tacos, I said, it was a stupid question to ask, obviously. And he didn’t reply either. Stein stroked the boy’s hair and I felt sorry for him, having to be with Stein the whole time. We got up, I put my costume back on and we headed back, on the way I got a text message from Rolf telling me he’d sent an email, so my saying I had to work wasn’t a lie.