The Son (25 page)

She sat down and inhaled the salty air.

‘My parents and their friends used to call Nesodden “Little Berlin”,’ Martha said. ‘Because of all the artists who settled here. It was cheaper to live in a draughty cottage than in Oslo. If the temperature fell too far below freezing, people would gather in the least cold house. Which was ours. They used to stay up and drink red wine until the morning because there weren’t enough mattresses for everyone to sleep on. Then we would all have a big, communal breakfast.’

‘Sounds nice.’ Stig sat down next to her.

‘Yes, it was. People here looked out for each other.’

‘How idyllic.’

‘I don’t know about that. From time to time they would argue about money, criticise each other’s art or sleep with each other’s spouses. But the place was alive, it was exciting. My sister and I actually believed we lived in Berlin until my father showed me on the map where the real Berlin was. And explained to me that it was a long way away, more than a thousand kilometres. But that one day we would drive there. And we would visit the Brandenburg Gate and Charlottenburg Palace where my sister and I would be princesses.’

‘Did you ever go there?’

‘To the real Berlin?’ Martha shook her head. ‘My parents never had very much money. And they didn’t live to be very old. I was eighteen when they died and I had to look after my sister. But I’ve always dreamt about Berlin. So much so that I’m no longer sure if it really exists.’

Stig nodded slowly, closed his eyes and lay down on his back in the grass.

She looked at him. ‘Why don’t we listen to some more of your music?’

He opened one eye. Squinted. ‘Depeche Mode? The CD is in the CD player in the car.’

‘Hand me your mobile,’ she said.

He gave it to her and she started pressing buttons. Soon rhythmic breathing sounds were coming from the small speakers. Then a deadpan voice suggested taking them on a trip. Stig looked so shocked that she had to laugh.

‘It’s called Spotify,’ she said, putting the mobile between them. ‘You can stream music from the Web. Is all this news to you?’

‘We weren’t allowed mobiles in jail,’ he said, eagerly picking up the mobile.

‘In jail?’

‘Yes, I’ve done time.’

‘You were dealing?’

Stig shielded his eyes from the sun. ‘That’s right.’

She nodded. And smiled quickly. What had she, of all people, imagined? That he was a heroin addict
and
a law-abiding citizen? He had done what he had to do, just like everyone else.

She took the phone from him. Showed him the GPS function and how it could tell them where on the map they were and how to calculate the shortest driving route to any place in the world. She took a photo of him with the camera function, pressed the
record
button, held it up and asked him to say something.

‘Today is a lovely day,’ he said.

She stopped the recording and played it back to him.

‘Is
that
my voice?’ he asked, surprised and clearly embarrassed.

She pressed
stop
and played it again. The voice sounded constricted and tinny through the loudspeakers: ‘Is
that
my voice?’

And she laughed when she saw the expression on his face. She laughed even harder when he snatched the phone from her, found the record button and said that now it was her turn, now she had to say something, no, she had to sing.

‘No!’ she protested. ‘I’d rather you took my picture.’

He shook his head. ‘Voices are better.’

‘Why?’

He made a motion as if to tuck his hair behind his ear. The habitual gesture of someone who has had long hair for so long that he has forgotten it’s been cut off, she thought.

‘People can change the way they look. But voices stay the same.’

He looked across the sea and she followed his gaze. Saw nothing but the shimmering surface, some seagulls, rocks and sails in the distance.

‘Some voices do,’ she said. She was thinking of the baby. The whimpering on the walkie-talkie. That never changed.

‘You like singing,’ he said. ‘But not in front of others.’

‘What makes you say that?’

‘Because you like music. But when I asked you to sing, you looked just as petrified as that girl in the cafe when you gave her the key.’

She jumped. Had he read her mind?

‘What was she scared of?’

‘Nothing,’ Martha said. ‘She and the other girl are supposed to shred and reorganise the files in the attic. Nobody likes going up there. So the staff take turns whenever a job needs doing.’

‘What’s wrong with the attic?’

Martha followed a seagull which hung suspended in the air, high above the sea, shifting only slightly from one side to the other. The wind up there must be much stronger than it was down here.

‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she said quietly.

‘No.’

‘Me neither.’ She leaned back on her elbows so that she couldn’t see him without turning. ‘The Ila Centre looks as if it’s nineteenth century doesn’t it? But it was actually built in the 1920s. To begin with it was just an ordinary boarding house—’

‘The cast-iron letters on the front.’

‘That’s right, that’s from back then. But during the war the Germans turned it into a home for unmarried mothers and their children. There are so many tragic stories from those years and they left their mark in the walls. One of the women who came to stay there had a baby boy and claimed it was a virgin birth – something girls would occasionally say when they found themselves in trouble in those days. The man everyone suspected was married and, of course, denied being the father. There were two rumours about him. The first that he was a member of the Resistance. The second that he was a German spy who had infiltrated the Resistance and that was why the Germans had given the woman a place at the home and not arrested the man. Anyway, one morning the suspected father was shot dead on a crowded tram in the centre of Oslo. The killer was never identified. The Resistance claimed they had liquidated a traitor, the Germans that they had caught a member of the Resistance. In order to convince anyone who had doubts, the Germans suspended the body from the top of Kavringen Lighthouse.’

She pointed across the sea.

‘Sailors passing the lighthouse in the daytime could see the withered corpse which the seagulls had pecked at and those who passed at night could see the vast shadow it cast across the water. Until suddenly one day the body was gone. Some said that the Resistance had removed it. But from that day the woman started to lose her mind and claimed that the dead man was haunting her. That he came to her room at night, that he leaned over their baby’s cot, and that when she screamed for him to get out, turned to her with black holes where his eyes used to be.’

Stig raised an eyebrow.

‘This is how the story was told to me by Grete, the manager at the Ila Centre,’ Martha said. ‘Anyway, legend has it that the baby wouldn’t stop crying, but whenever the women in the other rooms complained and told the woman to comfort her child, she replied that the child cried for both of them and would do so forever.’ Martha paused. Her favourite part of the story was coming up. ‘Rumour had it that the woman didn’t know which side her child’s father worked for, but to pay him back for denying paternity she had reported him as a member of the Resistance to the Germans
and
told the Resistance he was a spy.’

A sudden, cold gust of wind made Martha shudder and she sat up and hugged her knees.

‘One morning the woman didn’t come down for breakfast. They found her in the attic. She had hanged herself from the big cross-beam in the roof. You can see a pale stripe in the wood where she supposedly tied the rope.’

‘And now she haunts the attic?’

‘I don’t know. All I know is that it’s a difficult place to be. I don’t believe in ghosts, but no one seems able to spend much time in that attic. It’s as if you can sense evil. People get headaches, they feel pushed out of the room. And often they’ll be new members of staff or contractors hired to do maintenance work, people who don’t know the story. And, no, there isn’t asbestos in the insulation or anything like that.’

She studied him, but he didn’t display the sceptical expression or the small smile she had half expected. He just listened.

‘But that’s not all,’ she went on. ‘The baby.’

‘Yes,’ he said.

‘Yes? Have you guessed it?’

‘It was gone.’

She looked at him in amazement. ‘How did you know?’

He shrugged. ‘You told me to guess.’

‘Some people think that the mother gave it to the Resistance the same night she hanged herself. Others that she killed the child and buried it in the back garden so that no one would take it from her. Anyway . . .’ Martha took a deep breath. ‘It was never found. And the strange thing is every now and then we hear a noise on our walkie-talkies, but we can’t work out where it comes from. But we think it’s . . .’

She thought he looked as if he had guessed that as well.

‘A baby crying,’ she said.

‘A baby crying,’ he repeated.

‘Many people, especially new staff, get freaked out when they hear it, but Grete tells them that the walkie-talkies sometimes pick up signals from baby monitors in the neighbourhood.’

‘But you don’t think so?’

Martha hesitated. ‘She might be right.’

‘But?’

Another gust of wind. Dark clouds had appeared in the west. Martha was regretting not bringing a coat.

‘I’ve been working at the Ila Centre for seven years. And when you said that voices never change . . .’

‘Yes?’

‘I swear it’s the same baby.’

Stig nodded. He said nothing, didn’t try to offer an explanation or a comment. He just nodded. She liked that.

‘Do you know what those clouds mean?’ he asked at last and got up.

‘That it’s going to rain and it’s time we went home?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That we need to go swimming right now, so we’ll have time to dry in the sun.’

‘
Compassion fatigue
,’ Martha said. She was lying on her back, looking up at the sky; she still had the taste of salt water in her mouth and she could feel the warm rock against her skin and through her wet underwear. ‘It means that I’ve lost the ability to care. It’s so unthinkable in the Norwegian care sector that we don’t even have a Norwegian word for it.’

He made no reply. And that was fine, she wasn’t really talking to him, he was just an excuse to think out loud.

‘I guess it’s a way of protecting yourself, detaching when it gets too much. Or maybe the well has run dry, perhaps I’m all out of love.’ She thought about it. ‘No, that’s not true. I have plenty . . . just not . . .’

Martha saw a cloud shaped like Great Britain drift across the sky. Just before it passed the treetop above her head, it turned into a mammoth. In many ways it was like lying on her therapist’s couch. He was one of those who still used a couch.

‘Anders was the bravest and the nicest boy at school,’ she said to the clouds. ‘Captain of the school football team. Please don’t ask me if he was head of the student council.’

She waited.

‘Was he?’

‘Yes.’

They both burst out laughing.

‘Were you in love with him?’

‘Very much. Still am. I’m in love with him. He’s a good guy. There’s more to him than just being nice and fit. I’m lucky to have Anders. What about you?’

‘What about me?’

‘How many girlfriends have you had?’

‘None.’

‘None?’ She raised herself up on her elbows. ‘Good-looking guy like you, I don’t believe it.’

Stig had taken off his T-shirt. His skin was so pale in the sunshine that it almost blinded her. She noticed with some surprise that he had no fresh needle marks. She guessed they must be in his thighs or groin.

‘Really?’ she said.

‘I did kiss some girls . . .’ He caressed the old marks with his hand. ‘But this was my only lover . . .’

Martha looked at the needle marks. She, too, wanted to run her fingers across them. Make them go away.

‘When I first interviewed you, you said you’d quit,’ she said. ‘I won’t tell Grete. Not for a while. But you know . . .’

‘. . . that the centre is only for active users.’

She nodded. ‘Do you think you’ll be able to do it?’

‘Pass my driving licence?’

They exchanged smiles.

‘I’m clean today,’ he said. ‘Tomorrow is another day.’

The clouds were still a long way away, but she could hear a distant rumbling, a warning of what was to come. And it was as if the sun knew it too, and burned a little more brightly.

‘Give me your phone,’ she said.

Martha pressed ‘record’. Then she sang the song her father used to play on his guitar to her mother. Usually when one of their countless summer parties was starting to wind down. He had sat right where they were sitting now with his battered guitar, strumming so quietly it was barely audible. The Leonard Cohen song about how he had always been her lover, that he would travel with her, follow her blindly, that he knows she trusts him because he has touched her perfect body with his mind.

She sang the lyrics in a small, fragile voice. It was always like that when she sang; she sounded much weaker and more vulnerable than she was. From time to time she wondered if she really was like that, and whether it was the other voice, the tougher voice she used to protect herself with, which wasn’t her.

‘Thank you,’ he said when she had finished. ‘That was really beautiful.’

She didn’t wonder why it was embarrassing. She wondered why it wasn’t more embarrassing.

‘It’s time we drove back.’ She smiled and handed him the phone.

She should have known that trying to take down the old, rotting hood was asking for trouble but she wanted to feel the fresh air as they drove. It took them more than fifteen minutes of hard work, alternating practical thinking with brute force, but finally they got it down. And she knew that she would never get it up again, not without spare parts and Anders’s help. When she got in the car, Stig showed her his phone. He had entered Berlin on the GPS.

‘Your father was right,’ he said. ‘From little Berlin to big Berlin is 1,030 kilometres. Estimated driving time twelve hours and fifteen minutes.’