To the Back of Beyond(13)
His way now took him pretty sharply downhill through a group of new houses that were a strange cross between farmhouses and single-family homes. Swings and trampolines and wading pools sat on the trimmed lawns. There was a closed restaurant in the narrow valley and a sawmill, behind whose windows fouled with spiderwebs and dust no one seemed to be working. Between the road and the stream a few sawn-up tree trunks were stacked to dry. Farther down, where a narrow pool had formed against a small dam, Thomas stripped behind a pile of boards and dipped into the freezing-cold water. He washed himself, and rinsed the worst of the dirt out of his clothes and hung them up on the branches of an elderberry. Then he dunked the stale bread in the stream water. It tasted watery and fell apart in his mouth, but it at least filled his belly and, having eaten, he felt better. Stark naked he lay down in the sun to rest.
Although it had gotten chilly, Astrid went back outside once the children were in bed. She took the paper with her and a glass of wine, and sat down on the bench in front of the house. Just two days earlier, exactly forty-eight hours, she had sat there with Thomas. If she shut her eyes now, she could imagine he was sitting beside her. From inside she could hear Konrad’s plaintive voice. Will you go to him? she asked. Oh, just leave him be, said Thomas, he’ll stop by himself. Will you please, she repeated, and with a groan he got up and went inside. Shortly afterward, she could hear him talking with Thomas, and the two of them laughing. Go to sleep now, Thomas called from the top of the stairs. Then the light came on in the living room, and Thomas put his head out the window. Are you coming in now? In a minute, said Astrid. She heard him shut the window, and had the brief sensation that he was a very long way away. She pictured him going to the cellar for a bottle of wine. He checked the level of heating oil in the boiler, and worked out whether it was enough to see them through the next winter or if they would have to order more. When he came out of the cellar, he glanced at the thermometer that indicated the outdoor temperature, sixty, but it was due to warm up again in the next couple of days. Then Astrid heard the calming tones of the TV, sounds and voices, music. She set down the paper, remained sitting for a minute longer, as though biding her moment, then got up and left the garden. She looked up and down the street, as though it might offer some clue or prompt, but she didn’t see anything out of the ordinary, just the nocturnal street with its line of single-family homes. She saw Thomas, equally perplexed, standing in the street, uncertain which way to go. Once a week he played handball and afterward would drink a few beers with his teammates; other than that he spent almost every evening at home. Earlier on, he sometimes had gotten together with a friend from his boyhood, but ever since the man joined the Unitarians and would talk about nothing else, Thomas had allowed the friendship to lapse. Astrid briefly wondered whether to call him, but she was sure that even in some extremity Thomas would never have turned to him, and apart from that man, there was no one she could think of to whom he might have gone. He had no close friends; his superficial relationships to colleagues at work, his clients, and his teammates seemed to be enough for him. Neither of them had an especially active social life, and since the children, they hardly ever went out in the evenings. Astrid had sometimes encouraged Thomas to meet up with his old friends again, but he seemed not to feel the need. I’ve got you, he would always say. Nor was he close to his parents or his sister, although they seemed to get on okay. If Astrid didn’t remind him of their birthdays, he would probably have forgotten them as well.
Only then did she realize that tonight was Thomas’s handball evening. The team practiced in a school gym just a couple of hundred yards away. She popped back inside the house and listened for the children. Hearing no sounds, she pulled on a coat and shut the door quietly after her.
The gym was half underground. Astrid stood in front of one of the plate-glass windows and looked down where the handball team was training, as they did every Tuesday. Most of the men were stood in a line. They seemed to be practicing a particular game situation, getting the ball thrown to them by the coach, hurling it into a corner of the goal, and joining the back of the line. Astrid scanned the line for Thomas, but of course he wasn’t there. From where she stood, the sounds were like distant thunder, the squeaking of the rubber soles on the floor, and every so often a half-stifled shout for a bungled or exceptionally good shot. The endless recycling of the same repeated movements came to feel absurd to her, as though the team was made up of robots on an assembly line, producing some substanceless product. Astrid was unable to tear herself away, she watched until the moment the coach kept hold of the ball, clasping it to his chest, as though unwilling ever to surrender it, and called the team to him to discuss the next drill. Suddenly she worried one of them might catch sight of her standing by the window, and she took a step back into the darkness.
Most of the players she knew only fleetingly, having met them at matches or at the annual barbecue the team laid on every summer before the holidays. The players’ wives turned up with salads and put them out on a collapsible table. Thomas helped at the grill, and Astrid sat at a table with three couples who seemed to be friends and were sharing village gossip, with loud shouts of laughter. When the others joined her at her table, they had briefly introduced themselves and shaken hands, and after that they more or less ignored her. The children paid flying visits to pick up a handful of chips or hurriedly drink a glass of iced tea. When Astrid asked them what they were playing, they gave some breathless information and scampered away to rejoin the other children. By the time Thomas finally jammed himself onto the bench facing her, laughing at some comment or other that someone had called out, she said she was tired and wanted to go home. She felt like an utter spoilsport, but she had the feeling she couldn’t stand the noise and the merriment for another minute. In spite of that, they didn’t go home until much later, after midnight, when there was a chill in the air.