My Friends

Chapter Forty-Four

FORTY-FOUR

It’s hard to tell a story, any story, but it’s almost impossible if it’s your own. You always start at the wrong end, always say too much or too little, always miss the most important parts.

That last part, about Joar and the blood, just tumbles out of Ted. He realizes at once that it’s a mistake, of course, Louisa is sitting beside him on the rocks looking like she can’t decide if she is moved or scared or angry. Mostly angry, from the sound of it.

“You said it was a love story! And it ends like THAT? What HAPPENED?” she snaps.

Stories are complicated, memories are merciless, our brains only store a few moments from the best days of our lives, but we remember every second of the worst.

“It’s… twenty-five years ago,” Ted says, as if he’s trying to convince himself that it’s nothing to cry over.

Louisa sobs furiously:

“Not for me! I wasn’t there! For me, it’s happening NOW!”

“I’m sorry,” he whispers, and then it’s as if everything happens again for him too.

The sun has come up, the world is waking, the day is starting. He pulls the towel more tightly around his shoulders, then he tells her everything. He tells her about the knife. That it was Ali who gave it to Joar that last winter, because she was the first to understand how everything would end. She couldn’t imagine any other story except one where Joar’s old man killed him, or the other way around. By the time summer came, no one else could either.

Ted tells how Joar hid the knife in the soil beneath the flowers in the tin box outside his window, but how he had to move it when his mom got suspicious. After that Joar kept the knife in his backpack, which was lying on the floor of his room the day his old man came in and saw the bird.

“A violent man is a sickness for all around him. Violence is a plague that spreads through everybody it comes into contact with…,” Ted says, as if he’s trying to balance his feelings by talking formally, like a teacher, but it doesn’t work. When he goes on, his voice is just fourteen years old again.

“Joar thought he was going to turn out like his old man. That violence is something you inherit. But that’s wrong. Violence isn’t a genetic illness, violence is a contagion, it passes from skin to skin. The heart gets infected. It’s exhausting to always be angry when you’re a child, constantly having to tense your body not to cry, because you know that if you start, you’ll never be able to stop. In the end Joar just couldn’t bear it. In the end he was prepared to do anything just so he could stop feeling everything all the time. And I remember thinking: when it happens, no one will be able to say it came as a surprise. Because everyone had always known: one day he would kill him.”

Louisa can’t breathe as Ted’s face cracks, a broken, hesitant little smile that makes his gaze lose its focus, because he suddenly realizes how angry Joar would have been if he heard that.

“Joar would never have liked anyone to talk about him,” Ted says quietly.

The only story Joar would ever have wanted to hear was of course the one about the artist and the painting, about a happy life and dreams coming true, because the only dreams Joar had were for someone else.

“But if you want to understand the painting, you have to understand Joar,” Ted explains. “And if you want to understand him, you have to understand his mom. Because her story is his. But… Joar’s old man? I intend to say as little as possible about that bastard.”

He remembers how much blood there was on Joar’s hands, as if he had dipped them in a barrel. He remembers his friend’s eyes: desperate, terrified. He was sitting huddled up outside the window of Ted’s basement room, holding out the crushed little box. He could hardly lift one arm, half his face was so red and so badly hurt that he couldn’t open the eye on that side. He was shaking, so Ted was forced to climb halfway out through the window with his ear close, close to Joar’s lips to hear.

Joar whispered that the bird had been lying in the box in his arms, defenseless, when his old man came into his room the first time. His mom had tried to stand between the man and the boy, as usual, but it was too late. His old man had already heard them laughing. He hadn’t said anything, just took a couple of swigs of whiskey straight from the bottle and disappeared back into the kitchen. Then there was nothing but waiting.

“Anyone who hasn’t seen real violence probably won’t understand that, but the minutes between the beatings are the worst,” Ted says, there on the rocks.

“Because you never know how many punches you’re going to get,” Louisa concludes, pulling the towel tighter around her shoulders.

Ted feels ashamed at that, because she probably knows more about violence than he does. But she nods for him to go on, so he tells her that the most evil thing about men like Joar’s old man is that he wasn’t evil all the time. Sometimes he was sober for weeks, then he and Joar’s mom would go for long walks and talk about getting a dog, once he bought a tent so he and Joar could go on a fishing trip. Sometimes Joar got to hold the tools when his old man fixed the car, that was how the boy learned about engines. Some evenings the three of them all ate dinner like a normal family, and his old man would be attentive and charming, even funny. That was the worst thing Joar knew, when he heard one of the man’s jokes and thought that that was where he had inherited his quick-wittedness from, because then he feared that he would get everything else too.

The good days were never good, they were a lie, they never lasted. There were just enough of them for his mom to believe that the bad ones were somehow her fault. When Joar was small he often used to sit on the toilet seat watching as she put her makeup on. He would sniff her perfume and ask, over and over again, how he smelled, terrified that he would smell like his old man. He wanted to smell like her.

“You smell like the best thing in the world, and the best thing in the world smells like you,” his mom used to reply, but that didn’t help the boy much.

His mom always used to get dressed up, even if she was only going to the supermarket.

“If you wear nice clothes, people forget what your face looks like,” she used to say in front of the bathroom mirror.

“Your face is really nice,” he would reply.

“Your face is really nice too,” she replied, and then he replied sullenly:

“Mom, you once said I had a good singing voice, so you obviously can’t be trusted!”

Then she laughed so hard that he had to run out, because there was no window in the bathroom.

When it was Joar’s birthday he asked for aftershave, and her heart must have broken, because she probably thought children his age ought to be asking for a bicycle. Some mornings her arms hurt so badly that he had to help her put makeup over the last of her bruises. He did it so carefully and thoroughly, became almost as good at it as he was at skating, and that was something she could probably never forgive herself for. The amount of violence her boy had seen.

Of course, Joar’s old man always promised not to do it again, but that only meant he always hit her as if it was his last chance. Sometimes he would cry and whisper that if she left him, he’d kill himself, but more often he yelled that he would kill her and the boy first. Most mornings he couldn’t even remember who he had hit at all.

Joar got bigger and started to step between them, somewhere in the mathematics of cruelty, presumably, the boy hoped that his mom would get hit less then, but it just got worse. All they did was to try to protect each other, but neither of them could. They had nowhere to go, they were too small and the planet wasn’t big enough for them to run from that man. The mornings after the worst days, Joar’s mom would get up and put on her most beautiful clothes and Joar would play soccer during every break at school, so no one would ask where his injuries came from. Even so, the good days were worst of all, because there were always just enough of them for you to forget they were merely a countdown.

Joar had been sitting on the floor of his room with the bird and his mom, he had heard his old man laughing drunkenly at something on television. What made his old man’s eyes turn black after that and sent him charging up into his son’s room isn’t important, it could have been anything at all. He had no damn fuse, that man, no rhyme nor reason. No logic. The only thing cruelty like his wants is to cause as much damage as possible. Why? No one knows. Sometimes it was enough that someone else looked happy, just for a single moment.

When Joar sat there outside Ted’s window with bloody hands and told him everything, he couldn’t stop the tears running down his face, and that made him shake with fury. Because that was precisely what his old man wanted that night, to see his power over the boy. The man hadn’t even looked at the box when he tore it out of his son’s hands. Joar’s mother’s scream must have been heard across the whole block, but what difference did that make? How many screams must the neighbors have learned to ignore over the years?

Joar’s old man had just stared at him, his foot crushing the box and the remains of the twigs and leaves and life inside it without breaking eye contact with his son for a second. Such is cruelty.

Ted never found out exactly what happened in the room after that, and what little he did know he didn’t want to tell Louisa, because as little as possible should be said about that bastard. But there was a knife in a backpack, there was a boy on the floor, there was a mother with her arms around the neck of a man who wouldn’t stop hitting.

When Joar stood outside Ted’s window later that night and held out the box, Ted’s hands ended up covered in blood too.

“Hide it,” Joar whispered.

“Come inside,” Ted pleaded, but Joar shook his head and looked down at his hands in astonishment, as if he was wondering who they belonged to.

“I have to get home before he notices I’m gone,” he whispered.

Then he turned around quickly and went out into the darkness. Ted called out without thinking:

“I love you!”

Joar stopped, just for a moment, without replying and without turning around. Then he ran.

Ted’s voice is barely audible there on the rocks now, Louisa has to move closer to hear about Joar sneaking back into his home. His old man was snoring on the sofa in the living room, passed out drunk with his son’s blood on his shirt. In Joar’s room his mother was on her knees, scrubbing the floor. It smelled so good in there that Joar felt dizzy. He had had two small bars of soap on his bookcase, Ali had given them to him as a Christmas present, she had stolen them from a shop specially for him. Obviously they were far too nice for Joar to wash himself with, so he used to just sit in bed smelling them when he was unhappy. They hardly weighed anything, barely as much as a bird.

After his old man had come into his room the first time that evening, then gone out again, Joar and his mother had quickly wrapped the soaps in a sock and placed them among the twigs and leaves in the box. When his old man had drunk himself angry enough and stormed through the door the second time, full of whiskey and bitterness, he had torn the box out of his son’s hands and Joar and his mother had screamed. His old man had just laughed, that’s how predictable his hatred was. He hadn’t even looked in the box before he threw it to the floor and stomped on it, he had been too preoccupied looking at Joar, too eager to see him broken at the bird’s death. And the boy had cried, just as the man wanted, but not about the bird, but about the cruelty. His old man couldn’t tell the difference in his tears, too stupid to realize that there could be one.

When the man was finished stomping on the box he proceeded to hit his son and his wife all around the room. When he had finally exhausted himself and staggered back out to the sofa, Joar had crawled up from the floor and opened the window. The tin edges of the window boxes were razor-sharp, and he had been shaking so much he cut his hands. When he picked up the bird he’d hidden in the loose soil beneath the plants, he got blood on its wings, and when he put it back in the crushed remains of the box, he got blood on that too. But the bird was breathing. He had carried it to Ted and hurried back. And a life was saved.

He helped his mom scrub the floor, their faces bruised and their hearts broken. Even so, they were both smiling, because a small bird was a big victory over an eternal tyrant. Joar took deep breaths of the smell of the soap and whispered into his mom’s hair: “I love you.”

“How can I be so lucky?” she whispered.

That night they slept next to each other in Joar’s bed, she with the boy in her arms, the boy with the backpack in his. His old man was passed out on the sofa. The next morning when Joar woke up everything smelled burnt.

His old man had been picked up by a workmate at dawn, still too drunk to make his own way to work, leaving just silence and smoke behind. Joar rubbed his eyes hard and stumbled out into the kitchen, confused. There stood his mother, in fresh makeup and with a look of embarrassment in her eyes: “I tried to bake muffins. I think they got a bit burnt…”

Burnt? They were cremated, Joar thought, but of course he didn’t say that.

Early one morning at the end of July they set the bird free down at the pier. It had stayed at Ted’s for a week or so, but Joar had been there every day to feed it seeds and worms.

There were five of them. That had been Ali’s idea. Of course at first Joar’s mother thought they were joking when they rang the doorbell, but then she had run and put her makeup on, and her prettiest high-heeled shoes. Even though Joar had explained again and again: “We’re going to a PIER, Mom! By the SEA! We’re not going to set the bird free in a NIGHTCLUB!”

She had taken her shoes off and walked the last bit down to the water barefoot, almost ceremoniously, and said proudly to her son: “Am I the first grown-up who’s been allowed to come here with you?”

And Joar had replied tenderly: “You’re not a grown-up, Mom.”

She hadn’t met his friends many times, yet she still knew all about them. When Joar was out of earshot, she had whispered to Ted: “He brags about all of you all the time!”

Ali heard that, unfortunately, and then she felt obliged to run and hit Joar really hard on the arm so he would hit her back. So that everyone would think that the tears in her eyes were because of that.

“Are you crying? I didn’t hit you that damn hard!” Joar muttered.

“Shut up,” Ali sobbed, she loved birds almost as much as she loved boys who loved birds.

“Can I ask something?” Joar’s mother asked once they were standing on the pier.

“Not now, Mom,” Joar said, but his mom asked anyway:

“Why doesn’t anyone adopt birds? I mean… you can buy birds and dogs, and you can adopt dogs, but you can’t adopt birds?”

“Who the hell adopts dogs, Mom?” Joar groaned.

Then Ali, friend of all animals, snapped:

“Anyone who isn’t an idiot! You shouldn’t buy dogs because there are so many homeless dogs!”

“How do you know they’re homeless? Maybe they just don’t want to live in a house!” Joar retorted.

“You idiot! Do you think dogs ought to live on the street?”

“Okay, so go to the jungle and adopt a lion, then! Why should lions be homeless?”

“Lions don’t even live in jungles , you idiot!” she shouted.

“I’m not a fucking idiot, you fucking idiot!” he shouted back.

“LOOK!” Ted cried out.

And that was when the bird took off from the artist’s hands. What a moment in life. First it just lay still between the artist’s fingers sleepily for a long time, as if it had been told it was time to go to school. But then, without warning, it suddenly raised its head. Spread its wings.

“And then it flew off,” Ted says dreamily on the rocks.

“Wow,” Louisa says, entirely without sarcasm, which is pretty remarkable for her.

“It looped around the pier, hovered above the sea, looked over its wing for a second as if… this sounds stupid… but it felt like it was looking at Joar and his mom.”

What a second that was, for everyone who saw it. What a damn second. The artist did something wonderful, which no one had ever heard before: he cheered. He jumped up and down on the pier and just screamed out loud with joy. How many reasons do you get to do that in an entire life? The sun broke through the clouds, it was a perfect moment, so obviously the stupid bird had to spoil every-thing.

It had gone about two hundred feet out over the water when it turned in a big semicircle and flew back. It flew over them toward the town and the apartment blocks.

“WRONG DIRECTION!” Ali yelled, as if it might come back and apologize.

“Maybe it isn’t the wrong direction for him,” Joar’s mom said tentatively.

“How do you know it’s a boy?” Ali asked.

“Because it’s flying in the wrong direction,” Joar’s mom smiled.

“Typical boy,” the artist said.

Oh, how they all laughed then. Apart from Joar, of course, who just spun around with his eyes looking up at the sky and sighed:

“It can fly anywhere it wants in the whole world, and it chooses to fly back to this fucking town?”

His mother stood beside him and thought for a long time before she murmured: “I think perhaps it flew back to its friends, darling. You would have done the same.”

They stood in silence for several heartbeats and considered this. Then Ali got restless and yelled:

“Come on! Let’s go swimming!”

Twenty-five years later, on the rocks by the sea, Ted lets the towel slide off his shoulders. He folds it neatly and puts it carefully in his suitcase, sitting next to the box containing the painting. Then he says to Louisa:

“We all jumped off the pier. That was the last time I swam in the sea with my friends.”