One of Us Read online

  When they got married, she had been several months pregnant. She had entered into the marriage with her eyes closed, hoping that when she opened them again everything would be all right. After all, her husband had a good side; he could be kind and generous, and was a very tidy person. He seemed good at his job; he was out at a lot of receptions and official functions. She had hoped their life together would improve when they became a proper family.

  In London she grew increasingly unhappy. It seemed to her that he only wanted an immaculately groomed wife and a dust-free home. Those were the things that interested him. Not her. Nor their son.

  She felt he was forcing himself on her. He felt she was distant and not there for him. He said she was using him, and had been thinking only of her own interests when she married him.

  By the spring, Wenche had fallen into a deep depression. She would not acknowledge it, however, thinking it was her surroundings that were making her unhappy. She could not bear her husband, nor her existence. Her head was a mess, her life meaningless.

  One day she started packing.

  When she had been packing for three days, she told her husband she wanted to take the children home. Jens was dismayed and asked her to stay. But it seemed simpler to go.

  So she went. Left Jens, left Hyde Park, the Thames, the grey weather, the au pair, the domestic help, the life of privilege. She had lasted six months as an embassy wife.

  Back in Oslo, she filed for divorce. Now she was alone again, this time with two children.

  Wenche had nobody else. She had no relationship with her own family, which consisted of her mother and two older brothers. She had no contact with the father of her daughter. He was Swedish and had only seen his daughter once, when she was a few months old; he had left as quickly as he arrived.

  ‘How could you give up your posh life and beautiful home in London?’ one of her few girlfriends asked.

  Well, it wasn’t London that was the problem, she now said. It had all been pretty perfect, in fact, just with the wrong man. Stubborn, temperamental and demanding were words she used to refer to her ex-husband. Cold, unaffectionate – that was how he described her.

  The marriage was past salvaging. Through a lawyer they came to an agreement. She would have Anders and he would pay child support. Under the agreement, she could live in his flat in Fritzners gate for two years.

  Three years would pass before Anders saw his father again.

  * * *

  Wenche’s life had been all about loss.

  It had been all about being alone.

  The coastal town of Kragerø, 1945. As peace came, the builder’s wife got pregnant. As the birth approached, she started getting flu-like symptoms and was confined to bed by paralysis in her arms and legs. Anne Marie Behring was diagnosed with polio, a much-feared illness with no known cure. Wenche was cut out of her belly in 1946. By then, the mother was almost completely immobile from the waist down and one of her arms partially paralysed. Wenche was sent to an orphanage as soon as she was born and spent the first five years of her life there. Then one day the fair-haired girl was brought home. The orphanage was closing down.

  She was left to her own devices. Her father, Ole Kristian Behring, was often out at work and her mother locked herself away and scarcely went out among people. No one was to laugh at her deformity.

  When Wenche was eight her father died. Home grew darker still, and her mother ever more demanding. It had been ‘wicked’ of Wenche to give her mother ‘this illness’.

  The little girl had two elder brothers. One left home when their father died, the other was aggressive and quick-tempered. He took out his feelings on his sister. He cuffed her so often that the skin behind her ears was raw and he thrashed her legs with stinging nettles. Skinny little Wenche would often squeeze behind the stove when her brother was after her. His hands could not reach her there.

  Conceal and keep silent. Everything at home was tainted with shame.

  When her brother was in a bad mood she would stay out all evening, only going home when it got dark. She wandered round Kragerø alone, she wet herself, she smelled, she knew she would be in for a hiding when she got home.

  When she was twelve, she considered jumping off the cliffs. The cliffs, so steep and tempting.

  But she did not jump. She always went home.

  The house was dilapidated and had no running water. She was the one who kept things in order, washed and tidied, emptied and cleaned the chamber pot kept under the bed that she shared with her mother. Even so, ‘You’re fit for nothing!’ shouted her mother. ‘This is all your fault!’

  She would rather have functioning legs than a daughter.

  Wenche did not measure up, did not fit in, wasn’t good enough. She was never allowed to invite anyone home and did not make friends with any of the other girls, who were quick to taunt and exclude her. The family lived such an isolated life that its members were seen as gloomy, even creepy. People kept their distance, though many of the neighbours felt sorry for the little girl who worked so hard.

  Wenche would lie in bed at night twisting her head from side to side to shut out the sounds of the house. The worst of these were the thuds as her mother moved about. She used two stools to drag herself across the floor. She raised them one by one, leaning her body on them in turn as she went, bringing each of them down on the floorboards with a thump.

  Wenche lay there hoping her mother would one day come to love her.

  But her mother merely became ever more demanding and dependent. Her brother ever more brutal. When Wenche was well into her teens, she happened to hear from a neighbour that he was actually a half-brother – born outside wedlock, his father unknown – a great disgrace in Kragerø at the time. This secret had been kept from her, as had the fact that her other brother was her father’s son from an earlier marriage.

  Her mother began to complain of hearing voices in her head. And when a man moved in, Wenche’s mother accused her daughter of trying to steal him. But she still expected Wenche to stay at home and look after her for the rest of her life.

  When Wenche was seventeen she packed a case and left for Oslo. It was 1963. She had no qualifications and did not know anybody, but she eventually got a position as a cleaner at a hospital, and later at Tuborg brewery in Copenhagen and then as an au pair in Strasbourg. After five years on the run, from her mother and brother, and from Kragerø, she trained as an auxiliary nurse in Porsgrunn, an hour’s travel from her hometown, and got a job at the hospital in neighbouring Skien. Once there, she discovered to her surprise that people liked her. She found herself respected and valued at work.

  She was quick, clever and considerate, her colleagues thought, even quite funny.

  When she was twenty-six she got pregnant. The baby’s Swedish father asked her to have an abortion. She insisted on keeping the child and gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth, in 1973.

  Many years were to pass before Wenche made a short visit to her home town. By then, her mother was seriously ill. According to her case notes, she increasingly suffered paranoid delusions attended by persecution mania and hallucinations. Wenche’s mother did not leave her sickbed again and died alone in a nursing home in Kragerø. Her daughter did not attend the funeral.

  * * *

  The art of concealing anything painful or ugly had become second nature to Wenche, and would stay with her for the rest of her life. Dulling the ache beneath a polished surface.

  Every time she moved, Wenche chose to live in one of the nicer districts of Oslo, even if she could not afford it, even if as an auxiliary nurse she did not ‘fit in’. Her attractive appearance was her own glossy façade. She was always smartly dressed and freshly coiffed when she was out and about, favouring high-heeled shoes and fitted dresses and suits from the capital’s more exclusive clothes shops.

  When she got home from London her life started to unravel. She was now in her mid-thirties and living in Jens’s flat in Fritzners gate, but did not know many people. She had no
one to help her and was initially tired, then exhausted, and before long completely shattered. She felt powerless and isolated.

  There must be something wrong with Anders, she decided. From being a calm baby and a fairly placid one-year-old, he turned into a clingy, whining child. Moody and violent. She felt like peeling him off her, she complained.

  At night, she often left the children alone. A neighbour with a daughter the same age as Elisabeth remarked to her that this was not the done thing. ‘They’re asleep when I leave and asleep when I get back,’ Wenche replied. She added that she had to take whatever night shifts she could get.

  ‘At Elisabeth’s they never have dinner,’ the neighbour’s daughter said to her mother. Economies were made on everything that could be hidden behind the front door.

  As soon as they had returned from London in August 1980, Wenche applied for, and was granted, financial assistance from the social services office in Oslo’s Vika district. The following year, in May 1981, she rang the office and asked if it would be possible to have a support worker or some respite care for the children. In July she applied for weekend respite care for both children. She told social services that she thought a male support worker would be a good idea for her daughter, perhaps a youngish student, according to the office log. But it was from Anders that she felt the most pressing need for relief, she told the office on that occasion. She could no longer cope with him, she said.

  At that point, Anders had passed his second birthday and Elisabeth was eight. Elisabeth was following in Wenche’s footsteps, turning into a ‘spare mother’ for Anders and for her mother.

  In October 1981, weekend respite care was approved for Anders twice a month. Anders was allocated to a newly married couple in their twenties. When Wenche brought the boy to them for the first time, they found her rather odd. The second time, they thought she was nuts. She asked if Anders could occasionally touch his weekend dad’s penis. It was important for the boy’s sexuality. He had no father figure in his life and Wenche wanted the young man to assume that role. Anders had no one to identify with in terms of his appearance, Wenche stressed, because ‘he only saw girls’ crotches’ and did not know how the male body worked.

  The young couple were speechless. But they were too embarrassed to report what she had said. They took Anders out on trips to the forest and countryside, and to parks and playgrounds around the city. He liked being with them and they thought he was a nice little boy.

  One weekend, Wenche did not turn up with Anders. She had decided it was not a suitable weekend home for her son. ‘Mother difficult to please, keeps demanding more,’ the social services office recorded in May 1982. She applied for a different weekend home for her son. ‘The daughter, aged nine, has started wetting herself,’ wrote the social services.

  The month before, Wenche had gone to the foster-home section at the child welfare office. She was looking into the possibility of having both children fostered. She wanted them to ‘go to the devil’, she told the child welfare office.

  Autumn arrived and life got even darker. In October, Wenche called in to the Frogner Medical Centre. ‘Mother seemed severely depressed,’ they noted. ‘Thinking of just walking out on the children and leaving them to society, to live her own life.’

  Wenche and the children had now been living in Fritzners gate for just over two years. The period she and Jens had agreed to was over and Jens wanted his apartment back. But Wenche put off the move. She did not feel up to it.

  A nervous wreck, was how she described herself. As Christmas approached, she hit rock bottom. It was simply beyond her to create any kind of festive mood.

  She was going to pieces.

  She had to keep a permanent eye on Anders to avoid what she called minor disasters. He would hit her and Elisabeth. If she told him off, he would merely smirk. If she shook him, he would just shout ‘It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt.’

  He never gave her any peace. At night he would lie in her bed, clinging to her, pressed up against her. She said it felt as if he was forcing himself on her.

  Swirls of Light

  But the greatest of these is love.

  First letter of Paul to the Corinthians

  Darkness had descended on the north of the country, above the Arctic Circle.

  It was pitch black when you woke up, dark when you went out, barely light at midday and black again when you went to bed. The cold bit into your cheeks. People had cut loads of logs, and were quick to shut the door to keep snowstorms and winter out.

  In the mountains the bear had retired to her lair. Even the cod in the sea were more sluggish. It was a matter of conserving energy for the spring and the light. Humans and nature had begun their annual hibernation. Everyone slept more and moved less. The lucky ones warmed each other.

  People were less happy than in the summer. The pain of winter had arrived.

  But then there were the moments when the dark sky burst into flames.

  ‘She wants to dance,’ people said, staring out of their windows.

  For Aurora Borealis – the northern lights – are never still. They swirl across the sky in ribbons and flashes, in arcs and loops, they curl up and meander, recede, fade almost to nothing, and then flare into life again, trembling.

  You never can tell with the Aurora Borealis, the flaring lights that have taken their name from the Roman goddess of dawn – Aurora – and the Greek word for the north wind – Borealis. When the sun goes into hiding in winter, it sometimes flings particles toward the earth that collide with gases, creating flickers that can be observed near the pole. The flickers can shine quietly and scarcely move, and then suddenly there is a lightning flash, and once again they explode into chains and spirals.

  You never can tell with people, either. They can lie there under their duvets, weighed down by melancholy, and suddenly flare into glimmering life.

  They dress up and go out. And sparkle like any other natural phenomenon.

  * * *

  It was one of those nights, the evening of St Lucia’s day, in Lavangen in 1980.

  The young people were wiggling and twisting on the dance floor. They wore tight trousers, some with flares. The girls were in tight tops with puffed sleeves. The boys wore shirts. The dance band on stage was playing cover versions of Smokie, Elton John and Boney M. They were from the villages scattered round the arms of the fjord that extended into the interior of the northern county of Troms. It was the annual pre-Christmas party, it was hope and expectation, it was getting drunk and messing about.

  Tone came in. She was a rosy-cheeked beauty of fifteen. Right after her came Gunnar. He was a tearaway of eighteen.

  Out of my league, they both thought when they saw each other in the dim lighting that night.

  Tone had flicked her fringe out and over with curling tongs, just like the blonde one in Charlie’s Angels. Gunnar had a mullet hairstyle: short at the sides, long and slightly wavy at the back. She still had a bit of puppy fat, he was thin and wiry.

  They lived on the shores of different fjords, she in Lavangen, he in Salangen. Tone had seen him once before. She had to go to Salangen for her dental check-ups, because there was no dentist in her village. After her appointment she generally popped into the baker’s, another amenity they did not have where she lived. There she was, standing in the window in the low, white wooden building on the sloping street down to the fjord, buying pastries. Three boys were walking past the shop. The one in the middle shone so brightly between the other two.

  That’s the best-looking boy I’ve seen in my whole life, she thought.

  And here he was now. The boy from the baker’s. Standing in front of her. And the band on stage was playing the Bellamy Brothers.

  If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

  If I swore you were an angel, would you treat me like the devil tonight?

  Of course she said yes.

  A girl approached Tone on the dance floor.

  ‘You friend’s in t
he queue outside, but she hasn’t got enough money to get in.’ Tone gave a start. ‘She asked me to come and get you, so she could borrow some money.’

  ‘Hmm,’ mumbled Tone, but she did not go out, then or later. Just imagine if her friend were to steal the boy who was holding her round the waist right this minute.

  No, now she wanted to dance.

  * * *

  They met as often as they could. They went to and fro by bus, or got friends to drive them. An hour each way. Once Gunnar passed his test it was easier, he would borrow his father’s car and race over to see Tone, floating home later. They celebrated the return of the sun as winter drew to a close. In April, Gunnar was sent to do his military service much further south, in Jørstadsmoen outside Lillehammer. Tone wrote long love letters. Gunnar tried his hand at poetry. He usually crumpled his attempts into a ball and threw them away, but every now and then he would send one.

  A place, one night in December, two lovers stand close together, and they will always remember, they want each other for ever, ran the words on the pale blue sheet of paper.

  The love of their life was what they found, in each other’s arms that day, and they wanted it always to be around, never change or fade away.

  We’re the boy and girl in my poem you see, and I’m so sad when you’re not near, it’s the emptiest time of all for me, so comfort me and write to me.

  Tone started at a boarding high school in Harstad, a couple of hours’ drive from Lavangen.

  Yesterday I just stayed in my room crying all day. A friend from my class came in and asked what was the matter. I couldn’t talk, just showed her your picture. Then she understood, Tone wrote, and went on: You bet I was relieved to get my period on Sunday.

  At the appointed time she would sit ready on the steps by the telephone box, guarding it, afraid someone would come along and want to use it just then, just as he picked up the phone at the camp two thousand kilometres away and dialled the number. The rings came once a week, at the exact same time.

  Once Gunnar had completed his military service he started at the teacher training college in Tromsø. Gunnar, nineteen, almost twenty, was specialising in the new subject of Computing and Information Technology. He also took some PE teaching options, in case computers did not turn out to be the future.