Broken Read Free Page A

need some sleep, it's very late now.'
    'Yes!' He nods adamantly. His grey eyes have lit up. 'There's just one small thing.' He raises his hand, he is begging. 'Am I a good person?'
    I smile and shake my head at this. The way he is looking at me makes me laugh, and I concede that he has won.
    'Of course you're a good person, Alvar Eide, you're as good as gold. Now leave me alone, I'm tired.'
    Finally he gets up; he carefully puts the chair back in its place. Turns off the light, bows politely and exits. I hear his footsteps on the staircase, I hear the door being closed. I put my head on my pillow, I feel dizzy.
    'Goodness gracious me,' I say out into the darkness. 'What do you make of this, puss?'
    The cat is asleep, his paws twitching, he is hunting.
    'Gandalf,' I whisper, 'listen to this. There is mutiny in the queue outside the house!'
    The cat sleeps on determinedly. I turn on to my side and pull up my knees. What does it mean that I no longer have an orderly system? This has never happened before. What will happen in future, if they start arguing about the sequence? Is there a moment far into the future where this flow of people ends? Where will I turn then? Will I have to settle for people who have created their own lives, real people? Lives I have no control over, lives I cannot shape the way I always have? I can find no peace. I don't like this night, this turn that my life has taken, I'm used to a certain amount of control, a certain order. But now Alvar Eide has wedged himself into my life. I turn to the wall and I want to go to sleep, but I'm troubled by words flying through my head. I want to enter the room where Alvar lives, but the door is shut and locked. I don't find the key until the early-morning hours.

CHAPTER 2
    I'm a good person.
    So thought Alvar Eide, just as he was putting on his coat. He stood in his hall studying his face in the mirror. This thought, that he was a good person, seemed to comfort him, as if he had suddenly realised that he had not amounted to much else in this world. He had never distinguished himself, never caused a stir. Not that he had wanted to either, but the years were mounting up, he had started to think about the end. At the age of forty-two he was thinking about the end. Perhaps because his father, Emmanuel Eide, had only lived to fifty-three. Then without warning his heart had stopped beating never to start again. Alvar found it hard to believe that he himself would live past this age; he imagined his death was programmed into his genes like a time bomb and that it would go off in eleven years. But there was now one thing to comfort him, one cool morning in November just as he was about to walk the two kilometres to his place of work: I have never achieved anything major, I have never distinguished myself, but deep down I know I'm a good person.
    He stuck his arms through the sleeves and reached for a camel-coloured woollen scarf he liked to wear wrapped around his neck. The scarf lay beautifully and neatly folded on the chest of drawers beneath the mirror. His gloves lay in a drawer; he pulled them on, they were slightly too big. He knew they kept his hands warmer that way. On his head he wore nothing. Even so, he glanced at the mirror to check that his hair was in place, gently combed over from his right temple and all the way across to his left. There was no breeze outside.
    He grabbed the door handle. Pushed it down and went out into the cool air; it felt clean and fresh against his cheeks. The light caused him to squint. Alvar Eide lived in the upstairs flat of a house in Nøste outside Drammen; his neighbours, the Green family, owned the ground-floor fiat. He did not know them very well. They came and went and he nodded briefly by way of acknowledgement; but he did everything he could to avoid having to make small talk. Alvar Eide was a shy man. Green, however, could be intrusive; sometimes he would linger downstairs by the letter boxes wanting to chat about everyday