The Third Realm

TOVE

They say that depression is congealed anger. I think of it as a petrified troll. A creature of darkness and the incomplete - irate, dangerous - transformed by daylight into something unmoving and lifeless.

I think of mania as similar to forgetting yourself, the way you might forget a saucepan on a hot stove.

The psychosis occurs when the mania exhausts itself, when the encounter with reality is the only thing left for it (and mania fears reality more than anything else). The psychosis is like one of the three doors in the folk tales, the one that must never be opened no matter what. It mustn’t be opened. Everyone knows. And yet it always gets opened in the end. When faced with nothing and something, you choose something first.

The folk tales.

The trolls, the three doors, the forest. The one where the animals can talk, and people turn into animals. The one with witches, crofters, kings, underground halls, tree stumps, princesses no one can spellbind, stepmothers and poor women, mountain pastures and rugged blue peaks.

Even as a small girl I sensed that the folk tales were concealing something. And that their secrets were significant. Later I would read Jung and his theory of archetypes and the collective unconscious, but that wasn’t what I’d sensed was present in the tales, it was something else. What I took from Jung was that I was the Magician and Arne the Orphan (even though his relationship with his father, right until his father died, had been a happy one, and even though he continued to enjoy a happy relationship with his mother), as well as an understanding of the universality and power of symbols. Apart from that, nothing.

The Magician is the one who transforms. The Magician is a revolutionary. The Orphan is the one who needs. The Orphan is a manipulator.

Hell isn’t the psychosis. Hell is leaving the psychosis. Hell on earth is what that is. Nothing of what you’ve thought, seen or felt has been true. And you’ve thought, seen and felt with your entire being. But that’s not all. Now suddenly they’re staring at you, your husband and kids. Imploringly or angrily, I’m not sure which is worse.

That's when the tears come. The bottomless grief.

Over what?

My self, my inadequacy.

Nobody wants a mad mother. Nobody wants to be one either.

‘Are you normal now?’ Heming once asked when they came to visit me.

What could I do but nod and cry and hold his reluctant body tightly to my own?

We arrived at the summer house late in the evening, having driven all day. Heming, Asle and Ingvild on the back seat, more or less paralysed by the monotony. Arne, whose excitement had risen during the last part of the journey, the landscape becoming more and more familiar to him, switched off the engine and turned beaming to the kids.

'Eight hours and two minutes,' he said. 'Thirteen minutes up on last year!'

'Well done,' said Ingvild, smiling back.

The twins didn't react.

'Everyone take their own things inside with them,' Arne said. 'And do it now so it's done. Ingvild, you bring the cat in, will you?'

'The child lock's on,' said Heming.

'Yes, yes, all right,' said Arne. 'There, it's off now.'

I looked at Ingvild and our eyes came together. She smiled at me the same way she'd smiled at Arne, lifted the cat carrier from her lap, put it down on the seat next to her and undid her seat belt, as the boys clambered out the other side.

She was too obliging.

'It's all right to get annoyed, you know,' I said.

'Yes,' she said, and smiled again. But this time there was a flicker of something darker in her eyes. She had it in her, a lot of it.

Did she even realise?

I got my cigarettes and lighter from the glove compartment and lit one while still standing beside the car. The others disappeared round the corner of the house lugging their rucksacks and suitcases.

The air smelled of the sea. It rushed in the bay. Cautious and consistent, as if someone lay sleeping down there.

Shhhh - shh. Shhhh - shh.

The sky grey-white. The grass grey-black. The trees and bushes black.

The outside light came on and coloured the grass unnaturally green.

'Nice to have a smoke, I imagine,' Arne said, coming back out to fetch some more things from the car.

'It is, yes,' I said. 'Do you want one?'

'Ha ha,' he said, wriggling into a heavy rucksack before picking up the carrier bags of food we'd bought at the supermarket below the bridge and going off round the corner again.

The neighbours with the Rottweilers were here - the lights were on in their house behind me.

No doubt everyone was here, now that the summer holidays had started.

I dropped my cigarette end onto the gravel and grabbed a suitcase to take in with me, and met Arne on his way back. He bobbed his head a couple of times, the way he did when listening to music he liked.

'Are you dancing for me?' I said.

He leaned forward and gave me a peck.

'It's good to be here,' he said. 'Don't you think?'

'Yes, of course.'

'I'll open a bottle of wine.'

'Have we got any?'

'Yes, we've plenty left over from last year. Unless Egil's drunk it all. I don't suppose he will have though. The plonk we drink won't be good enough for him!'

Inside, Heming and Asle went from room to room. We'd been away from the place just long enough for it to be exciting again. Ingvild was nowhere to be seen, in her room with the cat probably. I lugged the suitcase upstairs to the bedroom and then went back out into the garden and stood at the edge of the steep bank leading down to the bay. I lit another cigarette as I tried to feel my way into the surroundings, to become concurrent with them. To be here.

The summer evening. The greyish light, a slight tinge of blue. The glow of the house lights in it all.

'Shall we sit out?' Arne called from the open door behind me. 'I can just as well get the table and chairs out now as later.'

Without waiting for an answer he crossed in front of the house and unlocked the door of the annexe, emerging again a moment later with a chair in each hand, putting them down on the grass underneath the apple tree.

'Do you need some help with the table?'

'No, I can manage. You could fetch the wine and two glasses though?'

I was standing with the wine bottle between my knees, trying to remove the recalcitrant cork when Asle came into the kitchen.

'We're hungry,' he said. 'Is there any dinner?'

'What would you like?'

'Tacos.'

'That sounds all right,' I said. 'They're easy to make and won't take long.'

'Can't Dad make them?'

'Yes, I should think so,' I said, focusing on opening the wine again, the cork now releasing at last, sliding slowly up through the neck. 'Why do you want Dad to make them?' I called out after Asle as he made for the living room.

He turned towards me and gave a shrug.

'The meat's juicier when he does it.'

'Oh, I see,' I said and picked up the glasses in one hand, gripped the bottle in the other and went outside. Arne wasn't there. I sat down and lit a cigarette, noticing that I only had three left.

I'd go to bed early, it wouldn't be a problem then.

Behind me, the door of the annexe closed and Arne came walking across the grass with a lantern dangling from his hand.

'Give me your lighter a second,' he said.

The yellow light seeped out into the grey as if filling an invisible bowl that enclosed the lantern he then placed on top of the table. He poured wine into our glasses and lifted his towards me.

'Skål, Tove. A toast.'

'To what?'

'To us. To the summer. To being here.'

'Skål.'

'Come on, a bit of enthusiasm wouldn't hurt, surely?'

'I'm tired. It was a long journey.'

'I was the one driving, not you.'

'True.'

He sighed and we fell silent. The whisper of the sea was the only sound.

'I like the light here,' I said after a while.

'Of course you do, you're a painter.'

'I've always liked the light from a lantern when it's not quite dark. At the end of the day, at dusk.'

'Like I said, you're a painter.'

'I liked it before I started painting. I remember thinking just that when I was little.'

'That's romanticism, that is. Or rather, neo-romanticism. They loved painting summer nights, the gloaming. It was the mysteriousness they were after. Oda Krohg's best-known picture is of a lantern on a summer night. And then there's Richard Bergh's Nordic Summer Evening. It sounds like the same fascination.'

'Perhaps.'

'Not that you're a romantic exactly.'

'Oh? What am I then?'

'A neo-symbolist, maybe? A post-mythologist?'

'That's the big difference between us. You categorise. I decategorise.'

'As you often point out.'

'Not that there's anything wrong with categorising.'

He smiled wryly as he looked out at the sea.

'It's what pays our bills, at any rate,' he said.

'Dad?' one of the boys called out from the house.

It was Asle.

'Yes?' said Arne.

'Can you make us some tacos now?'

'In a minute.'

'We're starving.'

'Daddy's coming in a minute,' I said. 'Go back inside and he'll be right there.'

He did as I said. Arne filled his glass again.

'Let's have a nice holiday this year, shall we?' he said.

'Yes, of course.'

'Perhaps we both can make an effort.'

'Yes.'


I woke up in the middle of the night having dreamt. Although I lay quite still and focused, I couldn’t remember what it was about. All that was left of it was the mood. Reluctance, unease. And that Mamma had been involved in some way or another.

Arne lay on his back snoring, as he always did when he'd been drinking.

Outside, the night was almost light.

I tried to sleep again, though I knew it was no use. And wasn't it that very sense of knowing you couldn't that made it impossible?

I thought so.

I got up, went downstairs into the passage and put my boots and jacket on, thinking I'd have a cigarette in the garden. Only when I sat down at the table did it occur to me that I didn't have any left.

I couldn't just sit there and not smoke, I'd only think about it then. So I got to my feet and crossed the grass, then followed the path down the bank to the bay. The grass, long and wet on either side, the sea still and gleaming, the sky grey-blue.

What time was it?

It didn't matter. I wasn't in the slightest bit tired, and I had the whole world to myself.

Three black slugs stood out in the yellow grass at the side of the path. I crouched down beside them. Their black was the black of car tyres. And with the creases that ran side by side along the length of their bodies, like tread patterns, they looked like they'd been made in a tyre factory too.

Small, waving tentacles. Their will, slow and resolute.

I stroked the tip of my forefinger over the head of the one that was closest. It shrank back with aversion. Unlike a man's cock that swelled to its full length at the same touch.

Slugs liked what was soft and moist. Slugs liked slime. They came from the mushy forest floor.

I stood up. They were probably no more than a couple of months old. Yet when I studied them it felt like they were ancient. As if they came from the depths of time.

That was how it was with everything. Everything we could see was about as old as us. But their forms, yes, it was their forms, were ancient.

Imagine.

I came to the smooth flat rocks at the shore and gazed out across the shiny surface of the sea, wanting my thoughts to open out the same way the sea and the sky opened out, not to be squishy and slimy, black and slow.

When I was little I loved animals more than anything else, without distinguishing between them. I gathered snails and slugs and put them in my coat pocket, beetles and worms and spiders too. I made small homes for them in shoeboxes lined with soil and grass and leaves, and hid them under the bed. Mamma hated it and went mad at me whenever she happened to find them.

But she would never be as angry as when she'd washed the floors down and I came in with dirty shoes on. She must have thought I did so on purpose, to provoke her. And provoke her it did, at any rate. You little bugger, she would often yell, and could dish out a slap in the face too, if she was in the mood for it. After which she'd be overcome with remorse, she'd be completely in bits about it. There'd be no end to the kisses and cuddles then, the pats and caresses, and I'd be allowed to sleep beside her, as close as could be, she'd give me all the love and concern she had in her then. And it was a lot.

Just a shame it was so unevenly distributed.

Why was I thinking about her?

The dream. She rose up in me when I slept, like a dead body rising up from the bottom of a pond.

Not that my prayers had been answered. After all, she was still in the land of the living. Though not as far as I was concerned. As far as I was concerned she was a dead body that occasionally rose to the surface.

I went all the way out on one of the rocks and crouched down again. The sea lapped gently, as if contained in an enormous vessel someone was carrying, the seaweed lapping gently back and forth, yellow-brown in the gleaming, black, cold element.

The woods behind me were still. Everything was motionless apart from the sea's careful movements.

It was the most splendid hour of all, was it not? The hour before sunrise.

Was the difference between us simply that I liked dirt, mud, mould, soil, loam, all that crept and crawled, whereas Mamma was just the opposite, everything having to be clinically clean, completely disinfected?

Of course not.

If only I had a cigarette.

I went round the point and crossed the band of stony beach, climbed up onto the bare rock above and started walking along as the sky to the east blushed red, then, only seconds later, became gilded by the first rays of the sun, which for a moment remained unseen before pouring out over the edge of the world and throwing their light across the expanse of the sea.