It's Fine By Me

2

AUTUMN HAS COME, and I am on my newspaper round. Jimi Hendrix just died, they are playing ‘Hey Joe’ on the radio, and I have passed my driving test. I have my reefer jacket on, a pair of checked flares and a broad, red plaited belt with a loop buckle. Down the flare from the knee is a row of shiny buttons. It’s the latest fashion, and if anyone had seen me I would have really stood out. But not many people are up, only a lamp in the odd window, and as I walk the hills up from the block where I live towards the depot in the shopping centre, it’s a quarter past five. There is a frozen silver sheen on the lawns between the rows of terraced houses, and it’s not yet morning. I have had my hair cut in a moderate-mod style after several years of long hair, and I am not sure it’s such a big hit. So the gloom suits me fine.

I am tired, I still have homework to do and a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me something at school is not going the right way. What I do, I do well enough. What I hear, I remember and understand, I am not an idiot, but it’s as if the rest of my class has taken off on some journey they forgot to tell me about, as if there is a secret pact between teacher and students that does not include me. They know something I do not, and that’s how it has been for a long time now.

The others stand waiting in front of the entrance, I am the last to turn up, but there are no newspapers in sight. Konrad is there, and Fru Johansen, and the entire Vilden family, the two children yawning and leaning against their father’s back. This is what they live off, four newspaper rounds morning and afternoon, day in, day out. The oldest child, a girl, is fourteen years old, the boy twelve. They look as though they have just come out of the forest, you’d expect pine needles in their hair, but they live in Rådyrveien, in a flat, like the rest of us from Veitvet do. The mother is so ugly and bony that you have to like her, and the father, tall and distant, nods politely to the left, right and centre, and never says a word, just smiles and looks over our heads at something we don’t quite comprehend. High plains and spruce forests, I have always imagined. The girl is so attractive it’s hard to look her in the face.

‘Hi, Audun,’ says the boy called Tommy, and I say:

‘Hi Tommy, cool jacket.’ We often talk, I lend him old Cowboy and Indian books, and we are pals. He always seems to have a cold, a red patch under his nose, and he wears a striped, yellow jacket lined with fur and smiles happily, even though he has had the jacket on all week, and I have said ‘cool jacket’ every morning. I don’t talk to his sister, her eyes are so big and brown that after walking the same route for several years I still don’t know her name. But she looks at my new trousers.

We wait. It’s the third day in a row that the newspapers are late. Konrad’s moped is chugging away on its stand, he doesn’t switch it off unless he has to and burns up a hell of a lot of petrol. He already wears a cap, a grey bobble cap without a bobble that he pulls down so hard his ears stick out, like the retarded kids you see in town sometimes, and you wonder why they have to dress them like that. He has woollen gloves on with the fingers cut off, and his fingers are black with the old ink. He is fifty years old and lives with his sister in the terraced house right across from the women’s prison, and no one can wedge a newspaper behind a door handle like him. In one flowing movement his hand makes an arc in mid-air and the fat Aftenposten is lodged under the handle as hard as a board and never comes loose. How easy it looks, and yet I have tried it many times, and I cannot do it.

We hear the car before we see it, it’s the only sound there is apart from Konrad’s moped, and at full speed it sails up the incline from Veitvetveien, makes a U-turn in front of the depot and comes to a stop by our barrows. The driver jumps out, yanks the side doors back and hauls out the big bundles of newspapers. He drops them on the tarmac, with a loud groan each time, thwack, thwack they go, hitting the ground with a solid thud I’ve always thought had something to do with what is in the newspapers.

I pull out my two bundles and load them on to the barrow, cut the strings and check to see if there are any new subscribers. There are: two. I enter their names in my book and start dragging the barrow towards Grevlingveien. The others set off on their separate routes. Konrad up to Trondhjemsveien, Fru Johansen along Beverveien, which is where I live, and the Vilden family down to the houses along Rådyrveien. Tommy is carrying a huge bundle of papers. As usual he has cut the strings first, and now the papers start slipping and sliding in his arms, and the whole caboodle is on the verge of crashing to the ground. His sister comes over, bends down to give a hand, and they are so wonderful to watch it takes my breath away, but I too have siblings. One brother and a sister. That is, I had a brother. Last year he drove a Volvo Amazon that did not belong to him into the river Glomma and drowned. It happened just a few miles from where we used to live before we moved to Veitvet. It was an Amazon with all the extras: fox tail on the aerial, GT steering wheel and fur-lined seat covers at the front.

The girl in the passenger seat survived. She wept and said they hadn’t touched a drop. I don’t believe that for one moment. Egil had just turned fifteen the autumn before and didn’t have a licence yet. After we moved to Oslo he went back as often as he could when he was old enough to go alone. I didn’t. I only go there when I have to.

My sister moved out just after the accident. She is four years older than me, and of course she too had to go back. Now she lives with her boyfriend in Kløfta. He sells second-hand cars and makes money. I am sure he beats her, but I have never seen anything, and Kari does not say a word. If ever I catch him I’ll beat him up. That won’t cost me much. I have been training for years. With my newspaper money I bought a bench and weights.

I tell my mother.

‘I’ll give him a thrashing,’ I say. And she listens to me and then she quotes Lars Ekborg, the Swede who has a talk show on the radio where he goes on and on about all kinds of shit happening in the world and always rounds off by saying: ‘You’ve got to be tough, you really do!’

‘Is that how you want it?’ she laughs. Sure, it’s easy to make fun, but I know what I know.

I remember Egil and me playing on the living-room floor in our old house. There was a massive cupboard we used to crawl under. My grandfather, who worked at the sawmill in the next village, had made it himself out of some dark wood and there were glass doors. It was a fine cupboard, his greatest achievement, but it must have drained his creativity, for he never made a piece of furniture again.

Then my father came in. It was late, and we should have been in bed by then. He leaned against the door frame and looked at us with a stupid smile on his face.

‘Are there any good children here?’ he slurred. He seemed drunk. I had seen him drunk many times before. I knew the signs.

‘Oh yes,’ Egil said, crawling out from under the cupboard where he had been hiding. He was such an idiot, he would have said yes to anything. I sat on the floor and watched my father leaning heavily against the door frame. I did not trust him.

He straightened up and staggered towards us across the carpet.

‘See this,’ he said, and shoved his hand into his breast pocket and pulled out some banknotes. ‘Here’s a little something for two good boys.’ He stumbled forward with a big grin and pushed a blue five-kroner note at each of us.

‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ Egil cried, and started running round and jumping up and down on the floor. ‘Oh, thank you very, very much, Dad, you’re so kind!’ he shouted. I felt the crisp crackle of the note in my hand. Five kroner was a lot of money to me. Just a little more, with what I had already saved up, and it would be enough to buy the shiny bow I had looked at so many times in the sports shop by the station.

I watched my father standing in the middle of the floor with his hands on his hips and his head at an angle. He didn’t look so drunk now, he was watching us closely and there was a glint in his eye I did not like. Suddenly he burst into laughter, and then his face froze, he came back across the floor and snatched the notes from our hands and said:

‘That’s enough fun for tonight!’ He turned on his heel without a stagger, stuffed the notes back in his breast pocket and marched to the kitchen as straight as a flagpole. ‘Now, get to bed, it’s late,’ he said.

At first my brother stood with his mouth wide open, then he began to howl like the baby he was. ‘Waaaah!’ he wailed. ‘Waaah!’ Tears gushed from his eyes, and I went over to him and punched him in the shoulder.

‘You idiot,’ I said, punching him hard a second time. ‘You goddamn birdbrain, shut up!’ I hissed, and then I walked past him on my way upstairs to bed.

‘I never did anything to you!’ he yelled after me.

It was my last year as Wata, Davy Crockett’s friend of the Creek tribe. As soon as I was on my own, I was Wata. I was twelve years old, and I went up the squeaking stairs to the first floor of what I thought of as our log cabin, and I hated it now, it felt so cramped I could not breathe.

Inside our room, I stood by the window gazing out at the dark edge of the forest, longing to be there. There were paths running through it I knew better than the house I lived in. That night there was a moon, big and yellow, and I lingered and kept watch as Wata would have done, and then I got into bed without cleaning my teeth and hoped that Egil would not be up before I had gone to sleep. I pinched my eyes shut and thought of the shiny bow I would never have.

‘Shit!’ I said aloud in the darkness. ‘You goddamn paleface!’ But that did not help much, and I knew that Wata’s days were numbered. He could not be my companion any longer. I saw him glide through the night, fleet-footed and silent through the trees on his way back into the books, his brown body and his three white feathers gleaming in the moonlight.

Now Tommy has his newspapers under control, his sister gives him a hug, the yellow stripes of his jacket shining, and they disappear round a corner. I take twenty papers from the barrow, fold them under my arm and start working my way along the first houses in Grevlingveien. This is what I like. To be left in peace, feel the morning air on my face, feel every step, how my arms and legs move, and the morning so still, and I don’t have to think about anything. My round goes like clockwork, the shining door handles line up and I feed them with newspapers. I have never missed a single one, never given anyone a paper they shouldn’t have, and I know every door sign so well that at first I don’t even remember what they say, just what they look like, the shape of the letters, the colours and where on the door they are. I can think of a house, picture it, choose that door and then read the sign any time, anywhere, asleep in bed, at school, on holiday, it’s in my bones, and that’s fine with me.

I cross Veitvetsvingen down by the red telephone kiosk. I have a quick look under the grate on the floor to see if any change has fallen through, a habit I guess I’ll never quit, and as always I find two or three kroner. But I blush and hope there is no one watching me from behind their curtains.

There are only terraced houses along the road, and a few years ago I thought maybe it was posher to live here rather than in the tenement blocks, until I realised that the blocks were just two terraced houses on top of each other, and inside they were identical. At the bottom of the hill, on the left, there is a terrace of eight flats. Arvid lives in the one next to last. It’s the only house with balconies, and in the old days Arvid was nervous it would make him upper class, because nobody we knew lived in a house with a balcony. But I didn’t reckon three and a half square metres of balcony was enough to make him upper class, especially since his father worked night shifts at the Jordan brush factory. Arvid was happy to hear that. Under no circumstances did he want to be upper class, and as far as that goes, we both stand firm.

I walk up the flagstone path and round the back of Arvid’s house. There are four subscribers here. His father is not among them, but as I pass I stop at the kitchen window and peer in. It’s dark inside, so he is not home from the night shift yet. I turn at the end of the house and on to the road again, and look up at Arvid’s window on the first floor, pick up a pebble and throw it against the pane. I hear it hit the glass and Arvid is there at once. I don’t know anyone who’s such a light sleeper, and he is often tired at school. He sticks out his dark head, I roll up a newspaper tight and skim it at an angle like a boomerang, and it makes a perfect arc, and Arvid snatches it out of the air before it hits the window frame. We have done this before.

‘Latest news from Vietnam,’ I say.

‘I guess they’re bombing Hanoi again.’ He yawns and runs his hand through his hair which is curly and very thick.

‘You bet,’ I say. Arvid is in the National Liberation Front group at school. He can go on for hours about it. I am a passive member, I have too many other things on my mind.

‘I’ll read it later,’ he says, ‘I have stuff to do. I’ve got to go.’

‘What sort of stuff?’

‘You’ll see it when you see it.’

‘See you at school,’ I say and he salutes me with a clenched fist behind the window. I walk towards the barrow and then turn on my heel, but he is gone and I grab the handle and trudge round the bend back towards Grevlingveien.

Morning is coming, but there is not much light yet, it’s October, after all, and the early risers are coming down the road towards the Metro. I say hello and one of them looks at my hair and another one at my trousers and is annoyed because I am late, but I splay my hands and say it’s not my fault, and then a few papers tumble to the ground. The man looks up, rolls his eyes, and I mutter a silent curse.

Old Abrahamsen comes out on to the step and angrily slams the door behind him. Every day he does this and has done so for as long as I can remember. He works at the harbour and is carrying his rucksack. He used to live in Vika, not far from where he worked, straight out of the door, past Oslo West station and there he was, but they demolished Vika and now he has to travel into town every morning, and even though it’s fifteen years since he had to move, he is still fuming. The Metro is too newfangled, so he walks up Trondhjemsveien and takes the number 30 bus as he has been doing for almost two decades.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Just in time for the paper — read it on the bus,’ and he smiles and says:

‘Well, you know, Aftenposten is really not my thing, but you have to keep up to date.’

I know, he is a socialist, but he is so stingy he has literally weighed the Aftenposten and the left-wing Arbeiderbladet and found that with Aftenposten he gets more kilos for his money. He puts the paper under his arm and all of a sudden is a much happier man and is off down the road, the rucksack bumping on his back.

I am seriously late now and pick up the pace and stop greeting people. The road narrows, the last houses are at the edge of Dumpa, where Condom Creek flows through, and on the other side, the ground rises in a steep arch up to the women’s prison at the top. Heavy and sombre, it faces Groruddalen valley and the ribbon of morning light that’s stealing in over Furuset, and only a solitary lamp burns in the prison courtyard. It seems cold, the light, and I go cold myself, for the mere thought of so many women locked in behind those thick walls is painful, and I wonder what they recall when they wake up in the morning, what they speak about over dinner, what they think about when they go to bed at night. I picture people in chains, and know it’s not like that, but what do they see when they look out the windows?

Fru Karlsen is standing on the steps as I come round the corner to the very last house. She is smiling and I know she has been waiting for me. She often does. She is holding an envelope in her hand, and when I pass her the newspaper she puts the envelope in my jacket pocket and says: ‘I was away for your birthday, you know, but better late than never. Many happy returns.’

I didn’t know she had been away, but she has found out when my birthday is and made a point of remembering it and now she is giving me a present. It feels awkward. Only my mother gives me birthday presents and that’s the way it’s always been. And then this lady. She smells nice. She can’t be a day over forty, she’s good-looking, too. I feel my pulse racing, and the words I was going to say fall back into my mouth and are gone. But she smiles and has a good look at my checked trousers and my hair and smiles even more and then she strokes my cheek before she closes the door. My cheek burns and I am not able to say thank you, or anything else for that matter, just stand there looking at the door where it says Karlsen. I know she has a husband, but I have never seen him. He is probably an idiot. The heat from my face spreads down my neck to my chest.

I open the envelope and there is a hundred-kroner note inside. Hell, a hundred kroner, that’s too much. My legs start to itch, I have to get out of here. I dare not turn round. She might be standing behind the curtains watching, maybe expecting some sign from me.

Grevlingveien is a dead end street, but a footpath at the end leads up to Trondhjemsveien, alongside the Metro track. I leave the barrow and walk up far enough to be out of Fru Karlsen’s sight and lean against the wire mesh fence by the path, take the tobacco from my jacket, roll a cigarette and light it. Behind the fence the hill rises sharply, and there is a white house on the top where the prison governor lives, and the fields beneath have always had that smell of burnt withered grass in the spring. Now they smell of damp and mould. I shudder and take a deep drag and after a while I feel better. But a hundred kroner, that’s not good.

I finish my cigarette and kill it with my shoe on the gravel, shoot a glance up towards Trondhjemsveien before I have to go back down, and there he is. There are maybe thirty metres between us, and I have not seen him for five years. But I know him at once. The black hair, the snappy black suit he seems to have slept in, the nondescript grey shirt without a tie. His suntanned neck and grey stubble; the unnaturally blue eyes I can’t make out just now, but I know they’re looking at me without even blinking. I cannot move, and he is standing stock still. I try to think, but nothing comes to mind, and he takes two steps down the footpath, and then I shout:

‘STOP!’ He stops, grabs the straps of his rucksack and waits. He is so dark, and as slim as a blade and not like anything else. Behind him, I can see the high-rises in Rødtvet and behind them just the forest and more forest and I know that’s where he has come from. Had I been standing close to him now, I would have caught the smell of bonfire and pine trees and tobacco, and something more that could only be him. But I’m not standing close, and he scratches his chin, shakes his head, and I realise he hasn’t recognised me until now. That’s no surprise. I am much taller than when I was thirteen, I wear different clothes and my hair is different. He raises his hand as if to salute me, like an Indian would, and walks on a few paces, and I’m almost certain he’s smiling.

‘NOT ONE MORE STEP!’ I shout. ‘WHAT THE HELL ARE YOU DOING HERE? GO AWAY!’ I raise my clenched fists, and my body tells me I am stronger than him. He stops, resting his hands on his hips and tips his head to the side in a pose I know so well, and it always unsettled me, which is what it’s supposed to do. I stand with my fists in the air, and maybe he too feels unsettled. At any rate he turns and heads back for the main road, and I stay there until I am certain he has gone, and only then do I hurry down, back to the houses. I’m just a few steps along the footpath when I hear his laughter, and it makes my blood run cold. I cannot restrain myself and break into a run.

3

I CROSS TRONDHJEMSVEIEN, walk past the church at Grorud and down the hills. I took the Metro today, I didn’t want to walk the whole way, I couldn’t do it. I sat all the way up looking straight ahead of me. My neck is aching, and still it’s a long walk. Something growing in my chest makes me short of breath, forcing me to swallow again and again, but it doesn’t help. I gaze into the cemetery where Egil is buried. It’s hard to walk past without stopping, but when I do, I don’t know what to think about him being dead. Like I always do, I stand there with my mind going blank and a wave of heat rushing up from my legs. I walk down the hill and it’s as if someone is staring at me from behind.

I have changed my checked flares for regular Wranglers. I didn’t have to, but still, it’s a relief.

I come down the hill on to the brow and the narrow valley opens up and branches off onto Østre Aker vei, and just ahead of me is the yellow school building right by Grorud railway station and Grorud ironware factory barely visible behind the hillock to the left. On the other side of the railway line, there are the star-shaped houses where many of my classmates live: May Brit, Bente and Bente and Henrik. Their fathers are train drivers, or something else to do with the railway, and they all know each other. The school is at the bottom of the valley, and, to the left, beneath the cliff, the teachers live in their terraced houses, and a few writers too: Tor Obrestad, Einar Økland and Paal-Helge Haugen. Like birds on a wire, they sit in their windows looking up to the sky with the sun on their faces, holding on to the secret, and I envy them so furiously it makes my legs tremble. I have Haugen’s Anne in my rucksack. It’s like nothing else. So far, Gorky has been my hero, My Childhood the book above books, but Anne is lying there, in the book, seeing herself and the world through a haze of fever, and I can’t get her out of my head, it makes me think about when I was thirteen, in bed with yellow fever in a house I hated more than anything else.

There is a cold wind blowing through Groruddalen, a constant blast of air all the way from the sea right up to Gjelleråsen Ridge, sweeping along Trondhjemsveien, chilling Østre Aker vei, and even the toughest boy wears a cap in winter to keep his ears from freezing to glass. It’s still only October, but I am shivering where I stand looking almost right down into the schoolyard. The flag is flying though I can’t imagine why. A gust of wind comes and unfurls it and I laugh out loud because the flag is red and blue with a large yellow star in the centre, it’s a rebel flag, it gives me a jolt just to see it there, and from where I am standing it’s clear that the halyard has been cut. If they want the flag taken down, they’ll have to climb the pole first. I hurry down the last hill.

Down in the schoolyard, I see Arvid standing alone in the corner between the gymnasium and the slope Fru Haugen usually comes tripping down, her red hair on fire by the trees on the way to her music lessons. Arvid’s leaning against the wall, smoking and looking at the flagpole and the NLF colours flying. It is beautiful and unsettling at the same time; he smiles, a little cautiously, it seems, stubs out the cigarette and comes up to me. We are both late for different reasons, almost everyone has gone in for the first lesson and there are no teachers around. Together we walk to the hall with our bags over our shoulders.

‘OK then,’ I say, ‘that’s what you had to do?’

‘Yes,’ he says, ‘and now I guess there will be trouble.’

‘Did you expect anything else?’

‘Hell, no.’

And trouble there is. We have history with Wollebæk. After half an hour Arvid and Bente have tangled him in a long debate about imperialism and India’s development after Gandhi and then there is a knock at the door and in comes the headmaster. He reads out two names. They get to their feet and go with him. The two are Arvid and Henrik. When the bell rings they still haven’t returned, but outside, on the steps, we see them standing by the flagpole arguing with the headmaster. He wants them to climb up the pole to bring down the flag. They refuse. Students come streaming out and stand around them in a circle. The yard is packed, the headmaster waving with his hands, he’s warning them. Arvid and Henrik turn their back on him. Many Young Conservatives shout Boo! And the Young Socialists shout Victory To The NLF! but everyone else is just waiting to see what will happen. The headmaster turns to the crowd and starts to speak about 1814 and the founding fathers at Eidsvoll and the WAR and those who fought in it and what they would think if they saw foreign colours flying from a Norwegian flagpole. He waves his finger like a demagogue and stabs his points home, but his voice is unimpressive, it cracks on the high note, and those standing close to him, they grin and cover their mouths with their hands, and some at the back of the crowd jeer loudly, and Arvid turns and shouts:

‘But goddamnit, there is a difference, isn’t there! That flag,’ he shouts, pointing to the top of the pole, ‘is goddamnit the flag of an occupied country, just like we were! And the occupier is goddamnit the United States of America, that you’re so happy to have bossing the Norwegian foreign policy through NATO!’ The Young Conservatives howl as if possessed, they stamp their yachting shoes, jump up and down in their blue blazers and the headmaster’s face goes blotchy. I am still standing on the steps looking over the heads in front of me, and what I see is Simen Bjørnsen, the head of the school’s Young Conservatives, the Boy Scout, the great sportsman, on his way up the flagpole. He climbs like a monkey, he’s a natural, and before anyone has really taken it in, he is halfway up. The schoolyard explodes, it’s worse than on sports day, and as Simen slaps his hand on the top, unties the flag and lets it sail over the playground red and blue and yellow, and really, I don’t give a damn about this. I guess it’s all very important, but I am up to my neck in my own troubles, and it almost makes me throw up.

The crowd disperses and Arvid comes plodding after the headmaster towards his office. He looks defiant and lonely as he passes, and I pat him on the shoulder. He turns and looks into my eyes, but doesn’t see there what he is looking for, for he doesn’t even try to smile, just walks behind the headmaster with Henrik at his heels, and I don’t see him again that day.

Neither do I see him the next day, and when I get home from school I give him a call, and his mother tells me he has been expelled for a week. Two days for the flag and three days for swearing at the headmaster. And also, his conduct grade has fallen a notch, and if he behaves like this again, they won’t allow him to take his final exams. His father is in a rage, his mother tells me, though she seems quite unconcerned herself.

‘Can I talk to him?’

‘He’s out walking.’

‘Oh, is he. Where, then?’

‘I have no idea. I guess it’s me who should be asking you. Where do you two usually go?’

I know, of course, but I’m not telling her.

‘Don’t ask. I’ll find him. Bye.’

I get dressed and go out and along the Sing-Sing balcony that runs along the third floor. What I really should have been doing is the afternoon round with Aftenposten, but I said I couldn’t do it any more. It was too much, I didn’t get my homework done. And, to tell the truth, I was fed up with it. At school I’m exhausted because I get up well before dawn, and so I sit there at my desk knowing I have to go out again as soon as I get home. It’s one thing delivering papers before people get up in the morning, another being on display when everybody’s outside doing whatever or sitting by the window, watching me with some hilarious remark up their sleeve.

I walk past the Metro station, up along Veitvetveien to Trondhjemsveien and through the underpass and then zigzag up between the blocks in Slettaløkka. At the top, before the forest, is the fenced-off area of the Nike missile battalion with the tall lookout tower and the big iron gate and the sentry box. Today, the gate is open, but there is no guard. That’s fine with me, I didn’t plan to sneak in anyway.

The path into the forest starts just beyond the football pitch that the soldiers and local people share, and to the right are the cracked-up foundations of an old smallholding owned by the Linderud estate. The house was still standing when I moved here. I remember grey smoke from the chimney, snowflakes melting on the roof and a face in the shadows behind the window. She must be dead now. Below is the horse field. It slopes sharply down and rises again to the edge of the forest. Inside it is a clearing, and inside the clearing is a huge rock. It’s twenty metres long and ten metres wide and shaped like a fortress it’s easy to defend against enemy attacks, and then there are hollows where you can hide if there’s an invasion and several secret passages out if you need to escape. I just caught the last wars before I got too old for that kind of thing, but Arvid grew up among these rocks, and this is where he goes when he wants to be alone. I walk across the meadow, there is only one horse, it’s brown with white socks, it’s just a horse, nothing special. On my way up I see him on the top of the rock with a book in his hand and a cigarette between his lips. Even from a distance, I can see it clearly in the corner of his mouth, and he takes it out and blows smoke above the book, and the smoke curls in the autumn air, and it seems odd, like something I have seen in a film, and he stands up and watches me as I walk across the field.

For a moment there, it’s difficult to be the one who is approaching. I almost turn and go back. He stands quite still watching me. Someone is watching me, and I don’t know what he expects. I feel like going back. This has never happened before. Not with Arvid. He is my friend, we have been friends for five years, since the first break on the first day at school in the autumn of 1965, and hardly a day has passed when we haven’t talked, and now here he is, watching me approach, and I do not know who it is that he sees.

But it’s only a moment, and then things fall back into place, he raises the hand holding the book and I wave back, and what I’m thinking is, I will always get by on my own.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘Hi.’ He climbs down from the rock.

‘It’s damn cold.’

‘Hell, yes,’ he says, a bit uncertain, because, in fact, it isn’t cold any more, but it was this morning, and nothing else occurs to me just then, and the only sound is the sound of the horse snorting in the field. It’s restless and tosses its head and backs away. We can’t see what it is it’s afraid of, but now it is prancing on stiff legs and suddenly rears round and gallops towards where we are standing. It all happens so fast, it is sudden and violent and now the horse does look remarkable, for it is a thing of beauty, and even though there are many beautiful things in this world, it is always a strange feeling when you actually see them. And what we see is this animal with ears pinned back, its brown skin steaming and legs like shadows beneath its belly, and the hooves hammering the ground like a train over jointed tracks. I feel Arvid go stiff. I grab his shoulder and go stiff myself, although I have grown up among horses, and the instant before it hits us, I can see everything around me with brilliant clarity: the brilliant blue autumn sky, the yellow ridges, yes, every leaf up close and binocular-sharp in the limpid air. I suck the air down and howl WAAAHH! The horse turns in a flash and veers to the right and comes to a halt another twenty metres down the field, its flanks quivering, and then lowers its neck and snatches a mouthful of grass as though nothing has happened.

‘Goddamnit,’ Arvid says, ‘that was something. Do you think it would have knocked us down?’

‘What? No, I’ve never heard of anything like that. I don’t know what spooked it, but I knew it would stop.’

‘You screamed.’

‘Because it was so damn beautiful.’

Arvid throws himself down on to the grass with his arms stretched wide and bursts into laughter, and I too have to laugh, because what was awkward between us has evaporated in the wake of the horse. I sit down on a boulder and roll myself a cigarette.

‘How are you? Your mother said you got a week.’

‘I don’t know, really. It was lousy being expelled, but now I have time to read more.’ He waves his book. ‘Strong stuff. Do you know it?’

It’s Jan Myrdal’s Confessions of a Disloyal European, that has just been published by Pax. I know Jan Myrdal. Arvid has been taking the Metro to Oslo East every weekend to buy the Swedish paper Aftonbladet where Myrdal has a column, but this book I haven’t seen.

‘You can have it when I’ve finished.’

‘I can buy it myself. I guess I have more money than you have. How’s Henrik?’

‘We planned it together, but of course I was the one who hoisted the flag, and that’s what I told them, so it was me who got expelled. But listen to this,’ he says, and reads:

‘“In Ceylon I talk to a nice European tea planter.

‘“‘So how many people live in this district?’ I ask.

‘“‘We are only four families,’ he says.

‘“‘That’s not very many,’ I say.

‘“‘And twenty-five thousand Tamils, of course,’ he says.”’

‘Shit, let me see.’ He hands me the book, and I read the page, and the next; it’s pure, concise writing about things that you walk around turning over in your mind. I have to have this book, there is something different here, open, bold. I give it back.

‘Come along,’ I say, climbing the rock to the highest point and Arvid comes with me. From where we stand, we can see past the fields to Rødtvet and Kaldbakken and a tiny slice of Trondhjemsveien where the footpath descends to the houses in Veitvet. I point.

‘Do you know who I saw there yesterday morning?’

‘How would I know?’

‘My father.’

‘Your father? Hell, isn’t he dead?’

‘Did I ever say that?’

He thought for a moment. ‘No, I guess you haven’t. As far as I remember, you haven’t said a thing about him, ever. That’s why I thought he was dead.’

‘No. He isn’t dead.’

‘I see,’ Arvid says. He looks bewildered, and looks down at Trondhjemsveien as if there was something he could find there.

So now I’ve said it. I shouldn’t have, because then I may have to tell him more. Arvid is my friend, and now he looks at me, and my mind goes dim, and all around me it’s getting dark, the forest is dark, it’s late in the day and no longer possible to see in between the trees. It’s all shadows. I turn my back, but that doesn’t make it any better, a chill runs up my spine, and I can’t stand still. I start to move down the rock, jumping from boulder to boulder as fast as I can, and Arvid is behind me.

‘Hey, you, wait, for Christ’s sake.’

But I don’t.

4

THERE IS A man dressed in black wandering the paths in the great forest. He walks day and night with a grey rucksack on his back. In the rucksack he has a pistol. Sometimes there is a metallic clink when it knocks against other things he carries with him. But no one hears. Only he is walking these paths. His pace is even, confident and not too fast, he has all the time in the world. He walks twenty kilometres a day, and when evening falls, he lights a fire close to water. The flames illuminate his weather-beaten face and when he bends down to throw more wood on the fire, the black fringe falls across his forehead. He lies down to sleep a few hours, and then, in the night, he walks another ten kilometres. His blue eyes sparkle in the dark, an owl sits blinking on a branch, and he never takes a wrong turn. He wears brown rubber boots, and he crosses streams and bogs when he has to, and he climbs the ridges. On the last ridge he halts and looks about him with a thin smile. From the top he can see a broad valley with terraced houses and high-rises and a big road leading north. He has arrived now. He drops his rucksack in the heather and sits down on a rock. He rolls a cigarette, there is a hiss as he lights up, both the sun and moon are out and he sits there watching for a long time. His hands are large and brown and rough, and there are deep furrows down both his cheeks. From his rucksack he pulls out a bottle and takes a long swig; he screws up his eyes, tightens the top and puts the green bottle back. There is a clink, and again he smiles. He finishes his cigarette and stubs it out on the rock where he is sitting. He gets up and without looking back, he walks into the forest until he finds a place that feels right. There, he rests the rucksack against a tree, takes an axe and starts to build a shelter. He is working on it all day. It is small, but it’s waterproof and solid: he has done this many times before. As night falls, he takes out a primus stove, pumps paraffin into the burner head, lights a match and puts a frying pan on top. He tosses bacon in the pan and sits on a tree stump to wait. He has all the time in the world.

The alarm clock glows half-past one and I have no idea what woke me up, but now I cannot sleep. Outside, the rain is falling, even and solid as a wall, a shushing wall. The street lamps flicker as I lean against the windowsill and look out. The grey Sing-Sing houses out there have sunk into the ground, been washed away. Just this rain and the street lamps.

I have been dreaming. I am trembling, my forehead feels heavy and there is sand behind my eyelids. I am still drunk and cannot collect my thoughts. The only thing I remember is the dream and Arvid in the doorway. I am on my way out and he is about to tell me something important, his arms cut the air, but we have drunk too much, there is a rushing in my ears and I cannot hear what he is saying. There is a warm glow from inside the living room, he is alone, his sister and his parents have taken the night ferry to Denmark. They are going to a funeral. He stands dark against the light and is the best friend I have ever had and it doesn’t matter that I cannot hear what he is saying.

In the room the air is stale and clammy. I open the window, and the October night seeps in, heavy, moist, you can almost touch it, and I stand in front of the open window wearing only my underpants and feel like screaming. The skin down my thighs and stomach feels tight, and I beat my hand on the sill until it hurts.

In the dark I grope for my sweater and a pair of trousers, pull them on and sit in the armchair I got from the old three-piece we used to have in the living room. I fumble my way and find the tobacco and matches on the table. I roll a smoke and light up. The match flares, and for a split second the room is illuminated, a little shock to the eye, and then it goes dark again; darker, even.

I sit smoking, hearing the drumming from outside, then I get up and go to my desk, switch on the lamp that only gives off a muted light, open a drawer and take out a battered copy of Penthouse. I have seen it before, many times, I am sick of it, and yet I leaf through it. There is a sequence with two girls. They are so naked their skin gleams and must be so soft to the touch, they are touching each other and it does look genuine. I know it’s not, but I look anyway. I thumb through and the two girls touch each other more, slim hands on shiny skin, their mouths half open, eyes half open, and then they are all over each other, and I close my eyes and think about Fru Karlsen, the skin on her neck down to her shoulders and then further down, and I unbutton my trousers and touch myself, my right hand firmly round my dick. And while I’m doing this, I think how sad it is to be sitting alone in a room in the middle of the night like this, and my own thoughts distract me, and I have to concentrate, have to look at the magazine again and it takes longer than usual and afterwards the room is empty and there is a draught from the open window. I throw the Penthouse out into the rain and close the window with a bang. Then I go into the bathroom and wash.

Back in the room, I switch off the lamp and light the cigarette that’s gone out in the ashtray. Now only the glow of the cigarette is visible and the faint square that is the window. When I feel I’m tired, I lie on the bed with my clothes on. I am almost asleep when I hear a sound I have not heard for years. I get out of bed and tiptoe across the floor, into the hall and over to the door of my mother’s bedroom. Through a crack in the doorway I can see the white back of a man moving. I do not know him, and I quickly turn round. He must have been in the house the whole time as there was no one up when I returned from Arvid’s. This time I undress and lie close to the wall with the duvet tight around me.

I wake up and the sun is shining straight into my face. Someone has been in here and opened the curtains. I get out of bed, feel my head hurting a bit, but everything in the room is bright, and it’s a bright blue morning, Sunday morning, and of course I can’t remember my plan for the day. I roll a cigarette although it’s stupid to smoke before breakfast, but I don’t want to go downstairs yet. I watch the blue smoke curl under the ceiling, look at myself in the mirror above the dressing table, put my old sunglasses on and keep them on while I look at myself smoking. I hear the church bells chime from the top of the shopping centre.

I take a book from the shelf over my desk. It is worn, dog-eared with stains on the jacket, and then I get into bed and start reading. It was Arvid’s father who said we ought to read that book, but Arvid had already read it, he has read all the books that are worth a damn, and his father must have known that. He only said it so he could add:

‘Read this one, boys, then perhaps you’ll understand what it’s like to toil and sweat for the things you want!’ Arvid groaned, but I read the book, and this is the third time now. It is called Martin Eden and was written by Jack London. I had read The Call of the Wild and The Sea Wolf, almost everyone we know has read them, but only Arvid and I have read Martin Eden, and we keep it to ourselves.

There is something about this book, and there is something about his struggle, and as soon as I had read it I knew I wanted to be a writer, and if I didn’t make it, I would be an unhappy person.

I hear them talking down in the kitchen. There is a smell of fried bacon and coffee, but I don’t want to go downstairs, and now that I have heard them, I find it difficult to concentrate on the book. I put it down and go over to the weights bench, which I have placed between the bed and the chest of drawers, lie down flat on my back and raise the bar from the stand and quickly pump it twenty times. I get up and add ten kilos on each side and do twenty more. I feel warm now, it’s really too early in the day, but I don’t care. I am really eager, and I double the weights, do quick, rhythmic lifts and feel my chest tighten, and my biceps, and my stomach is working like it should, going smooth and easy as a ball bearing. I know who I am, I am drenched and this is my sweat. Only my mother and I live here now, and that suits me fine.

I shower, splash and make a lot of noise, and as I turn the water off I hear the front door slam. I’m in no hurry, and when I come downstairs to the kitchen, she is alone, standing by the stove, looking out of the window with her mind somewhere else. I sit down at the table and look at her. She is forty-three years old. Then she turns and looks at me.

‘When did you get home last night?’ she says. Not a word about the man who has just left.

‘I don’t know, twelve, maybe half-past. I don’t know. Anyway, you weren’t up.’

‘No, I wasn’t.’

‘Of course you weren’t.’

She blushes, but refuses to say anything about the man who has left. ‘You were at Arvid’s, weren’t you?’ I nod and help myself to what’s left of the bacon and a slice of bread.

‘Isn’t he supposed to be in Denmark? I heard his grandfather had died.’

‘He didn’t want to go there. I guess that’s his business.’

My mother shrugs, I eat and then the telephone rings. We have a telephone now. She answers it cautiously. ‘Hello?’ she says.

‘It’s Arvid,’ she says. I get up from the table, still chewing, and take the receiver.

‘Hi,’ I say, and chew a little slower for it is hard to make out what he’s saying, but I understand that he wants me to come over. ‘OK, I’ll be right there,’ I say and gently put the receiver down, and as I am doing so, I hear his voice again and I lift it quickly, but then it’s the dialling tone.

‘I have to rush,’ I tell my mother and grab another piece of bread and eat it going into the hall and put my jacket on and my shoes.

‘Didn’t you say you would stay home today?’

‘I never said that,’ I say, and know full well I said so yesterday. I open the door and turn, and she is standing in the light from the kitchen window and is no more than a silhouette and that makes it easier.

‘What about letting me know if more than the two of us will be living here?’ I say, and I am outside before she has the time to answer.

5

I WALK UP Beverveien towards the Metro station by the shopping centre. It is twelve o’clock. Over the rooftops I can hear the bells ringing after church. It’s still cold, but the sky is all blue and the sun is thawing the mud on the road, and it leaves grey-brown stripes on my shoes, and outside the station there are shards of glass and blood-stains on the tarmac. They are pink and pale after the night. On the corner in front of Stallen, which used to be Glasmagasinet, people are looking at the display they have seen a hundred times before. They’re pretending to be out for a Sunday stroll. But I know them and know they are circling the centre waiting for Geir’s bar to open at one. They just can’t stay at home any longer and keep their fists in their pockets to hide their shaking hands. I feel like yelling at them, for Christ’s sake pull yourselves together, and stay out of my way! I know they won’t pull themselves together, it’s too late. They are old, their days are over, everything they have known is gone, all the things they could do, and now here they stand, scraping their feet against the ground, letting the clock tick them closer to their first gulp, and then they’ll sit and drink until their bodies calm down and will talk rubbish about everything being so wonderful, and when evening comes, they have to go home, and so they fall asleep early and hope their dreams won’t be too bad, and then they wake up the next morning as always.

I open my jacket at the neck, I suck in the air and expand my chest to its limit, and then I walk round to the lower side of the shopping centre and along Grevlingveien to Veitvetsvingen and down to the house where Arvid lives.

I knock first, and then I ring the bell, but there is no answer even though I wait for about five minutes, so I turn the handle, and the door is open, and I step into the hall.

‘Arvid?’ I call, not too loud, and there is no response. I walk on into the living room and see that he has thrown up in the middle of the floor. Luckily for him there is lino down and not the wall-to-wall carpet almost everyone has now. I go into the kitchen and fill a bucket of water, find a rag and wash the floor and pour the crap down the sink and flush it with hot water so it will all go away. That’s no easy job. What’s left I have to remove with a paper towel and throw in the waste bin. I take the bin bag from the stand, tie it up and put it in the hall ready to be carried out. The smell is not the greatest, so I open the door.

I wash my hands and go back to the living room and head for the stairs. At the foot of the stairs there is a bookcase with Tolstoy and Ingstad and Gorky and Jack London and all the others. It belongs to Arvid’s father, from before the war, but Arvid took it over long ago. It has rose carvings along the front at the top and women’s bodies and men’s faces down the sides, and the wood is dark with oil and not like anything else in the flat. I run my fingers over one of the female bodies, then go upstairs, the steps creaking as they always do, and I can hear Arvid groan inside his room. I look in and there he is, lying flat on the bed with his clothes on and his head over the edge, talking into a bucket.

‘Interesting conversation,’ I say, and walk straight in and open the window because the air is thick and bad for his health.

‘Comedian,’ he gurgles into the bucket. On the floor is the ashtray we used last night, full of dog ends. I pick it up, empty the mess down the toilet and wash it in the sink. The bottle beside the bed was half full when I left last night. It’s empty now.

‘Have you heard the news on the radio?’ I ask.

‘No, Goddamnit.’

‘Nixon’s announced a full withdrawal.’

‘What!?’ He yanks his head up from the bucket. ‘Is that true?’

‘No, but you could do with a shower. It’s not beyond you.’

‘Idiot!’ He tries to stand up, and his face goes all white and he has to sit back down. He swallows and struggles with something stuck in his throat.

‘Come on,’ I say, but he is resting his head on his arms and looks as if maybe he’s crying. I go out and find a towel in the cupboard by the bathroom and toss it through the door. It hits him on the forehead.

‘Pull yourself together. Get into that shower, and then we’re out of here.’ I go downstairs and sit down in the living room and roll a cigarette. At first it is quiet up there, and then I hear him shuffling across the floor, and at last the shower starts, a trickle at first and then stronger, and I go to the balcony door and stand in the sun, smoking. It’s nice and warm against the sunny wall, and I close my eyes and finish the cigarette and flick the butt on to the lawn. Back in the living room, I go to the bookcase, run my fingers over the spines and stop at the centenary editions of Tolstoy from 1928 and wonder if Arvid’s father has really read them all. I pull out the first volume of Anna Karenina, read the first sentence I have read many times before:

‘All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ it says, and Arvid turns off the shower. I put the book on the shelf and slump into a chair and wait. It takes him ten minutes to come down, still pale, but he is clinging on.

‘Mush, mush!’ he says, as Helge Ingstad does in his book Trapper’s Life when he wants the dogs to set off. It’s been our code for years and seems a bit childish now, but I take the hint and jump to my feet and say:

‘Did you ask about the car?’

‘I had to sweet-talk him for half an hour,’ he says and pulls the keys from his pocket.

‘Will you drive or shall I?’

‘Are you out of your mind? I’m not sober.’ He throws me the keys and I catch them with one hand, grab my jacket from the chair and walk towards the door.

‘Don’t forget the bin bag on your way out,’ I say.

We take Trondhjemsveien out of town to Gjelleråsen Ridge. The car is a black Opel Kadett, not exactly the latest model, but well looked after, and I feel good sitting behind the wheel. I have had my licence for two months; Arvid and I took our tests at the same time. Before that, I had only driven a tractor out in the countryside. The cars were Egil’s thing, he was obsessed and pestered his way into most of those around our place from the time he was ten, but I do like the movement and freedom and always stretch the speed limit. Arvid rolls his window down all the way, and his head is almost out of the car, the wind blows in and it gets cold, but he shuts his eyes and opens his mouth and refuses to roll the window back up.

‘You’ll get your head chopped off or a sparrow down your throat,’ I say.

‘Aw, shut up,’ he answers and I swerve the car wheel to give him a scare, but he doesn’t care.

‘Leaving Oslo,’ I say as we pass the sign by Skillebekk. ‘Akershus County next. Nittedal or Skedsmo?’

‘Skedsmo,’ he says from outside the car, and I turn at the crossroads at the top of the ridge and drive down the long, winding hill behind Mortens Kro, the restaurant there, and on to the Hellerud plain.

‘Please, not Lillestrøm.’

‘OK.’ I turn into the road for Nittedal church and Solberg, down a steep incline and cross the narrow bridge over the Nitelva river. Along the banks there are boys with fishing rods casting their lines and having a good time in the warming sun. One of them has just landed a perch, its scales glinting, and I stop the car and watch. Arvid opens the door, gets out and goes over to a bush where he throws up and then slides down the embankment to the river and washes his face in the ice cold water.

‘We should have brought fishing tackle,’ he says, coming back up behind the car and is in a cheery mood all of a sudden.

‘Well it’s too late now, you have soiled the water.’

He gets back in, and I do a perfect hill start without the handbrake. The fields rise steeply on both sides of the river and yellow and grey they arch in a pattern of shapes and lines against the blue sky, and I don’t know why, but it does something to me.

‘Left or right?’ I ask at the first junction.

‘Right, or else we’ll be back in Nittedal.’ I turn right, up a gravel road and wonder what’s with him and Nittedal.

The road winds between sloping fields and slowly climbs, and then we are at the top. Down to the left, the valley opens beneath a lattice of shadows and light on the meadow, and moving north it narrows into a funnel and only the gleaming road heads on to Harestua. We can barely make out Glitre Sanatorium, its solid yellow shape in the foothills. There is a strong wind here: a gust catches the car and almost blows us into the ditch, and I wrench the wheel against the wind and the car lurches forward like a drunk man’s car, and I give Arvid a glance and wonder how his gut feels. But he laughs, he’s having a good time.

‘Step on it,’ he says, leaning back and putting his feet on the dashboard. ‘Shit, I feel so much better now.’

We enter Skedsmo by Nittedal church through a grove of spruce trees. There are a few houses, and there is a bus shelter, and Arvid points at the trees.

‘Do you remember when we trudged through those trees to the Krakoseter cabins with our rucksacks down round our knees? We had to sing the Scout song the whole way. Do you remember when you got your pants filled with Coke? Being a Scout was such great fun.’

I do remember, and I remember exactly how much fun the Scouts were. We had joined the Scouts for a year because of the trips they went on, and I remember that one time I didn’t finish a cross-country run because I’d been lying in the heather watching a fox attack a pigeon. The Scout leaders came crashing and yelling through the forest and scared the fox out of its wits and dragged me down to the cabins. And when we were there, I had to stand on my hands out in the yard surrounded by Girl Guides while two leaders held me up by the feet and a third poured a bottle of Coke down each trouser leg. Then they forced me to walk around for two hours without changing my clothes while the Coke dried into sticky patches all over my body. When at last they allowed me to wash and I had borrowed some clean clothes from Arvid, I went into the leaders’ room and punched the scoutmaster. He was even a member of the goddamn Rotary Club.

I remember the burnt bread over the fire and the burnt sausages and the assistant Scout leader who was thirty-five and still lived with his mother and always wanted to ask the new boys back to his room at home. We’re going to a jamboree in America in the autumn and have to discuss it, he kept saying, and who didn’t want to go to America? But he was the only person who had ever heard about that trip to America, and I remember how relieved I was when I walked alone down the path through the forest to the bus stop on my last day after being expelled from the Scouts, and I promised myself I would never join anything organised again.

‘You still remember it, don’t you?’ Arvid asks and starts singing, and I chime in and soon we bawl at the top of our voices:

Dear father in heaven so high, hear my heart’s silent prayer, toiling on earth beneath the sky, give me the strength and wit to care, help me to live by thine own son’s creed, to honour my parents, the land and laws, and help all others in word and deed, obeying Scout vows and aiding our cause!

And we remember every word and every note of the song, and know we will never forget them for as long as we live.

At the Skedsmo junction the road goes north to Gjerdrum. There are fields on both sides the whole way, and behind them is the dense forest. The road twists and turns, goes up hill and down dale, and the driving is never boring. I keep the speed up as much as I dare, go even faster on the straights and change down before the bends and try to stay as close as possible to the point when the Opel just might lose traction and skid off the road, but not quite, because the car is not mine. The telephone poles flash past, and I feel a rush in my body that is new and makes my head spin, and now would be a good time to hear Jimi Hendrix play ‘Crosstown Traffic’ or ‘Purple Haze’. Arvid sits quietly with his hair blown back, just watching, then he picks up his tobacco and rolls two cigarettes, lights them both with the dashboard lighter and pokes one in my mouth.

‘God, it’s wonderful,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been here before. Is this where you come from?’

‘Not quite.’

Not quite, but not far off either. I thought I had forgotten how everything looked, but I haven’t forgotten a thing.

I have not forgotten the cornfields in autumn, or Lake Aurtjern in July or the apple tree outside my window, and all I had to do was reach out and pick an apple, or the long gravel road where Siri Skirt used to walk and show her bottom for two ten øre coins, and she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and once I was allowed to walk round twice while she held her skirt up under her chin; or the rafting holiday on Lake Hurdal. My father forced me to come with him, and made me pull up a pike that scared me witless, and when I refused, he hit me in the face, and then I hammered a nail into my foot, and we were forced to go home.

‘Hey, look at the petrol gauge,’ Arvid suddenly shouts, ‘we’re out of petrol. Have you got any money? I think I’m skint.’ He puts his hand in his pocket and we pull into the Shell station in Ask and empty our pockets. We have twenty-five kroner between us. I let the car roll to the first petrol pump and sit waiting for Arvid to get out and fill up. But he doesn’t move. We stare straight ahead, and we don’t speak, and then he says:

‘I’ve never filled a car with petrol.’

‘Me neither.’

‘I don’t even know where the petrol tank is. Do you?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Perhaps they come out and do it for us?’

‘They stopped doing that ages ago.’

‘Shit.’

We both get out and walk round the car and realise we have parked on the wrong side of the pump. Then a Ford Granada drives in, and a man in a hat and coat jumps out, and his face is flushed. He yanks the nozzle from the pump, bangs the cap open and stuffs the nozzle in and then he gawps at the pump, his lips moving, mumbling words I can’t make out, and then I see that what he is gawping at is the kroner counter, and what he is mumbling is the numbers as they tick by. He is at it for a long time, and we pretend we are discussing our route, and at the same time we are studying every move he makes. When he goes in to pay I hurry to the Opel and back it into position and do what he did before I forget, and hope it’s the right kind of petrol. I put in twenty-five kroners’ worth. Then I enter the kiosk with an unlit cigarette in my mouth trying to look as if it’s something I do every day.

After a few more kilometres heading north, I turn off the main road on to a bumpy gravel track. It rounds a sharp bend, and stones and ruts on the road pound the wheels and make everything shake. Then the road plunges down, and at the bottom of the hill there is a bridge over the river Leira where the rapids start. In the woods on the other side I glance in between the trees to see if my shack is still standing. It is not.

‘Fancy going for a visit?’

‘A farmer?’

‘A kind of farmer, yes. He lives right over there. Leif is his name. If he isn’t dead.’

‘OK, but if he’s dead I don’t want to see him.’

‘You were funnier with a hangover.’

I stop and change down to first and climb the hills on the other side of the river. We pass a few model farms, painted red and white the way they’re supposed to be, rose beds and everything neat and tidy, and Arvid looks around, his eyes full of expectation. He hasn’t a clue where we’re going. A few minutes later I see Tommy’s barn at the top of a steep slope. There is not a level square metre of land on his property. Some goats are grazing on the slope. At one time the barn was yellow, and he was so proud that this was the only yellow barn in the district, but now the paint is peeling and it is more grey than yellow. The odd board has gone missing, and we can see straight into the hayloft. There isn’t much hay. Behind the barn, you can see the farmhouse with its sway-backed roof, and once it was white, but now it is as grey as the barn. It is only five years ago, it must have looked the same then, but it did not seem like it.

We have to drive on a bit to find the driveway, and I keep looking for the blue letterbox that used to be a landmark before, but the box has fallen off and is lying on the ground, and I have to back up the car. I turn into the driveway and pick up speed, and as I remember it, there was a pothole in the road so muddy after rains that you had to have a tractor pull you out if you got stuck, and it probably isn’t any better now. And it isn’t. I put my foot down and shoot across, the mud flying everywhere. The rear of the Opel bounces into the air and Arvid jumps around in his seat and shouts:

‘Hey, take it easy, for fuck’s sake. This is my dad’s car! He’ll kill me!’ But I am driving fast now, because I have second thoughts and wonder how I got myself into this. But it’s too late to turn back, and I want this over and done with.

There are three cars in the yard. Not one of them has four wheels. They have stood there for a good while and one of them I remember very well. It’s an old Volvo station wagon that was used for everything from transporting piglets to delivering the dead on commission, and these were the only times the car was washed. The other two are what Egil called ‘crash cars’. You buy them as wrecks, get the engine running and drive them until they fall apart and leave them wherever they break down. A chicken cackles and sticks its head out of a smashed window. From where I am standing, I see nothing that can move under its own steam: even the wheelchair by the farmhouse door is missing a wheel and is lying on its back, rusting where someone left it.

A man in stained overalls comes round the corner of the barn and stands squinting, shading his eyes from the sun.

‘Hi, Bjørn,’ I say, and he shakes his head and strokes his jaw. Then he scuttles into a shed without saying or doing anything.

‘Who was that?’ Arvid asks.

‘Bjørn. Farm boy.’

‘Farm boy? He must be at least seventy.’

I scratch my head. ‘About seventy-two.’

‘Is he always so talkative?’

‘Bjørn never says a word.’ I walk over to the house and knock at the door. No one answers, so I push it and go in through porch and call through the open kitchen door:

‘Hello, anyone at home?’ I hear a shuffle of feet and a woman of about thirty I have never seen before comes from the kitchen and looks surprised. There is something wrong with her legs. She doesn’t lift them when she walks.

‘Does Leif still live here?’

‘He sure does.’

‘My name’s Audun Sletten. I spent a summer here a few years back and I thought I would come by and say hello.’

‘Well, I don’t know, he’s asleep.’

Fine, I think, we’ll be out of here, but then I hear his voice from the living room.

‘Who is it, Ingrid?’

‘Young man called Audun. He’s come by, he says.’

‘Audun? Is that Audun, you say? I’ll be damned, be right there.’ There is a bit of a commotion, he groans as if he is making a serious effort, and then comes wheeling into the kitchen. He looks exactly as he used to, the grey crew-cut hair, his sculpted face like some bust I have seen in a magazine, and his upper body like a chunk of rock. But his legs are thinner, they don’t seem to carry him any more. There was some trouble with his legs before, but I didn’t see the wheelchair coming. I go up to him and shake his hand and he holds mine in both of his.

‘Well, if it ain’t Audun. It’s been a while.’

‘Summer of ’65.’

‘And now it’s 1970, that makes it more than five years. I’ll be damned, you’re big now. And strong too, I can see that. You’ve got a friend with you, a long-haired baboon?’ He laughs without malice, Arvid grins and goes to shake hands.

‘Arvid Jansen. I look after Audun.’

‘Oh, so he still needs that, does he? Well, I guess we too did that for a while, back then. I’m only joking. Audun was a boy who could look after himself. Be wrong to say anything else. He came here with that white bum of his, and welcome he was, that’s for sure. He could graft like an adult even though he was no more than a half-pint.’

‘White bum?’ Arvid whispers.

‘Shh,’ I say. ‘And Signe, is she here?’

Leif takes a deep breath and says:

‘I guess she moved. Lives somewhere in Trøndelag I’ve heard, I’m not really sure.’ He smacks his hands on the wheelchair. ‘And here I sit. But it’s fine, it’s fine. Ingrid helps me indoors and Bjørn outdoors. It’s fine.’

But I don’t see how it can be fine out here, or going anywhere but down the drain. Something must have happened, and I cannot ask. Signe with the large bosom and her large smile, Signe with her soft hands on her way up to the first floor where I was lying in bed that last summer, full of yellow fever and not able to sleep. Their children had moved out a long time ago, so the whole room was mine. Her white shift in the grey from the skylight, Signe with her white gentle words, Signe so kind. But I cannot ask. Once I sent a card, but there was no answer.

‘You see, somehow she fell ill. Well, let’s not talk about that now. Jesus, it’s nice to see you again, Audun. How’s your mother getting on down there?’

‘A lot better,’ I say. ‘A heck of a lot better.’

He looks at me with those fiercely blue eyes. ‘Yes, I guess she is.’ He strokes his chin and his bristles rasp loud enough for all of us to hear. He clears his throat takes another deep breath and says:

‘You know, your father was here a month ago. Strange you should come now. He was out of here, he said. He left his accordion, it was too heavy to carry with him. He said he was going far. I could just keep it, he didn’t give a shit, if you’ll pardon the expression. There it is.’ He points to a corner of the large kitchen. All the junk is still there, I remember a lot of it, and straight away I recognise the worn, brown case. I go over and open the case and there it is, black and white with red stripes on the bellows, a Paolo Soprani. I bend down and run my fingers across the keys as if the notes might come, but they don’t. For people with thick blood, I think. I look up at Leif. He is looking at me.

‘He didn’t look too friendly when he left, Audun, I have to say. But I don’t know what to do with that squeezebox. None of us here can play. Perhaps you could take it with you? That would be good. Then it would stay in the family, like.’

He crossed the line there speaking of family, and he knows it, so I don’t answer. I look down at the accordion.

‘Fine,’ I say, ‘we’ll take it with us,’ and Arvid, who has heard about this accordion, is about to speak, but then he catches himself before the words come out. The air in the kitchen goes quiet, and we stand there hardly daring to breathe. I think fast and say:

‘What happened to Toughie, the fox you kept on a chain behind the barn?’

‘Oh him,’ Leif says and tells the story of the fox that thought he was a dog and was kept on a rope behind the barn, and the hens refused to sit on their eggs as long as he was there. But everybody loved that fox and didn’t want to let him go, so Leif had to brood the eggs in his armpits and in the end Signe, Bjørn and all the guests were walking around with eggs in their armpits until they had aches and pains all over. Dinner was especially difficult, Leif says, and demonstrates how they had to sit at the table with their arms down by their sides, all posh like, and hold their knives and forks like aristocrats.

‘In the end we had better manners than the Sun King,’ Leif says, and Arvid laughs, and Ingrid hums by her bench, and as we leave I grab the case by the handle and promise to be back soon now that I have my driver’s licence.

We put the accordion on the rear seat and drive out of the yard. After the pool of mud Arvid says:

‘Why did you take the accordion?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You can’t even play it.’

‘I’m telling you, I don’t know.’

‘I don’t think your mother will be too happy about it, now that you know he’s close by. Do you believe in fate now or what?’

‘For fuck’s sake, I don’t know, I keep telling you! Goddamnit, why can’t you leave me in peace!’ I come out of the drive and turn too sharply round the bend and hit a fence post and it scrapes against the door, and I jump on the brakes. We both sit there. Arvid’s face is white.

‘Oh shit, I’m sorry,’ I say.

‘It was my fault. I should’ve kept my mouth shut.’

We open the doors. Leif’s house is on the opposite side of a hollow, but if anyone is standing in the window, I can’t see them. The car door is not as bad as I thought, but there is quite a scratch in the paintwork. But no dent. Arvid runs his hand along the door.

‘It won’t be cheap. The whole door will have to be resprayed.’

‘I can pay. I’m going to stop anyway,’ I say.

‘Stop what?’

‘Stop school.’

‘That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard. You’ve got less than a year left. Weren’t you going to be a writer?’

‘You won’t be a writer just because you finish school. Did Jack London finish school? Did Gorky? Or Lo-Johansson or Nexø, or Sandemose, or anyone else worth reading?’

‘For Christ’s sake, Audun, that was a hundred years ago! No one went to school for long then! Today everybody does!’

‘Not me. I’m going to get a job.’

Arvid sits down in the ditch and starts throwing stones into the field, small ones at first and then bigger and bigger and he gets up and finds himself a big piece of rock and heaves it with both hands as far and as hard as he can and he yells:

‘Goddamnit!’ He turns. ‘What’s happening here?’ he says.

‘Nothing. I’ll just quit school.’

‘It’s not only that,’ he says, ‘and you know it.’

6

EGIL WAS TWO years younger than me, and I am pretty certain I can remember when he was born. Or maybe I am mixing it up with stories Kari has told me.

One story goes like this.

Kari and I are alone at home. She is six and is supposed to be looking after me. My mother and father are away. She is at Stensby hospital having Egil, but I don’t understand that, only that both of them are away and Kari is with me, and anyway this is not the first time. It’s funny the things you don’t forget. There is a knock on the living-room window and I turn and see my father’s face through the glass. He looks strange. He is waving one hand and making faces, and his face fills the window. The door is locked, and he has lost his key. Kari goes to open it. She doesn’t really want to. I hear a bang and run into the hall and see my father lying face down on the floor. He is laughing into the floorboards. I hurry over and sit on his back, but then he gets up and I fall off, hitting my shoulder on the shoe rack. It hurts. I scream, but he doesn’t care. He goes over to the cupboard in the living room, it is called grandfather’s cabinet, I already know that. He bursts into laughter and says:

‘Now there are three of you. We have to celebrate.’ I don’t understand what he means, but he takes the pistol from the cupboard. I must have seen it before. It has been one object among many; now it is different. He lifts his arm and fires three shots into the ceiling. We cover our ears, the loud cracks make our bodies shake.

‘I’ll never forget it,’ Kari says. ‘I thought my head would explode.’ We have been to the Grorud Cemetery and are walking along Trondhjemsveien on our way home. My mother is a few steps behind us, she’s crying and wants to be left alone. It’s Egil’s sixteenth birthday. It’s a Friday in October. I have taken the day off from school, and when we get home, Jussi Björling will be on the turntable. She always plays opera when something is wrong, she plays opera when nothing is wrong, she always plays opera no matter what. Sometimes she locks the door, turns the volume up and stands on a chair conducting with her eyes closed. I have seen her through the window on my way from friends’ houses at Linderud, I have looked across the little hollow with the stream and into our apartment on the third floor and seen how my mother is standing on a chair conducting the music I cannot hear, and wondered how many other people have seen her.

And almost always it is Jussi Björling. There is a signed photograph of him on the living-room wall. How she got hold of that, no one knows, but it has always seemed impressive, has given her records some extra meaning, and it was on the wall of our house in the country. My father couldn’t stand it, he did not like opera, he liked tango and anything else was for people with thin blood. On his own accordion he could play the tango, and people said he was pretty good.

‘Jussi Björling? Hell, he looks like a pen pusher!’ he used to say, and once, when he was in a drunken haze, he smashed some of her records.

‘We were lucky the neighbours called the police,’ Kari says. ‘Things could have got out of hand. You were only two years old, for Christ’s sake. He was so drunk. He was always so goddamn drunk. Was I happy when we moved at last.’

We talk about him as though he, too, were dead, we do that every time we talk about him. It’s not often. But he isn’t dead.

We walk down Trondhjemsveien. Flaen and Kaldbakken are on the lower side where many from my class live. Among them is Venke. I know exactly which window is hers. I have been there with her, kissing on her bed with my hand up her skirt and her hand down my pants, and with her mouth against my neck she whispered: ‘I think maybe I love you, you’re so strong.’ That really scared me, so I took off.

These houses seemed so important before, but now they look like something from a cartoon, compared with the high-rises at Ammerud. Rødtvet is on the upper side, and behind it is forest and more forest, for hours and days if that’s what you want. You can go in there and keep wandering and come out again far into the countryside.

‘It took him five years to get here,’ I say. ‘He must have fallen asleep on the way.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘He’s here now. I saw him just over a week ago, at the end of my paper round.’

‘Who’s here now?’

‘The person we’re talking about. Dad.’

What a word! Dad. But there is no other.

‘He was standing there, at the top of that hill.’ I point to where the footpath slopes down from Trondhjemsveien, by the Metro bridge. ‘The man in the black suit. The man with the shiny pistol. I wonder if he still has it. Perhaps it’s in his rucksack. And it was definitely his rucksack.’

‘You must be kidding! Are you sure?’ Kari grabs my arm and walks a bit faster to leave our mother further behind.

‘Of course I’m sure. Do you think I have forgotten what he looks like?’

‘Have you told her?’ Kari tries not to turn round, but doesn’t quite succeed.

‘What would be the point of that? I don’t want to move again. Not now, at least. I’m not scared of him.’

‘Oh no?’ She looks at me, and I know as well as her that I am scared to death. He is the only person who really scares me. Everything else is child’s play.

‘I’ll kill him,’ I say.

‘Shh, don’t talk like that. But what does he want? What do you think he wants? We’ll have to work out something. It’s too bad I have to go home on the bus tonight.’

‘To your car spray hotshot?’

She blushes. ‘You mind your own business!’

‘There’s nothing to work out. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.’

We stop until my mother has caught up with us so we can walk together down Grevlingveien. She is not crying any more, and Kari slips her arm under hers, and she smiles at us.

My mother is small and fair-haired, quite slim, and if you are not standing too close and can’t see the lines around her eyes and mouth, thirty-six is not the first age that springs to mind. I suppose you could say she is attractive, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say. Once, around where we used to live, I saw her turn a man’s head on the road, but maybe she had smudged her lipstick or had a black eye that day. She had one from time to time. So did I. When my father was home for long enough, we all did.

She has always wanted curly hair, but it is straight as a waterfall, just like mine, and it seems to me that fair-haired people are not as curly as dark-haired people. Anyway, she has tried curlers and tongs and once she saved up to have a perm. When she came home she stood crying in front of the mirror because the curls were compact and tight and not what she had pictured and dreamt about, and, to be frank, she did look terrible. For almost an hour she stood over the basin trying to smooth her hair out again, and she stayed indoors for several days. So much money down the drain. What she does now is fill the kettle, put it on the stove, and when the water boils she hangs her hair over the gushing steam, and then the tips curl and give her what she calls a natural wave.

Since we moved, she has really had only one good friend. His name is Robert, but he calls himself Roberto, and he rented our spare bedroom the first difficult year in Veitvet. Now he lives in a smart one-room flat in Majorstua on the west side. He drives a white MGB, digs opera and is a homo. That doesn’t seem to bother him much, and it doesn’t bother me either. Sometimes he pinches my bum, but that’s just teasing, to show he knows that I know that he isn’t actually pinching my bum. Or something like that.

Every Wednesday afternoon Roberto drives to Veitvet from Majorstua to listen to opera with my mother. The white car floats down Beverveien with the roof rolled back, round the curve, and Roberto waves his hand to the boys standing along the road and the boys wave back, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone that he is a homo. But I may be wrong there.

As we go up the steps in the tower and along the Sing-Sing gallery he is standing outside our door with a bouquet of flowers and a plastic bag in his hand, even though it’s only two days since he was last here, and I think that maybe homos have a feel for that kind of thing, like girls do. Anyway, my mother smiles and pulls herself together and is happy. Now there is someone to share the opera with, and I’m happy too, because I don’t have to stay at home and be a comfort. Some days it makes me feel claustrophobic and today is one of them.

I go up to my room and change into normal clothes, hold up my checked trousers before I go for the Wranglers instead. Before I leave, I play Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ to cleanse my mind. It’s unbeatable. It is so full of hatred it makes me want to lie down on the bench and pump iron, but it will take too long. I can’t be indoors now, not with Kirsten Flagstad and Maria Callas howling in the next room.

On my way out, I hit my foot against something sticking out from under the bed. It’s the accordion. I sneaked it indoors and up to my room when my mother wasn’t there and have hidden it. I have a KEEP OUT sign on my door to make her stay away. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone, only Arvid knows, and sometimes I feel an urge to take it out, hold it in my arms and play a few notes. But I am afraid it will make me remember too much. I push it back underneath with my foot.

I walk through the living room. Roberto is standing by the old record cabinet waving a new recording of Tosca, and he winks at me, and I pat my bum, and my mother says, ‘Well, put it on, then.’

The first notes come thundering down the stairs as I leave the building. She plays music louder than I do, and yet I am the one who gets a hard time. I guess I appreciate Jussi Björling more than she does Jimi Hendrix. The only singer for her after 1945 is Elvis. I couldn’t give a shit about him. But maybe Elvis reminds her of the days when the future was still open and she sat around in old American cars necking with my father, dreaming behind the dashboard with Kari in the back seat wrapped in nappies, and was about to marry this man that she wanted. What a kick in the teeth.

It’s raining outside. Heavy, gusting rain, and the concrete walls of the houses turn sticky and dark. It makes me feel so out of place, and suddenly I long for thatched houses and log walls and attics and birch trees right outside your window and meadowland where the wind and the rain sweep across the tall grass in one long, surging swell and make you think of films you have seen and of walking barefoot, and then it painfully passes and is squeezed into a funnel with only one narrow way out.

There is nothing to work out. We just have to wait and see what happens. But nothing happens. Soon two weeks have gone, and had I not been the person I am, I would have thought it was a ghost I had seen. I remember a time out in the country when almost everyone believed in ghosts. Someone had planted stories that spread all over the district like a nervous disease, and in the end Kari was so scared she joined something called Kløfta Parapsychological Association. Its members went off in droves to old abandoned farms and lay on the living room floors with tape recorders, keeping each other awake, rigid with fear, waiting for white ladies in lace frocks. But girls are girls, and what I believe is what I see when I see it. I have never seen any ghosts. The ones that haunt me do not glide around at night wearing lace frocks, howling with grief.

Perhaps I had got it wrong. But I had not, and then there is the accordion and what Leif said, although I don’t understand just why he went to Leif. Anyway, it was him. But what does he want? What is he waiting for?

I walk along Beverveien in the rain, turn up the collar of my reefer jacket and feel the rain running off my hair down my neck, and the sun breaks through, and even though it’s very low, it feels like spring, only colder. I could go into the woods now, take the paths from the top of Slettaløkka into the forest and on to Lake Alunsjøen and down around Lake Breisjøen to Ammerud. I often do that, it’s a fine route if you walk fast. I like walking fast. But that road is closed to me now.

Arvid is standing outside the Narvesen kiosk by the Metro station buying cigarettes. He has just got off the train after school and is still carrying his schoolbag. I lean against one of the columns under the bridge and wait until he has finished. After the long drive into the country, I have only seen him at school. We have barely spoken, which is quite unusual, and he smiles in a shy way as he turns and sees me standing there.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘You weren’t at school today. Have you stopped coming?’

‘We were at the cemetery.’

He nods, and then I ask:

‘How did it go with the car door?’

‘Dad got all worked up, of course. But now it’s all sprayed and done.’

‘How much was it?’

‘A hundred kroner. But don’t worry. I said it was my fault, so Dad paid.’

‘No way. It was my fault.’ I pull my wallet out and take a hundred-kroner note. I’ve just been paid for the paper round. My mother will have to wait for her share. ‘Here,’ I say.

‘Bloody hell, Audun, you know you don’t have to pay.’

‘What’s right is right, or else everything would just be crap. Take the money, I’ll be all right, no problem.’ He takes the note folds it and puts it in his pocket.

‘So, you’re not quitting school then?’

‘That’s a whole other thing. Coming?’

‘Where to?’

‘Well, not the woods, that’s for sure. To town maybe, or Geir’s?’

‘Geir’s? I thought you hated the place.’

‘It’s early. None of the jokers are there yet. I feel like a beer. It has been one shitty day.’

Arvid giggles. ‘Why not?’ he says. ‘It is Friday and all.’

We walk into the shopping centre from the top level along the square towards the door to Geir’s. Arvid carries his rucksack in his hand. On his back, it would make him look like a schoolboy, and we open the door, walk in and sit down at a table right at the back.

‘I hate to tell you, I’m skint,’ he says, ‘but if I dig around I may have enough for one.’

‘Hell, it’s on me.’ I order two beers. There are some things with alcohol you must never do. You must never drink alone, never drink on Sundays, never drink before seven o’clock and if you do, it has to be on a Saturday. If you’re hung-over, you go for a walk in the forest, and you must never drink the hair of the dog. Do that, and you are an alcoholic, it’s common knowledge. If you are an alcoholic you’re out of control. If you have no control, you are finished. Then you spend the rest of your days walking through the valley of the shadow of death. You are the problem no one wants to solve. They give you a wide berth in the street, scurry behind the canned food when you’re in the shop to buy beer. The woman at the cash desk is in a hurry. And then you die and no one gives a shit.

It’s not Saturday, and it’s well before seven o’clock, but apart from that, we’re in the clear, and after the first sip I feel good. Arvid smiles and wipes the froth off his top lip.

‘That was good,’ he says. ‘We ought to do this more often. It’s a shame we don’t have money, then we could have a few more.’

‘You’ve got the hundred kroner,’ I say.

‘But of course I do,’ he says and grins.

7

I WAKE UP. I have been dreaming about Egil for the first time since the accident. In the dream we are standing on a log by the bank of the river Glomma, fishing with our new spinning rods. We got them for Christmas and haven’t tried them out yet. It’s Easter, perhaps. The silver reels glisten in the sun, and Egil looks the way he did last year. I know he is dead, but it doesn’t matter. It is absolutely still by the river. Straight ahead the water’s swirling and further up are the rapids, and yet we do not hear a sound. It is wonderful. Egil smiles and casts a long line, he is happy, and I smile back at him. I can’t remember ever seeing him so calm, his face so soft and smooth. He’s relaxed because he knows he is no longer alive, and there will be no more trouble. That calms me, too.

The rods are a joy to cast. The spinner flies out towards the middle of the river. I have never cast so far, it just glides of its own accord. I close my eyes and let the sun warm my skin. Suddenly Egil is shouting, his voice is thin. There is something on his hook, and there is fear in his eyes. The old scowl is back. I run over to help him: his rod is bent to breaking point, and I hold him from behind. But when I touch him his body is not the body of a fifteen-year-old boy. He is plump and warm: how strange, I think, and he is winding the reel like a madman. I grab the rod and wind with him. Then he shrivels and fades away, and winding alone is hard work. Suddenly it’s as if the river is boiling, and I see the bumper of the Volvo Amazon break the surface, and then the bonnet, and the car pitches like a huge fish with its belly in the air and then I see the windscreen and start to cry.

When I wake up it’s dark, and I am still crying. I feel a little sick, and heavy as I roll over and have look at the alarm clock. In half an hour I have to be up and on my newspaper round. I roll back, I want to sleep longer, but when I close my eyes, the car is back, it’s in my pillow, it’s on the wall, and I can’t escape it.

I get out of bed and dress and go down to the kitchen. It’s dark down the stairs, and the kitchen is dark and cold, and my body too is cold. My mother is asleep. I leave the light off and go to the stove and lift the lid of the hotplate. We still have it. The plate is set to three, and in the dark the element has a faint glow, you can light your cigarette on it. I turn and lean against the edge and let the heat drift all the way up to my neck. I turn back and give my stomach the same treatment. When we were just kids in the country, Egil always raced to be first down the stairs to the kitchen in the morning. He would pull over a stool and get up on it with his back to the stove and his bum out, and he had such a greedy look on his face. I remember how I didn’t like that face, it made me feel embarrassed, and I never tried to fight him for the stool, even though I too was cold in the morning. Now it’s only me, and I can stand here for as long as I like.

I fill the kettle and put it on and stand waiting. Outside it’s dark, but I can just make out the low-rises in Linderud. Some windows are lit. It used to be just fields out that way. Arvid flew kites there in the autumn, and horses from the Linderud estate were grazing as far down as Østre Aker vei. Now the Siemens building towers above the road. At the top, close by the large white manor house, is the EPA shopping centre. It looks like shit. There is not a farm worth the name in the valley now. I can’t see the forest from the window, our house is too far down in the dip, but I can sense that it’s there.

The water is boiling. I take a handful of coffee from the brown tin and drop it in, wait for it to sink, cut two slices of bread and see from the clock above the stove that I have plenty of time. I grab the handle of the kettle and lift it and let the kettle fall a few times to get it going. I try a cup, but it’s not there yet. I fetch milk from the fridge, pour a glass and sit down and eat, and by the time I have finished, the coffee is ready. It flows nice and thick from the spout. I hear sounds from my mother’s room, she goes to the toilet, and I stand in the dark not moving, afraid she will get dressed and come out. But it goes quiet again. I stay in the dark, roll a cigarette and sit at the table and smoke and drink coffee and look out of the window.

I keep my barrow just behind the stairs at the bottom of the tower. Everybody knows it’s mine, I have put my foot down, so the kids don’t fool around with it. I pull it out on to the footpath and walk up Beverveien towards the shopping centre. This morning I am the first one there. The newspapers are piled outside the depot, and I load the two packages on to the barrow and cut the strings. I see Fru Johansen coming down the road, but I don’t hang around for a chat. I set off along Grevlingveien and at the same time keep an eye peeled for the Vilden family, who are usually the first to arrive, sleepy and dutiful, but today I cannot see them. That makes me feel uneasy, and I know why. It is stupid, but all the same I look back over my shoulder towards the shopping centre as I move down Veitvetsvingen. After the first house where Pål, who used to be in my class, lives I walk on down the hill, and at the end of the road she is standing by the garage, as if she has been waiting for me. Her hair is untidy, she has been crying, and her face is wet and strained.

‘It’s Tommy,’ she says, ‘he didn’t come home last night. We’ve been looking for him everywhere.’

I can hear her words, but I am so captivated by her voice, that at first I don’t get what she is really saying. She suddenly looks completely resigned, her shoulders sinking, and she wipes her nose with the back of her hand.

‘It’s Tommy. We can’t find him. He’s been gone since yesterday.’ She’s in despair and bursts into tears, and I just look at her. Her hair is dark and curly, flowing everywhere, I want to run my fingers through it, and I raise my hand and stop by the sleeve of her grey duffle coat, and then I suddenly remember that red spot under Tommy’s nose. How come I never thought about that before.

‘Perhaps he hasn’t got such a bad cold after all,’ I mumble.

‘What did you say?’ Her words come out too loud. She senses it herself and scans the deserted street.

‘Come on,’ I say, ‘I don’t think you know where to look.’

I leave the barrow and take her with me up the hill I just came down. Halfway up, I look back down the road to the house where Arvid lives. He is leaning out of the window; it gives me a start, but I keep on going and do not call to him. It’s as if everyone is waiting for me. I hurry up the hill with the girl in tow, and I still don’t know her name.

We walk past the shopping centre. Konrad comes chugging by with his cap pulled down on his ears, and he waves, and I don’t wave back, just march towards the Metro station and round it and into Hubroveien and along the wire fence by the rails towards the next station at Rødtvet.

‘Hey, not so fast,’ she says behind me, ‘where are we going?’ But I do not answer, just keep up the same speed along the fence until the path narrows where the slope comes down from Trondhjemsveien towards the Metro line. There is a little dip at the path’s end. On the other side of the rails is Fru Karlsen’s house. There is no one standing on the step waiting, but I know she is there behind the curtains, and right in front of me in the grassy dip is Tommy, his head resting against the fence. This is where they hang out. I used to look here for Egil. I stop short, and the girl bumps into me from behind, I can feel her against my back.

‘Tommy!’ she shouts. I bend down and smell the fumes of Lynol: sweet and strong and nauseous, and I almost throw up the way I always did when we had woodwork at Veitvet School and I had to go into the paint room.

‘You little shit,’ I say. ‘You little swine, what the hell are you doing?’ I feel the anger inside me, but when she thumps me in the back with her fists, I stop. I grab him under his arms and legs, the yellow-striped jacket is covered in muck. I hold him tight and walk as fast as I can on the path alongside the rails. He is so small, he is as light as anything and thin and cold as ice, and I start to worry and put my ear to his face to listen for his breathing and then he turns his head with eyes closed and rests his cheek against my chest.

‘Papa,’ he whispers.

‘For Christ’s sake!’ I say, and she hits me again.

They live in Rådyrveien at the lower part of Veitvet. The long apartment block is identical to the one that I live in, and it stands at an angle to the road below where Låke used to have his grocery store. It’s closed now, the windows are lined with cardboard and you can see your reflection as you pass. The fields rise up to the left, towards Bredtvet farm and the prison, where the rebel Hans Nielsen Hauge’s statue is standing. The Sunday school is there in the hollow by Condom Creek, and a few years ago there was a ski jump behind a hill near Østre Aker vei. I jumped eighteen metres there once and landed face first. Five stitches.

The father stands waiting by the door to the tower, tall and thin, searching the street, and when he sees us coming, he breaks into a run. His eyes are red from lack of sleep, and I pass Tommy to him, and he lifts the boy and holds him in his arms, and says, ‘Oh, Jesus.’ And he doesn’t even look at me, just hurries back down. He staggers on, his long legs teeter, he looks like a stork with a giant baby in his beak and Tommy’s feet are dangling down by his hips.

‘Maybe you should call an ambulance,’ I say to his sister, ‘he’s not in great shape.’ She nods, and suddenly I feel naked without Tommy in my arms. I turn and look up the street.

‘I guess I have to be off. The people waiting for their papers will be pissed off.’

‘I know,’ she says with a little smile and puts her arms around me and gives me a kiss on the cheek. ‘Thank you,’ she says. My hands hang down by my side, there is no room for them anywhere, and then she lets go and runs down the road after her father.

When I am almost up to my barrow, old Abrahamsen is standing there, shifting his weight from foot to foot, peering left to right, and then he spots me hurrying up the hill by the Veitvet waterfall and calls from a distance:

‘Can I have one?!’

‘Sure!’ I shout back, even though I am quite close now, and there is no other sound.

‘Damn,’ he says, ‘I won’t make it to the bus.’ He is really pissed off, but still he doesn’t move. I don’t know what he wants, and all of a sudden I feel weary.

‘Well, run off then, or read Arbeiderbladet instead, hell, I don’t know, but I just can’t stay here.’ I take the barrow and set off and then, damn me, if he doesn’t go all friendly.

‘Look, Audun,’ he says, and I turn and he says: ‘Well Audun, I’ve watched you walking this round for several years, and I was wondering. How are you really doing?’ He blushes, the old man, and I blush, too, I don’t know how to answer a question like that, so I shrug and wait. He scratches his chin, and there is a rasping sound.

‘Well, if there is ever anything, you know where I live.’ He is relieved; he has said what he wanted to say. He opens the newspaper, and now suddenly he has all the time in the world, and he strolls up the hill past the red telephone booth, and I think to myself, I really don’t get this man. He reads while he is walking, he must have radar or sonar navigation, like a bat at night, because he moves between the posts and the bushes by the kerb without once looking up.

I finish off Veitvetsvingen as quickly as I can, and only Grevlingveien is left. People are standing on their steps, waiting, and they are not happy. But I don’t look at them or apologise or anything, just push the paper into their hands and hurry on. At the end of the route, by the last house, Fru Karlsen is standing by her door. The dress she is wearing is really something, her shoulders still tanned after the summer have a faint glow, warm, as though she is just out of bed, and I have pictured it white and white, and myself in it, and my own skin close to the skin I can see now, her hands everywhere, and my hands everywhere, where she is soft and different, and the dizzying fragrance of Fru Karlsen, but straight away I can see that there is something amiss, for her arm is rigid as she runs her hand through her hair, and I just want to turn and get the hell out of there. But I can’t, I have to give her the newspaper, it’s my job, and I walk slowly towards her on the flagstone footpath.

‘Well, if it isn’t Speedy Gonzales,’ she says. Her mouth is distorted in a way I have never seen before, and I pass her the newspaper. She doesn’t take it, doesn’t look at it, her eyes are glaring straight at me. It makes me feel uncomfortable.

‘What the hell do you mean by being late when you know I am waiting for you! Can’t you see I’m all dressed up?’ She seems a little drunk, but she can’t have been drinking, it’s barely half-past six, and yet, there is this shine in her eyes, and she looks cold wearing that dress well into October. She is freezing, and she has dressed herself up for me.

‘Things happened on the way round, I had to sort that out first. You’re not the only person who is pissed off.’

‘The only person! You foolish boy! You could have had anything you liked! Do you understand what I’m saying? I could have given you anything you liked! But I am not waiting for anyone, especially not a baby like you!’ And then she slaps me. There is no time to duck, and it stings like hell. I back a few steps, squeeze the newspaper hard, it’s thick today, and heavy, and I sling it at her. It hits her where she is really soft. Whether it hurts or not I cannot tell, but she is startled, her eyes change colour, and I say in a low voice:

‘You old hag! Get back inside to that old man of yours! I wouldn’t touch your wrinkled skin if you paid me!’

8

WE HAVE FRENCH for the first lesson. Henrik has to read aloud from the text we’ve had to prepare. He sits at the very back. He can’t do French, neither reading nor writing it, but he is a good imitator. That’s what he can do, and with a little help he has bluffed his way through two years, and is close to the abyss. If we have a French oral, he is done for. But Starheim is hard of hearing, he leans forward with a cautious smile, his eyes glued to Henrik’s face. It sounds like French, he is almost certain. Everyone can see he really doesn’t catch what Henrik is reading, but it does sound French, and Henrik throws his whole body into it, so it looks French as well. Henrik really doesn’t say anything, it’s just babble, but Starheim is vain, he won’t be caught saying what? or eh? so he just goes for it:

‘Très bien, merci, Henri. Audun, you can take it from there.’

I have no idea where Starheim thinks Henrik stopped reading, so I choose a place at random and keep going. Henrik’s face is like a mask, and Starheim does not bat an eyelid. I used to think this was funny. I have done my homework, I understand what I am reading, but my pronunciation is not great, and it’s enough for Starheim to smile with relief and say:

‘Pas mal, Audun. A little more practice on your pronunciation, and you’ll be fine.’ Henrik looks triumphant, this is killing him, his face tense and almost desperate and his eyes filled with tears. Tiny sounds come from his mouth. He can’t hold it back much longer. A few students have to look out the window.

‘Not bloody likely,’ I say under my breath, so only those next to me can hear.

On our way out Arvid says:

‘Henrik’s skating on thin ice. I don’t think the examiners are quite as deaf. But it’s funny.’

‘I don’t understand why he bothers.’

‘What’s the matter with you? You knew your stuff, didn’t you.’

‘Nothing’s the matter with me. I’m just a little tired.’ I close my eyes and see Fru Karlsen and her face when the newspaper hit her. Arvid pats my shoulder. I feel like telling him about Fru Karlsen, but all that’s another world.

‘Have you heard about the Stakhanov Prize?’ he says. ‘It was a prize Stalin gave to the most industrious workers during the first five-year plan. It was named after a man who worked his ass off. You’re in the semi-finals.’

We walk across the schoolyard between students from our class, and we stand in the sun with our backs to the gymnasium. I look around me, and then I turn the corner where there is nothing but trees and sit down on the grassy slope leading up to the teachers’ houses and fish out half a cigarette from my pocket and light it up. I sit smoking in the strip of sunlight with my eyes closed. Arvid follows me.

‘Give us a drag,’ he says. I pass him the cigarette. He inhales, and then he slowly blows out smoke and looks at me.

‘Seen any more of your dad?’

I shake my head.

‘Weird business,’ he says, and that’s all he can say, because it’s something he doesn’t understand. It’s not his fault, I know that, but still it’s irritating.

‘It’ll be fine,’ I say.

‘I hope so.’ He gives me back my cigarette, and I take the final drag just before I burn my fingertips, and I am about to throw it away, when a head pokes round the corner.

‘Gotcha!’ I drop the butt and stamp on it. It’s Twisty, one of our teachers. He is called Twisty because of the way he walks, but it is meant kindly, he is well liked by all the students. He walks all the way round and says:

‘Shit, do you have to smoke when I’m on duty? You’ll get me into trouble. Look here,’ he says, putting a hand up his jacket, ‘the new polec booklets have come.’

He is a SUF-er, a Young Socialist member, they have their own lingo and ‘polec’ means political economy. Arvid has joined a study group. He is eager, he grabs the booklet, and Twisty reaches for another.

‘Are you joining as well?’ he says to me. ‘We start on Tuesday.’

I shake my head.

‘He’s not ripe yet,’ Arvid says, ‘but he will be, don’t push him.’

‘That would be great,’ Twisty says. ‘Do you know, Arvid, the membership of the NLF group has doubled since the stunt with the flag? That was a class act.’ Arvid blushes, and I agree. It was a class act.

‘I have to be off. The bell will go in a couple of minutes. No more smoking, please.’ He twists back around the corner, and we get up and brush the pine needles off our trousers.

‘This is not for real,’ I say.

‘What isn’t?’

‘All this. Henrik with his French, Twisty and his booklets, the whole school.’

‘Sure it is,’ Arvid says.

We have Rønning, the deputy headmaster, for English. He is the only teacher I like. He is sort of a show-off in his West-Norwegian way, parading the classroom pulling at his red braces, his jacket dangling from his shoulders, his grey hair whirling round his head, and he speaks English with a heavy Stord Island accent. He loves for us to laugh at his jokes, but we don’t understand them. He is passionate about his subject, though, and feeds us extra reading; in his office the spirit duplicator works overtime. It will soon be on its knees with metal fatigue. When he comes down the corridors, a cloying smell of spirit drifts behind him.

Our textbook is the Anglo-American Reader. The English in it is tiresome, with a faint taste of bog water at the edges, but the American has a sky above it that I feel comfortable with. We are reading about the Melting Pot. The Golden America, the land of freedom and equality, the haven for the homeless and persecuted, the melon they all want a slice of, the fields they all want to plough. Poor folk from Hardanger in Norway, the Abruzzi in Italy, and the Ukraine fleeing from landowners, Cossacks and the taxman, the bastards who bleed the smallholder dry until there is nothing left to eat except granite, and if you are not an Indian or a Negro, you may have a chance to see a future ahead of you and a patch of land on the prairie. I am not an idiot, I know about the napalm in Vietnam, I know about Wounded Knee and the Ku Klux Klan; for as long as I have lived I have seen the race riots on TV. They shot Martin Luther King and Malcolm X, I have read Eldridge Cleaver’s Soul on Ice and felt the flames of his hatred. But there is something about those people. They are for real. They step out of the shadows and set out on journeys never to return. A girl in the book writes about her grandmother coming to America on board the SS Imperator sailing past the Statue of Liberty to Ellis Island. There is winter in the air, and she walks down the gang plank in her colourful clothes and her black hair to the gates where the wheat is separated from the chaff, snowflakes drifting, and she is cold and the girl writes: the snow like stars in the night of her hair. She is happy with that sentence, and so am I. I turn to Arvid and say:

‘Isn’t it good?’ He reads the piece twice and looks up at me.

‘Purple prose,’ he says.

‘What the hell do you mean by that?’

‘Too much. Sentimental. US propaganda.’

‘But, for Christ’s sake, don’t you get it? Those people just took off, burned all their bridges and this girl is trying to show how afraid they were, and at the same time how grand their deed was.’

‘Maybe, but it’s still purple prose.’

I snatch the book back.

‘Sometimes, Arvid, Christ,’ I say, and read on to myself. Maybe he is right, maybe it is purple prose, but I like it.

‘Is what you’re doing of any importance to the rest of us?’ Rønning says. He’s standing by the dais with his thumbs tugging at his braces, gazing down the row of desks.

‘There was just something in the text. I thought it was good. I didn’t mean to interrupt.’

‘I see. Perhaps you might like to read it aloud for us?’ It’s like he’s rolling his ‘r’s even more than usual today. I look at him pleadingly, but he grins and splays his hands. Hell. I read. I read the whole page and finish with that sentence, the grandmother almost chokes me, my voice cracks, and everyone turns to look at me. I’m supposed to be the tough guy in the class, the strongest, the best athlete and generally as dour as shit. It just turns out that way, I don’t know why. I stare back, they think I am strange, it’s fine by me, they’re like mist, I hardly see them. Arvid’s and Venke’s faces are the only ones I can really make out. There is a shine in Venke’s eyes.

‘That’s not bad at all,’ Rønning says.

‘Forget it,’ I say.

After the lesson Rønning stops me at the door. He waits until everyone has left and says, ‘I am sorry. I shouldn’t have pushed you into reading aloud. I wasn’t aware it meant so much to you.’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Well that’s good then. Is everything OK with you? You have been a little, what shall I say, reserved these days.’ He smiles. I shrug.

‘I think maybe I’m going to stop coming here.’

‘Now? Well into your final year? Well, school isn’t everything. Don’t think I believe that. There are many other things you can do. Perhaps you need a break. Sleep on it for a week, then come to me, and we can talk about it.’

‘OK, that’s fine,’ I say.

‘By the way, I have a book at home about Ellis Island. It might be of interest to you.’

9

WHEN WE PUT Egil in his grave, it was Easter. Kari was supposed to move to Kløfta the week before. There had been some fine days, it was spring for real, nature was going berserk, and her boyfriend was standing in the sun outside the block with his lorry waiting. He couldn’t be bothered helping us, and that was just fine with me. I couldn’t stand either him or his lorry. I went to my room to fetch something I had bought for Kari, an old Supremes album I had got hold of at Ringstrøm’s Records, and I was standing by the window looking down at him. He was leaning against the red bonnet smoking, flicking the ash from his cigarette, and running his hand through his Brylcreemed hair. Then he stubbed out the butt on the footpath and looked up at the windows with sleepy eyes and a sullen smile. He was James Dean, and he had made this long trek to rescue Kari from suburban hell.

Egil came out of the stairway and walked up to the lorry with a large box in his arms. He’d been in a lot of trouble over the last year, and now he had stayed close to home for a while, but I could see how he was restless, he had this scowl on his face. He shoved the box on to the back of the lorry and the two of them started chatting. Egil was keen and unable to stand still, and after a few minutes he was sitting behind the wheel and had started the engine. It began to roll down Beverveien and rounded the bend at the end of the road. When I came out with Kari, he had driven the whole loop and was on his way back down from the top. I gave Kari the record.

‘Here you are,’ I said. ‘Listen to this and dream about the old days.’ She looked at me in surprise and was so happy that she hugged me right in front of her boyfriend.

‘Silly you. Thank you so very much. You think of everyone, don’t you?’

‘Yuk,’ I said. I didn’t want anyone to think that about me. It wasn’t even true. But she was my sister, and she had always been OK.

‘Don’t get married straight away,’ I said. ‘Think about it first,’ and she laughed, but her boyfriend sneered, and when the lorry was back in place, I walked up close to him and brushed him pretty hard with my shoulder as I hurled a bag of clothes on to the back.

‘Hell,’ he said, and spun round, but I didn’t even look at him, just kept him behind me, and he had to stand there panting on his own.

Egil stepped out of the cabin. He was excited, his whole body shaking.

‘Cool wheels,’ he said, gazing at Kari’s guy as though he really was James Dean, and right away James Dean was in a much better mood and combed his hand through his greasy hair and said:

‘Of course it’s cool, I fixed it and did the paint job myself. You know, Egil, if it’s a job you’re after, there’s enough to do around my place.’

‘Do you mean that?’ Egil said, and was even more excited.

‘Dead right I do. You’re a natural.’ He gave a generous swing of his arm, and glanced at me.

Egil turned. ‘Did you hear that, Audun?’

‘Sure I did. You’re welcome!’ I said and walked straight to the stairway and didn’t look back. That was the last thing I said to him. I met my mother on my way up. She was crying because Kari was moving out.

‘Is something the matter?’ she sniffled.

‘No. I’m just getting the last few things.’

Egil went with them up to the country to help unload the truck and have a look at the place where he might be working. He didn’t come back. Two days later he drove one of James Dean’s Volvo Amazons into the river Glomma and drowned.

On Good Friday, spring was cancelled and the next day the sleet came. It stuck to our faces as we came out of the church with the coffin between us. I had thought it would be heavier. I was holding one handle, and behind me came Arvid and behind him it was Kari. On the other side was my mother, and behind her Roberto, and last came Egil’s teacher from school. He had stood up for Egil many times, had pleaded for him when he broke into the Co-op, but it was no good. Egil had been his special vocation, and now it was over.

There was no one else. JD said he didn’t feel too good, so he stayed in bed back at Kløfta and drank blackcurrant toddies. It was fine by me. There had been talk about letting my father know, but I refused and said if he showed his face I would take off into the woods and stay there until he had left.

The priest was bad. He had been to our flat to offer his comfort and ask about Egil and what he was like, so he could prepare his talk for the church. He was the priest, so we told him the truth, he had been a pain in the ass, and when we were halfway through the truth, he got up from the sofa and took his coat.

‘OK, that’s enough. I think I will do it my way.’

And he did. Nothing of what we had told him was included. Just some waffle about the shining light he had been to those around him, how his youthful vigour had been brought to such a sudden end and then the after-life with its eternal restoration, sunshine beyond compare and twittering of birds, and I just switched off, my mother stopped crying and Kari sat staring up at the ceiling. Not a tear between us.

‘What a sack of shit, he is,’ Arvid whispered behind me as we came out into the slush and laid the coffin on the long trolley and started hauling it across the gravel. ‘He got Egil mixed up with Little Lord Fauntleroy.’

I didn’t answer, I did not even think, just looked down at my shoes and tried to steer the coffin, and then I looked at the trees that were covered by white curtains, and we followed the priest on his way to the open grave. The air was full of flakes that came down upon us, and when I stared up at them, it felt as if we were running, and that was exactly what I was thinking, that I would run away from all this. We were moving slowly towards the grave, and when finally we got there and were about to lift the coffin from the trolley, I had to look down. There was sleet at the bottom of the grave and water and wet clay. It looked cold and awful and I remembered the Easter when Egil and I had been poaching in a reservoir north of where we lived. Three perch we caught, and there were more there for the taking. We had sneaked out early, my father was still asleep, so I reckoned we would be all right. Egil was just a kid, but he was a demon at fishing, and I was sure that his eagerness to do it again was so great that he would keep his mouth shut. The plan was to hide our rods in the woodshed on the way back and say we had been playing cards at my pal Frank’s house because Good Friday was so boring. So my father thought too, and he was a keen poker player. The fish we had already given away to a woman we met on the road. We liked fishing, but we didn’t like fish. The problem was that Egil had stumbled into the lake, he was soaked to the knees, and I still had the rods under my arm when we walked up the path from the gate.

He was standing on the steps in his underwear, his head tilted and his hands down by his sides.

‘Come here, Egil,’ he smiled. Egil grinned with relief and went over to the steps. My father tousled his hair, and Egil leaned against his hip.

‘Where’ve you been so early, Egil?’

‘We’ve been playing cards at Frank’s house.’

‘You don’t say. And you dropped the cards in the swimming pool, did you, and you had to wade in after them?’

Egil laughed. ‘Frank hasn’t got a swimming pool, you know that.’

‘Wow, you don’t say? Where the hell have you been fishing then?’ my father said and hurled Egil against the wall. I felt the thump through my whole body and Egil was winded, he turned white and then he began to sob.

‘Now watch carefully, Egil,’ my father said. ‘Audun, come here.’ I looked at him. I put down the rods and took the box of bait and the extra hooks from my pocket and put them down too before I walked towards the steps. It was a distance of ten metres, and I took my time. I motioned to Egil to keep his mouth shut, and the minute I turned round, my father’s hand came out of nowhere and hit my face. I was knocked backwards and my cheek went numb, I couldn’t feel a thing and then it went hot and then there was a pain.

‘Are you watching carefully, Egil?’

‘Yes,’ Egil said.

I rose to my knees, I thought, I’m getting out of here, and then he lashed out again and hit me on the side of the head and my ears were ringing and I could barely hear Egil shouting:

‘We were fishing in the reservoir! That’s what we were doing, but it was Audun’s idea. It was. Cross my heart.’

I was ten years old at the time, Egil was eight and when school started after the Easter holidays I was still in bed, and every move I made was painful. Now the sexton was turning the crank and the coffin sank into the earth. Kari threw a bunch of roses and the priest threw soil. I turned and walked up to the church and out through the gate and stood outside on the road smoking and trying to think, but everything I touched was oily and just slipped out of reach.

Sleet gave way to rain. I held the cigarette in the hollow of my hand, and my confirmation coat had grown too small, it made me feel fat, it annoyed me, and then they were finished over in the cemetery. The small flock came slowly up to the gate and there they stopped, and the priest shook their hands one by one and said a few words. I couldn’t hear him, but the look on his face was mild and sympathetic, and eventually he came up to me and said:

‘So, you didn’t want to pay your brother your final respects?’

‘You don’t know what you’re talking about,’ I said. We were the same height and looked each other straight in the eye.

‘I know that when this life is over and the next begins, then there shall be peace,’ he said, and he was clearly pleased with his words. I looked into his face. If ever I wanted to punch someone, that would be now.

‘Kiss my arse,’ I said.

10

IT’S FRIDAY. ARVID calls and wants me to go with him to the club. He sounds worked up. I am tired, I sleep badly, and when I can’t sleep, I read. I have started Hemingway and Arthur Omre, but it’s too much. After the newspaper round and school, my brain is spinning. Still I say yes.

The club is in the shopping centre on the second level, and the entrance is right behind the spiral staircase leading up to the third. The staircase is a free-standing tower with a footbridge from the top to the market square, and Olav Selvaag, the entrepreneur, liked the tower so much that when Veitvet was finished he used it as a logo, and all his vehicles have it painted on the door.

An electric sign says Linderud Youth Club, even though Linderud is the next station. It’s childish, I know, but it has always annoyed me, and when I come up the slope by the post office and the music school, Arvid is standing by the staircase waiting. Several young people walk past him on the way in, but Arvid’s leaning against the railing, smoking in his yellow cord trousers and black jacket. Under the jacket he has a Fair Isle sweater and a large loose scarf round his neck. His hair is long now, if that’s the way to say it, because his curls grow out in all directions, and he is wearing a beret, which his grandfather gave him for Christmas last year. It’s not often he has the nerve to wear it.

He looks cool. The girls in his class dig him, but he is so shy he doesn’t get it, and that’s why it all comes to nothing. I may be wrong, though. Perhaps he doesn’t tell me everything, I don’t tell him everything, but what I do know is that everyone who passes through the door into the club is at least two years younger than we are, and I don’t understand what we’re doing here. It’s a year since we last came, and I said a sleepy yes on the phone because it seemed important to him.

I walk up to him and say:

‘Hell, Arvid, all they do in there is play table tennis and dance, and they dance like shit to music we hate. And I don’t even like table tennis.’

‘We’re not staying. We’ll be off after a while.’

‘So why go at all? It’s not even certain they’ll let us in. We’re over eighteen.’

‘Just for a little while.’

I should have stayed home. I should have lain down for an hour to sleep off the anxious feeling that’s in my stomach, but then they do let us in. The club leader is standing in the doorway looking sceptical, he is closer to us in age than most of the kids who hang out at the club. He stops us and asks how old we are. It’s embarrassing.

‘Eighteen.’

‘When?’

‘Just turned.’

‘OK, but we don’t want any trouble. You haven’t been to Geir’s bar first, have you?’

‘Are you crazy?’

‘And no fooling with the girls.’

We go in, and I stop in the middle of the hall. ‘Shit, Arvid, I’m not up for this.’

‘Just for a little while.’

The place is packed to the rafters. All the rooms are crowded with people, and I don’t know what to do with myself, so I stand in a doorway watching some snot-nosed kids playing table tennis. Arvid has gone off after checking out the room. The discotheque is right at the back, the music banging into the hall every time someone opens a door, and many turn to look at him as he hurries further in. He has shoved his beret into his jacket pocket, but still he looks cool.

Most people in the room I have seen before, but I don’t really know them, and many look up at me in surprise, and one calls out:

‘Hey, Audun, I thought you’d retired?’ His name is Willy, and he is one of those who hang around the Metro station. He is sixteen and was a friend of Egil’s. I always thought he was a slimy bastard. Whenever he came to our door to ask for Egil, I left him standing outside on the Sing-Sing gallery, even when it was pelting down.

I shrug and look past him and see Tommy’s sister sitting in a corner talking with two other girls. She looks back at me, and I blush, and Willy puts down his table tennis racket and carves his way through. He comes straight over to me and smiles. I can’t for the life of me think why: maybe because I am the oldest person in the room, and he wants to impress. He has shoulder-length blond hair, a little longer than mine, and he takes hold of my arm and says:

‘Shit, Audun, that was a bloody shame about your brother. Egil was a dead cool guy.’

I remove his hand. ‘Beat it,’ I say.

He doesn’t like that. He gets confused and looks round to see who has heard what I said, but the table tennis balls click to and fro, and sometimes they bounce on to the floor, and the players shout and laugh and are having a good time.

‘Come on, Audun, surely I have a right to say something. Shit, Egil was my best friend.’

‘Did you hear what I said? Scram!’ I push him away, he staggers backwards, and now it’s hard for him to pretend nothing is happening. The room goes quiet, and those inside it turn and look to the doorway where I am standing. It’s fine by me. I have no business with them. Willy crouches down and gets sly, he smiles, he wants to fight, one word from me, and he will fight. That’s fine, too, I don’t give a shit, and then Arvid comes down the hall, his face in a frenzy.

‘They’re not here,’ he says.

‘Who isn’t?’

‘Unless you’re one of them?’ he says and walks straight up to Willy and slams him against the wall.

‘Hey, give me a break,’ Willy says, ‘I had nothing to do with it!’

I am completely at sea. Arvid suddenly goes wild, his thin body tense like a wire, he can’t keep his feet down, and he grabs Willy around the neck and pins him to the wall.

‘One of who, Arvid?’

‘One of those who beat up my dad. Just two hours ago. He was on his way home from his shift, right, and when he came out of the Metro, this gang went for him. I guess he didn’t think their jokes were funny. How the hell would I know! And now he’s at home in bed, and he looks a mess.’ He starts shaking Willy like a rag doll, and I don’t understand why Willy is just standing there looking scared instead of fighting back. He must be stronger than skinny Arvid and much more used to a scrap, but he shouts:

‘I wasn’t with them. It was Dole and the others.’

‘Dole and the others? For fuck’s sake, Dole is your great pal, isn’t he? You knucklehead!’ Arvid yells, and now he is pounding Willy, and it looks so awkward, and no one is playing table tennis any more, they’re all on their feet roaring and cheering, and I grab Arvid’s shoulder and haul him off, and in the corridor I can hear the club leaders come running. We have to get out, pronto. I hold his shoulder in a rock-hard grip and hiss in his ear:

‘Calm down for Christ’s sake. We’re leaving.’ The man at the door rounds the corner and blocks the exit. I move in close, wrap my arms round his back, and before anyone can see what I am doing, I lift him and carry him into the next room. There he stands yelling in the middle of the floor.

‘You just wait! I’ll get you for this!’

‘Kiss my arse,’ I say and pull Arvid by the jacket and run down the hall and out through the door. It’s dark outside and suddenly cold, and we carry on up the spiral staircase, round and round, and into the square. There we stop, and I say: ‘What the hell has got into you? Why can’t you tell me what’s going on before you drag me out? And here I was, convinced it was a girl you were after, the way you’d dressed up!’

‘You have to show them who you are, don’t you get it?’ He snatches the beret from his pocket and smacks it on his head. He hasn’t calmed down at all, my friend is standing there shouting into my face.

‘He’s sixty years old, for Christ’s sake, and he doesn’t even admit it to himself. He was a boxer, right, he still believes he’s young, and now he’s been beaten up by a gang of snot-nosed kids. He doesn’t even dare to go to casualty although he needs stitches all over his face. He crawled up the stairs, goddamnit. Do you understand what shape he’s in?’

‘Hell, of course I do, just calm down a bit,’ I say, but I don’t understand what shape Arvid’s father is in, I only know that I am getting angry too. His father’s been beaten up, it’s a disgrace, but why does he have to shout at me? ‘No need to get hysterical. Calm down,’ I say again.

‘Why should I calm down? Tell me why I should calm down!’ He is close to tears, and suddenly he pokes me in the chest. ‘Tell me why I should calm down!’ he shouts.

‘Take that stupid beret off,’ I say. ‘It looks so goddamn pretentious!’ He stands in front of me, his mouth wide open, and I really feel like punching him. But of course I can’t, and I don’t know where to put my hands, but I will hit him unless I can think of something very quickly. I don’t want to beat it and leave him here alone, and so I do the only thing I can think of and put my arms around him, pull him close to me and hold him tight. Very tight. He goes as stiff as a fence post and gasps for air, and only then do I realise that Arvid loves his father. It has never occurred to me. They seem to argue most of the time, they slam doors and shout at each other up and down the stairs. I am still angry, and I squeeze him, and then Arvid starts crying. For fuck’s sake, he says to my shoulder, and he loves his father so much, and now that he’s been beaten up, Arvid wants to take on the whole of Veitvet on his own, beret and all. It makes me furious, and I squeeze him harder, and there’s a heat surging up from my legs into my stomach, and it’s not a nice feeling at all, so I keep it down there, and we stand in the middle of this market square hugging each other, and if anyone sees us now, they’re bound to think we are a couple of homos.

I don’t know if I dare let him go. If I do, I will feel naked and cold and lost in this world.

Somewhere a clock is ticking. I see the sign for the Skoglund grocery store, I have seen it a thousand times before, but never like this in the midst of a silence. Outside the silence a car comes to a halt and sets off again, and then I hear quick footsteps, someone is moving up behind me and says:

‘Hey, I followed you,’ and little by little I release him. I don’t know how long we have been standing like this, but my arms ache, and I realise that I have been squeezing him as hard as I can. In my chest there is a pain, and Arvid straightens up and takes a deep breath, there is a whistle in his throat, and I see what caused the pain: it’s the NLF badge on his lapel. I lean towards him and whisper:

‘Forget what I said about your beret, it’s just fine.’ But he looks at me as though he has never seen me before, I could have been Christopher Columbus and he my first Indian, his face is flushed and his eyes are shiny. I turn, and it’s Tommy’s sister standing there.

‘What’s your name?’ I say.

‘What?’

‘What’s your name, for Christ’s sake?’ I’m almost yelling, but she answers calmly:

‘Rita. Didn’t you know?’

‘No.’

‘Right. Well, anyway, I heard what you said at the club. It’s true that it was Dole and a few others. Willy just stood watching. Dole’s in there,’ she says and points. We are standing outside Geir’s bar. I look through the window. Dole is sitting at the nearest table with a beer in front of him, it has a golden gleam from the lamp above, and I can see the bubbles from here, and he has a crew cut, like an American marine. He was the first to have long hair at school, and now he has no hair at all. His head is large and round, and he is laughing and telling something funny to someone I cannot see. I turn to Arvid.

‘Right, shall we go in then?’ I say a bit roughly, but he just looks at me and has no idea what I am talking about.

‘What’s up with him?’ Rita asks. ‘Did you have a fight?’

‘He’s upset about his dad. Don’t come with me now.’

I walk towards the bar door. As I’m about to go in, it’s pushed open from the inside, and one of the local drunks comes staggering out. I stand back, and Dole looks up and sees me through the window. He knows who I am, but not what I want. I push the drunk aside and clear the way, and inside I head straight for the table where Dole is sitting. He is pretty hammered, he grins and says:

‘Hello, Audun, old boy,’ but I don’t answer, I just go up to him, lean down and grab his leg and pull. He hits the floor with a bang, the chair tips forward and hits him on the back of the head, the glass is knocked over and all the beer splashes down on his crew cut. He lashes out with the other leg but I skip to the side, and with his ankle in a firm grip, I drag him to the door.

‘Fuck you, Audun! Have you flipped or what!’ he yells, and I say nothing, for there is nothing to say, I just drag him along the floor. He flails out on all sides, crashes into chairs and tables, holds on to someone’s foot and shouts:

‘For fuck’s sake, help me!’ But no one lifts a finger. I bang open the door with my back, and outside in the square I let go of his leg. He gets to his feet with a groan. Once he has straightened up, I punch him hard in the stomach. I know what I’m doing. I have seen it before. He jack-knifes, and all the beer spurts from his mouth, and it floods out on to the ground between us, and I step away. I stand at the ready. But he coughs and splutters and stares at the tarmac.

‘You know what, Audun?’ he mumbles. ‘You’re a dead man.’ And then he opens the bar door and walks in bent double.

I turn back to the square. Rita is there alone, watching me with a look in her eyes I could have done without.

‘Where’s Arvid?’ I say.

‘He took off. The wrong way, I think.’

Right. I don’t know why I did what I did, but I don’t think it was for his sake.

‘Right,’ I say, running my fingers through my hair. I look at her. ‘How’s Tommy doing?’

‘Fine. He’s much better now. He really is.’

‘Good,’ I say, and start towards the stairs.

‘Audun?’ she says behind me. I turn round. She is wearing a brown leather jacket that must have been passed down from her father, that’s how it looks, and she seems older now than I’d thought before.

‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

‘OK, that’s fine then.’

I walk down the spiral staircase and down the slope by the post office and the music school and along the terraced houses in Grevlingveien. It’s so quiet. I am breathing calmly. I just feel a little warm in the pit of my stomach. I cross Veitvetveien without looking left or right. A car brakes suddenly, but my eyes are fixed ahead, and I walk the footpath between the houses until I come out on Beverveien and down to the block where I live.

My mother’s in the living room. She is watching TV. On the table there is half a bottle of Upper Ten whisky, and she has her fingers round a glass while she watches Fred Astaire dancing solo across the screen. I have never seen her drunk, but I know she drinks. There are empty bottles stacked behind her winter boots at the back of the cupboard in the hall.

‘Hi,’ she says without taking her eyes from the TV. ‘You’re home early. I thought you were going to the youth club?’

‘It was boring.’

I’m about to go to my room, but I change my mind and plump down on the sofa. Fred Astaire is sitting in a telephone booth now, talking to Ginger Rogers. He has turned on the French accent, and she doesn’t know it’s him she is talking to. He gives her some good advice with heavy French ‘r’s. He pouts. I don’t see the point. I get up from the sofa and go over to the cabinet beside the TV and fetch a glass. On the wall above the cabinet is the signed photograph of Jussi Björling.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ I say in a straight voice. Now she looks up.

‘Don’t you think we’ve had enough of that?’

‘You’re drinking.’

‘It’s Friday. I’ve earned it. Well, you’re eighteen. You have to find out things for yourself. But be careful. Have some water in it. Here,’ she says, pushing over a jug of water. I pour myself a fair amount of Upper Ten and add some water.

‘That’s Fred Astaire,’ she says. ‘He could dance with the phone book, and I would watch.’ She smiles. She likes having me there. When I am not out, I usually sit in my room listening to records or reading, and she watches TV or listens to an opera in the living room. If she has her music on loud, I turn up the volume as well. I lean back and take a sip. I have never tried whisky before. It doesn’t taste good, but it does warm you right down to your feet. I shiver a little. I could get used to this, I think, and then I watch the film. It’s completely without meaning, but Ginger Rogers is attractive. She looks intelligent, much more intelligent than the stupid part she is playing. The glass is empty. I am fine now, the shivering has gone. I carefully reach for the bottle and pour myself another one, and she just watches the film. I may as well tell her now.

‘I’m quitting school,’ I say.

‘What?’ She tears her eyes from the screen.

‘I’m stopping school.’

‘Over my dead body.’

‘There’s nothing to discuss. I have made up my mind.’ I take a large swig from the glass, there is not a lot of water in it this time, I swallow and it flows all through my body. I like it, I could sleep now, and Fred Astaire is singing. Ginger Rogers is looking at him, she is smiling, they will find each other in the end. That’s good.

I pull myself together.

‘We don’t have a lot of money, do we,’ I say, ‘but I can’t do both the paper round and school any more. If I start working full time, we’ll be a lot better off.’

‘You don’t understand. I get money so you can go to school.’

‘What sort of money?’

‘It’s a state allowance. It’s for helping bright children from disadvantaged homes. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it’s called.’ She blushes.

‘What! And you’ve never told me! Why didn’t you?’

‘That’s my business,’ she says, glancing at the TV where the credits are rolling. She missed the end of the film.

‘I don’t care what it’s called,’ I say, ‘I’m going to stop anyway. What’s there for me at school? I’m not like the others.’

‘Rubbish! What others? Your best friend, Arvid, he’s in your class, isn’t he? Is he suddenly different from you?’

‘Hell, of course he is. Do you want to know what I’m like? Do you want to know what I’m really like?’ I get up from the sofa, the room is swaying, I hold on to the table and close my eyes.

‘But Audun, are you drunk? How much have you had?’ She takes the bottle and checks the contents. The whiskies I took must have been pretty stiff, because there is not much left.

‘Forget it,’ I say, and let go of the table and head for my room. I trip over the door sill and land on my knees, but that’s fine, I was going down there anyway. I pull the accordion out from under my bed and open the case and there it is: black and white with red stripes on the bellows. A Paolo Soprani. I hold it up, put my arms under the straps, loosen the catches on both sides and go back into the living room.

‘Goddamnit, now you’re going to hear what I’m like,’ I say and pull out the bellows and squeeze the keys and the buttons hard at the same time. The accordion sends out a howl that fills the room. I pull and squeeze again, and my mother covers her ears and shouts:

‘Audun, what is this? Where did you get that? Answer me!’

‘I have thick blood!’ I shout and laugh. ‘Do you want to hear a tango? Ho, ho! Here’s a tango!’ I pull and squeeze and stamp my foot, making the whole room shake, the glasses on the table and the glasses in the cupboard clink, and suddenly the picture of Jussi Björling falls off the wall and crashes to the floor. I stop playing and my mother hurries over to pick it up, and then I can see there is a baking recipe on the back and a photo of a loaf. The picture’s from a magazine, and the signature is printed on it. I laugh so much I can hardly stand.