‘That’s nothing to do with… Arne! Arne, can you take this guy over to the ambulance? He’s pushing his luck here.’
The shivering man was led away to the ambulance with a certain amount of brute force.
‘He could at least have thanked you,’ said the police officer, waving over one of the paramedics. ‘It was pretty brave, jumping in like that. Not everybody would have had the courage. Over here!’
He stood up and placed his hand on the shoulder of a man in a high-visibility yellow uniform.
‘Look after our hero,’ he said with a smile. ‘He needs warming up.’
‘I’ll just go and get another stretcher. Two seconds and…’
The boy shook his head and tried to get to his feet. He was naked beneath a thick blanket, and without his even noticing somebody had pushed his feet into a pair of trainers that were far too big. The paramedic grabbed him under one arm as he swayed.
‘I’m fine,’ mumbled the boy, pulling the blanket more tightly around him. ‘I’m just so fucking cold.’
‘I think we’d be better with a stretcher,’ the paramedic said doubtfully. ‘It’s just…’
‘No.’
The boy wobbled towards the ambulance. When he had almost reached the edge of the quay, he stopped for a moment. The salty gusts of wind blowing in from the fjord suddenly made him realize how close he had been to death. He was on the point of bursting into tears. Embarrassed, he pulled the blanket over his eyes. He had to take a little sidestep, and tripped over the edge of the blanket. In order to keep his balance, he grabbed hold of the nearest thing. It was the tarpaulin covering the body on the stretcher.
Things took a definite turn for the worse.
It couldn’t have been more than five minutes since he came ambling along Aker Brygge, alone, fed up and with no money for a taxi home. During those paltry 300 seconds he had swum in icy water, been certain he was going to die, saved a man from drowning, been praised by the police and almost frozen to death. In that same period of time, two fully equipped ambulances and three police cars containing a total of six uniformed officers had arrived at the scene. Which was almost incomprehensible, given the brief time span. In addition, as soon as he was pulled up on to the quay and the police had taken responsibility for the lifeless body he had held in a grip of iron, the security guard had called in no less than five of his colleagues from the nearby office buildings.
In the midst of this chaotic crowd of uniformed men and one lone woman, some thirty members of the public were milling about, all in various states of intoxication and all paying little attention to the temporary police cordon. Those who were still around in the early hours of this Sunday morning were drawn to the dramatic scene like moths to a flame. And since no more than five minutes had passed since Aker Brygge had been more or less deserted, the police had yet to grasp the connection between the security guard, the young swimmer, the drunk in the hat and the dead body that two of them had struggled to haul out of the water. The police had their procedures, of course, but it was dark, it was chaos, and the most important thing had been to get the drunk out of the water alive. For that reason, and perhaps also because one of their own had managed to fall in while they were heaving the body out, only two officers had taken a closer look at the corpse. One of them, a young man, was bent over and throwing up ten or fifteen metres beyond the cordon without anyone even noticing.
The other had covered the body and was quietly explaining the situation to a detective inspector when the young man with the stubble lost his balance due to sheer exhaustion.
He fell backwards. His blanket started to slip off. For a little while he was more preoccupied with not revealing his nakedness than regaining his balance, so he grabbed hold of the tarpaulin with both hands as he fell. It had got stuck on the far side of the trolley, which started to tip over. For a moment it looked as if the weight of the corpse would be enough to prevent total disaster, but the boy didn’t let go. He went down wearing nothing but the oversized trainers. The back of his head struck the icy ground with an audible thud. The pain made him cry out, then he lost consciousness for a couple of seconds.
When he came round, he noticed the smell first of all.
Something was lying on top of him, something that was suffocating him, taking his breath away with the stench of rotten flesh and sewers. Someone screamed and it occurred to him that he ought to open his eyes. The corpse was lying in perfect symmetry with his own body, as if in a kiss of death, and he found himself staring straight into the opening in the hood.
There was something in there that from a purely logical point of view had to be a head.
After all, it was inside the hood of a padded jacket.
In the police report which would be written some hours later it would emerge that for the time being the police were assuming that the body had been in the water for approximately one month. In the same report they would stress the fact that in all probability it was the clothes that were holding the body together, by and large. From a purely clinical point of view the corpse would be described as ‘badly swollen, partly disintegrating’, whereupon the writer of the report briefly pointed out that it was impossible to establish with any certainty whether it had been a man or a woman. However, the clothes might possibly indicate the former.
The boy, who had spent the whole of Saturday night trailing round Oslo in his quest for girls and booze, and who had thrown himself fearlessly into the fjord in the middle of winter to save another person’s life, passed out once more. This time he remained unconscious for a considerable period; he didn’t come round until he was lying in a bed in the hospital at Ulleval, his mother sitting beside him. He started to cry as soon as he saw her. The poor lad sobbed like a child, clinging tightly to her warm, safe embrace as he tried to suppress the memory of the last thing he had seen before the blessed darkness had borne him away from the sea monster.
From a hole in the formless mass, right where there had once been an eye, a fish had suddenly poked its head out. A tiny shimmering silver fish, no bigger than an anchovy, with black eyes and quivering fins; they had stared at one another, the boy and the fish, until it suddenly flicked its body and fell from the dead head, straight into the boy’s bellowing mouth.
On the Way to a Friend’s House
‘From now on we shall always have fish on Christmas Eve!’
Adam Stubo picked up the cod’s head from his plate with his fingers before sucking out the eye and chewing thoughtfully. His mother-in-law, who was sitting opposite him at the oval dining table, pursed her lips and turned her head away, raising her eyebrows. Her husband had already had a little too much to drink. He pointed at his son-in-law with both his knife and fork.
‘That’s my boy! Real men eat every bit of the fish.’
‘Actually,’ his wife began, ‘spare ribs on Christmas Eve has been a family tradition since-’
‘I’m sorry, Mum.’ Johanne put down her knife and fork. ‘It was a mistake, OK? A stupid and completely insignificant mistake. Can’t you just forget the spare ribs? The Middle East is in flames and we’re in the middle of a major financial crisis and you’re sitting here making a song and dance about the fact that Strom-Larsen lost my sodding order. Everybody around this table likes cod, Mum, it’s not such a bloody-’
‘I hardly think it’s necessary to use language like that, dear. And I have to say that in my personal experience I have never known Strom-Larsen to forget one single thing. I’ve been shopping with this city’s best butcher since before you were born, and I’ve-’
‘Mum! Can’t you just…?’ Johanne closed her mouth, forced a smile and looked at her younger daughter Ragnhild. She was almost five, and was looking with curiosity at her father, who was eating the other eye.
‘Is that good, Daddy?’
‘Mmm… strange and interesting and delicious.’
‘What does it taste like?’
‘It tastes like a fish’s eye,’ said Kristiane, hitting her plate rhythmically with her fork. ‘Obviously. Fish’s eye, high in the sky.’
‘Don’t do that,’ her grandmother said gently. ‘Be a good girl for Granny and stop making that noise.’
‘Some people think fish is delicious,’ said Ragnhild. ‘And some fish think people are delicious. That’s only fair. Sharks, for example. Do sharks celebrate Christmas Eve, Daddy? Do they have little girls for dinner before they open their presents?’
She laughed uproariously.
