Men in My Situation by Per Petterson

Author:Per Petterson [Petterson, Per]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781473569782
Publisher: Random House

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The last evening we had together, the girls and I, was the day before New Year’s Eve, on Monday school was starting up again after Christmas. Vigdis had called me a few days earlier, so I was reconciled to the state of things. I still had a black eye after the brawl in Kongens gate, it was turning yellow, but was still a little swollen. I hurt in several places, close to my eye, my left shoulder, my right knee.

And then all of a sudden I was not to pick them up at Skjetten. That was the message I received from Turid when I called the day before, to ask her when was a suitable time for me to come. You don’t need to, she said, you don’t need to come and get them.

They were supposed to stay with me just that one day, less than twenty-four hours, and my intention was for it to be a special evening and make the most of it, and I had also made a plan, so what she said made me uncertain. Why shouldn’t I come to get them, I said, need, what does need have to do with it, why shouldn’t I come to get them, and she said, oh Arvid, do I really have to tell you. She sounded like my mother, and that immediately gave me a feeling of guilt, a jolt in the stomach, the trapdoor beneath me creaked, and just as quickly I thought, goddammit, guilt, guilty of what, and was about to defend myself, but then I didn’t know what to defend myself against, I found nothing in my memory, nothing she wouldn’t have to tell me, and that made me anxious about what she might have taken it into her head to say, and I let it lie.

Instead Turid came to drop them off. It had never happened before. I stood by the window and watched her park her metallic-blue Toyota with its red rims close to my champagne-coloured Mazda in front of my apartment building, and the combination made the Mazda look derelict, hillbillyish, as if it was something Turid had planned beforehand, metaphorically to demonstrate the view she now held of our relationship, and that made it look ominous, and I thought, just a few months, and nothing is as it used to be.

I really did like picking up the girls. It made everything easier. In the car the mood always changed for the better on the way to Bjølsen, and they asked me what plan I had made for the next two days, and every single time I had one, and we sang twenty-five-year-old Beatles songs I had played for them countless times, and they told me about things that had happened in their lives since last I saw them, and I told them what had happened in mine, which wasn’t very much if you took out my nights on the town, the successful ones and the not so successful. So I

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