you going in there as well?’
‘Well, I…’
‘If so, just tell them, if they don’t quieten down soon, I’m going to call the police! They’ve been at it since five.’
‘Five o’clock this morning?’
‘Yes, they woke me up when they arrived. They weren’t exactly quiet, I can tell you.’
The door in front of us opened and the noise level rose appreciably. The man standing in the doorway was in his forties, a rough character, unshaven and dressed in clothes with an unmistakable Salvation Army cut: solid and timeless. His eyes swept the stairway. ‘What’s yer business?’
‘Mette Olsen,’ I said politely.
He sent me a baffled look.
‘The person who lives here. Is she in?’
‘Oh, Mette. What’s yer business, I asked.’
‘Are you her guardian or what?’
‘What’s it got to do with you! You from the social?’
‘Something like that. May I come in?’
He didn’t answer, just stepped back into the flat. The inauspicious music that was belting out was Swedish dance band. It sounded like a Danish ferry in there. ‘Meeette!’ came the cry, like a delayed echo from 1970.
‘What’s the problem?’ answered a high-pitched, reedy voice from inside the room.
‘Someone wants to talk to you!’
‘Send him in then, for Christ’s sake!’
The next-door neighbour, who had moved so close to me now that it felt like I was under guard, gave a loud snort. More in hope than anything else, she said: ‘Are you really from the social services office? I suppose you’re going to evict her, aren’t you? You know things can’t go on like this, don’t you.’
‘I belong to a different department,’ I said as the man in the doorway slowly turned his head back in my direction.
‘You heard what she said. Come in!’ He beckoned me in, and I had never felt so welcome.
The neighbour seemed to be about to enter too, but she stopped on the threshold. The thug didn’t need any second bidding; he slammed the door in front of her so hard that she literally had to jump back a step to avoid being struck.
Inside what was supposed to be the sitting room there was the raucous babble of varying shades of inarticulate human voices in a bad-tempered struggle to drown the music. The smell of alcohol and smoke from roll-ups mixed with a not insubstantial dash of dope wafted towards me as I stood by the door squinting through the sea of fog for Mette Olsen.
There were eight people in there, nine including the doorman from Rent-an-ape. Three women and six men. The oldest of the men must have been close on sixty, the youngest eighteen or nineteen. I had my money on him as the dope-smoker and the others as the musical directors. Their faces were unshaven, undefined and unfocused, both with regard to their vision and their pattern of movement. Everything seemed eerily sluggish, as if their whole nervous systems were so shot through with alcohol that they moved in slow motion, powered by a controller who was even drunker than they were.
The women were not much more presentable. All three were in that slightly diffuse age-range between twenty-five and forty. The one with most years of service, in drunkenness terms, had fiery red hair with an extended grey patch from the roots upwards. Another’s hair was so black she could have been a gypsy, but the colour had come from a bottle and her dialect from the coastal region around Bergen. The third was Mette Olsen.
She was half-sitting, half-slumped over the table. Her gaze came from deep inside her narrow, thin face and she had become ten years older in the three years that had passed since I last saw her. She had light streaks in her hair, although they made little difference, and the make-up she had applied ten or fifteen hours earlier had now turned to black smudges around her eyes and a red stripe from one corner of her mouth like a frozen sneer. Her blouse had come undone at the front and in the opening I could see a dirty, grey bra stained light brown from coffee or beer.
One hand was holding a kitchen tumbler full of what looked like neat alcohol, for it was hardly water. Slowly her eyes focused on me. ‘Waddywan?’ she asked in slurred dialect.
I asked myself the same question, but it was neither the appropriate place nor the time. ‘I don’t know if you can remember me.’
She studied me without a spark of recognition. ‘Where from?’
‘I was at your house a few years ago. From social services.’
Instantly the room seemed to change character. Even the music took a break and stopped and the needle rasped its way to the end. Several of the competing monologues died away. The Danish ferry veered round in a huge U-turn and everyone’s attention came with it. ‘Social services! He’s from social services,’ I heard pass from head to head. One of the men stood up and began to roll up his sleeves. Another pulled him back down. ‘Hang on. We’ll deal with him afterwards…’
Mette Olsen looked at me, her eyes swimming. Her lips trembled. ‘From social services? There are no kids here!’ A shiver went through her body. ‘You yourself saw to that…’
Steely, hostile looks struck me from all sides.
‘Well… this is about — your son.’
‘Johnny boy?’
‘Yes.’
‘What’s up with him?’ For a moment a sudden fear flared up inside her. ‘He hasn’t…?’
‘No, no. Is there somewhere we could talk, alone?’
She blinked, trying to get me in focus. ‘I dunno.’ She slowly turned her head. ‘In there maybe.’ She was looking at a half-open door.
One of the men called out: ‘Yep, take him to the bedroom, Mette, then there may be more children for social services to take care of!’
Rowdy laughter filled the room.
Mette Olsen stood up and tottered on unsteady legs round the table. ‘Don’t listen to them. Come with me, you.’
She grabbed the underside of my arm, more for support than anything else, and led me with a solemn countenance into the bedroom, where the unmade bed and all the clothes scattered to the winds made its first indelible impression. I left the door behind us ajar so as not to feed any unwanted reactions. Behind us the volume of voices resumed and someone put on another record, although they may just have returned the stylus to the first track.
Inside the bedroom, she let go of my arm and flopped down on the edge of the bed. The look she sent me was of indeterminate character, on the frontier between fear and loathing. ‘Wozzup with Johnny boy?’
I adopted a serious expression. ‘When did you see him last, Mette?’
Tears filled her eyes. Large, red flushes appeared on the side of her neck. ‘You ask me when I saw him last? You were the one who took him from me! I’ve never seen him since — since the day you came to my house…’
‘Not at all?’
‘Never!’
‘But you know he was placed in a foster home?’
She closed her eyes as if thinking. Her face quivered. ‘I know, yes. Some snooty sods who couldn’t have kids of their own. Foster home! Right. They stole him from me! That’s what they did. Stole him! Terje said I should sue them, but that was no help, and Jens advised me not to. He said it would be my ruin. As if I had anything left to ruin…’
‘Jens?’
‘Jens Langeland! The solicitor. I’d had him before…’
‘Langeland?’
‘Yes. The first time I was charged with… but that’s a long time ago now. I was pretending to be a hippie and played with the bad boys. But he was so young then, straight out of school. Just a stripling. Well, mm…’ She blinked again.
