‘This is—’ Carl began.
‘Shannon Alleyne,’ she interrupted, reaching out a hand so small that it felt like taking hold of a chicken’s foot.
‘Opgard,’ Carl added proudly.
Shannon Alleyne Opgard wanted to hold hands longer than me. I saw Carl in that too. Some are in more of a hurry to be liked than others.
‘Jet-lagged?’ I asked, and regretted it, feeling like an idiot for asking. Not because I didn’t know what jet lag was, but because Carl knew that I had never crossed even a single time zone and that whatever the answer was it wouldn’t mean a lot to me.
Carl shook his head. ‘We landed two days ago. Had to wait for the car – it came by boat.’
I nodded, glanced at the registration plates. MC. Monaco. Exotic, but not exotic enough for me to ask for it if the car was to be re-registered. On the walls of the office at the service station I had obsolete plates from French Equatorial Africa, Burma, Basutoland, British Honduras and Johor. The standard was high.
Shannon looked from Carl to me and then back again. Smiled. I don’t know why, maybe she was happy to see Carl and his big brother – his only close relative – laughing together. That the slight tension was gone now. That he – that they were welcome home.
‘Why don’t you show Shannon round the house while I get the suitcases?’ said Carl, and opened the trunk, as Dad used to call it.
‘Probably take us about the same time,’ I murmured to Shannon as she followed me.
We walked round to the north side of the house, where the main entrance was. Why Dad hadn’t had the door open straight onto the yard and the road I really don’t know. Maybe because he liked to see all his land each day when he stepped outside. Or because it mattered more to have the sun warm the kitchen than the corridor. We crossed the threshold and I opened one of the three doors in the corridor.
‘The kitchen,’ I said, noticing the smell of rancid fat. Had it been there the whole time?
‘How lovely,’ she lied. OK, so I’d tidied up and even washed it, but you couldn’t exactly say it was lovely. Wide-eyed – and maybe slightly anxious – her gaze followed the pipe that led from the wood stove through a hole sawn in the ceiling to the upper floor. Precision carpentry, that’s what Dad had called it, the way the circular pipe had safety clearance through the timbers on its way up. If that was true then it was – along with the two equally circular holes in the outside toilet – the only example of it on the farm. I turned the light switch on and off to show her that at least we had our own electricity.
‘Coffee?’ I asked and turned on the tap.
‘Thanks, but maybe later.’
At least she’d mastered her Norwegian courtesies.
‘Carl will,’ I said and opened the kitchen cupboard. Fished and fumbled about until I found the coffee pot. I’d actually even bought some old-fashioned coarse ground coffee for the first time in … well, ages. I managed just fine myself with freeze-dried and noticed as I held the pot under the tap that from sheer habit I’d turned on the hot tap. Felt myself getting a little hot around the ears myself. But anyway, who says there’s something sad about making powdered coffee with water from the hot tap? Coffee’s coffee. Water’s water.
I put the pot on the hot plate, turned on the oven and took the two paces over to the door to one of the two rooms that sandwiched the kitchen. The one facing west was the dining room, which was closed in winter since it acted as a buffer against the wind from the west, and we ate all our meals in the kitchen. Facing east was the living room with its bookcases, TV and its own wood stove. On the south side Dad had allowed the house’s only extravagance, a covered glass terrace, which he called the porch and Mum ‘the winter garden’, even though it was of course closed off in the winter and solidly barricaded behind wooden shutters. In summer Dad would sit there and suck on his Berry’s tobacco and drink a Budweiser or two – another couple of extravagances. He had to travel to town to buy his pale American beer, and the silvery-green boxes of Berry’s moist snuff were sent over the pond from a relative in America. Dad explained to me early on that unlike the Swedish crap American moist snuff goes through a fermentation process that you can taste. ‘Like bourbon,’ said Dad, who claimed that Norwegians only used that Swedish crap because they didn’t know any better. Well, at least I knew better, and when I began using it was Berry’s I used. Carl and I used to count up the empty bottles Dad lined up along the windowsill. We knew that if he drank more than four he could get tearful, and no one wants to see his dad tearful. Thinking back now, that might be why I seldom if ever drank more than one or two beers. I didn’t want to get tearful. Carl was a happy drunk, so he had less need to set these kinds of limits.
All this was going through my mind while we traipsed around and I showed Shannon the biggest bedroom, the one Dad referred to, in English, as the master bedroom.
‘Fantastic,’ she said.
I showed her the new bathroom, which wasn’t new any more, but at least it was the newest thing in the house. She probably wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told her we grew up without one. That we washed downstairs in the kitchen, with water heated up on the stove. That the bathroom came after the car accident. If what Carl had written was true, that she was from Barbados, from a family that could afford to send her to college in Canada, then it would naturally be difficult for her to imagine sharing the grey water with your brother while the two of you stood there shivering over the bowl in the middle of winter. While Dad, paradoxically enough, had had a Cadillac DeVille parked out there in the yard, because a proper car, that was definitely something we should have.
The door to the boys’ room had obviously swollen and I had to wiggle the latch a bit to get it open. A breath of stale air and memories wafted over us, like the smell of old clothes you’d forgotten you owned from a wardrobe. Along one of the walls stood a desk with two chairs next to each other; along the opposite wall a bunk bed. The stovepipe from the hole in the floor down to the kitchen was at one end of it.
‘This was Carl’s and my room,’ I said.
Shannon nodded at the bunk bed ‘Who was on top?’
‘Me,’ I said. ‘The oldest.’ I drew my finger through a layer of dust on the back of one of the chairs. ‘I’ll move in here today. So you two can have the big bedroom.’
She looked at me in alarm. ‘But, Roy, of course we don’t want to …’
I focused my gaze on her one open eye. Isn’t that a little strange, to have brown eyes when you have red hair and skin as white as snow? ‘There are two of you and only one of me so it’s no problem, OK?’
She gazed round the room again. ‘Thanks,’ she said.
I led her into Mum and Dad’s room. I’d aired it thoroughly. Regardless of what people smell like, I don’t like to breathe in their smells. Excepting Carl’s. Carl smelled – if not exactly good – at least right. He smelled of me. Of us. When Carl was ill in the winter – like he always was – I snuggled up to him. His smell was always right, even though his skin was covered with the dried sweat of fever, or his breath smelled of sick. I inhaled Carl and shivered in close to his glowing body, used the heat he was losing to warm my own carcass. One man’s fever is another man’s hotplate. Living up here makes you practical.