I Refuse Read Free Page A

and threw myself into the pond. A thin sheet of ice had settled on the water overnight and was still there, and I hit it and it cracked around me like flatbread, and the water was cold, cold, cold. I grabbed his collar with one hand and was treading the green water and it wasn’t easy, moving forward with my shoes on, and my clothes, and Lobo’s feet couldn’t touch the bottom of the Bjørkerud pond and neither could mine. It was slippery, and sticky, and I had to drag him as I swam, and a few times I tried to push off with the tips of my toes, like I did when I took my swimming badge, but I couldn’t reach and Lobo couldn’t help me. He tried, but his body was like an anchor, a dead weight I had to pull through the water, and his black coat was short, so he must have been frozen stiff, Lobo, like the rest of him was stiff. I was just a boy then, he was older than me, but we had never been friends. I thought he was shifty, a sneaky lurker always on the lookout for a screw, and what the hell were you doing in the pond, I said, were you thirsty, Lobo, and I was so fond of that dog, I really was, I wouldn’t have been without him, not for a single day, and why did you come here for a drink, Lobo, I said, were you so thirsty, I said, was it too far to walk home.
    At long last I felt solid ground beneath my feet, and I hauled Lobo up the muddy slope at the end of the pond where the double pine was holding on tight with its long, gnarled and twisted roots, and my teeth were chattering beyond control, and they grew bigger in my mouth, and Lobo keeled over on to the grass like a block of wood. He was breathing in long gasps with a whistle at the back of his throat. Soon he would draw his last breath, a few more gasps and he was done for, no question about it. But then he just kept breathing, and I stood up in my sodden clothes. I was so cold. Everything was a sticky green, there were sticky green stripes across my wet, blue jumper, and in my mouth there wasn’t room for one more tooth, and my mother said to me,
There’s a good boy, Tommy
.

TOMMY ⋅ SPRING 2006 ⋅ 1966
    THE TELEPHONE RANG in my office. I had just taken the lift from the garage and got out on the ninth floor in the new high-rise in Oslo close to the harbour front. I was still thinking about Jim. The bag. The reefer jacket. The dark woollen cap. Once upon a time his clothes had been so stylish, he was the first to have long hair out where we lived, the first to wear flared hipster pants, a reefer jacket and a neckerchief. A long-haired sailor on dry land. He looked fantastic.
    It was Upper Romerike police district calling. I said:
    ‘Hello, this is Tommy.’
    I was a bit out of breath, I hadn’t run a metre. I drank too much, that was why.
    ‘Could you come up here and collect your father.’
    ‘I don’t think my father’s alive,’ I said, and the policeman said:
    ‘He’s not so sprightly at the moment, I’ll give you that, but he’s not dead.’
    ‘Are you certain it’s
my
father,’ I said. ‘How can you know,’ and the policeman said:
    ‘Who else could it be.’
    I had been so sure he was dead. I tried to work out how old he might be now. Seventy-five, maybe. Or even older. So he was alive. It was hard to imagine.
    Back then, in 1966, we lived in Mørk. My father was a dustman. He worked on a dustcart. He was the man who stood on the footplate with his hands in gloves and the gloves round the steel bar at the back where the shiny, curved shutter door slammed down like a huge bureau top when the cart drove off, and creaked open when my father jumped from the footplate and the dustcart still moving, and him running into the sheds or along the kerb where most of the bins were. He pulled the square hundred-litre metal bins out or dragged them across the gravel and hoisted them up on to his shoulder and poured what was in them into the back of the cart and ran back with the empty bins to fetch more. Sometimes he took two at once, one in each