all in our disgusting little family. You wanted only the love you were denied, and you didn’t give a shit about the love you were given. Sorry, Rolf, Stein and Irene, but she had room only for me. Which makes point three all the more amusing: I never loved you, baby, however much you considered you deserved it. I called you Mum because it made you happy, and life simpler for me. When I did what I did it was because you let me, because I couldn’t stop myself. Because that’s the way I am.
Rolf. At least you told me not to call you Dad. You really tried to love me. But you could not fool nature; you realised you loved your own flesh and blood more: Stein and Irene. When I told other people you were ‘my foster- parents’ I could see the wounded expression in Mum’s eyes. And the hatred in yours. Not because ‘foster-parents’ shrank you to the only function you had in my life, but because I wounded the woman you, incomprehensibly, loved. I think you were honest enough to see yourself as I saw you: a person who at some point in your life, intoxicated on your own idealism, undertook to raise a changeling but soon understood that your account was in deficit. The monthly sum they paid you for care did not cover the real expense. Then you discovered that I was a cuckoo in the nest. That I ate everything. Everything you loved. Everyone you loved. You should have realised earlier and thrown me out, Rolf! You were the first to see that I stole. Initially it was only a hundred kroner. I denied it. Said I’d been given it by Mum. ‘Isn’t that right, Mum? You gave it to me.’ And Mum nodded after some hesitation, with tears in her eyes, said she must have forgotten. The next time it was a thousand. From your desk drawer. Money that was meant for our holiday, you said. ‘The only holiday I want is from you,’ I answered. And then you slapped me for the first time. And it was as if it triggered something in you, because you went on hitting. I was already taller and broader than you, but I have never been able to fight. Not like that, not with fists and muscles. I fought in another way, one where you win. But you kept hitting me, with a clenched fist now. And I knew why. You wanted to destroy my face. Take my power away from me. But the woman I called Mum intervened. So you said it. The word. The Thief. True enough. But it also meant I would have to crush you, little man.
Stein. The silent elder brother. The first to recognise the cuckoo by the plumage, but smart enough to keep his distance. The clever, bright, smart lone wolf who upped and left for a student town as far away as possible and as soon as he could. Who tried to persuade Irene, his dear little sister, to join him. He thought that she could finish school in fricking Trondheim, that it would do her good to get away from Oslo. But Mum put a stop to Irene’s evacuation. She knew nothing of course. Didn’t want to know.
Irene. Attractive, lovely, freckled, fragile Irene. You were too good for this world. You were all I was not. And yet you loved me. Would you have loved me if you had known? Would you have loved me if you had known that I was shagging your mother from the age of fifteen? Shagging your red-wine-soaked, whimpering mother, taking her from behind against the toilet door or the cellar door or the kitchen door while whispering ‘Mum’ in her ear because it made both her and me hot. She gave me money, she covered my back if anything happened, she said she only wanted to borrow me until she was old and ugly and I met a nice, sweet girl. And when I answered, ‘But, Mum, you are old and ugly,’ she laughed it off and begged for more.
I still had the bruises after my foster-father’s punches and kicks the day I rang him at work and told him to come home at three, there was something important I had to tell him. I left the front door ajar so that she wouldn’t hear him come in. And I spoke into her ear to drown his footsteps, said the sweet nothings she liked to hear.
I saw the reflection in the kitchen window, of him standing in the kitchen doorway.
He moved out the next day. Irene and Stein were told that Mum and Dad had not been getting on well for a while and had decided to separate for a bit. Irene was broken-hearted. Stein was in his student town, and he answered with a text: ‘Sad. Where would u like me to go 4 Xmas?’
Irene cried and cried. She loved me. Of course she searched for me. For the Thief.
The church bells rang for the fifth time. Crying and sniffling from the pews. Cocaine, incredible earnings. Rent a city-centre flat in the West End, register it in some junkie’s name who you pay off with a shot, and start selling in small quantities by stairways or gates, ratchet up the price as they begin to feel secure; coke folk pay anything for security. Get on your feet, get out, cut down on dope, become somebody. Don’t die in a squat like a bloody loser. The priest coughs. ‘We are here to commemorate Gusto Hanssen.’
A voice from far back: ‘Th-th-thief.’
Tutu’s tribe sitting there in biker jackets and bandanas. And even further back: the whimpering of a dog. Rufus. Good, loyal Rufus. Have you come back here? Or is it me who has already gone there?
Tord Schultz placed his Samsonite bag on the conveyor belt winding its way into the X-ray machine beside the smiling security official.
‘I don’t understand why you let them give you such a schedule,’ the flight attendant said. ‘Bangkok twice a week.’
‘I asked them to,’ Tord said, passing through the metal detector. Someone in the trade union had proposed that the crews should go on strike against having to be exposed to radiation several times a day. American research had shown that proportionally more pilots and cabin crew died of cancer than the rest of the population. But the strike agitators had said nothing about the average life expectancy also being higher. Air crew died of cancer because there was very little else to die of. They lived the safest lives in the world. The most boring lives in the world.
‘You want to fly that much?’
‘I’m a pilot. I like flying,’ Tord lied, taking down his bag, extending the handle and walking away.
She was alongside him in seconds, the clack of her heels on Gardermoen’s grey antique fonce marble floor almost drowning the buzz of voices under the vaulted wooden beams and steel. However, unfortunately it did not drown her whispered question.
‘Is that because she left you, Tord? Is it because you have too much time on your hands and nothing to fill it with? Is it because you don’t want to sit at home-’
‘It’s because I need the overtime,’ he interrupted. At least that was not an outright lie.
‘Because I know exactly what it’s like. I got divorced last winter, as you know.’
‘Ah, yes,’ said Tord, who didn’t even know she had been married. He shot her a swift glance. Fifty? Wondered what she looked like in the morning without make-up and the fake tan. A faded flight attendant with a faded flight attendant dream. He was pretty sure he had never rogered her. Not face on, anyway. Whose stock joke had that been? One of the old pilots. One of the whiskey-on-the-rocks, blue-eyed fighter pilots. One of those who managed to retire before their status crashed. He accelerated as they turned into the corridor towards the flight crew centre. She was out of breath, but still kept up with him. But if he maintained this speed she might not have enough air to speak.
‘Erm, Tord, since we’ve got a stay-over in Bangkok perhaps we could…’
He yawned aloud. And felt no more than that she had been offended. He was still a bit groggy after the night before — there had been some more vodka and powder after the Mormons had gone. Not that he had ingested so much he would have failed a breathalyser test, of course, but enough for him to dread the fight against sleep for the eleven hours in the air.
‘Look!’ she exclaimed in the idiotic glissando tone that women use when they want to say something is absolutely, inconceivably, heart-rendingly sweet.
And he did look. It was coming towards them. A small, light-haired, long-eared dog with sad eyes and an enthusiastically wagging tail. A springer spaniel. It was being led by a woman with matching blonde hair, big drop earrings, a universally apologetic half-smile and gentle, brown eyes.
‘Isn’t he a dear?’ she purred beside him.
‘Mm,’ Tord said in a gravelly voice.
The dog stuck its snout into the groin of the pilot in front of them, and passed on. He turned round with a raised eyebrow and a crooked smile, as if to suggest a boyish, cheeky expression. But Tord was unable to continue that line of thought. He was unable to continue any line of thought except his own.
The dog was wearing a yellow vest. The same type of vest the woman with the drop earrings was wearing. On which was written CUSTOMS.
It came closer, and was only five metres from them now.
It shouldn’t be a problem. Couldn’t be a problem. The drugs were packed in condoms with a double layer of freezer bags on the outside. Not so much as a molecule of odour could escape. So just smile. Relax and smile. Not too much, not too little. Tord turned to the chattering voice beside him, as though the words that were issuing forth demanded deep concentration.
