‘Gotta light?’
A plump, top-heavy lady somewhere in her late thirties looked up at him. Her cigarette bounced provocatively up and down between her red lips.
He raised an eyebrow and looked at her laughing girlfriend, who was standing behind her with a glowing cigarette. The top-heavy one noticed and then laughed as well, taking a step aside to regain her balance.
‘Don’t be so slow,’ she said in the same Sørland accent as the Crown princess. He had heard there was a prostitute in the covered market who got rich by looking like her, talking like her and dressing like her. And that the 5,000-kroner-an-hour fee included a plastic sceptre which the customer was allowed to put to relatively free use.
The woman’s hand rested on his arm as he made to move on. She leaned towards him and breathed red wine into his face.
‘You’re a good-looking guy. How about giving me … a light?’
He turned the other side of his face to her. The bad side. The not-such-a-good-looking-guy side. Felt her flinch and slip as she saw the path left by the nail from his time in the Congo. It stretched from mouth to ear like a badly sewn-up tear.
He walked on as the music changed to Nirvana. ‘Come As You Are.’ Original version.
‘Hash?’
The voice came from a gateway, but he neither stopped nor turned.
‘Speed?’
He had been clean for three years and had no intention of starting again.
‘Violin?’
Least of all now.
In front of him on the pavement a young man had stopped by two dealers; he was showing them something as he spoke. The youngster looked up as he approached, fixing two searching grey eyes on him. Policeman’s eyes, the man thought, lowered his head and crossed the street. It was perhaps a little paranoid; after all, it was unlikely such a young police officer would recognise him.
There was the hotel. The dosshouse. Leon.
It was almost deserted in this part of the street. On the other side, under a lamp, he saw the dope seller astride the bike, with another cyclist, also wearing professional cycling gear. The dope seller was helping the other guy to inject himself in the neck.
The man in the linen suit shook his head and gazed up at the facade of the building before him.
There was the same banner, grey with dirt, hanging below the third-and top-floor windows. ‘Four hundred kroner a night!’ Everything was new. Everything was the same.
The receptionist at Hotel Leon was new. A young lad, who greeted the man in the linen suit with an astonishingly polite smile and an amazing – for Leon – lack of mistrust. He wished him a hearty ‘Welcome’ without a tinge of irony in his voice and asked to see his passport. The man assumed he was often taken for a foreigner because of the tanned complexion and the linen suit, and passed the receptionist his red Norwegian passport. It was worn and full of stamps. Too many for it to be called a good life.
‘Oh, yes,’ the receptionist said, returning it. Placed a form on the counter and handed him a pen.
‘The marked sections are enough.’
A checking-in form at Leon? the man thought with surprise. Perhaps some things had changed after all. He took the pen and saw the receptionist staring at his hand, his middle finger. The one that had been his longest finger before it was cut off in a house on Holmenkollen Ridge. Now the first joint had been replaced with a matt, greyish-blue, titanium prosthesis. It wasn’t a lot of use, but it did provide balance for his adjacent fingers when he had to grip, and it was not in the way as it was so short. The only disadvantage was the endless explanations when he had to go through security at airports.
He filled in First name and Last name.
Date of birth.
He wrote knowing he looked more like a man in his mid-forties now than the damaged geriatric who had left Norway three years ago. He had subjected himself to a strict regime of exercise, healthy food, plentiful sleep and – of course – absolutely no addictive substances. The aim of the regime had not been to look younger, but to avoid death. Besides, he liked it. In fact he had always like fixed routines, discipline, order. So why had his life been chaos instead, such self-destruction and a series of broken relationships between dark periods of intoxication? The blank boxes looked up at him, questioningly. But they were too small for the answers they required.
Permanent address.
Well, the flat in Sofies gate was sold right after he left three years ago, the same applied to his parents’ house in Oppsal. In his present occupation an official address would have carried a certain inherent risk. So he wrote what he usually wrote when he checked in at other hotels: Chungking Mansion, Hong Kong. Which was no further from the truth than anything else.
Occupation.