Neither Here Nor There Read Online Free PDF Page A

Northern Lights weather. ‘You should have been here just before Christmas – ah, fabulous,’ they would say and then assure me that tonight would almost certainly be the night. ‘About eleven o’clock you go out. Then you’ll see.’ But it didn’t happen.
    When I wasn’t walking or searching the sky, I sat in the bar of the hotel drinking beer or lay on my bed reading. I tried once or twice to watch television in my room. There is only one network in Norway and it is stupefyingly bad. It’s not just that the programmes are dull, though in this respect they could win awards, but that the whole thing is so wondrously unpolished. Films finish and you get thirty seconds of scratchy white circles like you used to get when your home movies ran out and your dad didn’t get to the projector fast enough, and then suddenly the lights come up on the day’s host, looking faintly startled, as if he had been just about to do something he wouldn’t want the nation to see. The host, always a handsome young man or woman with a lively sweater and sculpted hair, fills the long gaps between programmes by showing endless trailers for the rest of the evening’s highlights: a documentary on mineral extraction in Narvik, a Napoleonic costume drama in which the main characters wear moustaches that are patently not their own and strut around as if they have had a fence post inserted rectally (but are trying not to let it affect their performance) and a jazz session with the Sigi Wurtmuller Rhythm Cadettes. The best that can be said for Norwegian television is that it gives you the sensation of a coma without the worry and inconvenience.
    I began to feel as if a doctor had told me to go away for a complete rest (‘someplace really boring, where there’s nothing at all to do’). Never had I slept so long and so well. Never had I had this kind of leisure just to potter about. Suddenly I had time to do all kinds of things: unlace my boots and redo them over and over until the laces were precisely the same length, rearrange the contents of my wallet, deal with nose hairs, make long lists of all the things I would do if I had anything to do. Sometimes I sat on the edge of the bed with my hands on my knees and just gazed about me. Often I talked to myself. Mostly I went for long, cold walks, bleakly watching the unillumined sky, then stopped for coffee at Kokken’s Café, with its steamy windows and luscious warmth.
    It occurred to me that this was just like being retired. I even began taking a small notebook with me on my walks and keeping a pointless diary of my daily movements, just as my dad had done when he retired. He used to walk every day to the lunch counter at our neighbourhood supermarket and if you passed by you would see him writing in his notebooks. After he died, we found a cupboard full of these notebooks. Every one of them was filled with entries like this: ‘January 4. Walked to supermarket. Had two cups of decaff. Weather mild.’ Suddenly I understood what he was up to.

    Little by little I began to meet people. They began to recognize me in Kokken’s and the post office and the bank and to treat me to cautious nods of acknowledgement. I became a fixture of the hotel bar, where I was clearly regarded as a harmless eccentric, the man from England who came and stayed and stayed.
    One day, lacking anything at all to do, I went and saw the Mayor. I told him I was a journalist, but really I just wanted someone to talk to. He had an undertaker’s face and wore blue jeans and a blue work shirt, which made him look unsettlingly like a prisoner on day release, but he was a kind man. He told me at length about the problems of the local economy and as we parted he said:
    ‘You must come to my house one evening. I have a sixteen-year-old daughter.’ Gosh, that’s jolly gracious of you, I thought, but I’m a happily married man. ‘She would like to practise her English.’
    Ah. I’d have gone, but the invitation never came.