The silenced.

Ha.

45

Pieter

Stavanger, 1960

On a saturday evening in early August, I drove out of town to the beach at Orrestranda, where you used to paddle in the shallows and eat the sand. I changed into my swimming costume in the back of the car, and left my shoes stacked together over my folded clothes. Barefoot, with a towel slung across my shoulders, I took the sandy trail from the parking lot and climbed over the grassy dunes to the beach. Children played there, hurdling the small waves, and the dark heads of swimmers bobbed further out. Without breaking stride, I dropped my towel to the sand and walked into the water and kept moving forward until I was past the breaking waves and standing chest-deep. I fanned my arms along the surface of the water and let the swell rock me back and forth, sometimes lifting my feet off the seabed. My Bear. How many times had I done this? How much was the sea part of me? I was salt. I was sea. Water had been my element since I was a boy, staying with my grandparents on Karmøy in that house of white clapboard with a red roof, a house that was now occupied by strangers.

I floated on my back and let myself be blinded by sky. Nothing up there but more nothing, and when you stare at nothing for too long, you start to see things.

My grandmother kept dogs and cats. The cats always seemed to hang with bulging pink teats, with kittens. The dogs were usually ill or deformed. Rhubarb, strawberries and blackberries grew wild in my grandmother’s garden, and once I ate so many blackberries my faeces looked like pie filling. My grandfather: the fisherman who told mariners’ tales and other tales too, stories that I could never really be sure came from his own experience or fantasy or what – on this the old man was ambiguous.

Hundreds of metres up from where I floated, a gull coasted in from the right side of my vision, passed, then seconds later, circled back again from the left. I shivered. I hadn’t thought about my grandparents’ house in a very long time: the blackened kettle on the stove, the top drawer in the kitchen that contained balls of string, pencil nubs, candles and errant nuts and bolts, ledger pads and tobacco tins full of wooden buttons. Treasure for a young boy. I remembered how I nearly burned the house down, and I remembered the wallpaper that lined the stairway, a diamond pattern of soft, yellow blossoms. I remembered listening to the radio and eating home-pickled onions out of a jar, and the wind blasting my bedroom window, where on the sill I kept my collection of stones and shells and other ocean-worn rubbish. I remembered the heavy, cut-glass sweets dish on the low table in the front room. It was impossible, after nicking a sweet, to replace the lid silently, the ring of crystal infinitely loud and lingering in that small house.