A Private Haunting Read Online Free PDF

place. His dad worked the boats. A big guy. A fisherman and a fighter , he told Jonas once, when he was still allowed to go round, before Axel’s mum spent a week in hospital. Anyway, getting in touch with Axel was ridiculous, the sudden brain-fart a treacherous mix of too many hours in the midsummer sun, the guilt of passed time and some subconscious desire to atone for not even saying goodbye when he left for university in Oslo.
    The past. It sucked like the tide. But what are you left with when the waves recede? Empty shells in an open hand. He thought about the sea as he threw the last of the cone stacks in the back of the Iveco and drove up the road to pick up a suddenly re-appeared Eggers.
    â€˜I finished the booze.’
    â€˜Where have you been?’
    â€˜I climbed a tree. I haven’t climbed a tree in yonks .’
    â€˜What kind of tree was it?’
    â€˜Big one. Big tall fucker with leaves.’
    â€˜Leaves, eh?’
    â€˜It’s a tree innit?’ He started to laugh.
    He couldn’t imagine Eggers doing nostalgia. You had to leave home for that but Eggers never had. Only distance created the melancholy, like thoughts of the sea made Jonas again think of his father, tumbling through his childhood like a plastic bag on a winter beach. The only thing Eggers got melancholy about was when the free show ended on the sex-cams.
    â€˜So what about it? Is there gonna be meatloaf or not?’
    â€˜You’ll have to wait.’
    â€˜Tell me or I won’t come!’
    â€˜You always come.’
    â€˜Not this time!’
    Jonas smiled. Today, he liked Eggers. Rather, at this precise moment of today, he liked Eggers.
    Later, it may be different. His thoughts of Eggers ranged in a spectrum from deep hate to horror to distaste to neutrality to whatever to like to delight to love. Right now, perhaps, as Jonas drove to the depot, glancing at Eggers with his feet on the dashboard, a cigarette and a boozy smile, pointing out this place and that, perhaps right now like was edging into delight .
    How could it be otherwise? The afternoon was a delight, the yellow fields and the old pubs, the limestone cottages and the hedgerows. It felt like belonging and belonging was good. If he mined a deeper sense of it from Eggers, the man who had never left here, then strike down the fool who sought happiness in a place that once wasn’t his home but now was.
    â€˜I like this place,’ he told Eggers.
    Eggers looked at him. ‘And?’
    â€˜I just do.’
    â€˜What the fuck do you want me to do about it?’
    â€˜Nothing!’
    â€˜Knob end.’
    But Eggers was laughing and Jonas was laughing and he could see it, belonging , not just in Eggers but later on, in the warmth in Lomax the butcher’s eyes as he handed over the hamper of meat and fish, and in the banter with the off-licence boys as they loaded the beer slabs into the cab of the truck. Commitment to a place. It was a practice. Just ask Li Po. But you can no more belong to a new place in a few months than you can make fire with damp tinder. And yessir , Jonas knew how to make fire. All those evenings round at Haakon’s and Jonas’s parents with no idea; burning the fingertips, honing the craft under the big man’s expert eye.
    * * *
    Cannonball Adderley welcomed the first six guests. Dizzy Gillespie and Stan Getz the next seven. Just after 9 pm Sun Ra sound-tracked the breaking of the party record. Sixteen people!
    Then more people. And more . Jonas beamed and stopped counting because he didn’t need to. It pleased him on a near-molecular level to see these people enjoying themselves, eating at the smorgasbord . The six cases of Ringnes beer the off-licence had sourced were fast-disappearing. His buzz was already respectable and two akevitt shots with a red-faced man whom he’d seen but never spoken to gave it an edge of impregnability.
    â€˜I’m Jonas.’
    â€˜I know you are.