Per Petterson - I Refuse

Tommy. How long have we been friends.

All of our lives, Tommy said.

I cant remember us ever not being friends. When would that have been. Jim said. I think it could last the rest of our lives, he said carefully, in a low voice. Dont you think.

It will last if we want it to. It depends on us. We can be friends for as long as we want to.

Tommys mother has gone. She walked out into the snow one night, leaving him and his sisters with their violent father. Without his best friend Jim, Tommy would be in trouble. But Jim has challenges of his own which will disrupt their precious friendship.

Per Petterson was born in Oslo in 1952 and worked for several years as an unskilled labourer and a bookseller. He made his literary breakthrough in 2003 with the prizewinning novel Out Stealing Horses, which has been published in forty-nine languages and won the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize.

DARK. IT WAS half past four in the morning. I was driving towards Herregrdsveien from Hauketo. Just before Ljan station I turned off to the left over the railway bridge, the lights were red, but there was no one else around, so I turned anyway. When I was over the crossing and further down the road, past the shop there, they called it Karusellen, a man plunged out of the darkness into the headlights of my car. He was about to fall when I saw him. I hit the brakes, the wheels locked and the car skidded sideways for a few metres with a sickening squeal and stopped right by him. The engine died. I was certain I had hit him with the bumper.

And then he didnt fall. He leaned against the bonnet, took three steps back and swayed. I saw the light flooding in through his eyes. He stared at the windscreen, but he couldnt see me, he couldnt see anything. His hair was long, and his beard was long, and he had a grey bag tucked tightly up under his arm. For a moment I thought it was my father. But it wasnt my father. I had never seen my father.

Then he was lost in the darkness on the other side of the road, where the path led steeply down into Ljansdalen. I sat with my arms straight out in front of me, my hands pressed hard against the wheel and the rear of the car halfway into the opposite lane. It was still dark. Darker, even. Two headlights approached from down the hill. I twisted the key, but the car wouldnt start, and I tried again and then it burst into life. I felt my breath at the top of my throat, I was panting, the way a dog does. I backed into the right-hand lane before the other car could reach me, and I turned and drove slowly down to Mosseveien and turned right at the bottom, towards Oslo.

Back then, during Jens Stoltenbergs first red green coalition government, I lived to the north-east of Oslo, in Romerike, and yet less and less I drove the easy way into Oslo along the E6, but instead made a long detour around our capital in the east, from Lillestrm via Enebakk to Hauketo, because it brought back sweet memories.

Of course it was a lot further that way and took more time, but it was not so important, I had been off work for a whole year and had no idea what would happen next. A letter from Social Security came in the post telling me to show up at their office, but I guessed I wouldnt have to go back to work straight away. As long as I remembered to take my pills, one day slid nicely into another.

I drove at just under the speed limit along Mosseveien to the suspension bridge connecting the island of Ulvya to the mainland. There was still no traffic. I moved slowly across the bridge as it swayed beneath me, a nice feeling, as if on the deck of a boat, I liked that feeling.

I parked in the lay-by to the right, on the bend there, and leaned back in the seat and closed my eyes and waited. Breathing from my stomach. Then I opened the door and swung my legs out and walked around the car and took out the old, black bag with the fishing equipment in it. Nothing fancy, a bait rig with a line and twenty hooks and a weight at the end.

The regulars were already there, standing alongside the railings, where they had stood for ten years or more. I was the only newcomer for perhaps just as many years, but no one asked me why I had suddenly appeared. I had been coming here at least twice a week for three months now.

The man closest to me turned when I stepped on to the bridge, the bag in my hand. He saluted with three fingers to his cap, like a Boy Scout. He had two sweaters on, one over the other, the top one blue, the one underneath white, well, off-white, and they were both in rags, they called him Container Jon. On his hands he had fingerless mittens, or maybe they were normal gloves he had cut the fingers off. I had seen newspaper boys do the same. These ones were an unexpected reddish colour, pink, almost.

Any bites, I said. He didnt answer, but smiled and pointed to the newspaper he had spread out on the ground by his feet. On it were a medium-sized cod and two mackerel, one still wriggling. He winked with his left eye and raised his right hand and flashed five fingers three times.

In fifteen minutes, I said with a low whistle.

A plastic bag had been tossed up against the railings, ICA, Co-op, whatever, it wasnt his, thats for sure, and two scrunched-up paper cups likewise tossed, and a light-coloured paper napkin smeared with ketchup and mustard, and further up a tangled mass of lousy fishing line. Container Jon coughed a few times with a mitten covering his mouth, it was an ominously hollow sound, and he turned and said into the darkness:

Damn foreigners. Fishing during daytime.

I walked past him and stopped between two suspension cables. Each stretch between two cables had been given a number, this was the niner. Then I loosened the last hook from the rig and pulled out half a metre of line and leaned over the railings. With a few clumsy twists of my wrist I let the line with the weight on the end slowly unwind from the bait rig and into the water. Around the top of each hook I had wound a bit of shiny, red tape. When my uncle did some serious fishing a little further south from here, in the Bunnefjord not far from Roald Amundsens house, in a rowing boat he had hired free and for nothing, he always used mussels as bait. He wanted salt water to fish in, this was right at the beginning of the 1960s, and he drove for miles and miles in the grey Volvo PV to walk in his high waders in the shallows out by Bekkensten quay with the shiny surface of the water only just below the tops of his boots and his shirtsleeves rolled up in a vain attempt to keep them dry each time he bent over to catch the mussels and put them in a bucket cut in half that was floating in front him.

But all this was too much trouble for me, and I certainly didnt go anywhere near the distance he did to get his bait, and the fish didnt bite any different for me than they did for my uncle back in those days. You dont need bait, the others on the bridge said, theyll go for anything shiny.

I fixed a wheel hub I got off a bike to the railings, using mudguard struts to secure it firmly around the top handrail, it was called a windlass, that kind of device, and was usually attached to the gunwale of fishing boats and you could probably buy it in a shop if you wanted, but this was my personal patent. I placed the fishing line in the groove and in that way I could gently raise or lower it without the line wearing thin on the railings until eventually, it snapped with a loud crack. Which of course had happened to general amusement.

Day was slowly breaking. I had been standing there for more than two hours and hadnt had a single bite. It annoyed me, but frankly, fish wasnt my favourite dish any more. Not like it was in the past. The fish I did catch, I always gave away.