Chapter Forty-Eight
FORTY-EIGHT
Nothing about the train station feels like home. The town where Ted grew up no longer exists, it doesn’t even look the same as it had two years ago, the last time he’d seen it. Excavators are clawing at the earth, all the buildings are covered with scaffolding, orange tape shows where you aren’t allowed to walk. This town is shedding its skin, all the time, it’s excellent at reminding men like Ted that they belong to the past.
His body tenses, he shrinks a little, almost as if he’s expecting to be hit. Louisa follows him in a silence that’s unlike her. At the end of the platform there’s a view of the sea, and Ted stops there for a moment. If the town hadn’t recently built luxury apartments down in the old harbor district, you would have been able to see all the way to the pier from there.
Two workmen begin hammering a plank into the ground a short distance away, and Ted jumps at the sound as if it were a pistol shot.
“Are you okay?” Louisa asks anxiously.
He nods. It’s a lie. He stands there thinking about Joar and that last day in July, the hours after they had been to the museum, and all he can remember is the sound of a human head being struck. It must have been terrible, twenty-five years later he still dreams about it sometimes, even though he didn’t even hear it. He is scared of a sound he didn’t even experience. That’s the worst thing about having a vivid imagination: it works in all directions.
He has thought about that day so often since then, has thought that the force of the blow must have been so immense that it was a miracle the whole head wasn’t ripped off. Because the human body is so tough but so soft, we’re a lethal animal yet completely unprotected. Fists and elbows can break ribs and crush jaws, one blow to the temple can mean the end, one single unguarded moment can extinguish a brain. One single really hard blow is enough. We think we’re so big, but we’re small, fragile, pathetic.
That last summer as children only lasted a few weeks, but it will carry on inside Ted for his entire life. Time weighs more when you’re little. In hindsight he never remembers Joar saying, “I have to kill my old man,” it was just something that Ted suddenly saw in his eyes. There was no anger in them, oddly enough, no blind fury. Everything had already burned out, inside Joar there were just ashes left, together with the cold calculation of a fifteen-year-old who had weighed all the options and concluded that this was the only one that remained.
He never stood a chance. Joar was dangerous, but the world was more dangerous. The world is undefeated.
“Come on, we’re going this way,” Ted whispers.
He carries his suitcase and the box containing the painting down the steps toward the street. Louisa follows him with her hands nervously clutching the straps of her backpack, her eyes darting in all directions, as if she’s trying to recognize places from his story.
They take a bus the last bit of the way, but don’t get off by the crossroads where all the friends grew up. They head in a different direction, toward the churchyard. Louisa stops at the gate, not because Ted asks her to, but because she feels it would be an intrusion to go with him. She wouldn’t have wanted any company visiting Fish’s grave.
Ted bends down next to a flower bed by the church, looks over his shoulder to check that no one is looking, then picks three small flowers. He stops at one of the graves, crouches down, and whispers:
“I didn’t steal these. They’re adopted.”
Then he apologizes for not having the artist’s ashes with him. As if that were necessary. As if those four teenagers twenty-five years ago weren’t a love story, belonging to each other forever, impossible to separate. Ashes or not.
“I love you and I believe in you,” he smiles, and pats the stone.
Then he walks back to the gate, picks up his suitcase and the box containing the painting, and nods to Louisa:
“Come on. Not far to go now.”
“To what?”
“The end of the story,” he says.
They pass some big, beautiful houses where rich people live. Then some smaller ones, for less rich people, and soon some even smaller ones. The cars get rustier, the lawns browner, until eventually they walk up a hill along a narrow cul-de-sac full of ramshackle little houses. Ted stops in front of the last one, steps up onto the narrow veranda, and knocks on the door. When it opens, twenty-five years have passed since that summer, but the eyes are still exactly the same. All the air goes out of Louisa. She’s never even seen him, but of course she knows instantly who the man in the doorway is.
Joar.