A Modern Family by Helga Flatland

Author:Helga Flatland [Helga Flatland]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781912374465
Publisher: Orenda Books
Published: 2019-08-02T16:00:00+00:00

I sit in a bar down in Grünerløkka after bidding Håkon and Ellen farewell. I call Kjersti, a friend of mine who has just divorced her husband, one of only a few friends I’ve been in touch with over the past few weeks. I haven’t told anyone else about the divorce, haven’t been able to face the prospect of being confronted by my own fears or the cracks that have formed as a result, and anyway, I’ve been convinced that this was a temporary state of affairs.

I tell Kjersti that Mum has a new partner, even though Håkon explained after a while that Mum didn’t view him that way at all, that actually she had her doubts after things had moved so quickly. I receive no sympathy from Kjersti, who asks me to stop being so egotistical, telling me I ought to feel happy for Mum, grow up, she says. I play along while silently writing off everything she says as her own way of justifying the decisions she’s made.

I don’t have any desire to go home, so I order myself another beer. I never got the chance to say anything else I’d planned to bring up with Ellen and Håkon. We’re not the ones getting divorced, I’d imagined myself saying to them, we need to stick together. I’d pictured myself comforting them, reassuring them, putting things into perspective for them. But as it turned out, they were the ones to put things into perspective for me: I’m the one who’s overreacting, and I’ve laboured under the misapprehension that both Håkon and Ellen must feel the same way, that we must have the same experience of the situation, that their foundation has been shattered just like my own, but it’s just you, I think to myself, it’s just you who was stupid enough to build your life on the illusion of something real, while Ellen and Håkon saw through them both long ago. I drink quickly to stifle my shame.

A man approaches me and asks if he can sit beside me at the bar. I gesture to the seat beside me, in spite of the fact that there are any number of free tables behind us. He orders a beer, checks his phone, asks how my day has been. I start laughing. He nods in agreement.

‘Yep, it’s absurd, the whole thing,’ he says, picking up his phone, a newspaper article on the election glowing in my direction.

‘What’s absurd is how much we care about a US election,’ I say, my mind filled with a comforting rush.

I repeat a few of Håkon’s arguments, he disagrees. We sit and discuss things for a while, and it takes half an hour and another beer before I realise that I’m ingratiating myself, seeking out something in him. I wonder if I ought to just let everything go to ruin, if I should give up too. But I have children, I tell him as we stand outside the bar, one hour and several beers later, sharing a cigarette.

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