Beat The Devil's Tattoo
She spits the blood out of her mouth onto the bathroom floor; staining the impeccably white marble tiles a scarlet red. He pushes her down to the floor and kicks the area she thinks her left kidney might be and slams the mahogany door shut.
A sudden bout of nausea takes ahold of her and she crawls, with great difficulty to the expensive toilet, and grips the toilet seat. Her stomach heaves a few times. But she doesn't throw up. Too little food, she thinks, silently in her mind.
She lies against the wall, a frail hand resting on her throbbing back, the other on her throbbing head.
Out of nowhere, or perhaps somewhere, a dark faraway somewhere, there flitted out a memory. Blurred, unfocused and most certainly hazy, but still a memory. She was sitting at her neighbourhood's library and worrying about her university exams, rubbing a spot just above the left side of her temple, where she frequently got headaches.
Her hands were shoved inside her warm purple jacket sleeves as it was cold outside and inside where she was sitting.
No one was there but her, the surprisingly young librarian and three other people, presumably also students, she surmised from the texts they were avidly highlighting. She gazed out the window to look at the snow-dusted trees and roads and cars. She had no doubt that the wind outside was biting and would sting her face as she walked back home in the dark.
Somehow, the thought was not as depressing as it usually was for her. Strangely. She shrugged slightly at her own incomprehensible emotions, with a wan smile. Someone had sat down next to her while she was lost in her thoughts. And appeared to be asking her a question, which she had not paid any attention to. She shook her head.
"Ja? Sorry, could you please repeat that?"
The 'someone' was a tall, whitish-blonde, glassily blue-eyed pale lanky boy with shoulder length hair. His skin was so sunlight deprived, she thought, that it had taken on a greyish pallor. He smiled, slightly alleviating the discomfort she felt at having someone ,who looked like a Norwegian necromancer who might practice spells in a dark graveyard, so close to her. Of course, that was all just prejudice. Maybe he was an albino...
He extended a very long and of course, very pale arm towards her.
"Calle," he said simply, as if this was a perfectly normal and flawless means of answering a question. She might have raised her eyebrows back home, in Malaysia where everyone must be fully introduced and with some mention of their mutual friends.
But partly because she was in Norway, so very many miles away from home, and partly because she was tired from all the studying and cramming and acknowledging sources and now fully appreciated the Norwegian way of introduction, which was clear and succinct, she shook his hand.
"Harvey," she replied with a wry smile, to which Calle returned in kind. He held her gaze for a few more moments before sliding a piece of paper out of his brown bag, which was tattered and lay carelessly on his lap, and onto the table.
"I was wondering if you could answer some questions on your experience as a foreigner in Norway..." he paused for a while, as if wondering what to say next, "Harvey".
She squirmed inwardly; his piercing eyes were so intense in their cold gaze. Harvey found that she couldn't look at him for long, and soon was tugging desperately at her shoelaces so she could pretend to tie them to avoid looking at the Norwegian necromancer, who apparently had a name, Calle.
"Ja sure. Just let me get my, um, pen..." She hastily finished tying her shoelaces, which she had succeeded in loosening, and briefly scanned the library. Just her luck. She was the only obviously 'ethnic' foreigner in the room out of the 3 other 'students' and Mrs Brevik, the librarian. She grabbed a bright blue paper mate that she had just used in her conclusion of the of the paper she had been writing and proceeded, almost mechanically, to answer the questions.
A sudden bout of nausea takes ahold of her and she crawls, with great difficulty to the expensive toilet, and grips the toilet seat. Her stomach heaves a few times. But she doesn't throw up. Too little food, she thinks, silently in her mind.
She lies against the wall, a frail hand resting on her throbbing back, the other on her throbbing head.
Out of nowhere, or perhaps somewhere, a dark faraway somewhere, there flitted out a memory. Blurred, unfocused and most certainly hazy, but still a memory. She was sitting at her neighbourhood's library and worrying about her university exams, rubbing a spot just above the left side of her temple, where she frequently got headaches.
Her hands were shoved inside her warm purple jacket sleeves as it was cold outside and inside where she was sitting.
No one was there but her, the surprisingly young librarian and three other people, presumably also students, she surmised from the texts they were avidly highlighting. She gazed out the window to look at the snow-dusted trees and roads and cars. She had no doubt that the wind outside was biting and would sting her face as she walked back home in the dark.
Somehow, the thought was not as depressing as it usually was for her. Strangely. She shrugged slightly at her own incomprehensible emotions, with a wan smile. Someone had sat down next to her while she was lost in her thoughts. And appeared to be asking her a question, which she had not paid any attention to. She shook her head.
"Ja? Sorry, could you please repeat that?"
The 'someone' was a tall, whitish-blonde, glassily blue-eyed pale lanky boy with shoulder length hair. His skin was so sunlight deprived, she thought, that it had taken on a greyish pallor. He smiled, slightly alleviating the discomfort she felt at having someone ,who looked like a Norwegian necromancer who might practice spells in a dark graveyard, so close to her. Of course, that was all just prejudice. Maybe he was an albino...
He extended a very long and of course, very pale arm towards her.
"Calle," he said simply, as if this was a perfectly normal and flawless means of answering a question. She might have raised her eyebrows back home, in Malaysia where everyone must be fully introduced and with some mention of their mutual friends.
But partly because she was in Norway, so very many miles away from home, and partly because she was tired from all the studying and cramming and acknowledging sources and now fully appreciated the Norwegian way of introduction, which was clear and succinct, she shook his hand.
"Harvey," she replied with a wry smile, to which Calle returned in kind. He held her gaze for a few more moments before sliding a piece of paper out of his brown bag, which was tattered and lay carelessly on his lap, and onto the table.
"I was wondering if you could answer some questions on your experience as a foreigner in Norway..." he paused for a while, as if wondering what to say next, "Harvey".
She squirmed inwardly; his piercing eyes were so intense in their cold gaze. Harvey found that she couldn't look at him for long, and soon was tugging desperately at her shoelaces so she could pretend to tie them to avoid looking at the Norwegian necromancer, who apparently had a name, Calle.
"Ja sure. Just let me get my, um, pen..." She hastily finished tying her shoelaces, which she had succeeded in loosening, and briefly scanned the library. Just her luck. She was the only obviously 'ethnic' foreigner in the room out of the 3 other 'students' and Mrs Brevik, the librarian. She grabbed a bright blue paper mate that she had just used in her conclusion of the of the paper she had been writing and proceeded, almost mechanically, to answer the questions.
"Forste sporsmalet," she mumbled, reading out loud. "The first question," she translated in her head. "Hvor er du fra?" Where are you from? She scribbled "Malaysia", frantically wanting to be done with this awkward situation. ''On a scale of 1-10, how would you rate your Norwegian?" she read.
Well she was answering this, wasn't she? She gave herself a 'fem' , five, but then changed it to a four. The questions after questions were obviously sociological, and her desire to leave the library and Calle dissipated slowly.
"You are a Sociology student?" she asked, becoming more animated. Calle, the necromancer, shook his head.
"Nei. My friend is, and he's too lazy to get up and interview people. I'm studying marine biology."
Now Harvey couldn't resist raising her shapely, thick, black eyebrows that were her crowning glory, apart from her chestnut-black eyes, in her opinion.
The necromancer was intelligent!
"Marinbiologi? Oh, I'm doing medicine!" She didn't say that though she loved economics and excelled greatly in it, her career path was already chosen by her parents. Neither did he say he was destined to be, at least in his father's opinion, a great football player, and that he would have had he not gotten caught drinking heavily when he was playing in the Dana cup in Denmark, aged 16. He also didn't mention the fact that he was struggling to find a college to accept him to a course of marine biology, because his grades did not quite make the cut.
Both smiled at each other, with the awkwardness thawing, as if it were ice in between them, like in the coming of spring after winter. Their secrets unbeknownst to them, were bringing closer together.
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