It's Fine By Me

13

I REIN MYSELF in. On the first day I take the Metro from Veitvet, get off just a few stations closer to Oslo and cross under a railway bridge where I can see the sky between the sleepers above my head, and I walk up a road with factory buildings and warehouses lined up on each side, until I am at the top. Behind a warehouse storing washing powder and down another road to the left, I see the tall, grey Alles Hjem office block across the way, with a car park on the opposite side. The production plant is behind the office block. You cannot see it from the road. I try the main door I entered last week, but it is locked and dark inside. I rattle the brass handle until I realise the people up above don’t start until half-past eight. Now it’s only half-past six, and I walk around the building and find a small gate and enter the yard where there is a loading ramp the entire length of the wall. Pallets are stacked up in rows with waste paper compressed into bales, and I walk along the ramp and in through the plastic flap doors where the forklifts come and go.

The large room I walk into is the finishing shop. Just inside the door there are pallets of shrink-wrapped magazines shoulder to shoulder, twenty-five in each rack, and twelve racks high, ready for the distribution centre, and right in front the conveyors, long and low, and one so new you can still see the blue paint. Last week when I was here with the foreman, waiting to be shown round, a little man came down from his platform. His forearms were as big as Popeye’s, and he grabbed my shoulders in an iron grip.

‘Are you going to work here?’ he said.

‘I think so.’

‘Don’t,’ he said, pulling me away to his station on the conveyor. ‘Look. Do you know how long I’ve been working here? I’ve been working here for fifteen years, and in all those years I’ve been standing in front of this box, stuffing printed matter into that hole, and do you know what?’

‘No.’

‘It never gets full.’

‘Doesn’t it?’

‘Do you understand what I’m saying? It never gets full!’ He held me round the shoulders so tight, it was hard to say anything but:

‘Let go for fuck’s sake.’ Luckily the foreman came up, and the man let go of me, and we moved on.

‘You won’t be working here,’ he said. ‘You’ll be working on the rotary press.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Don’t mind him. He’s a philosopher.’

‘Right.’

The rotary press is at the other end of the hall and down the stairs. I walk slowly down the two landings to the clocking-in machine. I find my card and stick it in the slot and the sound makes me jump. The ink is black — one minute past seven it is red — and then I enter the cloakroom.

All the mirrors, all the basins with the No washing feet or clothes signs, the ugly yellow walls just like they were at Rosenhoff School, the grey metal cabinets one after the other, old men and young bikers, suddenly like big birds with their shirt tails flapping over bare thighs and white calves and then all in their blue work gear. Confident, seasoned.

I hate the thought of flapping my wings among them and try to delay it, but in the end I have to, and when I have finished, the new work clothes with their sharp creases are stiff and dark blue compared to the lighter, faded blue of the others. Behind me someone is whistling a wedding march, and I itch all over. I head for the door.

The concourse is strange and quiet and not as I remember it from my guided tour. The printing presses just stand there, three floors high, not a grain of dust stirring, and the air is cold against my face. I walk past the Number Three and on through a large door to the next concourse where only one press is standing, but this one is even bigger. Here is where I am going to work. At this machine. Seven men sit in two separate groups: printers and assistants. I am the one they’re waiting for, and when I enter, they all look towards the door, and a frighteningly tall, powerful man stands up and goes towards the console. I haven’t said hello to any of them, and I think maybe I should, but nobody seems to expect anything of the kind and I stand out on the floor between the two groups like an idiot with my arms hanging down like a pair of wooden planks. The tall man turns and yells:

‘TROND!’

‘Yes!’ someone tries to yell back, but his voice cracks at the top.

‘You tell this new. what’s your name?’ he shouts to me.

‘Audun Sletten,’ I say. My voice sounds reedy.

‘You explain to this Letten what his job is!’ Goliath shouts to the one called Trond. ‘He’s on C press.’

‘Sletten!’ I shout. Everyone looks at me and grins.

‘What?’

‘My name is Sletten, not LETTEN!’ I yell and feel my face itching. There is an echo in the room, and Letten bounces around like a ping-pong ball up under the ceiling.

‘Oh my God, did I get it wrong?’ Goliath says with a smirk. ‘It’s these ear protectors. They’re no good. My hearing’s damaged.’

Blood’s pounding in my ears, sweat running down my back. I clench my fists and raise them slowly, but no one even looks at me. I can hear their mocking laughter, and then they all get up and walk towards the press, and they are all bigger than me, and they laugh and shake their heads.

‘That was some entrance you made,’ Trond says, coming over to show me what they call C press.

‘Very funny,’ I say.

Trond is lanky and thin, has a Keith Richards haircut and a ring in his left ear and close up, he seems pretty normal.

‘What do you think of the Stones?’ he asks.

‘They’re OK,’ I say, ‘but Hendrix is better.’

‘Jimi Hendrix is a Negro, for Christ’s sake. And he’s dead, isn’t he?’

‘That’s true, but without the Negroes the Stones would have played the tuba. And that’s a fact.’

‘Hendrix is OK,’ Trond says, ‘but myself, I prefer the Stones.’

‘So I can see,’ I say, and Trond grins.

Goliath starts the press on slow, there is a jerk and everything begins to roll slowly.

‘All right,’ Trond says, ‘in front of you there are four drums, one on top of the other. Above and below them there are the ink rollers. The ink is pumped from the barrels. The printing plates are attached to the top and bottom drums, the two in the middle have rubber blankets. The ink rollers rotate against the plates, the plates against the rubber and the rubber against the paper. On the back of the paper web, there’s a huge steel cylinder that the paper wraps around. You can’t see it now, but it weighs so many bloody tons you can’t even imagine. If anything goes wrong when it’s moving, all hell will break loose.’

‘Right,’ I say.

‘Right,’ Trond says. ‘When we start up, no old ink on the rubber, it will clog, and then the blankets split, and the print is ruined, and every time we start up, the blankets have to be soaking wet or else the paper gets stuck to the ink when the plates slam on, and then it rips, and we have to spend hours with tweezers getting off all the stuff that’s got stuck. It’s a crap job. When I say wet, I mean wet, but not with water. White spirit. There’s a bucket on the stand behind you. Right?’

‘Right.’

‘You must never use water, spit, cry or piss on the paper. It can’t take it, it rips straight away, and we have to re-thread the whole paper web. We do that as little as possible. It’s really boring work and nobody gets a break. When you wash the blankets, you use rubber gloves and those rags there, under the bucket stand. If you don’t, your skin will go red and after a couple of weeks it starts to fall off. Right?’

‘Right,’ I say.

‘If you feel the rag being pulled from your hands, never do the first thing that occurs to you.’

‘No? And what’s the first thing that occurs to me?’

‘Holding on to it. What happens then, we call losing your maidenhead. It often happens to new people. So let go and stop the press. The red button is there on your left. Right?’

‘Right,’ I say, and worry a little about that maidenhead thing, but I don’t want to ask. I make a mental note of the red button.

‘OK, wash away.’ And I wash. I’m clumsy and nervous and hold the rag too tight, wondering where my maidenhead is. It takes some time, it’s like the ink is glued on, but then most of it is gone, and the blankets are wet, and Trond yells:

‘READY!’ And suddenly it’s like standing on the runway at Gardermoen airport as a jumbo jet takes off. The press shrieks and howls and BANG! BANG! go the drums as they hit the cylinder, and the roar gets louder as the speed increases. I cover my ears. Trond looks at me and grins, points his finger to his temple and turns it. OK, there is something I don’t know, and now he will tell me. Trond steps behind the press and comes back with two small boxes. He gives one to me, and inside are two yellow foam rubber thingies.

‘Watch. Like this!’ he shouts in my ear and rolls the thingies between his fingers until they are small and narrow, and then he stuffs them in his ears. I do the same with mine. The roar subsides, the foam rubber expands, it’s a strange and slightly awkward feeling, the noise becomes distant, and it’s a little like being high. If anyone tapped me on the head, there would be an echo.

Trond shouts again.

‘WHAT?’

‘You’ll have to learn sign language! It’s a hundred decibels in here!’

Inside the soundproof room we remove the earplugs, and even though it’s supposed to be quiet in here, all sounds seem sharper than before. My first thought is to put the plugs back in.

‘In six months you’ll have ear canals like a cow’s arse,’ Trond says. ‘This being your debut, Samuel will be first on the stacker and then me. But don’t wander off. If the paper tears, and you’re not here, you’ll have Long John on your back.’

Long John: that would be Goliath. Goliath suits him better, but I guess I’ll keep that to myself. I am not ready to play David.

14

BANG!

I jump up from my post at the stacker, and I am up on the gallery within seconds. The paper has torn for the fifth time today and it’s not yet ten o’clock. The whole time it’s a hassle, I charge up the stairs like a madman to get there before the whole shebang catches fire. Something is not right. Each time the machine stops, the paper starts to burn.

The heat from the gas burners hits me as I run along the gallery and fling the small doors open. On my forearms, the few hairs I have left curl like tiny worms. I have been fast, but not fast enough. The flames lick out at the end of the top heater, and I rip the fire extinguisher off its stand and blast away, and films I have seen roll through my head, disaster films with flames out of control devouring everything, and here I stand with my three-litre extinguisher! If the machine oil catches fire, I’m done for.

The flames don’t go out, they spread, and soon the paper web is ablaze. I am so tired I am burning, my chest is hot and my back is freezing, and I run along the gallery and around the machine and grab the second extinguisher and stand there alone between ceiling and floor in the large concourse shooting from the hip like some crazed Western hero.

‘SAMUEL!’ I yell. Jesus, I’m new here, why don’t they help? Then I see it: it’s the gas in the burners, they’re not switched off. It’s supposed to cut off automatically when the machine stops, but there is a blue hiss in there. No wonder it’s on fire.

‘SAMUEL! FOR FUCK’S SAKE, SWITCH THE GAS OFF!’

Samuel is sitting inside the soundproof room. I can see him when I bend down: he is smoking and reading an old Playboy, or looking at the pictures, that is, because he can’t read English. My voice must have cut through. He gets up from his chair, puts the magazine down and grinds out the cigarette with a steel-toed shoe. I have thought about it many times: why does he wear those protective shoes? The heaviest thing he has ever dropped on them is a pack of cigarettes. He goes over to the console and switches the gas off, steps back to his chair and lights another cigarette, opens Playboy, and he doesn’t even send me a glance. I stand up, there is the taste of ash in my mouth. I lick my lips, but it won’t go away.

In fact, we have the same job. Assistant rotary press operator, it says in the files. But as I am thirty years younger than him and new to the job, Samuel has awarded himself an age increment, which means that every time something happens, he stays in his chair, while I rush around like a maniac.

Of course, there are Trond and Jan, but Jan is off sick, and Trond is on the toilet and has been there for a long time. Trond is the ballet dancer of the workplace, he finds his way everywhere, he can turn his hand to everything, he is full of humour as dry as the air we work in and has a knack of being on the toilet each time the paper tears.

I slide down the banister from the gallery and cut the paper just before the fire reaches the one-ton heavy roll, and then I race back up again. With the gas switched off it’s easy to control the flames. I pull out the rest of the paper, sweep up a hundred metres of red-hot web and stuff the whole lot into the container for inflammable litter.

I brush the soot off my overalls. My forearms feel as dry as old cardboard, I am so tired, I am sweating and freezing, and I sit down on the lowest step of the stairs and roll a cigarette. To thread a new web alone is impossible.

Maggi walks past in a light blue coat with a notepad in her hand. She is forty-five years old, newly divorced and always cheerful.

‘Goodness me, are you here on your own?’ she says.

I do not answer, and she asks:

‘Anything you need from the shop?’ and stands with her pencil at the ready. Her job is to run errands, fill the coffee machine and make everybody happy.

‘Petterøe 3 and rolling paper. Rizla.’ She writes it down as she is leaving and waves over her shoulder and is gone. With numb fingers, I roll the shreds of tobacco I have left. The cigarette looks more like a trumpet, but I light up, and my hands are shaking, and then the foreman enters the room. His coat is spotless white, and he stops in front of me, looking at his watch as though it were some kind of new invention.

‘Tell me something, Sletten, haven’t you been here long enough to know the break starts at eleven and not at ten?’

I get to my feet, drop the cigarette and stub it out with my shoe.

‘And I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there are some very serviceable ashtrays placed here and there on this floor.’ He turns on his heel and brushes invisible dust off his coat. There is a bald patch at the back of his head, and his hand automatically shoots up to cover it, and then he is off through the doors at the far end of the hall. The doors slam shut, and the sound slams through my head, and there’s a humming in there, for this is my father leaving, the way I saw him the last time he was home five years ago. It was Sunday morning, and we hadn’t seen him for two weeks, and suddenly the door opens, and in he comes wearing the same clothes he wore when he left.

‘Hello,’ I say. I feel timid, but he doesn’t answer anyway, just walks right past me to the stairs, his eyes fixed straight ahead, and then there is the smell of him, the smell of his jacket, his body, the smell of bonfire and forest and long-forgotten sunny Sundays, only so strong and unfamiliar in here. He hasn’t shaved since he was last at home, maybe hasn’t washed, either, and there are grey streaks in his beard I didn’t know were there. I turn, and my mother is standing in the living room doorway, she doesn’t speak, just gazes up the stairs, and I gaze up the stairs. We can hear him in the bedroom, he is taking his rucksack from the cupboard, pulls out the drawer of the bedside table, and we know what he’s got there, the police never found it, and there is a clunk as he drops it into the rucksack. My mother mumbles something I can’t make out, and upstairs he stuffs more things into the rucksack, and then he comes back down. I hold my breath, I do not breathe, my mother does not breathe, and he is outside, slamming the door behind him, and it slams through my head, and he didn’t even look at me.

I run into the living room and across to the window and watch him walk down the gravel path to the gate. By the road, he stops and turns, puts his hand in the rucksack, pulls out the pistol and takes a shot at the house. There is the sound of thunder and lightning, and the bullet smashes through the kitchen window and hits the cupboard above the sink and bores a hole in the wall behind it, which is nothing but plasterboard, and maybe it goes right through to the living room. We stop at the kitchen threshold and dare not go any further. We can see the hole in the pane and we turn and look at the cupboard. There were three jars of strawberry jam on the middle shelf inside, and soon it is dripping red into the sink. Dripping and dripping, and then it starts to flow, but neither of us can make the effort to go in and open the cupboard door to see what’s behind.

‘My God, what shall I do?’ my mother whispers. I close my eyes and see my father’s hand raising the gun, there is a flash of light, for it is sunny outside, and I run back to the living room, the hall smelling of bonfire and forest and long-forgotten sunny Sundays, but when I look out the window, there is no one by the gate.

The next day my mother starts packing.

I look around for Samuel and catch sight of him half hidden behind the press where he is padding about with a broom, sweeping the ashes off the floor. As soon as the foreman’s through the door and gone, he drops the broom and goes into the soundproof room.

Trond comes whistling in where the foreman went out, he has a copy of Melody Maker tucked under his arm. He looks at me and grins.

‘Tell me something, Sletten,’ he says in a bossy voice. ‘Are you sure the printing trade is right for you? Have you considered the Oslo Fire Brigade? Hell, can’t I go to the shithouse for two minutes without you razing the whole place?’ I don’t answer. In a couple of months I might; for now, I just shrug.

‘Samuel!’ Trond shouts. ‘Come on, we have to thread the paper.’ To me he says, ‘The printers are in the storeroom playing poker, so we’ll have to do without them.’

We start the machine on slow, make a new cut in the paper and start threading it through the press, one man each side, round hundreds of cylinders and rollers. It takes ages, but everything runs smoothly, we could have done it with our eyes closed. When we’ve finished, we wash down the rubber blankets and have a smoke. We’re not allowed to start up without the printers, so we just have to wait for Goliath and Elk to show up. But they don’t, and Trond checks his watch.

‘Lunchtime,’ he says.

To get to the cloakroom, we have to go through the next concourse. I open the large door and walk straight into a wall of sound. The roar bounces off the walls and the compressed air valves make smacking sounds as the pressure is released, there is a loud whistle, the machines are coming in to land, everything moves, there is someone running, and the machines stop and go silent. A man I cannot see lets out a naked laugh, another man throws his lunch pack like a baseball, it fizzes in an arc through the air, and I can’t resist, I jump and catch it in mid-flight and toss it into the nearest waste bin.

I hear ‘Fuck you,’ and there is a tingle in my spine, but I just put my hands up and move on without looking back.

In the canteen we help ourselves to coffee from the counter, find a table by the wall, and Trond pulls a pack of cards from his pocket and starts to shuffle. We are the first ones here, it’s perfectly still, and we hear the clatter from the kitchen and the canteen lady humming. Trond deals with practised fingers, five cards each, and the door opens and all the others come streaming in wearing blue, ink-stained work clothes, and their hands are flushed from the white spirit and strong soap. They are shouting and laughing about something that has happened, but we don’t know what that is, and we don’t care. But when everyone has sat down, Jonny comes bursting in, five hours late today with his hair standing on end, and his face as red as his hands. He isn’t close enough for me to smell him, but I know he reeks of alcohol. He pours himself a large mug of coffee and chuckles at something only he knows about. On his way from the counter, he stops at the window facing the car park and looks out.

‘I’ll be damned,’ he says. ‘Did I come in the car today?’

Everyone cracks up laughing, they slap their thighs and roar with laughter, but I can see from Jonny’s face that he is not joking, he is staring in disbelief at the yellow Opel Kadett parked crosswise out there. His eyes are rimmed with white as he runs the gauntlet through the canteen and sits down at a table by himself. He lowers his head, and I pick up my cards, but I don’t look at them, I look at Jonny and think back to the first time I saw him, charging from the gallery of Number Three with a test print in his hand. Everything was wrong, no one was doing their job, and he was so furious the blue veins on his forehead stood out, and on his back there were big patches of sweat, and he scurried in between the machinery and started to dance along the ink regulators, twisting them like a lunatic, and then he was out again and off to the paper-folder for another test. Kneeling down, with a magnifying glass in his hand, pirouetting up, waving the print in the air he smacked it down on the table and said:

‘This is how it should look, this is pro work, damnit!’ And I guess he’s right, that’s what pro work looks like, but now he is empty, and I know he is finished. He’ll get the boot for certain, he’ll keep drinking until he ends up under the bridges along the Aker river or standing at the soup kitchen with his hand stretched out, his gaze turned in, saying:

‘Got any change, pal?’ And then he’ll die thirty years before his time.

There is a downward pull in the space around him, like at the edge of a cliff where half of you wants to jump and the rest of you holds back, and it makes me furious, makes me want to lash out. I can’t concentrate, and I chuck my cards on the table.

‘What’s up with you?’ Trond asks, impatient. ‘Why can’t you sit still like other people do?’ But I cannot and I get up, and there he is, the guy with the lunch pack. He started working here a month before me and is a veteran and doesn’t like me taking liberties.

‘Leaving, are you, tough guy?’ he says. I feel the heat rising. There’s no avoiding this, and he could not have chosen a better time. I round the table and face him and say:

‘No, I was going to come and see if you had any food left, I’m so goddamn hungry today.’ I haven’t said anything so stupid for years, but now he is forced to do something and shoves me hard in the chest. I would have toppled over without the table behind me. It’s a long time since I’ve been in a situation like this, but I made up my mind years ago that, if I ever were, I would be ready, and I lash out at once. The pain that shoots up my arm is so fierce that the first thing I think of is how much it must have hurt him, because I hit him right under the eye. He howls and crashes backwards, and I hold my arm, it hurts so much I could scream. I take two deep breaths, and then there is a racket in the canteen, and someone grabs me from behind and lifts me off my feet. I kick out and the someone hisses in my ear:

‘You fucking idiot, you’re not even through your probation period yet!’ It’s Goliath: he carries me through the canteen to the door and lobs me into the corridor without drawing an extra breath, I could have been his teddy bear, if he ever had such a thing. My knee smashes against the opposite wall. There is something expanding in my chest like a balloon, it’s swelling and pushing from the inside, it makes me dizzy, and I jump up and hurl myself at him and throw a left hook into his stomach. It’s a wonderful feeling, I have felt like doing it for weeks. A strange noise comes from his mouth, but then I feel a smack above my ear, and I am on the floor. There is a rushing sound and then a howl in my ear, and I can barely hear what he says:

‘If I were you, I would clear off and get down behind the machine until this blows over. You and I can settle up some other time. You goddamn squirt!’ He slams the door, and the bang bounces through my skull, and the corridor goes quiet. The only noise is in my ear. I limp to the stairs. My knee hurts, and I have to take the steps sideways, it is three floors down to the print shop, and I try not to think. I haven’t really seen this staircase before. It is painted yellow, and I cling to that. But of course, that’s not a whole lot.

On the ground floor I meet Maggi. She comes from the lift with her trolley on her way back from the shop. She stops.

‘Here’s your tobacco,’ she says. ‘That’s twenty-five kroner.’

‘What tobacco?’

‘You ordered a pack of tobacco. Have you gone senile?’

‘I’m not senile. It’s my head. It hurts.’ I try to put my hand in my pocket for money, but my arm is paralysed.

‘Let me,’ she says and thrusts her hand into my pocket, rummaging around and fiddling with all kinds of things, I gasp, and she winks, finds the money and counts off what I owe her and stuffs the rest back with a broad beam. And then, in a friendly way, she pats me hard on the knee.

‘Ouch!’ I scream. She laughs, loud and husky, wags her finger and goes into the finishing shop.

In the cloakroom I sit on the bench in front of my cabinet, stick my bad hand under my shirt and rub my knee with the other. It’s strange when there’s no one here, very unfamiliar and quiet, just grey and a hideous yellow, wet patches under the sinks, and I try to remember why I quit school. I don’t remember anything, and I sit there for a long time, my mind a blank, until I hear sounds that might be laughter on the stairs. It gets louder, and I hear the steel-toed shoes on the floor, but still no one has opened the door. I get up and stare at the door and wait, thinking maybe Trond was right. Maybe the printing business is not the trade for me.

15

KJARTAN, CALLED ELK because of his size and his gait, approaches A press waving a spatula knife in his right hand. Elk is the deputy printer and fifty-three years old, he is recently and unhappily divorced and has a mass of grey hair above his heavy face. I stand by the stacker, handing out sixteen-page sheets on a vibration plate, working them and piling them 32 high on a pallet. Soon I will have been here for two months, and no one can complain about my skills, the printed sheets go on the pallet in razor-sharp stacks. There are 12,500 sheets on each pallet, that is 25 sheets per stack and this is the tenth pallet today. For once we haven’t had a single paper break, and I am exhausted by the everlasting thunder of the press. It gets into your bones and in the end turns them into jelly.

I follow Elk out of the corner of my eye. I have just reported a blemish on the print. For the moment it’s outside the cut, but it is growing and soon it will be on the printed page itself. It has to be a build-up of ink on the rubber blanket. I reported it only because I am dying for a fag and know we will have to stop the press to remove it. I stand there shifting my feet, my pack of Petterøe out and ready, and I am just waiting for Elk to give the stop signal to Goliath, who is the head printer.

The spatula is gleaming. I was the one who cleaned it, it’s part of the job. Assistants clean the printers’ tools. It’s ridiculous, they could do it for themselves. But they insist, they want to maintain the line of command.

Elk paces around the machine. He closes one eye as if taking aim, a strange sight that is, and then he goes down on one knee, holds the spatula at an angle to the whirling rubber blanket, supports his arm with his left hand, and I realise he is not going to stop the press. The cylinders are rotating at 18,000 revolutions per hour: all you see is the newsprint flashing by. Goliath is in the cage behind the console reading a tabloid. No one else in sight.

From the large windows up under the ceiling a ray of sun comes shining into the concourse, so powerful and tangible you could bang your head on it, if that’s what you wanted to do. All of a sudden there are sparks raining through the room making the sun seem like a torch with a flat battery. Something flies through the air, and I feel a smarting pain in my earlobe. Christ, I could have been killed. A chill runs down my spine. I go numb, completely rigid, my brain slams the brakes on and comes to a standstill. And then I see the jet of blood. I start to run, I throw myself at the red button, so far from my post at the stacker, and the sound of the machine coming to a halt is like a plane crashing. Suddenly I realise Elk is drunk, that he smelt of alcohol when I reported the blemish.

‘We’ll fix that,’ he said with a crooked grin, and that was the first time I’d ever seen him smile. Now the great Elk is standing with one hand bleeding, screaming:

‘MY FINGERS, OH FUCK, I GOTTA FIND MY FINGERS!’

There are three fingers missing from his left hand. Goliath comes running in, he tries to calm Elk down, he has a rag he wants to wrap round the injured hand. He gulps so hard you can really see it, and he holds Elk tight around the shoulder, but Elk, who is almost as tall and even stronger, tears himself away and starts running in circles.

‘FUCK FUCK OH FUCK I GOTTA FIND MY FINGERS!’

People rush in from all sides and crowd around the A press, and we look for Elk’s fingers, but they are nowhere to be found, and to be honest, I’d prefer not to find them.

Goliath tries to catch the eye of the man with the large face that is the same colour now as his hair, and his hand just bleeds and bleeds.

‘Hello Kjartan. Kjartan.’ For once Goliath speaks gently. ‘Hello, Kjartan, take it easy now. Let’s get out of here. I’ll drive you to casualty. Come on now, Kjartan!’

Elk stares at Goliath with a strange, distant look in his eyes and then he shouts: ‘BUT DON’T YOU GET IT I HAVE TO FIND MY FUCKING FINGERS THEY HAVE TO BE SEWN BACK ON!’

But we can’t find his fingers, and Goliath forces Elk to go with him. He has lost so much blood that his knees are giving way, and he doesn’t look so tall any more. On their way out, they pass the foreman, who looks around him. Goliath doesn’t even turn his head, and as I am the one standing closest to the foreman, he asks me:

‘What’s going on here?’

‘Kjartan’s lost three fingers.’

‘Oh. Jesus!’ The manager sees all the blood and says Jesus again. Then he looks at me.

‘What happened to you? Your ear is bleeding.’ I touch my earlobe, and there is blood on my fingers.

‘The spatula knife,’ I say.

‘The spatula?’ Then it dawns on him. ‘So where the hell were you standing?’

‘By the stacker.’ Everyone looks back at the belt. In the wall behind the half-filled pallet is Elk’s spatula knife, centimetres into the plaster.

‘Oh, Jesus,’ the foreman says. ‘You could have had your skull sliced in two!’ He runs his hand through the hair he has left and leaves the concourse smoking nervously and goes up to the office where he spends most of the day flicking through pornographic magazines.

We wash off the blood, remove the ripped rubber blanket and stretch a new one around the drum, and we can go home.

In the cloakroom, the ever-hip Trond says: ‘At least I’m no longer the only one here with a pierced ear.’

The next day Trond calls me over. He is behind the press cleaning up. We have finished the print run and have to wash everything down before we start afresh.

‘Just look there,’ he says.

In the water tank, Elk’s fingers are floating. They are swollen and look like big snails. I throw up straight into the tank. The foreman, who is doing his inspection tour has recovered well from yesterday’s ordeal and says:

‘You’ll have to clean that up yourself, Sletten!’ And I have to wash the tank and remove my vomit and Elk’s three fingers.

‘I don’t want to watch this,’ Trond says, making himself scarce. I don’t really know what to do with the fingers. In the end I wrap them in some waste paper and throw them in the rubbish container. And then I go to the toilet and throw up once more.

It’s dark on my way home from the late shift. No one lives in this area. Along the road down to the Metro station there are nothing but factories and warehouses, and in a few offices the lights are still on. The old street lamps are hanging on rotting posts and swing in the wind and creak in their rusting metal holders, and most of them are smashed anyway. I am walking alone. There is no one else going my way that I feel like talking to. Trond lives in Lørenskog, and he has a car and all, and besides, I have fallen out with plenty of people.

The early winter gloom devours everything. Litter blows down the gravel road, through the grey I can see the white of it rolling along the ditches, and it’s so quiet I can hear the rustle and the echo of my footsteps. Beneath the railway bridge it is totally dark, but then I see the lights from the Metro station, so I walk the last stretch a little faster. I pay at the barrier where a sleepy ticket collector sits reading the magazine I work on every day. He could have saved himself the trouble, it won’t make him any smarter. Down the steps I can hear my heart beating.

The train arrives on schedule. Inside the carriage I try to read, but I am tired, and before I am even able to concentrate, I see Linderud station disappearing behind me, so I just have to put the book in my bag.

I am the only person to get off at Veitvet. There is a hollow echo between the concrete walls on my way down the stairs, and another sleepy ticket collector is sitting at the barrier reading the same magazine. Perhaps Oslo Transport Company buys up remaindered copies, hell, I don’t know, but I am about to drop a remark. I decide not to. It’s half-past eleven, and my whole body is aching. When I close my eyes, I can see the fingers in the tank.

I go out through the glass door by the Narvesen kiosk, and as I’m about to start down the steps to Veitvetveien, someone behind me shouts softly.

‘Hi, Audun!’ I turn. And there are Dole and Willy plus two others. Dole is smiling. I am a dead man. Quickly and quietly they spread out: they know how to do this, they have seen it in films, and there is no point trying to escape. I rest the bag against the railings. This is the moment I have to rise out of myself and become someone else: Martin Eden or Jean-Paul Belmondo or Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I too have seen the films. It will be all right. Arvid and I used to talk about it, it’s the only way to keep your dignity. Or else they own you. I smile at Dole and splay my hands.

‘Out late?’ I say. He smiles back, There’s one thing we both know: I am finished. And then the film unravels. A man in dark clothes comes skulking along the walls from the shopping centre. Geir’s bar has just closed, and he is not too steady on his feet, but still he can probably make it wherever he wants to go. I don’t know if it’s him, his face is shrouded in the darkness by the station, and I am not used to seeing him here among the houses and streets and shopping centres, but it looks like his walk, and as he slips by, I say to Dole:

‘Just wait a moment!’ and take a few steps after the man and shout: ‘Hey, you! Stop,’ although I am not really sure I want him to stop. But anyway, he doesn’t stop. I am about to run after him, and his back melts into the shadows up towards Trondhjemsveien and the woods on the other side, and Dole leaps out and blocks my way.

‘That was a new one,’ he says, ‘but it won’t fuckin’ work, Audun, you’re goin’ nowhere.’ And then he lashes out. I am not prepared for it, my guard isn’t up yet, and he hits me in the mouth. I am about to shout ‘Wait!’ but it hurts so much the word doesn’t reach my lips, and they are all over me, the four of them, punching and kicking, and I get my beating, with no dignity, Martin Eden and Albert Finney are over the hills and long gone. Finally, I am on the asphalt and all I can do is protect my face. Dole gives me a last kick and says:

‘Goodnight, Audun,’ and clatters down the stairs with the others. I hear Willy’s laughter, and then they are gone.

I am not sure I’m able to stand up. There is a smell of dust and beer and tarmac. I lick my lips. I can’t feel my mouth, but it tastes of blood. It hurts to breathe, I cough and the pain shoots across my ribcage. Dole’s last kick was vicious. I lift myself up, I can just about do it, my arms stiff and sore, and finally I get on my feet. Straight ahead is the sign for the bowling alley. It’s dark inside, but the sign is luminous. I look towards the stairs. There is my bag. I walk slowly over and pick it up. It’s painful. I can hardly bend down. I look around. Everything is quiet by the Metro. If anyone saw what happened, they have legged it. I look in through the station windows. The ticket collector is hunched over a crossword. He is deaf and blind. How he can even see that crossword is beyond me. He can go to hell.

I can’t go home like this. My mother will be hysterical and start fussing and ask me all kinds of questions. I don’t think I can face it. I hold the bag close to my chest and spit. There is a red spot on the asphalt. I put my hand to my mouth, and I can feel how my upper lip is split. I need help for this. Very slowly I walk round the shopping centre, past the rear entrance to Geir’s bar and down past the youth club and the post office. If I keep my back straight, my chest doesn’t hurt so much.

‘Anything comes up, you know where I live,’ old Abrahamsen said. He lives at the far end of Veitvetsvingen in a three-room terraced house. I take him at his word. I don’t know where else to go. I could go to Arvid’s, but I have hardly seen him the last month, and I would feel awkward.

I come to the bend in the road. There are cars parked the whole way down. People have more cars than they used to. I cough as gently as I can and ring the bell of the last house. When the bell stops ringing, it is dead quiet. I turn to see if anyone is standing there gawping, but there is no one about. I have two holes in my trousers, one on each knee, and there’s only one button left on my jacket. A noise comes from behind the door, and then it opens and old Abrahamsen peers out. He’s in his underwear. Of course he is, it’s late. I check my watch, but it’s broken and stopped at ten to twelve.

‘I’ll be damned, it’s that boy.’ He smiles. I try to smile back, but I cannot: moving my lips hurts too much. He opens the door and the light streams out from the hall. I close my eyes.

‘For fuck’s sake, Audun, what’s this you look like? Get yourself in here.’ I squint and try, but I can’t move my left leg up his steps. It has gone all stiff. He comes outside and supports my arm, and I limp indoors. I have never been to his place before. I had pictured an old man’s flat with an oilcloth on the table, elks in the sunset, discoloured wall lamps and unwashed, brown coffee mugs. But the walls are freshly painted and covered with framed pictures and photographs and the kitchen is spotless. In the living room there are several paintings and two bookshelves, and there is a zebra skin hanging on the longest wall. There is not one picture of anything in Norway. He sees what I am looking at and says:

‘I was a seaman. You didn’t know, did you? Can you manage to take your clothes off?’ I nod. I can if I have to.

‘You need to take a shower to see what’s what.’ I nod again and start to undress. The jacket and the shirt I can do, but I can’t do the trousers, it feels like my ribs crack when I bend down. I look at him and shrug and shake my head.

‘If it’s fine with you, I can do it,’ he says, and I nod. It’s fine with me. And old Abrahamsen kneels down and pulls off my jeans and boots. His hair has gone grey, but it’s all there, the sinewy arms in the vest work at my laces, he is quick and his muscles ripple, it looks good, and I think: to look like that when you’re past sixty.

He pushes me gently towards the bathroom. I stop him, I want to tell him something, but it’s too difficult, it turns to mush in my mouth, and I make a sign with my hand. He goes to fetch paper and a pencil. I write: ‘Could you please call my mother and tell her not to worry?’ And I add the telephone number.

‘I’ll sort that out, Audun. You take that shower.’

I do. The water is lukewarm and pleasant. It runs red down my stomach and on to the white, painted cement floor, like a rusty snake coiling, and then tapers down the drain. Carefully I dry myself and look into the mirror. Jesus Christ.

He knocks on the door and comes in with plasters and iodine in a little bottle. He stands watching me, shaking his head.

‘How do you feel?’ he says.

‘It hurts.’

‘A lot?’

I nod. He opens the bottle, cleans the wounds with some cotton wool and puts on the plasters. I stand quite still with my eyes closed. Once, by mistake, his elbow touches my ribs. I groan. He presses his finger softly in a few places. I groan again.

‘A couple of broken ribs would be my guess,’ he says, ‘it hurts, but it’s no disaster. Well, this is as much as I can do. I’m not sure about your lip, though. You’ll need to go to casualty with that.’ He tilts his head and smiles.

‘I remember one time I looked a bit like you do now. I was about your age too. It was in Hull, that was, a few years after the First World War. I had signed on a freight vessel. A Dane beat me up, I didn’t stand a chance. He was two metres of muscle from Hirtshals. We became friends later on. We’d had a pint too many, that’s all. You know, I could tell you some things about Hull. It was a great place. Not many people liked it, but I did. And here’s me telling stories. You need some clothes.’

He goes out and rummages around in a wardrobe and returns with a worn, grey suit, measures me up with one eye pinched and helps me on with the trousers. The suit fits and feels good. It’s clean.

‘That’s it, you have to look presentable in casualty, otherwise they won’t treat you properly.’ He rings for a taxi and puts on a jumper, jacket and shoes. He is going with me.

In the taxi down Trondhjemsveien, I huddle in the corner of the back seat. I feel better now, the engine hums and ticks over like a taxi should. I could have gone to sleep had it not been for my aching mouth and chest. I close my eyes and then old Abrahamsen says:

‘I don’t have to tell you, Audun, you know for yourself. You’re eighteen years old. It’s a tricky time. There’s so much going on, and later some say it was the best time they ever had, and some say it was the worst, and they’re both right. People live different lives. People are different. Some get the cream, always, oh, I’ve seen them. But one thing is certain: at some point everything changes. You’re not eighteen all your life. That may not be much of a consolation, but take a hint from someone who’s on the outside looking in: you’ll get through this. I’m dead sure.’

The doctor is tired and irritable. The first thing he says:

‘Is this your doing?’ looking old Abrahamsen in the eye.

‘Thanks for the compliment. Could I have done all that to such a strong fellow without a single scratch in return? Thank you very much!’ He bows, and the doctor is even more irritable. He tells me to get on the table, where I lie flat and he shines a lamp in my face and leans over me. There are black rings under his eyes and he needs a shave.

‘Right,’ he says, ‘you have a choice. I can either stitch you up without an anaesthetic and it will heal just fine, or you can have an injection, and you’ll look into the mirror three weeks from now wondering where you got the hare lip.’ He talks like James Cagney, if Cagney had spoken Norwegian, there is a touch of American movie about the room, and it isn’t much of a choice.

‘No anaethedic,’ I say.

When he has finished he puts a big plaster over the cut, giving me a snub nose, he winds a bandage round my chest, and to his back I say ‘Thank you very much’.

‘OK, next,’ he shouts through the door, and we go down the corridor, past reception and on through the double doors to the square in front and look for a taxi. I am dizzy with fatigue and pain, and in the car I say the only right thing.

‘Tell me bou Hull.’

Old Abrahamsen smiles and tells me about Hull. About sailing down the Humber past fishing boats bow to stern all the way from Grimsby, and the old paddle steamer carrying passengers to and fro across the Humber and the old wooden wharves that must be long gone by now, but they smelt of fish and tar, reeking of a hundred years of sweat and toil when the sun was out, and quiet Sundays in Pearson Park where old men in white shirts and braces played bowls in the shade under the trees, the measured strides of men past seventy and the far-off clicks when the wooden bowls collided. It was so quiet you could hear your watch tick and your heart beat. And old Abrahamsen was young and lay on the grass kissing Mona O’Finley from Dublin. Her father had fled Ireland after 1916 and settled in 14 Pendrill Street, a grey house in a row of grey houses, off Beverley Road heading east. Oh, he liked Hull all right, there was not much of an upper class there, and on some days all you could hear around the harbour was Danish and Norwegian. And if talking to your neighbours was not what you fancied, you could go and have a pint at the Polar Bear, the finest pub in the world, where men in faded blue clothes were discussing trade union politics and poetry.

‘Oetry?’

‘Yes, for sure, poetry, and if you ask me, that was the best time of my life. You know, Audun, there are so many things in this world. It’s not just here and now.’ I nod, and we pass through the Sinsen intersection and up the hills past Aker Hospital to Bjerke trotting stadium at the top, and I really wished we would never get to Veitvet.

16

I AM OFF sick for the rest of the week and the whole of the next. My mother’s got a cleaning job at the Park Hotel, so she is away for most of the day, and I drift around the flat on my own, curtains drawn, drinking soup through a straw and lying in bed, reading and taking painkillers whenever I have to. At six she comes home and tells me the latest news about celebrities and pop groups staying at the hotel, about their drinking and the state of the rooms and toilets after they’ve left. She is ruthless. I miss talking with Arvid, but he doesn’t ring me, so I don’t ring him.

The Sunday before I return to work, I go for a walk in Østmarka. I take the Metro from Veitvet to Tøyen and change there and go to Bogerud and walk into the woods from Rustadsaga. It’s cold, the air is crisp and clear and dead leaves lie in golden heaps along the hiking trail. My body still feels sore, but it’s working again, and I push the pace until the muscles tell me it’s enough. It is good to breathe after many days indoors. I have changed the large plaster for a smaller one, so I don’t have a snub nose any more. The swelling has gone down, and apart from a few yellowish-blue marks and the plaster, my face looks almost normal. I have a cigarette in my pocket. I am going to smoke it when I’m halfway. I don’t meet anyone that I know. People from Veitvet trek in Lillomarka.

And I don’t see any animals, but long Lake Elvåga is glittering in the sunshine. About halfway, I stop and slide down and sit on the slope by the bank. It is fine and open here, and the trees are naked. I take out the roll-up and a little notebook I like to think is similar to the one that Hemingway used in the Twenties in his Paris book A Moveable Feast. I light the cigarette and try to do what he did: write one true sentence. I try several, but they don’t amount to any more than what Arvid calls purple prose. I give it another go, and try to get down on paper the expression on Dole’s face when I dragged him by the leg across the floor of Geir’s bar. It’s better, but not very good. I leave it for the day and put the notebook back in my jacket pocket and clamber up to the path. I go north along the lake to Elvågaseter restaurant. I order a coffee and sit by the window. I let the coffee cool for a few minutes. I speak to no one. Then it’s the last stretch, up past Vallerud to Gamleveien. There is a bus stop there. I have to wait for half an hour, but that’s fine with me.

The bus is nearly empty, just an elderly man with a rucksack sitting at the very front talking to the driver. I sit at the back as I always do, thinking that for one and a half weeks I haven’t spoken to anyone except my mother.

The next day, I’m back on late shift. I sleep in for as long as I can, and when I catch the Metro, I am wearing Abrahamsen’s grey suit. It attracts attention. People stare in the Underground, and in the cloakroom at work there is whistling and polite bowing between the cabinets. Trond waves his arm and says I look like something straight out of a black and white film from the 1930s, and others say, hand on heart, that the tapered trousers are what make the greatest impact. The suit causes so much of a stir that no one mentions my face. Which was pretty much the idea.

Jan is off sick again. He has been sent to hospital. No one talks about what may be wrong with him. He is the paper roll man, and I have been trained as his substitute. Trond winks and says promotion is just round the corner. Trond is supposed to step in on the paper-folder, but the man there is never ill. A change is welcome, and I must work alone, which I like, but it’s a lot more hectic.

The rolls of paper are stored on a large platform, row upon row in the next room. Each of them weighs a ton, and they are transported on a little trolley that runs on rails from the platform to the middle of the press where the roll star is. There is room for three rolls in the star. My job is to keep it filled and not ever lag behind, and the art of it is to make the splice. The paper is spliced when the press is going full blast, and so I need a length that matches the speed. I calculate the angle and make a V-shaped tear along a steel ruler and fix the tip back against the roll and cover it with a precise pattern of strong double-sided tape. When the old roll is almost finished, I swing the star 120 degrees round until the new roll is straight under the web and start up the motor until it’s running at the same speed as the rest of the press. And so I stand waiting, waiting, my finger on the button, and then I have to push it, and a brush pastes the join to the paper web and a knife cuts off the old roll with a bang. The sport is to get as close to the cardboard core as possible. If all goes well the splice is removed at the folder, and if it doesn’t, there is a howl and the paper comes streaming out of its web, or it concertinas, and we have to stop the press and re-thread the whole web. That takes an hour at worst, with test runs and washing down, and I am no one’s favourite. It doesn’t always go well, but I am not stupid, and Jan has been a good teacher.

Today all goes well. I toil and sweat and enjoy my work, I kick-start the trolley and stand on it as I shoot along the rails into the next hall, cut off the wrapping, and manoeuvre the paper rolls to the edge of the platform and rock them gently on to the trolley. There’s a trick to it: if I push too hard the roll topples over, and that’s why I wear my steel-toed shoes. They are supposed to take a ton’s weight, but I don’t feel like testing the claim. I keep the star full and two rolls in reserve, and by lunchtime not one splice has gone awry.

In the canteen we play cards, printers and assistants at their separate tables; this is lunchtime apartheid, but I couldn’t care less. Everything’s gone better than expected. When Trond suddenly looks at my face and asks what I was really up to last week, I just answer with a shrug.

Goliath and the other printers are sitting at the next table. Midway through lunch, Jonny goes to their table from his corner and takes a seat. They deal him in, but he makes so much noise and laughs so hysterically that they send him off with a flea in his ear, and he has to go and sit down on his own again. I keep a watchful eye on him.

‘How’s Jonny doing?’ I say. Trond peers over his cards towards the corner.

‘Much worse. Every day he picks a quarrel with the foreman and turns up late every other. He’s on the edge. I’ve got a tenner on him to blow his stack this week. I don’t think I’ll lose.’

Neither do I. Jonny sits chewing on his sandwich and stares out the window, but outside there is nothing to see, it’s pitch black. I have an urge to go up and talk to him, but then I don’t. He is not in my league.

After the break, he runs around Number Three yelling at everybody and getting more and more desperate, and then he is off to the cloakroom. This keeps happening, and each time he returns with his body in a knot and throws himself at the ink regulators, but now he is the one making mistakes. His team is at their wits’ end, they have to stop the press every half an hour to re-set.

There’s a web break on ours. It’s not my fault, but Harald, who is Elk’s deputy, is running around giving orders and has fingered me as the sinner. He is sweating. I’m not afraid of him, I know what I am doing, and I do it my way, so I just turn my back on him. Goliath stands watching with a wry grin. I have no idea whose side he is on. We never talk. We prise out all the fragments that got stuck, and Goliath starts the machine on slow, and we thread a new web and wash down the blankets. It’s no problem, we are ahead of schedule. Harald can do his job, and I can do mine. When the press is running, I stock up with rolls, make the splices on the two already in the star and take out my pack of Petterøe and roll a cigarette. If all goes as it should do, I have twenty minutes.

First I tidy up around my post, chuck the rags soaked with white spirit in the red bin and throw all the other junk in the waste container. Then I take out a book from my bag and go behind the machine and sit down on a stack of pallets and open it. Right in front of me, the large double door is open to the next hall. The presses have been going all day, and it’s hot. Behind me, Samuel is standing at the belt taking the folded sheets out of the stacker, and then he works them on the vibration plate and lays them on the pallet. He is singing aloud to himself with his earplugs pushed well in. I try to catch what it is he’s singing, but he must have made up the song himself, because it’s like nothing ever known to the human race. I read and smoke and take an occasional look into the next concourse. Everything is running and humming. Jonny is standing by the console on Number Three with his finger on the button pushing up the speed. He is way behind schedule and will have trouble with management if he doesn’t deliver. Suddenly the paper flies, there is a bang and it catches fire. Jonny leaps screaming into the air, and his team run up the stairs to the gallery to put the fire out, and I put my book down, it is ten minutes past nine, and Jonny lets loose an ear-splitting howl that cuts through the drone of machinery, it’s like an animal’s scream, and he grabs a pallet, he is a discus thrower now, Jonny so small, the pallet so big, but it takes off, it takes off like a flock of sparrows through the hall and crashes against the foreman’s window, it’s like the sun lighting up a shower of glass, and then everything grows quiet, even though the other presses are still working. Now he’s a goner. I close the book and start to run.

I get there at the same time as the foreman: he is out of his office looking petrified, and I come from the opposite direction. I get there first, push in between the foreman and the press and block his path and start picking up sooty paper and fragments of glass.

‘Where’s Jonny?’ he says. I straighten up and feign a bewildered look. ‘Jonny? Who’s that? Does he work here?’ I mutter under my breath, not knowing if he can hear me or not. With Jonny gone into thin air and the whole crew on the gallery, I just couldn’t stand by and do nothing. The foreman casts around, but there is no one to talk to, so he turns to me, small bits of glass crunching under his shoes.

‘What the hell are you doing in here?’ he says. ‘Why aren’t you on Number Five where you belong?’

‘There was a paper break here, so I thought I could give a hand.’

‘Give a hand? You should be doing your own damn work!’ He is losing it, everyone is looking away, and I realise he is not going to say anything about the window even though he is up to his knees in broken glass and I am the only person around. But I’m not going to back down now, and that makes me feel calm.

‘I am doing my own work,’ I say.

‘What do you mean? Are you being insolent?’

‘I am not being insolent.’ I am just saying I do my work. No one can say any different.

‘I’ll tell you one thing, Sletten. I’ve been keeping an eye on you. You’re a troublemaker, are you not?’

‘You can call me whatever the hell you like, but you can’t say I don’t do my work.’

I crossed the line there. But this day started too well. I must have been an idiot to think it was going to last.

I drop what’s in my hands and walk towards the hall, where I can see Samuel’s back. He still stands singing and has not heard a thing. I start to count. When I get to five, the foreman shouts:

‘SLETTEN!’ I stop and turn round.

‘YOU’RE FIRED! YOU CAN GO HOME, NOW!’

‘Kiss my arse,’ I say.

That was quick. I go in past Samuel, and my legs are trembling. There is air instead of bones inside them. It’s a strange feeling. I can ask old Abrahamsen to help me get a job at the harbour. I am strong, I can lift sacks. I don’t know. What is certain is that my mother will be beside herself. I walk past the soundproof room where Goliath is sitting by the console filling in today’s log. He looks up as I pass. I don’t look back, just go to fetch my book and then on to my place at the rolls star and put the book in my bag. The old roll will soon be empty. I could just go away and let it run out, but everything has been so perfect today, and no one can say I don’t do my job, even if I don’t have it any more. I go over and swivel the star round, start up a new roll and when it’s up to the right speed, I let the splice go. It sticks. Davidsen, the foreman, can go hang himself. It’s a little early to make a join if you want to save paper, but it’s better than having the press run empty, and I don’t want to wait. I want to leave now.

When the join has gone through the web and been taken out at the folder, I grab my bag and walk along the press. Goliath looks up again, he sees the bag, he looks surprised and comes to the door.

‘That join was a little early, wasn’t it?’

‘I didn’t want to wait. I’m leaving.’

‘Leaving? Hell, you’ve only just got here. You’ve been away for more than a week.’

‘I’ve been fired.’

‘What are you talking about? No one gets fired from my team without me being told about it.’

‘Maybe so, but just the same, I was fired five minutes ago, by Davidsen.’

‘Goddamnit. HARALD!’ Harald comes running in with blue ink dripping from his spatula. He has been stirring one of the tubs, and now it’s running down his trousers. ‘YES?’ he shouts over the drone of the machine.

‘Stop the press. Nice and easy. And don’t move a fucking finger until I’m back.’ He heads for the door. Then he stops and turns to me.

‘And you stay right here.’

‘Don’t make any trouble for my sake. I don’t give a shit about Davidsen.’

‘Sometimes you’re such a fathead, Audun, it’s painful to watch. If you gave a little less of a shit, maybe you would get on better. But I can’t lose a good roll man because of some useless foreman. So you stay right here. Do you understand what I’m telling you?’

‘Fine,’ I say. ‘Fine.’ Goliath pulls up his shoulders and rushes out the door, and the roar of the press subsides, the valves let out steam, and the web of paper goes white, and then it stops and it’s quiet. Samuel looks up from his post by the stacker, he is still singing, and now I can hear what song it is, it’s ‘Johansen’s Jumper’. Trond looks up from the book he is reading. He borrowed it off me, and I borrowed it off Arvid. He’ll get it back, one day.

‘What’s that noise?’ Trond says.

‘It’s Samuel singing.’

‘Oh, shit.’

I stay at my post by the rolls star. This is just crap. I want to get out of here. You do it yourself, or you leave. That’s the way it is, and I want to go.

‘What’s going on?’ Trond says. ‘Why have we stopped?’ I shrug and stay there. I am the only person sitting. The others are standing, scratching their heads, and then Goliath and the foreman come in through the door. They are yelling at each other. Goliath is waving his arms around as he walks towards the press. I grab my bag and stand up.

‘Sit back down,’ Goliath says. ‘This is a fag break.’ He fetches his chair from inside the soundproof room and places it right in the middle of the floor with his back to the foreman. The others do the same, and they sit down, take out their tobacco and roll cigarettes. Davidsen is the only person standing now, and his face is beetroot-red.

‘Hey, Odd!’ he shouts. ‘Start the press now!’

Goliath lights his cigarette, inhales and blows out.

‘Jesus, that was really wonderful,’ he says. ‘Today it’s been one thing after another, I haven’t even had the time to smoke a cigarette. We’re spoiling management, that’s what we’re doing.’

‘Odd! You heard what I said! I’m in charge here!’

No one can see him except for me. He is sweating, his white coat is too tight on him. He runs a hand through his thinning hair, and Goliath gets up and goes over to the press, pulls the spatula knife from his work pants and cuts the paper just above the star. Swish it goes! And then the two ends hang in the air. He puts the spatula knife in its pocket and sits down with his back to the foreman. Davidsen is close to crying. He looks at his watch. Very soon it will be too late to fire up. There won’t be time enough to wash the press down and start afresh before the shift is over. His shoulders crumple.

‘Audun, you’ll do the splice. That’s your job.’

‘I don’t work here,’ I say.

‘Don’t try to be funny. Do as I tell you.’ I look at Goliath. He nods. I get up from my chair and go over to the star and put it in neutral, pull the paper until I have enough to work with. Then I take out the sticky tape and make a strong join.

‘OK, let’s go,’ Goliath says, and stubs out his cigarette. ‘Get those blankets wet.’

Afterwards he comes up to me. ‘Do you know what, Audun,’ he says, ‘you’re a troublemaker.’

‘At least I do my job,’ I say, and then he smiles his wry smile. Maybe his mouth just is like that.

17

FOR THREE DAYS it has been snowing, and then it turns bone cold. Everything is different, it feels warmer down the stairs to the rotary press, and when evening comes, the doors open, casting yellow shadows, and my footprints shine in the dark on my way home from the late shift. My body is tired in a different way, time passes, that’s why, I know, and my mother doesn’t play opera as much and watches more TV. There are times I miss Kirsten Flagstad and Jussi Björling, but Jussi is taboo now. My hands have cracked up, so the ink doesn’t really wash off. Touching my shoulders and thighs is like rubbing stone, and then I think about what those hands might do to Rita’s skin or even Fru Karlsen’s, and I find some sticky mess in my mother’s cabinet and smear myself with it. And yet there is a change I have been waiting for that doesn’t happen.

I lie in bed under the duvet with only my nose out over the top and see the starry frost on the old windows. We were supposed to have changed them for a new kind, the ones you operate with a handle and tilt, but my mother didn’t want to spend the money, and now she has fallen out with the neighbours who think it looks ugly and unsymmetrical. Before I’ve even considered getting out of bed, the telephone rings. I lie back waiting for my mother to answer it. She doesn’t. The flat is completely silent apart from the shrill ringing tone that comes up the stairs and into my room. If only I had remembered to close my door last night, then perhaps I would not have heard it, but now it’s too late.

I don’t want to, and then I have to. I thump my fist on the pillow, thrust the duvet aside, jump out and run downstairs in my underpants only, knowing the phone is bound to stop the second I pick it up. It always does. But it keeps ringing, and I grab the receiver and shout into it: ‘Yes, hello, what is it?’

‘Jesus, you got a hangover?’ It’s Arvid. I am frozen, I cover one foot with the other and try to make myself as small as I can, but I am one seventy-eight tall and practically naked.

‘Shit, don’t you know the working class have a right to weekends off? By the way, this is a rare honour.’

‘And the same to you. Anyway, you’re not supposed to rest, you’re supposed to work the time you’re on this earth. You must seize the day and the hour, you have to go skiing with me in the woods. The snow is great, and I need some air. Imagine a Kvikklunsj chocolate bar and cocoa in Lilloseter or Sinober.’

At least he’s trying. And I think: come on, Arvid, and say:

‘Sinober’s too far. And I haven’t had my skis on for two years. I don’t even know where they are. Isn’t it damned cold?’

‘Don’t forget Ingstad out on the tundra. In the mornings he had to thaw the dogs over the fire. That was cold. Minus fifteen is more like a sauna. Find your skis, you’ve got them in the cellar, I know you have. See you out by the military camp in an hour. Green Swix is good for waxing. Goodbye.’

He hangs up, and there is only silence. I stand listening. Where is my mother? I go upstairs and knock on her bedroom door, and when she doesn’t answer, I open it. The room is empty, the bed’s been made. I look at my watch. It’s just nine o’clock, and it’s a Sunday, and then the telephone rings again. I’m still half naked, every room is cold, and I curse and have to go back downstairs.

It’s Kari.

‘Is Mamma there?’ She says Mamma.

‘No, in fact she’s not, I don’t know where she is. I’ve just got up. The telephone keeps ringing, I’m standing here stark naked, and I’m freezing my arse off.’

‘Audun?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want to come home, Audun. I don’t want to spend Christmas here. I want to come home.’ She whispers the last words. ‘I think I have to hang up,’ she says quickly, and then it’s the dialling tone. I stand with the receiver in my hand, listening, and all I hear is the beep.

‘Kari?’ I say before I even start thinking, and then I slam the receiver down and go upstairs to my room and search for clothes. I find a thick jumper and a pair of old skiing pants at the back of the wardrobe and red knee socks. Then I go down to the kitchen and put the kettle on for coffee. Where did I last see the ski wax? I go to the worktop and pull out drawer number two under the cutlery and there they are: small tins of red, blue and green Swix. In the country it was always the firewood box we rummaged through, when something went missing, and here, when the odd item disappears, it ends up below the cutlery in drawer number two. The skis are on the fire escape outside the kitchen window, I suddenly remember. They have been there for two years. I pick up the green Swix, hold it in my hand, weigh it, and then I see the photograph of Kari with her newborn baby on the wall above the kitchen table. I put the tin back, close the drawer and go out into the hall and dial Arvid’s number. He picks up.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Is your father there?’

‘My father?’

‘Yes, your father. Can I have a word with your father?’

‘Christ. OK. Don’t go away.’ He puts down the phone, and I hear him walk into the living room and call up the stairs, and then all goes quiet, and after a couple of minutes a door is shut, and Arvid’s father says:

‘Hello?’

‘Hello, it’s Audun. I know this is a little over the top, but I have to ask. Would it be possible to borrow your car for two or three hours today? It’s my sister in Kløfta. I think there’s a crisis, and I need to go. The bus takes too long. I’ll be careful. Word of honour.’

‘Well, actually I was going to use it myself today, but I suppose it can wait. It’s important, you say?’

‘I think it is. It would be cool of you. I have no one else to ask.’

‘Then you’d best be going right away.’

‘I’m already there. Thank you very much.’

I guess a reefer jacket and red knee stockings is not the latest fashion, but there is no time to change, and I lock the door as I leave. Wherever my mother is, she has her own key. And then I remember the kettle on the stove and have to go back in. I hurry through the hall, and in the kitchen I pull the kettle off the hotplate and close the lid with a bang. I start to sweat under my jacket by the stove and remember that this was the day I had planned to stay in bed and just take things one after the other. I slice off a chunk of brown bread before I leave and chew on it as I lock up and hurry along the Sing-Sing gallery.

I come out of the tower at ground level and run in the snow between the houses and across Veitvetveien. There are two cars stranded by the kerb with their iced-up windows and starter motors sounding like bad attacks of bronchitis as the drivers inside twist the keys. The frosty mist from my mouth fans out in the air, and coming down Veitvetsvingen, I see Arvid standing on the road by the car with the key dangling from his mitten.

‘If there’s a crisis, I’ll go with you,’ he says.

‘Sorry about the skiing trip.’ I rub my ears, there is an ice-cold wind, as there always is, and I haven’t worn a cap for years.

‘No problem. At least I’ll get some fresh air, I’ll just roll down the window.’

‘Oh no, you don’t.’

We pull the grey tarpaulin off the car. It is unwieldy and stiff, and when we fold it there is a cracking noise, and with a struggle we force it into the boot. The windows are ice-free, and the car starts first time. There is no nonsense with Frank Jansen’s car.

‘You can tell your father I’ll pay for the petrol.’

‘He’d expect nothing less,’ Arvid says.

We drive round the bend and along Grevlingveien towards the shopping centre and then up to Trondhjemsveien. I switch on the heating and the fan starts humming, and then there is a smell of something burning, and only very slowly does the car thaw out. We keep our mittens on. The road is nearly empty, only the occasional lorry steams past, and then we are lost in a spray of snow, and I have to cut the speed to keep the car on the road, and then suddenly the road gets all slippery, and I really have to concentrate.

Driving with your mittens on is difficult. My hands slip on the steering wheel and I clench them so hard my whole body goes tense, and my neck feels so stiff I can hardly turn my head. We drive without speaking. Everything out there is white, but the roads have been cleared, and the trees that glide past bristle with rime and crystallised snow. I give up on the mittens, pull them off, and the wheel is cold and damp against my palms, and we can see the white smoke curling upwards from the chimneys on every rooftop. We drive past Grorud, with the church, and the school down in the valley, and Lake Stemmerud up in the woods, where we used to swim in the summer. I almost drowned there once, but then it was thirty degrees plus. I was diving and hit my head on the bottom and didn’t have the strength to swim ashore, so instead I crawled along the bottom until my lungs were screaming. It was just my luck I didn’t crawl the wrong way. It was so embarrassing I didn’t tell anyone.

Arvid says nothing until Gjelleråsen Ridge:

‘Is it a serious crisis, you think?’

‘James Dean is no good. I’ve told them all along, but no one will listen. I don’t get what a great bird like Kari’s doing with him. Maybe we have to do a little kidnapping. Are you up for it?’ I try to laugh, but it’s not funny.

‘I’ll do whatever you tell me. You’re the boss on this one.’

‘Maybe there is no problem. But, whatever happens, Kari and the baby are coming with us when we drive back. Kari’s always been OK with me.’

‘So you owe her, is that it?’

I shrug. ‘She’s my sister,’ I say. ‘Call it what you like.’ Arvid is about to answer, and then he doesn’t and looks away and says to the window:

‘Sorry. Stupid thing to say.’

Yes, it was, but I can’t think about that now. Behind my eyes there are images flashing, making it hard to see straight. My hands tingle, and heat wells up inside me, and inside the car the windows are freezing up, until finally I can’t see a thing. Arvid takes an ice-scraper from the glove compartment, but the humid air freezes and clogs the windows faster than he can remove it, and I have to pull over, roll the windows down and then we both scrape the windscreen. I look at my watch again, this is taking too long.

‘Jesus, haven’t you finished yet?’

‘Take it easy,’ Arvid says. ‘We’ll have to drive for a while with the windows down, I guess. The fan’s not the greatest in the world.’ He scrapes the windows clean on the inside, and I do the outside. I kick at the snow and check my watch and say:

‘OK, let’s get the hell out of here.’

I drive through Gjerdrum to Ask with the windows open, it’s cold as hell, and from Ask I cut across to Kløfta, towards Ånerud. That’s where his place is. I have been there only once, for the christening, but I remember exactly where it is, I remember JD on the steps with the baby in his arms, the proud father, and Kari, pale and worn in the background.

I turn just before the Shell station and look at Arvid. He is quiet and serious.

‘Do you remember the last time we were here?’ I say. ‘At least this time we’ve got enough petrol.’ The petrol gauge is at three-quarters full. He smiles, but says nothing.

‘Do you regret coming with me?’

‘Hell no, it’s not that. Of course I want to come with you.’ That’s about all he has to say, and I do not ask, I have to keep my mind on the driving. The road goes up hill and down dale out here, and there are sudden bends, and even though the road has been cleared, it’s still slippery and churned up. We round a bend, and I concentrate so hard on what’s straight ahead of me that I miss the driveway. I don’t have time to slow down, so I brake instead, and skid sideways past the gate and come to a stop crosswise on the road some twenty metres further down. There is no one else around, only the engine is humming, and Arvid looks at me.

‘No problem,’ I say, wrenching the wheel hard. There is just enough space to coax the car straight, and it’s back and forth a hundred times, but I make it in the end, and then I slowly drive up to the gate and switch the engine off. We sit looking at the house. It’s quite a large house for two adults and a baby. Once upon a time the house was dark, built with tarred boards perhaps, and then later he might have made a half-hearted attempt to paint it white, and given up after one coat, and the brownish tar is showing, and now the paint is flaking off and the house looks weary. On the drive there are two snow-covered vehicles: the lorry I have seen before and a Ford Mustang, and there are no footprints or wheel tracks in the snow. To the right, at the back, is a woodshed. As far as I can make out, there are no tracks leading up to it. Inside the house, the curtains are drawn. No smoke from the chimney. It all looks cold and abandoned.

‘Hell, there’s no one here,’ Arvid says.

‘We’ll see about that.’ I get out of the car and slam the door so hard you can hear it from miles away, and I wade in through the gate and halfway to the house. The snow is up to my ankles. I stop and stare at the curtains in the window on the first floor.

‘KARI!’ I shout. My voice cracks in the freezing air and falls in splinters over the drive, there is a tinkling sound, like glass. I just know someone is standing behind the green flowery curtains.

‘KARI!’ I shout again. My back starts to itch, and I have this fleeting feeling that I have stood like this before, a long time ago, and then I remember when and decide I will not run off a second time and leave Kari behind. But from the house there is not a sound. I walk slowly towards it. A saw and a crowbar stand up against the porch. I pick up the crowbar and feel the frost tear at my palm.

‘Audun!’ I turn. Arvid has opened the car door. He’s getting out, he looks at me and points to the crowbar and shakes his head. ‘Drop that damned thing!’ he shouts, but I hold the metal tight in my hands, and then the child is screaming inside the house. There is a pain in my chest, and I hunch around that pain. I smash the crowbar against the porch, sending a sharp, crisp report into every room, a dry twig snapping in the cold, a gunshot. There is something about that sound. I raise the crowbar, I am about to strike again, I am ready now, I will smoke him out if I have to, and the door swings open, and Kari comes out in her red coat with a large sheepskin bag in her arms. The baby is all wrapped up, I can’t see its face, but I can hear the little whimpers from deep inside, and then Kari stops, rocking the bag gently and says:

‘There, there, little one, everything’s fine,’ and I stand with my arm still in the air, I don’t know what to do with it. I squint so hard my eyes start to ache, and I stare into the dark behind her.

‘Where’s James Dean?’ I say. The words feel sluggish and stiff in the cold.

‘James Dean?’ Kari is puzzled, she looks up at the crowbar and then at me and bursts out laughing. ‘Oh, Audun, that’s so like you. You mean Alf. He’s gone to Eidsvoll. He’s been there for two days. He had some cars to buy.’

‘But why did you ring, then?’ I lower the crowbar like some alien thing I try to make invisible, but I have cramp in my forearm, and my hand feels numb and maybe it’s frozen fast to the metal. Kari follows my every move, and she’s no longer smiling.

‘I told you, didn’t I. I want to come home. What exactly were you going to do with that crowbar, Audun? Demolish the house? The door was open, I heard the car come and saw you from the upstairs window,’ she says, pointing, ‘and I just had to dress little one. She didn’t want to be dressed, of course, so she cried like a stuck pig, but that’s how it is. She hates that bag. Here,’ she says, handing me the whole bundle. I have to drop the crowbar, it makes a clanking sound on the doorstep, and I take the bulging bag and hold it with numbed fingers. The baby starts to cry at once, and I stand there breathing smoke signals.

‘Rock her then, Audun,’ Kari says. And I rock away and hear Arvid coming up behind me.

‘Hi, Arvid,’ Kari says, ‘I just have to fetch a few things. I didn’t know you two would be here so quickly. When I had changed this little cry-baby, I rang you back, Audun, but you must have left already.’ She turns and goes into the house. The door makes a creaking sound, and just before it bangs shut, a cat comes shooting out. Arvid rounds me like a buoy and throws himself at the cat, and he catches it and rolls around in the snow, wrestling as if the animal were ten times bigger, howling like Johnny Weismuller in the movies. After a short struggle he gets up, holding the cat firmly by the scruff of its neck. He is all white with snow and has a scratch on his cheek, the cat’s wriggling and hissing, and Arvid raises a clenched fist and grins.

‘I’ve got a brilliant idea,’ he says. ‘Why don’t we kidnap the cat! Then at least we’ll have accomplished something. What do you think?’

I hear what he’s saying, he is trying to be funny, but I don’t really get it. I go on rocking the baby and I say, ‘It’s fine by me.’

He lets go of the cat, it’s running before it hits the ground and rounds the house and is gone behind the woodshed. Arvid brushes snow off his clothes, sighs and looks up at me.

‘Do you know something, Audun. Nothing’s fine by you. Absolutely nothing. And you can stop rocking that baby, she’s not crying any more.’

It’s true. All around us, it is quiet; in the woolly bag, it’s quiet. I look between the blankets and see the baby sleeping, her little face so smooth.

‘I guess she’s sleeping,’ I say. Arvid nods, rubs his bare hands, takes the mittens from his pocket and puts them on.

‘Shall I hold her for a bit? You could do with a breather.’

‘No, no, I’m fine.’ He nods again, wipes his nose with the mitten and takes a deep breath you could hear for miles and looks up into the air.

‘Jesus, I feel like singing,’ he says, ‘I really do. But maybe I’d better not. She might wake up again.’

‘Best if you don’t,’ I say. The door creaks, and Kari comes out carrying two large bags. She puts them on the step and locks the door with a huge key, and I hand her the baby, and Arvid goes over and takes one bag, and I take the other, and we wade across the drive to the car.

‘That’s all I could carry,’ Kari says. ‘It’s mostly for little one. Alf will bring down more whenever he comes home. He knows I’m going. I said I had to get away for a bit, and then he started to cry. You want to get divorced, he said. Christ, we aren’t even married.’

We push the bags down on the tarpaulin in the boot, and Kari puts the bag with the baby beside her on the back seat. Arvid and I sit at the front. I turn the key and start the car. Kari looks out of the window at the house.

‘The old house. Shit, I think it’s haunted, for a fact. Ride on, my gallant knight, and don’t spare the horses. I want to go home!’ Arvid laughs, and Kari laughs, and I coax the car gently up the slope, and then we glide along between the white fields towards Ask. The sun is out and shines as best it can, and the lines turn soft and yellow, and red in some places, and blue where the fields cut down to the river, and I think of what’s there beneath, the frozen, the rigid, and we don’t speak, and the baby is sleeping in the bag, and by the time we reach the Skedsmo junction, my hands are trembling so badly I pull into the verge, stop and say:

‘How about taking over, Arvid?’

‘I thought you’d never ask.’ He opens his door, and I open mine, and we walk around the car. In front, by the grille, his shoulder gently brushes mine as he passes, and then we get in. I lean back in the seat, Arvid turns the car back on the road. I close my eyes. I could sleep now, I think, and then I fall asleep.

I don’t wake up until we pull off Trondhjemsveien. In the bend, the low sun is straight in my face. It’s not even noon yet, and I miss my old sunglasses, but I haven’t worn them outdoors since I started training. Arvid drives under the Metro bridge, into Beverveien, right by the big garage and down the hill. In front of the block, he parks the car with its nose well on to the footpath. Sore and stiff we get out of the car, Kari with the baby in her arms, and Arvid opens the boot, and I pick up one bag and lead the way. There is a Sunday silence in the stairway tower and along the Sing-Sing gallery, and when I enter our flat, my mother is sitting by the kitchen table, smoking, her forehead against the window.

‘Hey, where were you?’ I say. She looks at me, but her mind is miles away. She was never like this before. There is a silence, she is looking right through me. She takes a puff of her cigarette, slowly blows the smoke out and seems to vanish in it.

‘I’m getting married again, Audun,’ she says.

I put down the bag and wipe my hands on my trousers. The lid on the stove is up and the cylinder hotplate is reeking heat into the room.

‘Who to? The man with the white back?’

‘The man with the white back?’

‘Forget it. Do I know who he is?’

‘I wouldn’t think so,’ she says calmly, ‘I haven’t known him that long.’

‘Aha. Are you going to move house then, or were you thinking that he should live with us?’

‘That was the idea, yes,’ she says, and now her mind is sharp. She sends me a defiant look.

‘I see. Well, then it’s going to be goddamn cramped here,’ I say, and Kari comes in through the door, the baby is awake, and she calls through the hall:

‘Hi, Mamma! Guess who’s here!’

18

MY FATHER IS dead. Two dog sledders found him on their way home from Lilloseter. It was the 22nd of December. They had taken a trail off the floodlit ski track and had seen a cabin in a clump of trees with a metre of snow on its roof. The cabin wasn’t there before, they said, so they steered the dogs off the trail to take a closer look. They were young men of my age with red anoraks and that Helge Ingstad look in their eyes and blue and white Oslo Dog Sledders Club badges on their arms. The cabin was small and solid and as tight as a bottle. The person who had built it knew what he was doing. Inside the cabin my father lay in his sleeping bag on a mattress of spruce with a primus stove up by his shoulders. There was no paraffin left. He must have fallen asleep, and it had burned with a flame turning brighter and brighter and finally poisoned him. He didn’t feel a thing. At least that’s what the doctor at Aker Hospital said. He had been dead for three days, he said, but it was cold, and I could picture the grey-blue air and the snow with its hard crust and the dog sledders doing what they had to do with a lump in their throats, loading my father on to the sled as stiff as a board, and fast as a train they set off for Ammerud where they could ring for an ambulance. From some papers he kept in the grey rucksack, they found their way to us, and now I am glad they did.

The telephone call came at ten o’clock on the morning of Christmas Eve. I didn’t know if I should laugh or cry. My mother was at the kitchen worktop rubbing salt and pepper into the pork to have it ready for the afternoon. Kari was out walking with little one. Alf had been down a couple of times, but Kari did not want to go back up, not yet anyway, and my mother didn’t seem too unhappy about that. She liked being a young, active grandmother. Now we were just waiting for the next one to move in.

And then the phone rang in the hall. I pretended not to hear it, so she had to leave the kitchen, and she lifted the phone with two fingers and placed it between her chin and shoulder, flapping her hands covered with fat and spices. I could smell it from where I was sitting on the steps reading Sailor on Horseback. That’s Irving Stone’s biography of Jack London. Jack had just sold his first story to Overland Monthly. It was the hard work that won him the victory, and in that way a triumph, because it was something he could do. Work hard. His friends bought up the whole print run, but he received no more than five dollars for the story, and even I thought that was lousy pay, and then my mother went all quiet and just stood there with her hands still in the air and her mouth frozen into a half-smile, and I sat watching her instead of reading the book. I guess I knew what she was going to say before she said it. That’s how it is sometimes. She put the receiver down with the same two fingers, very carefully, her eyes shiny and blank and bewildered.

‘It’s your father, Audun,’ she said. ‘He’s dead. I can’t fathom it. They said he was found dead in a cabin up in the woods here. I don’t understand a thing, really I don’t.’

I sat perfectly still, waiting. I never told her I’d seen him, only about the accordion and where it came from, and Kari had also kept quiet. I hadn’t planned to tell her at all, but I felt sorry for my mother just then. She ran her sticky fingers through her hair, and then there were streaks of pepper and brown fat in her blonde locks.

‘You’re getting pork fat in your hair,’ I said, but she wasn’t listening, she stroked her hand across her face, and it left dark stripes on her cheek. It looked like warpaint.

‘I have to go to Aker Hospital to identify him. I could wait until after Christmas, but I’d rather do it now and get it over with. The funeral and all that will have to be sorted out. I don’t know how. You’ll come with me, Audun.’

‘No way,’ I said. She looked at me then, in her new way. I didn’t like it. I stood up, and Jack London fell and slid down the stairs, the stout photograph in black and white on the jacket knocking against the rails. The book belonged to Arvid’s father, they never ran out of stuff at their place, and I bent down to save the cover, and as I stood up, I could see how angry she was.

‘Oh yes you will!’ she said. ‘It’s your father, for God’s sake!’

‘Hell, I don’t have a father,’ I mumbled, and I meant it, but then she was towering over me, unbending and hard, and she forced me up the stairs, step by step, grabbing my hair.

‘Now we’ve both got pork in our hair,’ I said, but she was deaf in that ear.

‘I am not doing this on my own, Audun. You’re eighteen years old and a grown-up now, and you’ve seen worse. If I can do this, so can you.’

And of course she was right.

‘Fine,’ I said, ‘I’ll come with you. I can ring Arvid’s father and ask if I can borrow his car. That’d be quicker.’

‘That would be great,’ she said and let go of my hair.

I rang and told him what had happened, and he listened quietly until I had finished the story. I was starting to like the man, and then he said:

‘That’s fine, Audun. You just come and get it. I’ll leave the key in the car, so all you have to do is drive off. But forgive my asking, what’s up with you lot?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I don’t know what’s up with us. Things just are what they are.’

‘Well, fine then, you give my regards to your mother and tell her Happy Christmas and all good wishes.’

‘Thank you,’ I said.

It’s not far to Aker Hospital. We drove ten minutes down a very quiet Trondhjemsveien, and of course it was him. I never doubted it. What my mother was thinking, I do not know, but there we were, standing in front of the steel table with his body on it, looking at the white face, and neither of us had really seen it for more than five years. We didn’t cry, and I don’t know why we should have. My mother gave the man in the white coat a nod and said yes, that is Tormod Sletten, and then she leaned over my father and stroked his hair.

‘You were a stylish man. No one can take that away from you,’ she said, and turning to me, she said, ‘You’re starting to look like him, Audun, but of course, you’ve got my hair. There’s no denying that.’ She smiled and stroked my hair, too, and my cheek, and then it got a little awkward. Luckily she started talking to the white coat about the funeral, he could arrange it for the 29^th he said, and I made for the wall and leaned against it and looked over at the table in the middle of the tiled floor. He was different now, his hair was grey, almost white, and his face was white, smooth even, and the furrows down his cheeks were not so distinct. Maybe they have done something to him, I thought, and carefully passed my hand over my own face.

As we left they gave us a bag with his personal effects. ‘We had to confiscate the gun,’ the doctor said. ‘We searched through his things, but couldn’t find a licence for it.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ my mother said. She gave me the bag, and we walked along the corridors. We could hear our footsteps between the walls the whole way down, and there were red and green Christmas decorations hanging from every lamp, and on the door out there was a huge wreath with a bell. Back behind the wheel, I opened the bag and looked into it. There wasn’t much: his knife, a few keys he had kept for long-forgotten doors, two fifty-kroner notes and a small black and white photograph. I picked it up, and the woman in it, I had never seen before. She had short, black hair and was sitting on a rock by a lake, maybe Aurtjern, the bay seemed familiar to me. Marianne it said on the back in his messy handwriting. I sat looking at the name, and then it came all the way back to me.

‘Marana,’ I said.

My mother leaned over the handbrake to study the photograph.

‘Well, I never, that’s Marianne Røkken,’ she said. ‘She was in my class at school. We were friends for a few years. She too fell in love with your father. I remember well when that photo was taken, because I was the one who took it. Fancy him carrying it around. That man!’ She shook her head, and I looked more closely at the photo and realised it was the clothes that made her seem like a woman. She was probably no older than I am now. And it struck me that there were things in my mother’s and father’s lives that I would never get to know.

It was a strange Christmas Eve. When we came back from Aker Hospital, Kari was in the kitchen talking to Roberto. He had stopped by with presents and silly jokes, singing arias, and had just started a rendering of ‘Jerusalem’ that was the worst I had ever heard. He was making more noise than the four of us put together. I drew Kari aside and told her what had happened, and we agreed not to tell what we’d known the last few months. There was enough going on already.

At last the roast pork was in the oven. The aroma spread slowly up to the first floor and mingled with the sauerkraut and the burning candle wax, and the dead man’s name was never mentioned. At three o’clock I watched Disney’s Christmas programme as I always do.

Last year there were only the two of us at the table, and I cannot deny it felt a little dreary. This time the table was crowded: Kari sitting with her little one, and Alf had come down to be with his daughter on Christmas Eve, he was loaded with presents, but we were not impressed, and Olav, my mother’s new boyfriend, rang the doorbell at five sharp. He brought plastic bags almost bursting at the seams and was visibly nervous. I decided to be nice and shook his hand. That helped a little, he started to relax, and my mother giggled and gave me a hug. He wasn’t exactly my type, pretty plump all round and almost bald, but his arms bulged under his shirt, and when he smiled he even looked a little bright. I asked him if he read books, and he said he liked Mikkjel Fønhus. That was fine with me, I had read a few myself, and they were not bad. He was a printer at Aas & Wahl and after a few aquavits that gave us enough to talk about. But watching my mother shimmy round the table, sweaty and smiling as I’d never seen her smile before, I knew that there was only room for one of us. Then and there I decided to pay old Abrahamsen a visit, once this weekend was over. He had a spare room, and maybe he could use the extra money.

And then the 29^th comes around. At Grorud Cemetery, the gravedigger has been thawing the ground for two days. I get up at the crack of dawn and start reading The Apache Indians by Helge Ingstad. Arvid gave it to me for Christmas. It’s a nice-looking edition from Gyldendal’s travel series, which he stumbled across in a second-hand bookshop, and there are several dedications on the inside leaf as well as the one to me. One of them says: To Arvid from Minna, Arthur and the boys. He liked that, and we have made up stories about who these people might be. But it’s hard to concentrate even though Ingstad could really write. It’s dark outside, and I can hear Olav snoring in the room next to mine, and my mother talking in her sleep. It drives me down to the kitchen. It’s dark there, too. I light a few candles and open the lid on the stove, put water on for coffee and flick through the book until the water is boiling. Then I sit down at the table and smoke and drink coffee and watch the coming day. The smell is different, there is someone breathing in every room, I hear little one whimpering in the one next to the kitchen. Soon she’ll be awake and crying. In the glow from the candles, I take out the photograph of Marianne and look at it. The face is familiar now. She is only eighteen years old in the photograph, and it’s summer, and if I ever get to write anything solid and good, I will start with that photograph.

It’s the same priest. I am sitting on the front bench and listen to him speak. This time we were prepared and told him as little as possible. He recognised us, and for a second there, he was lost for words, but I have to say he makes the most of it. He is a pro. My mother turns and winks at me and smiles wearily. I smile back. It’s all so strange we don’t know how to behave. She is sitting with Olav. It’s difficult not to like him now. I never would have thought he’d show up here. Kari is sitting beside my mother, rocking the baby, and old Abrahamsen on the bench behind, wearing the suit I had given him back, and all of Arvid’s family is here, and Roberto, and not one of us cares in the least what the priest has to say.

In the cemetery it’s all white between the gravestones, and the stones are white on top, and only the steaming pile of fresh soil by the new grave breaks up the idyll. We form a small procession as we walk down. The coffin trolley creaks in the snow, and there are cold candles and burnt-out torches after Christmas. Mild weather is on the way, I can feel it in the air, you could make snowballs now, and if I’d been a few years younger, I would have. We round a vast, vulgar monument put up for some rich family, and we are there. In a circle we stand around the grave, and the priest sings Alltid freidig når du går all alone. We hoist the coffin by the straps, and the sexton winds the crank handle until the coffin is lowered halfway into the grave, beside Egil’s. There are more flowers than last time, it’s like a goddamn party, and suddenly that seems so unfair, and then I start crying. Everyone turns, but I cannot stop. The priest looks at me, he smiles, he’s pleased, I am on the right track, he always knew I would be. I’m sure he has prayed to God on my behalf. My mother comes over and puts her arm around my shoulders, and Arvid looks me straight in the eye with a grin. I’ll take care of him later. I smile at my mother, but that only makes it worse. My chest feels tight, I sob aloud. It’s so goddamn embarrassing, I hide my face in my hands so I don’t have to look at Arvid, or any of them. Martin Eden would never have done that, I know, but, hell, I am only eighteen. I have plenty of time.