NOVEL

The House in Baker Road

The Love We Had, Chapter 22

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22

I sit here and I search for answers. — What am I going to do now, once I know I’ve crossed the border? — Now, when I have crossed the line, this invisible line. I now know I love a different man and not the one lying in the bed next to me.

So, what shall I do now?

This voice inside me doesn’t leave me alone. Those thoughts crumble around and around in my head, and I know that the night will be poor in sleep. The days to come will cause me turmoil, a turmoil that spreads and fills the void inside me with questions to which I know no answers.

My house has its address in Baker Road in this small town, on the plot between number 14 and number 18, where there is no house, a plot on which there was never a house built. Our house is at an address in Baker Road, an address that does not exist on the street map. And I am married to Lars, this calm, wordless man from the Fjord. This man I fell in love with that night at the hotel when the new local band had their first playing job. My husband, Lars from the Fjord, who, as little as I, Eira, has existed and trudged through the streets of this small town, crushed under the high mountains on both sides.

And as little as I exist in real life does he exist, and I exist as little as he.

I’m part of a fiction, whether I like it or not.

Yet I am real, I exist, I am who I am. I am Eira, I am the wife of Lars from the Fjord, and he is Lars from the Fjord. He is my man, my husband, the man I thought I would love to share good and bad days for the rest of my life, so I thought. He’s the one to whom I gave myself, and that I was sure that the stars had pointed out to be my companion in life, my spouse for the rest of my life. He’s my man, this man that I thought I was going to live my life with, get old with.

I go from the living room in the house in Baker Road, I stand in the kitchen and look out over the rooftops below the Baker Road. And I watch the houses in a row, I see the blocks nearer to the town centre, I see the old factory workers houses from the first half of the last century, and the new-built municipal care centre at Bakka.

Behind them all, I see the vast brick dwelling and to the left of it, the equally rugged, white brick building that is Odda Elementary School. It's the building where all those who in the first decades of the post-war era grew up in the central parts of the town spent their compulsory years in public school.

I stand in front of the kitchen counter that I and my Lars planned in the time when we built the house. And when I stand in front of the bench and wipe over with spray and cloth, I look out over the town and the Fjord — and yes, this town — I can’t believe it — that Lonely Planet called the ugliest town in the world.

I see the smelting plant lying downtown to the right of the plain, and I think of Lars, this calm man, this trusted worker who goes to and from the shift work at the smelter — this dinosaur, a factory from a different decennium, this monster which lies there downtown occupying the whole flat area.

The smelter was closed down in 2002, but it continued to exist for many years in the minds of the people of the town, where it still lived its noisy and dusty existence. The Smelter’s failed mission was to produce calcium carbide, calcium cyanamide and dicyanamide, throughout the coming century such as in the nearly hundred previous years.

I stand looking out, I see the large headlands with the zinc factory on the left, with its large buildings, the piers and the ships laying there and to the right Birch headlands, and right behind the headlands, the old bathing place, where once upon a time there stood a ten-meter-high plunge tower, the bathing place, closed down and depopulated, overgrown as it has been, as long as I can remember.

I’m thinking of the man I am married to, he who sees me no longer, he who is uninterested, who doesn’t care what I do, where I am, or who I am.

And I am thinking of the man I encountered, he who sees me, that takes care of me, who smiles at me. He’s the one who cares about who I am under my shell.

The story that the novel tells takes place in a small industrial town at the end of a fjord in western Norway. The story being told and the characters are fictional.

The photos included in the chapters are taken on location in the Odda Smelter (Odda Smelteverk, 1906–2003), the carbide factory that is part of the story.

The Love We Had

Part 1 The Longest Night -chapters 1–3, told by Lars. Part 2 The Light Inside -chapters 4–17, told by Aslak. Part 3 Save Our Secret Love -chapters 18 — XX, told by Eira.

Previous: Chapter 21 I Feel Numb, I Am Frozen

For quick access to all chapters, go here.

Øivind H. Solheim writes fiction, essays and articles aiming to help others understanding life, other humans and themselves. He has published five novels, two non-fiction books and a poetry book.

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