Hell Fire

24

Every winter, on the night before Christmas Eve, Eddie went to bed first. When the door closed behind him, Mass swung into action. She filled an old red stocking with candy and hung it above the door to her son’s bedroom. He would lie awake in bed and listen to the hammering. Early the next morning, he would empty the contents of the red stocking out onto the table and munch his way through it in no time. And now it was already January. Mass had tidied Christmas away and all the pine needles had been swept up.

Eddie had been working on the crossword for some time, chewing a pencil that was about to disintegrate. Intrigue. Plot. When he had finished, he sat and pondered. And after he had pondered for a while, he sat down at the computer. Mass took over the newspaper but kept an eye on her son staring at the screen. After a while, he turned and looked at her.

“When was Dad born?” he asked.

“Oh, darling, I’ve told you so many times before.”

“Well, tell me again,” Eddie insisted. “I need to get it absolutely right.”

“November sixth, 1945,” she said with a frown.

Something about her son’s behavior made her uneasy. There was a determination about him that she had seen on a couple of previous occasions; it meant he was up to something.

“Do you have his personal ID number as well?”

“No.”

“And where was he born?” Eddie asked.

“In Bergen.”

“And when did he leave us?”

Mass sighed in exasperation. “Eddie, darling, why do you want to know all this?” she asked anxiously.

“When did he move?” Eddie persisted.

“In 1987. On May twenty-seventh.”

He looked at her in surprise. “Crikey, you even remember the date?”

“Women remember things like that,” she said wearily. “Men don’t always pay attention to the details.”

“And when did he die?”

“In ’92. But don’t ask me the date because I don’t know. And I don’t know where he’s buried, and I don’t know if he had any children with his new wife. And I don’t want to know. He was a coward.”

“Why do you always say he was a coward?” Eddie asked.

Mass thought for a while before she reluctantly replied: “Well, when you were little, you weren’t very easy to deal with.”

Eddie looked at his mother with piercing eyes. “Why? What do you mean?”

“You didn’t want to do anything. You didn’t want to go to daycare; you didn’t want to be with other children. You clung to us all the time because you suffered from what’s called separation anxiety. So even though we managed to get you a place at daycare, we couldn’t use it. I’m just being honest now. And Anders was at the end of his tether. He didn’t think you’d ever amount to much. He called you a sniveling brat, and fathers shouldn’t say things like that about their own children. It’s just not right.”

“But if you weren’t in touch, how did you find out that he’d died?”

“His wife wrote me a letter.”

“His wife?” Eddie exclaimed. “Wrote you a letter?”

“Yes.”

“But she didn’t say where he was buried?”

“No, and I didn’t particularly want to know either, because I had no intention of visiting his grave.”

“But if you got a letter” — Eddie was excited now — “then you know her name, don’t you? And then I can find out.”

“I don’t remember much of the letter,” she admitted.

“Nothing?”

“Good Lord, Eddie, you do go on. You’re starting to annoy me now.”

“But you do remember her name, don’t you?” he nagged. “You can remember the date he moved to Copenhagen. So that means you’ve got a good memory, just like me.”

She closed her eyes and a considerable amount of time lapsed before she opened them again. “Well, since you’re obviously not going to give up, her name was Inga.”

“Inga what?”

“Inga Margrethe.”

“What else?”

“I can’t remember.”

“But it must have been written on the back of the envelope,” he said. “Have you still got the letter?”

“Of course not,” she snapped. “Why would I keep it?”

Eddie thought about what his mother had told him, that he was a difficult child. Even though it had never been said so directly, it was something he already knew. He turned back to the computer screen and opened a new document. He sat for a while and thought before he started to write.

He mailed the letter the same day. He had printed it on good paper because he thought that it might be more personal that way. No doubt they got heaps of letters. He didn’t want his to drown in them all. He had written his address and telephone number at the bottom, and, to be on the safe side, had stuck on two stamps. The long wait started. He would sit by the kitchen window and watch for the red mail van, and as soon as he saw it, he would rush out into the snow. Ansgar often came out at the same time with the cat at his heels. Presumably he stood by the window waiting as well, but Eddie just grabbed what was in the mailbox and disappeared back into the house as fast as he could. Sometimes he had Shiba with him. Her legs were getting worse and worse, but every time he mentioned it to his mother, she got upset. Some days she laid out a newspaper by the front door, so the dog could shit there. But Shiba also had good days, and then Mass held on to the hope that she would get better. She couldn’t bear to accept the inevitable. And all the time, Eddie waited for a letter from Tracker Tore. His body ached with anticipation and he was constantly in and out of his room to look at the photograph. His father really was a handsome man, he thought, with broad shoulders and thick blond hair. He had forged a steely determination to find his father’s grave. He would look day and night for months if he had to.