Encircling 2 by Carl Frode Tiller

Author:Carl Frode Tiller [Tiller, Carl Frode]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-55597-991-1
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2017-05-05T04:00:00+00:00

Namsos, July 7th, 2006

The first time I met you face to face was down on the beach at Gullholmstrand. Me and Bendik were there and so were Janne and her dog, a fat old Labrador with a gimpy hip. It was half-blind, this mutt, and would have been put down long ago if Janne hadn’t loved him more than anything else in the whole world and if her parents hadn’t been convinced that she’d be even more sad and lonely if she were to lose him. Janne wasn’t someone we chose to be friends with or invited to hang out with us, but she sometimes tagged along with Bendik and me because she didn’t have anybody else, and even though we weren’t always as nice to her as we might have been, we kind of accepted her and she was happy about that and grateful.

When the grown-ups talked about Janne they said things like “She was at the back of the line when good looks were being handed out” and “She’s a nice, well-behaved girl, but maybe a bit more backward than other kids her age,” but they only talked like that because they all wanted to be seen as nice people, when in fact what they actually thought was what me and Bendik said straight out: that Janne was ugly and stupid.

Because Christ knows she was. She had the kind of big, heavy glasses that left sore spots behind her jug ears and on her pug nose. She had a length of white elastic attached to her glasses that was supposed to keep them in place, but it was so tight that it made her hair stick up at the back, making her look like a peewee or a crested grebe or whatever it’s called, the bird I’m thinking of. She also had a double chin that wobbled when she walked and an ass so big it hung over the sides of the chair when she sat down. Her face was broad and flat and perfectly round with a big mouth that she never closed, not even when she ate, something that came in handy when you and me and Bendik wanted to upset the stuck-up, oh-so-prim-and-proper girls in our class, I remember. All we had to do was give Janne one of the bars of chocolate we’d pinched from the corner store and ask her to sit down beside them at break and eat it while they were having their packed lunches. That put them right off their food, I can tell you, and sent them running out of the classroom to throw up into the drinking fountain in the hallway. It was just as hilarious every time, or so we thought.

But enough of that.

Anyway, me and Bendik and Janne were down on the beach. I remember Bendik was cursing Janne because she had laughed when her dog climbed onto his foot and started humping it. They were both too taken up with this to notice you coming down the path with your swimming things in a Co-op shopping bag.

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