In The Wake Read Online Free Page A

harbour, with hoses spraying from a retinue of fireboats, and we stood on the quay and looked up at the empty hull lying under a blue sky with great fan-shaped black patches around the portholes, and a policeman wouldn’t let us go on board. It was Sunday and there were tourists there and people walking andsmall boats with dazzling white sails on their way out of the harbour, but no-one looked at the ship except us, and we started to argue with the Swedish policeman there on the long wharf, for we had driven so far, and we did want to go on board, but it was no use, and then I started to cry and I wanted to go for the policeman. My brother held me back and whispered something in my ear, I cannot rememberwhat, but I went back to the car without resisting. Then we just sat in our seats and looked out of the windows.
    He was wrong. I was body only and no words, just as he was, and no matter how much we talked there was always air between what we said and what we did. It was like champagne. I had tasted champagne at a publisher’s party some time before and could get my name wrong when someone askedme who I was. Almost everything we said was wrong.
    What we did was drive. We drove the whole time, we spent thousands of kroner on petrol. We couldn’t sit still. We dived under the spaghetti junction on the way in to Gothenburg, and when we came out of the tunnel we drove straight into a wall of water. The rain poured down harder than we had ever seen, it slammed on the roof of the car and streamedover the windscreen and we couldn’t see a metre in front of us. The world was glittering and milky-white and impenetrable with red dots that grew and grew, and I shouted: “Brake,” and my brother hit the brake. The vehicle in front was suddenly dead ahead with huge rear lights. It was a massive trailer, stock still in the middle of the 70 limit, where it had given up. My brother stood on thepedal and spun the wheel at the same time, the car swerved and ended up crosswise on the road with the door on my side slap up against the back end of the trailer. T.I.R. it said in huge letters above the number plate.
    I started to laugh, hit the dashboard with my palm and said: “A split second more and the whole Jansen family would have been wiped out. Not bad, that two months, and all gone.Some disappearing act.”
    My brother sat with his forehead on the wheel, and didn’t feel like laughing, but then he had to, and then he cried a while, and then it stopped raining. Quite suddenly.
    For the rest of the way to the boat we drove in silence, with the new light coming in through the windows, past the bridges and the steep wall of rock on the left, and turned off where the old Americaboats had moored, and the emigrants went on board with their chests and trunks for third class right down into the bowels of the ship, and had there been a car deck in those days, it would have been
under
the car deck, in cramped quarters with no other light than a dim bulb in the bulkhead, and what hope had left them. The sea sparkled, flat calm in the sunshine, and from Stigberget the remainsof the shower came, as if from an unknown lake, in waterfalls down the long staircases and streamed out across the asphalt so the spray leaped up from the wheels of the van.
    The crossing only took three hours. We could have sat in the saloon and read the bulky Swedish and Danish papers as we usually did, but we were drained and hungry and went straight to the restaurant. We ordered a three-coursemeal with beer and schnapps although before we had always just gone to the cafeteria, and we paid by Visa cards which were furry with insurance money. We spent two hours eating, and the third one we sat on deck in low chairs with our backs to the land we were approaching. A man stood at the rail gazing into the water. He didn’t move an inch the whole time I was there, and I thought of maybe gettingup and going over to stand there with him, but I never found the energy.
    It was