My Friends

Chapter Fifty-One

FIFTY-ONE

Joar stood outside that damn museum, digging through his damn backpack, but he couldn’t fucking find it. All he could find at the bottom were two damn soaps, taped together so they weighed roughly the same as a knife. Of course Joar should have known better than to try to hide anything from her, she who had already told him that moms find everything.

“She took it… I have to… fuck fuck fuck… I have to go home!” was all Joar managed to say.

He drove the car at full speed with trembling hands back through the town. The storm had come in over them now, the wind was rattling the windows, so they saw the flashing lights ahead long before they actually heard the sirens. When they were near the harbor, the ambulance rushed past them. As they turned toward the houses at the crossroads where they always called out “tomorrow” to each other, they saw the parking area outside Joar’s building. In the spot where Joar’s old man’s car had stood when they stole it, there was now a police car. Outside the door to the stairwell stood a group of serious men with hard bodies, bowed heads, and broken glances. They were Joar’s old man’s workmates from the harbor. One of them was Kimkim’s father.

Joar stopped the car and leapt out, he was running before his friends had even opened their doors, he was screaming desperately through the wind. He didn’t slow down when the men from the harbor held out their hands, he forced his way through the crowd so wildly that even the heaviest men backed off. When one of them tried to grab his backpack, he just slithered out of it and rushed on into the stairwell.

There was a body lying on the floor of Joar’s room. The window was ajar, dirt from the tin flower box had blown in across the floor.

Joar glances at Louisa. The kitchen was already small to begin with, but now it feels like a matchbox, ready to ignite at any moment. Joar whispers:

“It must have been one hell of a… one hell of a blow to the head. It must have been heard through the fucking walls. People think we’re so damn hard, so damn tough and dangerous. But we’re fragile. We’re defenseless little creatures. One single really hard blow to the temple is enough. One single second when you’re not prepared, it can shut down your brain. That was… I had a plan… my mom was going to work the night shift that night. She wasn’t supposed to be at home! That was why I kept checking if I had the knife all the time. I was planning to wait until my old man came home drunk and… but… I didn’t have time.”

In a voice so fragile that Louisa has to lean across the table to hear, Joar explains that he had prepared a small box. He was going to pretend he’d found another bird, and look extra happy so his old man would hate him more than ever. He would leave the knife under the flowers outside the window again, then he would wait until his old man stumbled into his room, and when the bastard grabbed the box Joar would reach through the window for the knife and stab his old man before he had time to react. It was a good plan. It would have worked if he had gotten the chance.

“I just remember screaming ‘MOM,’ over and over again. And I remember hearing someone yell my name, outside the house…,” Joar whispers.

Ted clears his throat gently.

“It was Kimkim who yelled.”

Because Kimkim had run after him from the car, but had been stopped by the men outside the building. He wasn’t strong enough to fight his way through. One day perhaps they would brag about that, those men, that they had once been so close to one of the world’s most famous artists. But that day they didn’t say a word, they just stood there, cowardly and silent, weak and pathetic, despite all their muscle.

Then a howl was heard from inside the apartment. Then all Ted remembers is the longest, most unbearable silence he has ever experienced.

He has often wondered what went through the minds of the men from the harbor outside the building then. He’s spent so much time wondering what Kimkim’s dad, the biggest and strongest of them all, might have been thinking. Ted saw the father meet his son’s gaze, and that was the first time Ted could ever remember Kimkim not breaking eye contact. He stared so accusingly that his father shrank. Those men from the harbor would have to bear an eternal shame, all friends of men like Joar’s old man have to do that. Because that silence after the howl from inside the apartment was nothing compared to the silence the men themselves had all been walking around in, day after day, year after year.

“The biggest threat to men’s health, statistically, is heart disease,” Ted says thoughtfully at the kitchen table. “Do you know what the biggest threat to women’s health is?”

“Men,” Louisa says, because all women know that.

Joar spins his coffee cup, leaving marks on the old kitchen table. Then he tells Louisa how he saw his mom’s body lying there on the floor of his room. How he yelled “MOM” over and over again. Then his voice sinks:

“Everyone… knew. They all knew what he was doing to us. Kimkim’s old man and my old man worked together for years. Some of the men from the harbor grew up on the same street as him. You know… you didn’t choose your friends in this town in their day. You became friends with the kids you lived next to, then you had fights with the kids from the next block… that’s how they ended up so loyal to each other. When they got jobs for each other in the harbor, they always said ‘the right sort of guy,’ and by that they meant that he could punch someone in the mouth and keep his own mouth shut. Because in the harbor, you have to be able to trust each other, it’s dangerous as hell down there, trucks driving at full speed, cranes lifting containers that weigh several tons on cables that look like shoelaces… you have to have each other’s backs. You have to be able to trust that the guy behind you will yell ‘WATCH OUT!’ if something’s about to hit you in the head. You understand? Kimkim’s old man was missing two fingers on one hand, because one time when they were young, he got his hand caught in a machine, it hurt so much that he passed out. It was my old man who saw and managed to pull him free. Otherwise he might have lost his whole damn arm. You know… Kimkim’s old man would have done anything for mine after that. Anything at all. Because those men have to be able to trust each other, right? You have to know that someone is going to yell ‘WATCH OUT!’ when you’re in danger? So they convince themselves that they have to be able to trust each other with… everything. So if someone talks shit about the boss in the locker room, you keep your mouth shut. If he cheats on his girlfriend, you keep your mouth shut. And if he… if he smells of alcohol when you pick him up in the morning? If he has stains on his knuckles that look like… like his wife’s makeup? Because he didn’t even wash his hands after he hit her? If he has stains on his shirt that he says are paint but which look a hell of a lot like blood? Then you keep your mouth shut. Maybe you ask his wife one single time, you know, if everything’s okay with her and the kid… but of course she just laughs and says everything’s great. Because what’s she going to say? Help us? He’s going to kill us? It’s obvious as hell that she won’t dare do that. And that’s absolutely fucking perfect for all those right sort of guys in the harbor, all those big strong men, because then they don’t have to ask again. They can just let it happen. Because obviously they haven’t seen anything, they haven’t heard anything, they just had a feeling . And you don’t call the damn police for that, because what the hell are the police going to do about your feeling ? So when I came home that day, and I saw Mom lying on the floor of my room and realized what had happened, I just remember that I… I lay down on the floor beside her and held her hands. And I had never felt like that before…”

The coffee cup spins around, around on the kitchen table, leaving wounds in the wood. Louisa thinks about the men who stood there outside Joar’s apartment building, and she thinks about Fish telling her what evil among men is like: It’s like water being heated up a little at a time. It gets worse and worse, but so slowly it’s hardly noticeable, so everyone can convince themselves that it’s probably normal, until we’re all boiling.

“He was funny, my old man,” Joar suddenly says with a sad grin. “That’s probably what caused the blow. He’d told a joke down at the harbor, and everyone laughed, and he was probably so pleased with himself that he didn’t look. And it was windy as all hell that day, there was a storm coming in. But I guess no one dared complain, no one said that maybe it was too dangerous to loosen those damn steel beams then, because, you know… real men, the right sort of guys, they don’t complain. My old man walked right in front of a crane, and the guy driving it turned too fast, he didn’t account for the wind. That’s all it takes, you know, just a few grams wrong in the weight distribution this way or that, and the beam starts to swing. My old man didn’t have a chance of seeing it. And you know what? I’ve wondered every day since then how many of his workmates saw it, and how many shouted ‘WATCH OUT!’?”

Ted sits there stirring his coffee, he can still remember the look on Kimkim’s dad’s face outside Joar’s apartment building, and how he crumbled and gazed down at the ground when Kimkim stared at him. It wasn’t shock on the man’s face then, it wasn’t grief, just shame. Joar’s cup spins, spins, spins on the kitchen table. It takes so little to crush a person, one small step this way or that. He says:

“Mom looked so horribly small as she lay there. Like a child who’d fallen out of a tree. I remember, the window was open, I could smell the flowers, I remember there was dirt on the floor. I know I looked for blood. I ran over and touched her shoulder, because my heart was beating so hard that I couldn’t even hear if she was breathing. Then I just heard her whisper my name and start to cry.”

Ted sits on the other side of the kitchen table but feels miles away. He’s thinking about what it was like standing outside in the silence. He remembers Kimkim telling him afterward that it was the first time he had seen his dad cry, with his face hidden behind his eight fingers. Ted remembers that too, and he remembers wondering who the man was crying for: Joar’s old man, Joar’s mother, or himself?

Joar clears his throat and gathers his strength before he goes on:

“Right after the accident, the men from the harbor and the police went to see my mom and tell her what had happened. They didn’t want her to find out over the telephone. And do you know what she did then? She ran straight into my room, because she was so scared that that was her first instinct: to protect her child. But of course I wasn’t there, I was at the museum, so she just lay on the floor crying and crying until I came home. And when she heard me in the doorway all she managed to whisper was: ‘Joar, Joar… your dad’s been in an accident. He’s in the hospital. They say he’s going to… die.’ And I tried to comfort her, but she sobbed: ‘You don’t understand, darling! I took your knife. I was… I was going to kill him. If he’d come home I would have… killed him.’ And then she just screamed. Like she’d been holding it in for years. I don’t know if it came from grief or relief. But I remember lying beside her and that I had never, ever felt anything like that. I felt… free.”

Ted thinks that it takes so little for a life to take a different direction. Change weighs nothing. Like a knife, like a bar of soap, like a tiny animal.

Joar smiles weakly at Louisa:

“Do you know what my mom asked? When we were lying there on the floor? She asked why I was so wet. I said I’d had a water fight with my friends. And then she worried I was going to catch a cold. Even then, she was… worried about… me.”

Ted says nothing, but he remembers standing beside Ali and Kimkim and looking up at the flowers outside Joar’s room, and he could have sworn that at that moment a bird landed by the window. It sat there for a couple of moments, peering in, then in a blink it was gone, spreading its little black wings and flying away. And Ted thought about how life is so fragile, coincidence decides so much, it takes so little to change everything.

Down in the harbor, when the heavy construction crane turned just a fraction of a second too quickly in the wind, it probably wouldn’t have taken more than a few extra grams to change the weight distribution so that the steel beam started to sway. It would probably have been enough for a small bird to land and take off again.