Paradise Rot. Jenny Hval
The old warehouse interior had been renovated into an apartment with thin dividing walls made from plasterboard that didn’t quite reach halfway to the ceiling. The spaces behind them seemed more like booths than rooms. Carral Johnston gave me a tour of the plasterboard labyrinth. She was a slender girl, a few years older than me, wearing a tight pastel-yellow wool jumper that almost matched her pale yellow-white skin. Her yellow curls were tied up in a ponytail that rocked back and forth over her shoulders while she walked over the wooden floors with long silent steps. My boots thumped after her. Inside, too, I seemed to make unnaturally loud noises that buzzed on the tin ceiling above us.
We wound up by the kitchen table in the middle of the building, where the yellow Carral Johnston sat with her legs up on a chair. While she told me a little about herself – that she was from Brighton, that she had been here for three years, and that she worked as an office temp – I sat and watched her feet through the steam from my tea. Her toes curled up over a small fan heater, and her arched ankles made the movement look like a ballet exercise. In my boots my own feet were arching, as if they were trying to copy her movement.
‘So, Jo, what do you think?’ she asked smiling and continued without waiting for my reply: ‘We have a washing machine, TV, mattresses, everything we need. Plus a whole lot of weirdness. It’s an old warehouse after all. When I first moved in, I thought it was a little scary.’
I nodded and wondered whether I was part of this ‘we’, even though I had never been to her apartment before.
‘But it’s not scary, just different,’ she continued and leant towards me. ‘The house has a life of its own. You get used to it. Excuse me for a moment.’
Carral put her arched feet back on the floor, stood up and walked to the bathroom. When she left my sight, it was as if something took over the house, and it seemed to rock. The floor panels were rubbing against each other, the plasterboard swayed like long blades of grass. The thermostat clicked on and off, unable to decide whether the room was warm enough or not. The world outside rattled against the window. From the bathroom I could hear the sound of denim pulled over skin, the sound of skin coming to rest on porcelain, and finally a trickling, increasing and eventually steady stream of water.
‘Sound travels here.’
Her voice, bathed in echo, came from everywhere, as if she was speaking from the floorboards, the fan heater, the kitchen clock. The stream continued.
‘Luckily I’m pretty quiet.’
Only a small drip was to be heard now, a pause, and then finally crumpled tissue being dragged against skin.
‘Paper-thin walls,’ Carral said and giggled, but the sound of flushing drowned her laughter. ‘As I said, that’s just what this place is like.’ She opened the door again, returned to her chair and put her feet up on the heater. The tea had stopped steaming. She put her hands around the mug with a satisfied smile, as if she had accomplished something.
I hadn’t met a lot of girls who talked while they peed, and definitely not a lot of girls who talked about peeing while they did it. There’s usually a lull in the conversation even when you’re sat in neighbouring cubicles. Maybe peeing and talking is a bit like singing and playing an instrument at the same time, I thought, two sets of muscles having to work side by side.
‘Your English is great by the way,’ she said and smiled.
‘Oh,’ I said, ‘we all grow up with the BBC where I’m from.’
‘Well, I’ve met other Norwegians. They all had terrible American accents.’ She still smiled the same interested smile.
‘You’re probably right,’ I said.
‘Speaking of you … Why did you come to Aybourne?’
‘I’m studying biology. Bachelor of Science, I think it’s called.’
‘But here? Why would you study here?’
‘I wanted to come here,’ I answered. ‘It’s a good university.’
‘So you’ve left everything behind to live here for three years. I hope you don’t have a boyfriend waiting for you back in Norway.’
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