Free A Private Haunting by Tom McCulloch

on so many others. Sam meant Bergen.
    Again, Jonas let Sam’s story lull and take him, until somehow it could be his own and then was.
    â€˜I had a woman there.’
    â€˜There’s always a woman.’
    â€˜Blonde hair. Right down her back. I had two nights there while the boat was loaded, some fleapit up by the cathedral.’
    â€˜St. Olav’s.’
    â€˜That’s the one. She worked in a bar.’
    Logen’s , Jonas remembered.
    â€˜She was... passionate, I tell you that.’
    â€˜That’s Norwegians for you!’
    â€˜Yeah. You Norwegians, you’re so passionate, eh?’
    A slicing voice. Jonas looked up into the red face and buzz-cut hair of someone he didn’t know.
    â€˜Come again?’
    â€˜Exactly! Sex , s’all you think about.’
    Buzz Cut’s fat friend started giggling, an odd nasal snuffle, eyes tight shut with cartoon lines.
    â€˜Come on now, John,’ said Sam. ‘Let Jonas be.’
    Buzz Cut put an arm round the old man’s shoulders. ‘No worries, just having a laugh with the Viking.’
    He popped a cigarette into his mouth and grinned. Jonas watched him walk away. He didn’t know this person. That licence to condescend to a stranger, where do you apply for it?
    Sam too watched Buzz Cut but didn’t see him, his gaze stalled somewhere in the middle distance. ‘I was going to stay there, you know. Do something or other. But I didn’t. You know the damnedest thing? I can’t even remember her name. I can’t see her face, can’t see it.’
    He expected , did Jonas. Likely, he expected too much, but rather expect and be disappointed than doubt and be cynical. But even Jonas did not expect old Sam. The first time he heard this story was in The Lion , a few weeks after he moved to the village. Standing at the bar ordering a beer. Sam leaned in and asked in Swedish what his name was. Jonas’s mouth did the cartoon drop. In English, he replied that he was Norwegian and nearly fell over when the question was repeated in his own language. Old Sam explained that he’d sailed the Newcastle-Bergen route for over thirty years. Merchant Navy, engineer second class.
    The old man knew: the steep cobbles and fussy window boxes of Nordnes; the phosphorescent winter glow of those white-panelled houses; the mist on Mt Fløyen as ethereal as a Japanese landscape. And Jonas knew Sam’s lost woman too, the barmaid with the blonde hair and the way she turned and winked and, quick-shifting, became his wife, Eva, and every time a different moment and now that evening of the REM tribute band and afterwards a bottle of wine in Byparken and singing Man on the Moon as the man himself looks down from his full whiteness in the east and yes, I see him, Jonas, I’ve never noticed him before…
    â€˜You should have got married, Jonas.’
    â€˜It never happened for me.’
    The old man suspected, of course. He tapped Jonas on the hand. ‘There’s time for everything.’
    It troubled him, the way Eva had retreated to the edge of the light. Once upon a more fragile time he dreamed of her every night. Yet now it sometimes felt he had to remember to remember. Where there was presence there was still existence. Something like that.
    â€˜Are you a dreaming man?’
    â€˜Haven’t had a dream in years,’ said Sam.
    â€˜Think they mean anything?’
    â€˜They can mean whatever you bloody well please. No point in worrying about the damn things.’
    Jonas downed the last of his pint. His mother flashed across his mind; if you keep worrying like that your head will fall off . Seven years old, this had, of course, worried him even more.
    He ordered two more beers and leaned on the bar. Buzz Cut fixed a stare, OTT and making Jonas giggle , a little boy’s laugh lost in the shouts from the pool table and the sudden laughter, the undulating rush of the football crowd on the TV. Meaning