I Refuse by Per Petterson Read Free Book Online Page B

Mørk with a family I did not like at all, and they certainly didn’t like me, they said I was a bad influence, and not only on her, was the general opinion, and they wouldn’t even let me near the house. The Lydersens they were called. If I crossed the road from the Co-op and went between Mørk Machinery and the Old People’s Home and over to the picket fence around the garden in front of the house, the old man would come out on to the front steps and shout: Get lost.
    I couldn’t understand why child welfare thought this was a good house for Siri to live in. They were model Christians in there, that must have been it, and everyone they knew was as Christian as they were, together they formed their own layer of the Mørk population, and they never spoke to anyone else unless they had to. They had even moved Siri to a different school, more than fifteen kilometres away, to Valmo, and so she went on a different bus from the one we had always caught from our neighbourhood. But I spoke to her anyway, behind the Co-op and the post office in the evening, maybe twice a week for as long as summer lasted and the days were long, and when autumn came, I cycled alone to Mørk in the cold and dark, and the frost had settled, you could feel it on the tarmac, how the tyres sang a different song, and the only lights I could see were the lamps lit in the windows of houses along the road and the shine of the lanterns in the courtyard of farms up against the forest, and they all made the road even darker.
    When I got there I turned into Lysbu’s BP station, he wasn’t retired yet, and I waited there with my bike against a pump. Sometimes when I got there early, I went in for a chat if it was his shift that evening, and most often it was. He thought that was all right, he liked me, I think, and he didn’t nag. He knew well why I turned up so late, and that was fine by him, it was no less than right and proper for us to come together, he said, you’re brother and sister for Christ’s sake, why the hell should you not, and he didn’t say a word to anyone, why the hell should I, he said.
    When Siri came down from the house, through the alley by the crossroads, I walked out and took her bike and put it behind the petrol station, and we walked down and sat on the slope towards the lake, where no one could see us. It went like a dream. I mean, she wasn’t locked up or anything.

SIRI ⋅ NOVEMBER 1967
    NO, I WASN’T locked up. Tommy had given me the rounders bat to use in my hour of need, and don’t think twice about it, he said, or he will make you suffer, and I put it under the bed, as he had done when we all lived together in our old house, but things were different here. I didn’t have to protect myself, not in that way, and Lydersen wasn’t the kind to creep up on me when I was in the shower or unexpectedly come into my room when I was about to go to bed. But Tommy wanted to look after me and often came in the evening to make me feel safe and give me comfort if he thought that was what I needed, but the fact was I had no problem looking after myself. It was a new thing. At home it had always been Tommy and me.
    We sat on the slope behind the Co-op on our separate rocks, one year had passed, and it was autumn now, and cold, we had our caps on and warm jackets, I had already started smoking, outside, in secret, and chewing Toy gum on the way home. I blew the smoke and my frozen breath out over the lake and said:
    ‘When I’m sixteen I’m going to sea.’
    That upset him, and he said:
    ‘But who shall I talk to when you’re gone.’
    ‘You’ve got Jim,’ I said.
    ‘That’s true,’ Tommy said. ‘I’ve got Jim, but that’s not what I meant.’
    ‘I know.’
    ‘I like having sisters,’ Tommy said.
    ‘I know,’ I said. ‘But you’ve got the twins.’
    ‘Well, yes,’ he said. ‘But they do their own thing, they just smile and wave and say hi Tommy when I walk past them on my way to Jonsen’s, and then they go back