In The Wake Read Online Free

night is quiet again. It is dark in the hall, and it is dark outside, there is only light in one window in the next-door block. Mrs Grinde lives there. The neighbours say she has binoculars, and it may be so, I don’t know anything about her, but she cannot be using them now, not unless they arearmy ones, and I do not think they are. I read the words on my screen: “I see the shape of the wind on the water.” Did I write that?
    I didn’t make a speech on my father’s seventy-fifth birthday. I had nothing against making a speech, but it did not occur to me for a moment that I should. We didn’t make speeches in my family. Not for birthdays, not for confirmations, never had any one of us risenat the table to pay tribute to another. With a single exception. The previous year my mother had been sixty, and I gave a long speech in verse from all her children. I think she liked that, and I think she felt that at last they were getting some dividend for voting Labour and being loyal union members most of their lives so that we should have a better and richer life. It was a fine speech, andalthough it might not have won me the Nobel Prize for Literature I was quite proud of it. So on my father’s seventy-fifth birthday I realised she was sitting there staring at me across the table. Dinner was well advanced, I was expecting nothing but peace, so I returned her gaze, and suddenly I realised that she was waiting for the speech I would be making for my father, and her expression toldme she was really wondering what had I thought up this time.
    I had not thought up anything. Nor could I spontaneously stand up and invent something. I had nothing to say. I turned and looked at the others at the table, my two brothers who were still alive and all the children and uncles and aunts, and they were all looking at me. The only one who was not looking at me was my father. And suddenlysilence fell at the table.
    I get up from the desk, walk into the hall, open the door to the stairwell and listen. I take a few steps, lean over the banisters and gaze up. Not a sound. It is the middle of the night, but maybe someone is standing up there and not moving. I clear my throat quietly, but the sound comes out loud and makes an echo and that is embarrassing, and I go in again to thedark hall and close the door. The two rooms next to my bedroom are empty now, but the doors are open, and it is dark in there too and not as before when at least one of the two girls had to sleep with a spotlight right in her face, yellow light under her eyelids and on into her dream. Now they do that in another place, another man maybe turns on those lights. I close both of their doors. Then I gointo the kitchen. I won’t be able to sleep anyway, I may as well have some coffee.
    When my brother and I drove on from Vestby Wayside Inn that early summer of 1990 after the journey to Copenhagen when we had tossed wreaths on to the sea and drunk toasts in the bar with police inspectors, psychiatrists, firefighters and danced with nurses more attractive than we had ever seen before, we were reallyin trouble from lack of sleep, we had probably only had half an hour on the benches outside the inn, and that was far too little, but the sun was baking and it was impossible to lie there any longer. The van was hard to drive, at least for me it was, its gear lever on the steering column, which I wasn’t used to, and anyway I hadn’t driven a car for a long time. By the time we reached the Swedishborder I was so tired and frustrated, getting into second every time I meant to be in fourth, that I let him drive the rest of the way to Gothenburg. He did so gladly. After all, he was Big Brother and I was Little Brother, and it was
his
neighbour who owned the vehicle.
    “I envy you being able to put words to all that has happened,” he said as we swung into the bend past the Lysekil turn-off,where we had been a few weeks before when the burning ship had been towed in to the nearest