Jens M. Johansson - Middle Class Hero (sample)

Adam opened the gate and stepped onto the tennis court. The surface was asphalted. Here and there a few weeds were poking up. He tested the ladder of the umpire chair. It was sturdy enough. He climbed up and took a seat. Only a few of the beads used to count the number of games and sets remained. The metal chair was rusty. He ran his fingers over the rough surface, and Adam came to think of the automatic weapon his father used to keep in the bedroom wardrobe when he was growing up. As a single dad, his father would probably have been able to get out of doing his military service, but he had enjoyed it, at least he thought he was supposed to. Adam didn’t know which one. But he remembered his father arriving home in his uniform, which he continued to wear well into the evening, and remembered how he would conduct himself differently in it. Adam remembered thinking how exciting it was to have dinner with a soldier, but later he just ended up connecting those memories with his father’s romanticised view of revolution. For a number of years they did practically nothing other than argue about it.

There was hardly a liberation army that his father didn’t keep track of and which he didn’t fully and completely support from their single-family home in Sinsen.

From the umpire chair, Adam looked across the grass between Trondheimsveien and the blocks of flats. All things considered, he felt better than he had done in a long time. That is, he had felt better than in a long time, until his father had blurted out that Iris was too good for him. What the hell did he know?

Ten months had passed. Ten brief months since she entered his office and told him that she had been unfaithful.

‘What?’

‘I had an affair.’

He had despised her calmness. He had felt like hitting her for the sake of equity, or simply for the satisfaction of getting back at her. ‘An affair! An affair! What the hell does that mean?’ he screamed. ‘One time? Several times? Where? In our bed? Who was it?’

She’d told him that the affair had gone on for a while, but that they had always gone to a hotel. The idea still made him nauseous. She had cried and apologised. He had cried and fumed. ‘Fucking cunt!’ And then she’d told him that she felt like she had already lost Adam, that was why she had done it. He was so disillusioned, she told him, so heavy, so dark and gloomy. ‘You’ve lost your sense of direction, you don’t believe in anything anymore.’ And he bellowed: ‘And you thought this would help!’ With his arms hanging helplessly at his side, he clenched his fists. ‘Who have you been fucking?’

Then Emma had arrived home from school and they’d had to restrain themselves somewhat.

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