Chapter Fifty
FIFTY
Louisa just gawps. Joar’s eyes keep darting around the doorframe, full of restlessness and anticipation, as if they still belong to a rowdy little brat who has just put fireworks in someone’s mailbox. But apart from his eyes? His face is twenty-five years older, his body a few pounds heavier, his skin many wrinkles richer. Beneath his eyes he has blue circles with a depth that requires dedication, you don’t get those from just a few nights’ poor sleep, they demand years of devotion in dark rooms with bottles you don’t leave half full.
“Hello, Joar,” Ted says warily, as if he isn’t entirely sure which version of his friend he’s going to encounter.
Joar looks him up and down with a degree of surprise, as if he has woken up in the future.
“You’re losing your hair,” he notes, without saying hello and without so much as glancing at Louisa.
“You’ve got a bit of a beer belly,” Ted smiles back tentatively.
“I’m fat, you’re ugly, at least I can go on a diet,” Joar retorts, quick as a flash.
Ted’s hand sticks out a few inches, but stops in midair, as if it doesn’t know if the rest of him is ready to touch anyone yet.
“You’re… not fat,” he whispers, instead of saying what he wants to say: I’ve missed you so much.
“You’ve gotten old,” Joar says, instead of saying what he probably feels: My skin has felt cold, all alone here.
“ I’ve gotten old? We’re exactly the same age!” Ted protests.
Joar snorts.
“We are NOT the same age. We might have lived the same number of years, but we sure as hell aren’t the same age. You’ve been eighty years old since we were twelve.”
Then Ted suddenly laughs so loudly that Louisa jumps and wonders where he has been hiding all that noise. As if all this time there has been an extra roar of laughter, just for Joar, unused for years. Then the man in the doorway turns to her.
“So you’re Louisa?”
The question is so direct and the eye contact suddenly so intense that Louisa starts to stammer:
“How… how do you know that?”
Joar nods to his old friend.
“Ted called from the train station.”
“When I went off to get the tickets for the sleeper train,” Ted confesses, as if he wants to apologize for doing it in secret.
With a degree of reluctance, Joar defends him:
“Ted probably didn’t want to say you’d be meeting me because he didn’t know if I’d have drunk myself to death before you arrived. But there’s no need to worry, I’m sober, I may look hungover, but that’s just my natural damn look these days.”
Louisa shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Ted glances at her and adds:
“I’ve told her about you, Joar. About us. But I think maybe that Louisa would have hoped to meet you when you were… a teenager.”
With her ears turning red, Louisa snaps:
“Stop it!”
“I’m just trying to explain!” Ted snaps back.
“You’re embarrassing me!” she hisses.
Joar looks from one to the other. For two people who have only known each other a couple of days, they really have found an impressive number of ways to get on each other’s nerves. Then he squints at Ted and asks:
“What the hell have you done to your face?”
Ted feels his bumps and bruises, and realizes that the tape on his glasses is coming loose again.
“It’s a long story,” he says tiredly.
Louisa groans.
“Stop saying that! It isn’t! You got mugged and beaten up! It’s a really short story!” She points toward the metal construction that leads up to the narrow veranda. “Can I ask something? Is that ramp for a wheelchair? Does someone in a wheelchair live here?”
Joar smiles weakly, then he grunts:
“Do you know what that is? It’s a fucking long story.”
“Everything is with you two, clearly!” Louisa says sullenly.
Joar looks hesitantly at the box by Ted’s side.
“Is that… the painting?”
His voice falls off a cliff at the end of the sentence.
“Yes! Do you want to see it?” Ted offers enthusiastically, but Joar shakes his head firmly.
He isn’t ready for that yet, so he blinks angrily and looks around as if some dust has just blown into his eye and the wind is about to get yelled at.
“Do you want coffee?” he grunts.
“Yes, please,” Ted says.
“Have you got any Coca-Cola?” Louisa says hopefully.
“Do I look like some sort of goddamn Mescaline-starred restaurant?” Joar complains.
Ted really is a good friend to him for not pointing out that it should be “Michelin.”
“Are you always this nice to guests?” Louisa asks, rolling her eyes.
Ted can’t help smiling at that.
“We haven’t seen each other for a few years, but he used to be even worse…”
Joar snorts indignantly:
“Ted’s the only one who’s changed! He was much quieter when we were little, he didn’t used to fucking argue as much as he does now!”
When he turns to go into the house Louisa sees something on his leg.
“Is that an… ankle monitor?” she asks.
“Well, it’s not a damn piece of jewelry,” comes the reply.
“Why do you have it?”
“Because they didn’t have room for me in prison anymore.”
“You’ve been in prison?”
“Do bears shit in the woods? Do one-legged ducks swim in circles?” Joar replies.
She groans impatiently. “Were you in prison for having a terrible sense of humor?”
“I’ve got a GREAT sense of humor!”
“So what were you in prison for, then?”
“It’s a long story,” Joar mutters.
Louisa takes a deep, deep breath, then glares at Joar, then glares at Ted, then glares at Joar again, and asks:
“Do you have a pillow?”
“What?”
“Do you have a pillow?”
“Of course I have a damn pill—”
“Can I borrow it?”
Joar looks at Ted, who shrugs his shoulder uncomprehendingly, and Louisa looks so adamant that not even Joar protests. So he disappears into the house and comes back with a pillow, and Louisa takes it with one hand and then spends thirty seconds punching the pillow over and over again as hard as she can with her other hand. When she’s finished, she holds the pillow up, first toward Ted and then toward Joar, and roars:
“If I have to hear ‘It’s a long story’ one more time, I’m going to hit both of you in—”
“Okay, okay, okay!” Ted says, carefully backing out of range of her swinging fists, but Joar just laughs.
“I can see why Kimkim liked her,” he says.
“Who the hell is KIMKIM?” Louisa shouts, by now thoroughly tired of no one telling a story from the goddamn beginning in this goddamn house.
Joar’s gaze wavers for a moment and his shoulders sink as the air goes out of him. Then he touches the box containing the painting for the first time, as if he were gently touching the cheek of someone asleep.
“His name was Kimkim. That other name, C. Jat, that was just what he put on his paintings. That was what he used when he became famous. Because then he probably felt like… someone else. But when he was with us, when we were his, then he was just Kimkim.”
“Kimkim?” Louisa repeats skeptically.
She feels a little betrayed that someone she has always known as “C. Jat” wasn’t actually called anything even remotely close to that.
“Kimkim,” Joar nods affectionately.
Ted touches the box then as well, at the other end, that’s the closest he and Joar get to touching each other.
“The first time we met, when Joar almost ran me over on his bike and drowned me—” Ted begins.
“You should have watched out!” Joar grunts.
Ted rolls his eyes so hard that his pupils scratch him on the back on their way home.
“Sure, sure, when I didn’t watch out. And almost drowned! When I got up on the pier and saw him and Joar for the first time, he said: ‘This is Joar. And my name’s Kim.’ But I had water in my ears, so I said: ‘Kim?’ And he said: ‘Kim!’ And I said: ‘Kim? Kim?’ And Joar thought that was so funny that from then on, he always called him Kimkim.”
“But Ali usually just called him Kim. Because she always had to be special,” Joar snorts.
Louisa peers at Ted:
“What did you call him?”
“I hardly ever said his name,” Ted says quietly.
It’s a funny thing. The person we fall in love with, we hardly ever call by their name. Because it’s somehow just so obvious that it’s you I’m talking to, that it’s you I’m always thinking of. Who else?
“Kimkim. Yes, that suited him,” Louisa nods, as if she were holding the name up in front of a mirror in a dressing room. “Can I ask something?” she says, then immediately asks: “Is it uncomfortable?”
She points to the ankle monitor.
“Yeah,” Joar grunts.
“And you’re not allowed to go outside the house?”
“No.”
“What happens if you do?”
“I blow up. There’s dynamite inside it.”
Louisa’s eyes open wide.
“Seriously?”
“No, you idiot, are you always this dim?”
Louisa throws up her arms.
“Oh, sorry, because all geniuses wear ankle monitors? Is it so your brain cells won’t escape, or what?”
At first Joar looks insulted, then rather amused. He grins at Ted.
“This must have been the longest train trip of your life.”
Ted nods his strong, strong agreement and Louisa looks affronted. Then they go inside the house and she brightens up, because Joar finds a can of orange soda at the back of his fridge. Louisa drinks it like it’s the last can of orange soda on the planet. Ted goes and pees twice during the course of one cup of coffee. Then he asks her:
“Have you decided yet?”
“Decided what?” she wonders.
“If you want to hear the rest of the story or not?”
She nods, after some hesitation.
“What story?” Joar asks.
“About us. About the summer when Kimkim painted the picture.”
Joar’s eyes narrow suspiciously.
“How much have you told her?”
“Up until you turned fifteen. And we went to the museum for the first time. And sat outside it in the car. And Kimkim farted. And you discovered that… that the knife wasn’t in your backpack.”
Joar drinks his coffee and looks like he has never wanted a shot of whiskey more in his entire life.
“You’re the one who’s good at telling stories, damn it.”
“This part belongs to you,” Ted says quietly.
So Joar tells her. With slightly fewer adjectives than Ted usually uses, and rather more swearing.