My Struggle: Book Three

“Our son has started making arrangements,” Dad said. “Are you sure it’s Geir? Not a little sweetheart?”

“Yes, I’m absolutely sure about that,” I said.

“Be back home by eight then,” Mom said.

Dad stood up.

“Soon we’ll be all alone in the evenings, Sissel,” he said, hauling his trousers up by the belt loops and running a hand through his hair. I was already on my way down the landing and didn’t hear what she answered. My throat was thick with excitement, my whole body tingling. In the hallway, I put on my sneakers — if we were lucky the forest would be dry now — the blue sweater, and the blue quilted vest Mom had made for me, opened the door, and rushed out to meet Ketil, who was sitting on his bike with one foot on the pedal and one on the ground, and Geir, who was standing next to him. Both glanced toward me.

“Let’s go to the boathouse,” I said. “No one will see us there.”

“OK,” Ketil said. “I’ll cycle round. See you down there.”

Geir and I ran down the slope and onto the path, jumped over the stream, and scurried down the hill, which seemed to vibrate beneath our feet, crossed the field, the gravel road, and only slowed down when we reached the grassy incline at the same time as Ketil hove into view at the top of the hill, beside the old, white house.

Ketil was two years older than us and kept himself very much to himself, at least that was how it appeared to us. The high cheekbones, the narrow eyes, and the gleaming, black hair made him look like an Indian and caused a stir among the girls. It wasn’t long since that had started. From one day to the next Ketil became the one they talked about and looked at, suddenly you heard his name all over the place, and the strange thing about this was not the way that he suddenly existed now, having existed before in a kind of vale of shadows, but that there was a certain pride in the girls who talked about him and eyed him, as if they were the ones who became interesting by making such an unexpected selection, almost more interesting than he was. For he just carried on with his life, cycling round, one day here, one day there, invariably alone, and always friendly to us.

He kicked down the stand on his bike, an orange DBS racer with drop handlebars and the tape hanging off one end, lifted the spring flap on the luggage rack, took the bag, and strolled over to where we were lying in the grass, each with a sprig of grass in our mouths.

“It’s porn time!” he said, grabbing the bag from the bottom and spilling the magazines over the grass.

The sun was low in the sky over the ridge behind us, and his shadow stretched a long way across the ground. From the islet in the bay came the sound of screeching gulls. Feeling weak all over, I took a magazine and rolled onto my stomach. Even though I looked at the pictures one at a time, and focused on one part, such as the breasts, which I only needed to catch a glimpse of to feel an electric shock of excitement shoot through me, or such as the legs and the wild thrill aroused by the sight of the slit between them, more or less open, more or less pink and glistening, often accompanied by a finger or two nearby, or near the mouth, which was often open, often contorted into a grimace, or such as the buttocks, sometimes so wonderfully round that I couldn’t lie still, this wasn’t about the parts in themselves, this was more like bathing in the totality, a kind of sea in which there was no beginning and no end, a sea in which, from the first moment, from the first picture, you always found yourself in the middle.

“Can you see a big mons anywhere, Geir?” I said.

He shook his head. “But there’s one here with enormous tits. Do you want to see?”

I nodded, and he held up the magazine for me.

Ketil sat some meters from us, with his legs crossed and a magazine in his hands. But after only a few minutes he threw it down and got to his feet.

“I’ve looked at them so many times,” he said. “I’ll have to get some new ones.”

“Where did you get them?” I said, gazing up at him and shielding my eyes from the sun.

“I bought them.”

“BOUGHT THEM?” I said.

“Yes.”

“But they’re old, aren’t they?”

“They’re used, you chump. There’s a hairdressing salon in town that also sells old magazines. They’ve got loads of porn mags.”

“Are you allowed to buy them?”

“Obviously,” he said.

I stared at him for a few seconds. Was he pulling my leg?

Didn’t look like it.

I flicked through. There were photos of two girls on a tennis court. They wore short skirts, one light blue, the other white, white shirts, a sweat band over their wrists, white socks, and white sneakers. Each was holding a racket. Surely they weren’t going to …?

I flicked on.

One was lying on the grass and had opened her shirt so you could see her breasts. Her head was back. Was she wearing any panties?

Nope.

Soon they were both naked, on their knees by the net, with their bottoms in the air. It was fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic.

“Look, Geir,” I said. “Two playing tennis!”

He glanced at me and nodded, too absorbed in his own pictures to waste any time.

Ketil had walked down to the old, tumbledown pontoon, where he stood skimming stones he must have found on the beach nearby. The water was like a mirror, and every time a stone hit the water, small circular ripples spread outward.

I had flicked through three or four magazines when he reappeared in front of us. I looked up at him.

“It feels good to lie on your stomach and read them,” I said.

“Ha ha ha! So you like rubbing yourself?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

“I can imagine,” he said. “But I’ve got to be off now. Keep the mags if you like. I’m sick of them.”

“Can we have them?” Geir said.

“Be my guest.”

He kicked the bike stand, raised a hand to say goodbye, and set off up the hill with one hand in the middle of the handlebars. It looked as if he were leading an animal.

It was so obvious to us both that Geir would have to hide the magazines in his room that we didn’t even talk about it when we parted outside my house an hour later.

Mom’s pizzas had thick bases that rose around the edges, making the filling of minced meat, tomato, onions, mushrooms, peppers, and cheese look like a plain surrounded by long ranges of mountains on all sides. We were sitting at the living-room table, as always on Saturday evenings. We had never eaten in front of the television; that belonged to the realm of the unimaginable. Dad cut a piece for me and put it on my plate, I poured myself a glass of Coke from the liter bottle where the words Coca-Cola were printed in white on the greenish glass, not on a red label, which you also saw. Pepsi-Cola wasn’t sold in Sørland, I had drunk it only at the Norway Cup, and apart from the Metro and the breakfast where we could help ourselves to as many bowls of cornflakes as we wanted, that had been one of the tournament’s biggest attractions.

When the pizza was finished, Dad asked if we felt like playing a new game.

We did.

Mom cleared the table; Dad fetched a pad of paper and four pens from his study.

“Would you like to join in, Sissel?” he shouted to Mom, who had started washing up.

“Love to,” Mom said and joined us. She had soap lather on one arm and her temple. “What are we going to play? Yahtzee?”

“No,” Dad said. “We each have a piece of paper and we write down six headings: country, town, river, sea, lake, and mountain. One column for each. Then we choose a letter and the idea of the game is to jot down as many names as we can that begin with the respective letter in three minutes.”

We hadn’t played this one before. But it seemed like fun.

“Is there a prize?” Yngve said.

Dad smiled.

“Only the honor. Whoever wins becomes the family champion.”

“You start,” Mom said. “I’ll put some tea on for us.”

“We can do a trial run,” Dad said. “Then we can actually play when you’re back.”

He looked at us.

“M,” he said. “So, the letter M. Are you with me?”

“Yes,” Yngve said, and was already writing, with one arm shielding his work.

“Yes,” I said.

Mont Blanc, I wrote under mountain. Mandal, Morristown, Mjøndalen, Molde, Malmö, Metropolis, and Munich under town. I couldn’t think of any seas, or rivers. Next was countries. Were there any countries beginning with an M? I went through all the countries I could think of. But no. Moelven. Was that a river? Mo in Rana, that was a town anyway. Midwest? Oh, right, Mississippi!

“Time’s up,” Dad said.

A quick glance at their pieces of paper was enough to confirm that they had beaten me.

“You read yours out, Karl Ove,” Dad said.

When I got to Morristown both Dad and Yngve were laughing.

“Don’t laugh at me!” I said.

“Morristown only exists in The Phantom,” Yngve said. “Did you think it really existed?”

“Sure. And why not? Sala works in the UN building in New York, and that exists, doesn’t it? Why shouldn’t Morristown?”

“Good answer, Karl Ove,” Dad said. “You get half a point for that.”

I made a face at Yngve, who smirked back.

“Tea’s ready,” Mom said. We went into the kitchen and took a cup. I added milk and sugar.

“OK, let’s play properly now,” Dad said. “We’ll do three letters. That’s probably as much as we can manage before bedtime.”

Mom knew almost as few names as I did, it turned out. Or else she wasn’t concentrating as much as Yngve or Dad. However, it was good for me; it was the two of us against them.

After Dad had counted the points from the first round, Mom said she had changed her name.

“I’ve gone back to my old maiden name. So now I’m Hatløy and not Knausgård anymore.”

My blood ran cold.

“You’re not called Knausgård anymore?” I said, staring at her with my mouth open. “But you’re our mother!”

She smiled.

“Yes, of course I am! I always will be!”

“But why? Why aren’t you going to have the same name as us?”

“I was born Sissel Hatløy, as you know. That’s my name. Knausgård is Dad’s name. And your names!”

“Are you getting divorced?”

Mom and Dad smiled.

“No, we’re not getting divorced,” Mom said. “We’re just going to have different names.”

“But a rather stupid consequence of this,” Dad said, “is that we can’t meet Grandma and Grandad for a while. My parents don’t like your mother changing her name, so they don’t want to see us anymore.”

I gaped at him.

“What about at Christmas?” I said.

Dad shook his head.

I started crying.

“This is nothing to cry about, Karl Ove,” Dad said. “It’ll pass. They’re just angry now. And then it’ll pass.”

I scraped my chair back, got up, and ran to my room. After closing my door I heard someone follow. I lay down on the bed and bored my head into the pillow while sobbing loudly with tears flowing as they had never flowed before.

“But, Karl Ove,” Dad said behind me. He sat on the edge of the bed. “Don’t get so upset. Is it that much fun with Grandma and Grandad?”

“Yes!” I shouted into the pillow. My whole body was contorted in convulsive sobs.

“But if they don’t want to see your own mother. It’s not much fun seeing them then, is it? Surely you understand, don’t you? They don’t want to see us.”

“Why should she change her name?” I shouted.

“It’s her real name,” Dad said. “It’s what she wants. And neither you nor I nor Grandma nor Grandad can deny her that right. Can we?”

He placed his hand on my shoulder for a fleeting moment. Then he stood up and left the room.

When the tears had dried up I picked up the book Mom had bought me and carried on reading. At the back of my mind I was aware that Yngve had gone to bed, that the sliding door was closed, that they were playing music in the living room, but without a scrap of it sticking. From the first sentence I plunged headlong into the story and fell deeper and deeper. The main character was Ged, a boy who lived on an island and had special gifts, and when this was discovered he was sent to a school for wizards. There it came out that his gifts were extra-special, and once when he had to perform for the others, in an act of excessive arrogance, he opened the door to the other world, the underworld, the kingdom of death, and a shadow stole out. Ged was dying, he was weak, with failing powers, for many years afterward, marked for life, and the shadow pursued him. He fled from it, hid in some obscure place somewhere in the world, abandoned all his ambitions knowing that what he had done, the simple wizardry tricks, was just empty gestures and pretense, that there was another, a more profound kind of magic woven into all existence, and it was to maintain the balance here that was a wizard’s real responsibility. All objects and all creatures had names corresponding to their essence, and only by knowing the objects’ and creatures’ real names could they be controlled. Ged could do that, but he didn’t reveal that he could, because every spell, every act of wizardry, affected the balance, something else could happen somewhere else, which could not be foreseen. The villagers where he had settled thought therefore that he was a poor wizard; after all he wouldn’t perform even the simplest tricks with which every village wizard plied his trade. He was young, serious, there was a large scar across his face, he was sensitive to cold, but when the chips were down, when he really had to use his gifts, he did. Once there was a child dying. He followed it into the kingdom of death and brought it back, even though he shouldn’t have, even though it was dangerous, for if there was one balance that should not be upset, it was that between life and death. But he did it and almost died in the process. The villagers saw for the first time who he was. And the shadow that he had released from beyond, who all this time had been flitting around the world after him, saw him, because whenever he used his powers, it noticed and came closer. He had to leave. And he did, in a boat on the sea between islands to the furthest shore. The shadow came closer and closer. After several confrontations, with Ged near to death, came the final showdown. All the while he had been trying to find the name of the shadow. He had scoured reference works about creatures from the oldest times, asked other, more intelligent wizards, but in vain, the creature was unknown, nameless. Then he knew. On the sea, alone in a boat, with the shadow getting closer and closer, he knew. The shadow was called Ged. The shadow had his name. The shadow was himself.

When I turned off the light, after reading the last page, it was nearly twelve o’clock and my eyes were full of tears.

He was the shadow!

At least once, often twice, a week during that autumn and winter I was on my own in the house. Dad was at meetings, Yngve was at rehearsals with the school band or training with the volleyball or soccer teams, or at his friends’ houses. I liked being at home on my own, it was a wonderful feeling not to have someone telling me what to do, yet I didn’t like it that much either because the nights were drawing in and the reflection from the windows, of my figure wandering around, was extremely unpleasant to see, it smacked of death and the dead.

I knew this was not how it was, but what good did this knowledge do?

It was especially spooky when I was engrossed in what I was reading because it was as if I wasn’t attached anywhere when I lifted my head from my page and got up. All alone, that was the feeling I had, I was absolutely alone, isolated by the darkness that rose like a wall outside.

Oh, I could always run the bath if I had enough time before Dad returned, he didn’t like me having a bath at all hours, once a week he felt was enough and he kept a beady eye on this, like everything else I did. But if I took a liberty now and ran the bath, got in, switched on my cassette recorder, and let the hot water wash over my body, I could see myself from the outside, my mouth agape, as it were, as though my head were a skull. I sang, the voice rebounded, I submerged my head and was terrified: I couldn’t see anything! Someone could sneak up on me! Was anyone there? The two, three, four seconds I had been underwater represented a hole in time, and someone might have snuck in through that hole. Perhaps not into the bathroom, no, there was no one there, but they could have snuck into the house.

The best I could do in this situation was to switch off the kitchen light, or my bedroom light, and look out because outside, when there was no reflection from the windows, there were the other houses, there were the other families, and sometimes the other children, too. Nothing made you feel more secure than that.

On one such evening I was kneeling on a kitchen stool in the darkness and staring out, it was snowing and a gale was blowing. The wind was howling across the landscape, rushing down the chimney, and the roof gutters were rattling. It was pitch black outside, under the yellow glow from the street lamps, there wasn’t a soul, only gusting snow.

A car drove up. It turned into Nordåsen Ringvei, coming toward our house. Was it coming here?

It was. It came into our drive and parked.

Who could it be?

I ran out of the kitchen, down the stairs, and onto the porch.

There I stopped.

Surely no one was coming to visit us?

Who could it be?

I was frightened.

Went to the door and pressed my nose against the wavy glass. I didn’t need to open the door; I could stand there and see if I recognized the late-night visitor.

The car door opened and a figure fell out!

The figure was moving on all fours!

Oh no! Oh no!

Swaying from side to side like a bear, it came toward me. It stopped by the bell and rose onto two legs!

I backed away.

What sort of creature was this?

Ding dong, the bell went.

The figure dropped to all fours again.

The abominable snowman? Lightfoot?

But here? In Tybakken?

The figure raised itself again, rang the bell, and fell back onto all fours.

My heart was pounding.

But then it hit me.

Oh, of course.

It was the local councilman, the one who was paralyzed.

It had to be.

The abominable snowman didn’t drive a car.

I opened the door as the figure was starting to crawl away. It turned.

It was him.

“Hello,” he said. “Is your father at home?”

I shook my head.

“No,” I said. “He’s at a meeting.”

The man, who had a beard and glasses and a bit of saliva at the corners of his mouth, and who often drove around with young people in his custom-designed car, sighed.

“Say hello and tell him I was here,” he said.

“OK,” I said.

He dragged himself to the car using his arms, opened the door, and lifted himself up into the seat. I watched him through widened eyes. In the car, his slow, helpless movements were transformed, he revved the engine and reversed up the incline at speed, shot down the road, and was gone.

I closed the door and went to my room. No sooner was I lying on the bed than the door downstairs opened.

From the sounds I worked out that it was Yngve.

“Are you here?” he shouted up the stairs. I got up and went out.

“I’m so hungry,” he said. “Want to have supper now?”

“It’s only a little after eight,” I said.

“The earlier, the better,” he said. “And I can make some tea for us. I’m absolutely ravenous.”

“Call me when it’s ready,” I said.

A quarter of an hour later we were at the table eating bread, each with a big mug of tea in front of us.

“Was there a car here this evening?” Yngve said.

I nodded. “The paralyzed guy on the council.”

“What did he want?”

“How should I know?”

Yngve looked at me.

“Someone was talking about you today,” he said.

My blood ran cold.

“Oh?” I said.

“Yes, Ellen.”

“What did she say?”

“She said you had a funny walk.”

“She didn’t!”

“Yes, she did. But it’s true, isn’t it. You do have a funny walk. Haven’t you ever noticed?”

“I do NOT!” I shouted.

“Oh yes, you do,” Yngve said. “Little shrimp can’t even walk normally.”

He got up and walked across the kitchen floor, falling forward with every step. I watched him with tears in my eyes.

“There’s nothing wrong with my walk,” I said.

“Ellen said it, not me,” he said, sitting down. “They talk about you, you know. You’re a little weird.”

“I AM NOT!” I shouted, throwing my bread at him as hard as I could. He moved his head to one side, and it hit the stove with a soft splat.

“Is Karlikins upset now?” he said.

I stood up with my mug in my hand. When Yngve saw that he got up, too. I hurled the hot tea at him. It hit him in the stomach.

“You’re so sweet when you’re angry, Karl Ove,” he said. “Poor little shrimp. Want me to teach you how to walk? I’m good at walking, you know.”

My eyes were filled with tears, but that wasn’t why I couldn’t see anything, it was because I was seething with anger inside and the red mist had descended.

I flew at him and punched him with all my strength in the stomach. He grabbed my arms and twisted me round, I tried to wriggle loose, he held me tight, I kicked out, he pulled me harder to him, I tried to bite him on the hand, and he pushed me away.

“Now, now,” he said.

I flew at him again, intent only on punching him in the face, smashing his nose, and if there had been a knife there I wouldn’t have hesitated to plunge it into his stomach, but he knew all that, it had happened many times before, so he did what he always did, held me tight and squeezed while calling me a little shrimp and saying I was so sweet when I was angry until I tried to bite him and he couldn’t keep my head at a distance and he pushed me away. This time I didn’t go for him again; instead I ran out of the kitchen. On the living-room table there was a fruit bowl from which I took an orange and I flung it at the floor with all my might. It split open and a thin jet of orange juice spurted up and sprayed the wallpaper.

Yngve stood in the doorway watching.

“What have you done?” he said.

I looked at him. Then I saw the line of juice on the wallpaper.

“You’d better wash it off, you idiot,” I said.

“It won’t wash off,” he said. “The stain will just get bigger. Dad will be livid when he sees that. What’s wrong with you?”

“He might not see it,” I said.

Yngve just gawped at me.

“Well, we can hope,” he said, bending down and taking the orange into the kitchen. From the rustling noises that followed I gathered he was putting it at the very bottom of the garbage can. He came back with a cloth and wiped the floor.

I was trembling so much I could barely stand upright.

The juice ran in a thin line and I couldn’t imagine how Dad could avoid seeing it when he came home.

Yngve washed the kettle and the two cups. Threw away the bread, picked up the crumbs. I sat in the chair by the dining table with my head in my hands.

Yngve stopped near me.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“Yes, you did.”

“It’s just that you get so angry,” he said. “Surely you can see that it’s tempting? I have said sorry.”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“What is it then?”

“My funny walk.”

“Come on,” he said. “Everyone walks in a different way. The main thing is to move forward. I was only kidding, really. I wanted to make you angry. And I succeeded. The way you walk is no stranger than anyone else’s.”

“Sure?”

“Sure as eggs are eggs.”

When Dad came home I was in bed. In the darkness I lay listening to his footsteps. They didn’t stop on the landing as I had expected but continued into the kitchen. He fiddled around in there for a while before coming out again. And he didn’t stop on the landing this time, either.

He hadn’t seen anything.

We were saved.

The next evening I went to the swimming class with Geir. We caught the bus from Holtet to the bus station in Arendal and walked up the hills to Stintahallen, each carrying a bag over our shoulders. In my bag I had some dark-blue Arena swim trunks, a white Speedo cap with the Norwegian flag on the side, a pair of Speedo goggles, a bar of soap, and a towel. We had been members of Arendal Swim Club since the previous winter. We could barely swim then, just getting from one end of the pool to the other was an enormous effort, bordering on the impossible, but since it was actually expected of us, as an absolute minimum in a swim club, and the coach, a man with tattoos on his arms who wore clogs, followed us along the side of the pool shouting, it took us a surprisingly short time to get by without any problems. We weren’t good, at least not if you compared us to the older boys who sometimes walked around inside, with their slim, long-limbed yet muscular bodies, and who powered through the water with open mouths and bug-eye goggles. In comparison to them we were more like tadpoles, I sometimes mused, splashing and straining and just as likely to swim sideways as forward. But even though we gradually improved and could soon swim a thousand meters in the course of a training session it wasn’t thanks to my progress that I continued, I knew I would never be a competitive swimmer because when the competitions came and I gave everything it was never enough, I couldn’t even overtake Geir — no, it was all the rest I liked, starting the moment we clambered onto the bus and continuing through the evening darkness on the road to Arendal, the deserted town we passed through, the shops we always stopped outside on our way to the class, and inside the hall, this large public building with its strange mixture of inside and outside, which we were funnelled through from standing at the entrance wrapped up in winter clothes to standing almost naked, fifteen minutes later, wearing only a strip of cloth at the edge of the pool, after having passed through the minor ritual of undressing, showering, and dressing, and then throwing ourselves into the wonderfully transparent, cold water that smelled of chlorine. That was what I liked. The sounds echoing around the pool, the night outside the windows, the coral-jewel partition between lanes, the diving boards, the thirty-minute-long hot showers we had afterward. Then the process was reversed and we went from being pale, fragile, semi-naked boys with big heads to once again standing fully clothed in the winter outside, with wet hair under our hats and the smell of chlorine on our skin, our limbs deliciously tired.

I also liked the feeling of being enclosed inside myself when I put on my swimming cap and goggles, not least during competitions, when I had a whole lane of my own waiting for me beneath the starting blocks, but often the thoughts waiting there, in swimming’s astronaut-like loneliness, became chaotic and sometimes also panicked. There could be water in the goggles, it slopped against my eyes, making them sting and preventing me from seeing, which of course upset the purity of my thoughts. I could swallow water and I could make a mess of the turn, which left me so breathless that I swallowed more water. And I could see that the swimmers in the adjacent lanes were already way ahead, which I was told by the voice inside me intent on winning, and I started a discussion with it. But even though this inner dialogue, which carried on calmly while I was swimming and fighting for all I was worth, and was therefore lent an almost panic-stricken aura, a bit like a military HQ deep in an underground bunker with officers speaking in controlled tones while the battles raged overhead, had the effect of me increasing the tempo, and for a few seconds I really gave it my all, it didn’t help in the slightest, Geir was ahead of me and would remain so, and I couldn’t understand that, I was obviously better than him, I knew so much more than him, also about the will to win. Nevertheless, he was the one to touch the pool wall then, and I touched it … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … then.

When the coach blew his whistle and the session was over for another week, it was not without some relief that I put my hands on the edge of the pool and heaved myself up, to run with Geir across the tiled floor into the shower, where the pace seemed to be slower, at least our pace was released as we took off our caps and trunks and entered the showers, to feel with closed eyes the heat spreading through our bodies, no longer needing to say or do anything, not even having to bother to laugh as one of the men on his way into the pool, which was now open for all comers, began to sing. There was something dreamlike about the atmosphere inside, the white bodies that appeared in the doorway and stood under the showers with slow, introspective movements, the sound of water beating against the tiles and mingling with the muffled noise from outside, the steam saturating the air, the hollow resonance of voices whenever anyone spoke.

Normally we stood around long after those we had trained with had gone. Geir with his face to the wall, me with my face to the room, to hide my backside. I snatched occasional glances at him when he wasn’t paying attention. He had thinner arms than me, yet he was stronger. I was a little taller than him, yet he was faster. That wasn’t why he swam faster than me, though. It was because he wanted it more. It was different with his drawings, they were just something he could do, it was in him, it had always been there. Apart from people, he could reproduce everything in precise detail. Houses, cars, boats, trees, tanks, planes, rockets. It was a mystery how he could do it. He never copied, as I did, his mother never let him use either a ruler or an eraser. Now and then his Norwegian could throw up oddities, such as fantisere and firkanti instead of fantasere and firkantet, and en appelsin instead of et appelsin, and even though I corrected him every time, he continued to say them as though these terms were a feature of him that was as permanent as the color of his eyes or the set of his teeth.

Then he noticed my glance and his eyes met mine. With a smile on his lips he stretched up and pressed the palm of his hand against the shower head, stopping the jet, and the water appeared to bulge beneath it. He laughed and turned to me. I held my hands out. My fingertips were red and swollen from the water.

“They look like raisins,” I said.

He examined his.

“Mine, too,” he said. “Imagine if your whole body had gone like that when we were swimming!”

“My ball bag always goes all wrinkly,” I said.

We bent forward and peered down. I ran a finger slowly over the hard yet sensitive folds of skin and a tingle went through me.

“Stroking it feels nice,” I said.

Geir looked around. Then he turned off the shower, went to the row of hooks, and began to dry himself. I grabbed a bar of soap and squeezed hard. It skidded along the floor of the room, hit the wall in the corner, and finished up over one of the grids. I turned off the shower and was about to follow Geir when I suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of the soap lying there in the middle of the floor. I picked it up and threw it in the bin by the wall. I pressed my face against the dry frotté material of the towel.

“Imagine what it will be like when we’ve got pubes,” Geir said, walking with his legs wide apart.

I laughed.

“Imagine what it will be like if they’re really long!” I said.

“Right down to your knees!”

“Then we’d have to comb them!”

“Or make a ponytail!”

“Or go to the hairdresser’s! I’d just like a trim round my dick, please!”

“Oh, yes. And how would you like it, sir?”

“Crew cut, please!”

At that moment the door opened and we stopped laughing. A fat, elderly man with sad eyes came in and the vacuum the laughter had left in us was soon filled with giggles as he first nodded to us and then turned away in embarrassment to remove his trunks. As we grabbed our swimming things and were leaving the shower room, Geir said loudly:

“I bet he’s got a whopper!”

“Or a teeny-weeny one!” I said, just as loudly, and then we slammed the door behind us and ran into the changing room. We sat laughing, wondering whether he had heard us or not, until the normally quiet atmosphere also impacted on us and we sluggishly began to pack our gear and get dressed. The only sounds you could hear inside were feet on linoleum, rustling noises as legs were slipped into trousers, arms into jackets, the metallic clink as lockers were opened or closed, someone sighing to himself, perhaps drained by the heat in the sauna.

I took my bag from the locker and put my swimming things inside. First, the goggles, which I held in my hand and examined for a second, because they were new and filled me with such pleasure that they were mine. Next, trunks, cap, and towel and, last of all, the soap case. With its gently rounded lines, greenish color, and faint aroma of perfume, the case belonged to another world from the rest of my swimming equipment, intimately connected with Mom and the items in her wardrobe: earrings, rings, flasks, buckles, brooches, scarves, and veils. She herself was unaware there was such a world, she had to be, otherwise she would never have bought me a woman’s bathing cap that time. Because a woman’s cap belongs to that world. And if there was one thing everyone knew it was that one world should never be associated with the other.

Beside me Geir was almost ready. I stood up, pulled on my underpants, took my long johns, and put one leg in, followed by the other. Then I pulled them up tight to my waist before turning and starting to search through my clothes for my socks. I found only one and searched through the pile again.

It wasn’t there.

I looked in the locker.

Nothing, empty.

Oh no!

No, no, no.

I frantically went through my clothes again, shook item after item in the air, hoping desperately to see it drop out onto the floor in front of me.

But it wasn’t there.

“What’s up?” Geir said. He was sitting, fully clothed, on the opposite bench watching me.

“I can’t find my other sock,” I said. “Can you see it?”

He leaned forward and looked under the bench.

“It’s not there,” he said.

Oh no!

“But it’s got to be somewhere,” I said. “Can you help me look? Please!”

I could hear my voice quivering. But Geir didn’t let on that he’d noticed, if indeed he had heard anything at all. He leaned over and looked under all the benches while I walked toward the showers in case it had got caught up in my towel and dropped out. It wasn’t there, either. Perhaps, inadvertently, I had packed it in my bag with the other swimming things?

I hurried back and emptied the contents of my bag on the floor.

But no. No sock.

“It wasn’t anywhere there?” I said.

“No,” Geir said. “But we have to get going, Karl Ove. The bus is leaving soon.”

“I have to find the sock first.”

“Well, it’s not here. We’ve looked everywhere. Can’t you just go without it?”

I didn’t answer. Once again I shook all the clothes, crouched down, and scanned the floor under the benches; once again I went into the shower room.

“We’ve got to go now,” Geir said. He held his watch in front of me. “They’ll be angry if I miss the bus.”

“Can you search while I get dressed?” I said.

He nodded and halfheartedly wandered around examining the floor. I put on my T-shirt and sweater.

On the top shelf perhaps?

I stood on the bench and peered along.

Nothing.

I put on my trousers and quilted vest, zipped up my jacket, and sat down to tie my laces.

“We’ve got to go now,” Geir said.

“I’m getting there,” I said. “You wait outside.”

After he had left I hurried back into the shower room. I looked in the trash can, ran my hand along the windowsills, and even opened the door to the pool.

But no.

Geir was standing by the hill when I went out. He started running down before I had even caught up with him.

“Wait for meee!” I cried. But he showed no signs of stopping, he didn’t even turn, and I sprinted off after him. Down into the darkness, past the gray trees, into the light on the road below. For every step I took the bare foot rubbed against the coarse leather of my boot. I’ve lost my sock, a voice inside me said. I’ve lost my sock. I’ve lost my sock. A ticking started in my head. It happened now and again when I was running, my head ticked, somewhere inside my left temple, tick tick, it went, but although it was alarming, sounding as if something had come loose or perhaps it was rubbing against something else, I couldn’t tell anyone, they would just say I had a screw loose and laugh.

Tick, tick, tick

Tick, tick, tick

I ran behind Geir all the way down to the candy shop where we went; the bag of candy we came out with was always the high point of these trips. Geir was waiting outside, impatiently shifting from one foot to the other. I stopped in front of him. As a result of the snowplows’ work we were standing half a meter higher than usual, and the new angle changed our view of the candy shop. It had a cellar-like feel to it, and this feel transformed everything, at a glance I saw the shelves were only “shelves,” that the goods were “goods,” displayed in a very ordinary room in a house, in short that the shop was a “shop,” although I didn’t articulate this to myself, it was just an idea that struck me and disappeared as quickly as it had come.

Geir opened the door and went in.

I followed.

“Are we very short of time?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It goes in eleven minutes.”

In the back room the assistant put the newspaper down, came into the shop, and stood behind the counter with a bored, even slightly disdainful expression on her face. She was old and repulsive; there were three long, gray hairs growing out of a mole on her chin.

The whole of one wall was covered with pipes and pipe cleaners, cigarette rolling machines and papers, tobacco pouches and cigarette packets, cigar boxes and snuff tins of various shapes and colors, all with different writing and small, stylized images of dogs, foxes, horses, sailing ships, racing cars, black men smiling, sailors smoking, and women in casual poses. The candy shelf, which we were both looking at now, covered the whole of the second wall. Unlike the tobacco products, the candy had no packaging; chocolates, hard candies, and gumdrops were in transparent plastic jars and represented themselves, with no pictures between them and us: what you saw was what you got. The black ones tasted of salt or licorice, the yellow ones of lemon, the orange ones of orange, the red ones of strawberry, the brown ones of chocolate. The small, square pieces of chocolate with the hard surfaces, called Rekrutts, were filled with hard caramel, just as the promised shape; the heart-shaped chocolates, for their part, were filled with a soft, jelly-like mass tasting of apricot, also as expected. The color codes applied to the candies and the gumdrops, with a few exceptions, which on these evenings we tried to narrow down. Some black candies could taste dark green while some dark-green ones tasted green in a throat pastille or eucalyptus kind of way — in other words lighter — and not a sweet-type green, which you would imagine from the color. And then there were the black candies that actually tasted like the King of Denmark aniseed candies, an orangey brown. The strange thing was that it was never the other way around, there were no orangey-brown King of Denmark candies that tasted black, nor had we ever come across any eucalyptus-green candies that tasted like sweet green or black ones.

“What would you like?” the assistant said.

Geir had put the money he would spend on the glass counter and leaned forward to see the range of candies better, the signs of time pressure evident on his face.

“Errr …,” he said.

“Hurry up!” I said.

Then it all came out in a rush.

“Three of those, three of those, and three of those, and four of those and one of those and one of those,” he said, pointing to the various jars.

“Three of …?” the assistant said, opening an empty paper bag and turning to the stand.

“The green ones. Oh, make that four. And then three of the red and white ones. You know, polka d … and then five babies’ dummies …

When we emerged from the shop, each with a small bag in hand, there were just four minutes to go before the bus left. But that was enough time, we told each other, running down the stairs. The steps, covered with hard-trodden snow and ice, were slippery, so we had to hold on to the banisters, which was at odds with the speed we were after. Beneath us lay the town, the white streets appearing almost yellow in the reflection from the lamps, the bus station, where the buses skidded in and out like sleds in the snow, and the tall church with the red tiles and green spire. The black sky arched above everything, strewn with twinkling stars. When there were only ten to fifteen steps left Geir let go of the banister and set off at a sprint. After a couple of strides he lost balance and his only chance to stay upright was to run as fast as he could. He swept down the hill at a blistering pace. Then he changed tactics and decided to slide instead, but his upper body had more momentum, he was pitched forward and plunged headlong into the drift beside the road. It had all happened so fast that I didn’t start laughing until he was lying in the snow.

“Ha ha ha!”

He didn’t move.

Was he seriously hurt?

I walked as briskly as I could over the last stretch and stopped beside him. At first he drew breath in short, sob-like bursts. Then came a long, hollow groan.

“Shit,” he whispered, holding his chest. “Shit. Shit. Shit.”

“I wish you wouldn’t swear,” I said.

He sent me a brief, withering glare.

“Did you hurt yourself?” I said.

He groaned again.

“Did it knock the breath out of you?”

He nodded and sat up and started breathing normally again. He had tears in his eyes.

“We’ve missed the bus now anyway,” I said.

“It knocked the breath out of me,” he said. “I’m not crying.”

He held his side as he struggled to his feet with a grimace.

“Can you walk?” I asked.

“Yep,” he said.

From the entrance of the Arena Shopping Center we saw our bus depart, turn onto the road, and disappear around the street corner. The next bus would be in half an hour.

We sat down inside the bus station, on a bench beside a photo machine, and ate our candy. There weren’t many people around. Two youths buying hamburgers and fries while their car idled outside, a drunk sitting on the floor with his head down, asleep, and a friend of the girl working in the kiosk.

Geir put one of the red-and-white candies in his mouth.

“What color does it taste like?” I said.

He looked at me with raised eyebrows.

“Red and white, of course!” he said. “It was a red-and-white candy.”

“It doesn’t necessarily follow,” I said. “Suppose I ate it and it tasted green.”

“What are you talking about now?” he said.

“Suppose it tasted of jam, for example,” I said.

“Jam?”

“Don’t you understand anything?” I said. “We can’t know if a piece of candy tastes the same as the color!”

But he didn’t understand. I wasn’t absolutely sure I even understood myself. But Dag Lothar and I had once put a piece of candy shaped like a black bolt in our mouths, exchanged glances, and said, both at the same time, it tastes green! And later that autumn we’d had visitors, Grandma, Grandad, Gunnar, Dad’s uncle Alf, and his wife Sølvi had been staying at our house, we ate shrimp, crab, and a lobster, which Dad had caught in the net only a few days before, and while we were eating Sølvi looked at Dad and said:

“Imagine you catching this lobster yourself. It tasted delicious.”

“It really was delicious,” Grandma said.

“Nothing tastes as good as lobster,” Dad said. “But we can’t know if it tastes the same for all of us.”

Sølvi stared at him.

“What do you mean by that?”

“I know how it tastes to me,” Dad said. “But I have no idea how it tastes to you.”

“It tastes of lobster, of course!” Sølvi said.

Everyone laughed.

I didn’t understand what they were laughing about. What they said was right. But I laughed, too.

“But how can you know that lobster tastes the same to me as it does to you?” Dad asked. “For all you know, it could taste like jam to me.”

Sølvi was about to say something, but held back, looking down at the lobster, then up at Dad. She shook her head.

“I don’t understand,” she said. “The lobster’s there. And it tastes of lobster. Not jam!”

The others laughed again. I knew Dad was right, but I didn’t know exactly why. For a long time I sat musing. It was as if I was constantly on the point of understanding, but then as I was beginning to comprehend, it slipped from my grasp. The thought was too big for me.

But it had been even bigger for Geir, I remembered, and looked up as the door opened. It was Stig. His face lit up when he saw us and came over.

“Hi,” he said.

“Hi,” Geir said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Missed the bus?” he said, sitting down beside us. Geir nodded.

“Want one?” he said, holding out the bag to him. Stig smiled and chose a baby’s dummy. So I had to offer him one afterward, too. Why on earth had Geir done that? We didn’t exactly have a lot of candy.

Stig was in the class above ours and did gymnastics training in Arendal three times a week. He competed at the national level, but there wasn’t a touch of arrogance about him, as there was with Snorre, who swam for the national squad and wanted nothing to do with us. Stig was nice, one of the nicest boys I knew, in fact. When the bus came he sat in the seat in front of Geir and me. By the end of Langbrygga the conversation had petered out, he turned round and sat like that for the rest of the journey. Geir and I were quiet, too, and the thought of the missing sock returned with renewed vigor.

Oh no, oh no.

What was going to happen?

What was going to happen?

Oh no oh no oh no.

No, no, no!

Perhaps he had noticed that we were late. Perhaps he would be standing there waiting. On the other hand, he might not be, he might be busy with something else, in which case I was safe; if I could get from the hall to the boiler room unnoticed everything would be fine because I had my other socks there and I could change into them.

The bus drove onto Tromøya Bridge and was buffeted by the wind. The windows vibrated. Geir, who always wanted to be the first to pull the bell cord, reached up and rang, even though we were the only passengers to get off here. The bus stop was right at the bottom of the hill, and I always felt guilty when I alighted here because the bus would have to set off again and wouldn’t be able to pick up speed until it had passed the brow of the hill a few hundred meters further on. Sometimes this feeling was so strong in me that I didn’t get off until the next stop, up by B-Max, especially when I was on my own. Even now, with thoughts of the sock burning in my consciousness, I felt a little pang as Geir pulled the cord and the bus braked with a sigh of irritation to drop us off.

We stood by the drifts of snow and waited until the bus had pulled out again. Stig raised his hand to say goodbye. Then we crossed the road and walked up the path to the estate.

Usually I would kick my boots against the doorstep a couple of times to shake the snow off and then brush my trousers with the broom leaning against the wall for that very purpose, but this time I skipped the kicks, fearing he might hear, just brushed my trousers and cautiously opened the door, sidled in, and closed it behind me.

But that was enough. From inside, I heard his study door open, and then the door to the porch.

He stood in front of me.

“You’re late,” he said.

“Yes, I’m sorry,” I said. “But Geir fell and hurt himself on the road, so we missed the bus.”

I started undoing the boot with a sock in it.

He didn’t show any sign of wanting to leave.

I pulled the boot off and placed it by the wall.

Looked up at him.

“What is it?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said.

My heart was pounding in my ears. Getting up and walking with one boot on across the floor was obviously not an option. Standing still and waiting for him to leave was not an option, either, because he wasn’t going anywhere.

Slowly I began to untie my laces. While doing so I had a brainwave. I unwound my scarf, placed it beside my boot, and, after undoing the laces, I pulled it off, took the scarf, and casually tried to cover my naked foot.

Then, with the scarf half-covering my foot, I stood up.

“Where’s your sock?” Dad said.

I looked down at my foot. Glanced at him.

“I couldn’t find it,” I said, my eyes downcast again.

“Have you lost it?” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

The next instant he was up close to me, grabbing my arms in an iron grip and pinning me to the wall.

“Have you LOST your sock?”

“Yes!” I shouted.

He shook me. Then let me go.

“How old are you now? And how much money do you think we’ve got? Do you think we can afford to lose items of clothing?”

“No,” I said to the floor, my eyes full of tears. He held my ear and twisted it.

“You little brat!” he said. “Keep an eye on your things!”

“OK,” I said.

“You can’t go to the swimming pool anymore. Is that understood?”

“Eh?”

“YOU CAN’T GO TO THE SWIMMING POOL ANYMORE!” he said.

“But …,” I sobbed.

“NO IFS OR BUTS!”

He let go of my ear and marched to the door. Turned to me.

“You’re not old enough. You’ve shown that tonight. You can’t go there again. This was the last time. Have you got that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Good. Go to your room. There’ll be no supper for you. You can go straight to bed.”

The following week I didn’t go swimming, but I missed it so much that the next week I acted as if nothing had happened, packed my things, and caught the bus with Geir and Dag Lothar. My fears trickled through at various points, but something inside me said I would be fine, and I was, on my return everything was as normal and so it stayed, he never said another word about my not being able to continue the class.

At the start of December, three days before my birthday and two days before Mom came home again, I was sitting on the toilet, taking a dump, when the familiar sound of Dad’s car turning and parking in the drive was not followed by the equally familiar sound of a door being opened and closed but by the door bell ringing.

What could this be?

I hurriedly wiped myself, pulled the chain, yanked up my trousers, opened the window above the bathtub, and poked my head out.

Dad was standing beneath me wearing a new anorak. On his legs he wore knee-length breeches and long, blue socks, and on his feet a pair of blue-and-white boots, all equally new.

“Come on!” he said. “We’re going skiing!”

I got dressed in a flash and went outside, where he was tying my skis and sticks to the roof rack beside a pair of brand new, long, wooden Splitkein skis.

“Did you buy some skis?” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “Isn’t it great? So we can go skiing together.”

“OK,” I said. “So where are we going?”

“Let’s go to the west of the island,” he said. “To Hove.”

“Are there slopes there?”

“There? Oh yes!” he said. “They’ve got the best.”

I doubted it, but didn’t say anything, got in the car beside him, how unfamiliar he looked in his new clothes, and then we left for Hove. Not a word was said until he parked and we got out.

“Here we are!” he said.

He had driven through Hove Holiday Center, which consisted of a large number of red houses and huts originating from the last war, most probably built by the Germans, like the firing range, which, I had heard rumored, had been an airfield, like the concrete gun placements towering above the sea-smoothed rocks and the pebble beaches close to the edge of the forest, and the fascinating low bunkers among the trees, where we used to play on the roofs and in the rooms when we were here in the afternoon on 17th of May celebration days, he had driven past all this, along a narrow road into the forest, which came to an end by a small sand quarry, where he stopped and parked.

After taking the skis off the roof, he came over with a little case full of ski-waxing equipment he had also bought, and we waxed the skis with blue Swix, which, after reading the back of one of the tubes, he said had to be the best. Apparently unfamiliar with bindings, it took him a bit longer to put on his skis than it did me. Then he put his hands through the loops on the poles. But he didn’t do it from underneath so that the loop wouldn’t slip off even if he lost hold of the pole. No, he put his hands straight through.

That was how little kids who didn’t know any better held them.

It hurt me to watch, but I couldn’t say anything. Instead I took my hands out and then threaded them through again so that, if he was paying attention, he could see how it was done.

But he wasn’t watching me; he was looking up at the little ridge of hills above the sand quarry.

“Let’s get going then!” he said.

Although I had never seen him ski before, I could never have dreamed in my wildest imagination that he couldn’t ski. But he couldn’t. He didn’t glide with the skis, he walked as he normally walked, without skis, taking short, plodding steps, which on top of everything else were unsteady, which meant that every so often he had to stop and poke his poles into the snow so as not to topple over.

I thought perhaps this was just the beginning and soon he would find his rhythm and glide as he should glide along the piste. But when we reached the ridge, where the sea was visible between the trees, gray with frothy white-flecked waves, and started to follow the ski tracks he was still walking in the same way.

Occasionally he would turn and smile at me.

I felt so sorry for him I could have shouted out aloud as I skied.

Poor Dad. Poor, poor Dad.

At the same time I was embarrassed, my own father couldn’t ski, and I stayed some distance behind him so that potential passers-by wouldn’t associate me with him. He was just someone out ahead, a tourist, I was on my own, this was where I came from, I knew how to ski.

The piste wound back into the forest, but if the view of the sea was gone its sounds lingered between the trees, rising and falling, and the aroma of salt water and rotten seaweed was everywhere, it blended with the forest’s other faintly wintry smells, of which the snow’s curious mixture of raw and gentle was perhaps the most obvious.

He stopped and hung on his ski poles. I came alongside him. A ship was moving on the horizon. The sky above us was light gray. A pale, grayish-yellow glow above the two lighthouses on Torungen revealed where the sun was.

He looked at me.

“Skis running well?” he said.

“Pretty well,” I said. “How about you?”

“Yes,” he said. “Let’s go on, shall we? It’ll soon be time to head home. We have to make dinner as well. So, away you go!”

“Don’t you want to go first?”

“No, you head off. I’ll follow.”

The new arrangement turned everything in my head upside down. If he was behind me he would see how I, someone who knew how to ski, skied and realize how clumsy his own style was. I saw every single pole plant through his eyes. They cut through my consciousness like knives. After very few meters I slowed down, I began to ski in a slower, more staccato style, not unlike his, just not as clumsy, so that he would understand what I was doing, and that was even worse. Beneath us, the white, frothy breakers washed lazily onto the pebble beach. On the rocks, in some places, the wind whirled snow into the air. A seagull floated past, its wings unmoving. We were approaching the car, and on the last little slope I had an idea, I changed the tempo, and went as fast as I could for a few meters, then pretended to lose balance and threw myself into the snow beside the piste. I got up as quickly as possible and was brushing my trousers down as he whistled past.

“It’s all about staying on your feet,” he said.

We drove home in silence, and I was relieved when we finally turned into our drive and the skiing trip was definitively over.

Standing in the hall and taking off our skiing gear, we didn’t say anything, either. But then, as he opened the door to the staircase, he turned to me.

“Come and keep me company while I’m cooking,” he said.

I nodded and followed him up.

In the living room he stopped and looked at the wall.

“What on earth …,” he said. “Have you noticed this before?”

I had forgotten all about the streak of orange juice. My surprise as I shook my head must have had a dash of authenticity about it because his attention wandered as he bent down and ran his finger over the thin line of orange. Even his imagination would hardly stretch far enough to guess it was caused by my flinging an orange at the floor just there, on the landing outside the kitchen.

He straightened up and walked into the kitchen, I sat down on the stool as usual, he took a packet of pollock from the fridge, placed it on the counter, fetched flour, salt, and pepper from the cupboard, sprinkled them on a plate, and began to turn the soft, slippery fillets in the mixture.

“Tomorrow after school we’ll go to Arendal and buy you a birthday present,” he said without looking at me.

“Shall I go with you? Isn’t it supposed to be a secret?” I said.

“Well, you know what you want, don’t you?” he said. “Soccer uniform, right?”

“Yes.”

“You can try it on and then we’ll know if it fits,” he said, pushing a knob of butter from the knife into the frying pan with his finger.

What I wanted was Liverpool colors. But when we went to the Intersport shop they didn’t have Liverpool uniforms on the stand.

“Can’t we ask one of the people working here? Perhaps they’ve got some in stock?”

“If it’s not hanging up, they haven’t got it,” Dad said. “Take one of the others.”

“But I support Liverpool.”

“Take Everton then,” he said. “It’s the same town.”

I looked at the Everton shirt. Blue with white shorts. Umbro.

I looked at Dad. He seemed impatient, his eyes were wandering.

I put on the shirt over my sweater and held the shorts in front of me.

“Well, it looks good,” I said.

“Let’s take it then,” Dad said, grabbing the shirt and shorts and going to pay. They wrapped them up while he counted the notes in his fat wallet, combed his hair back with his hand, and looked into the street outside, which was crowded with shoppers, now, three weeks before Christmas.

On my birthday I woke up very early. The parcel containing the soccer uniform was in my wardrobe. I couldn’t wait to try it on. Tore off the paper, took out the outfit, pressed it against my nose, was there any better smell than new clothes? I put on the glistening shorts, then the shirt, which was rougher, a bit uneven against your skin, and the white socks. Then I went into the bathroom to look at myself.

Turned from side to side.

It looked good.

It wasn’t Liverpool, but it looked good, and they were from the same city.

Suddenly Dad swung open the bathroom door.

“What are you up to, boy?” he said.

He eyed me.

“Have you opened your present?” he shouted. “On your own?”

He grabbed my arm and hauled me into my bedroom.

“Now you wrap it up again!” he said. “NOW!”

I cried and took off the uniform, tried to fold it as well as I could, placed it in the paper, and stuck it together with a bit of the tape that was still sticky.

Dad oversaw everything. As soon as I had finished, he snatched the parcel out of my hands and left.

“Actually I should have taken it from you,” he said. “But now I’ll keep it until we give you the rest of your presents. It is your birthday, after all.”

As I knew what I was getting and I had even tried the uniform on in the shop, I had been sure it was the day that was important and that on the day I could wear it. I hadn’t seen it as one of the presents I would be given when we ate the birthday cake in the afternoon. It was impossible to make him understand. But I was right, he wasn’t. The uniform was mine when all was said and done! On that day it became mine!

I lay in bed crying until the others got up. Mom was in high spirits and wished me a happy birthday when I went into the kitchen, she had baked fresh rolls the evening before, which she was warming up in the oven, and she was boiling some eggs, but I didn’t care, my hatred for Dad cast a cloud over everything.

In the afternoon we ate cake and drank pop. I had never been allowed to invite friends on my birthday, and nor was I on this one. I was sullen and surly, I ate the cake without a word, and when Dad put the presents in front of me, with a smile that showed no insight into what had happened that morning, as though it were possible to start afresh, I looked down and unwrapped the Everton uniform without showing any sign of pleasure.

“How nice,” Mom said. “Are you going to try it on?”

“No,” I said. “I tried it on in the shop. Fits perfectly.”

“Put it on,” Dad said. “So Mom and Yngve can see.”

“No,” I said.

He eyed me.

I took the uniform to the bathroom, changed, and went back in.

“Excellent,” Dad said. “I bet you’ll be the coolest on the field this winter.”

“Can I take it off now?” I said.

“Wait till we’ve finished with the presents,” Dad said. “Here’s one from me.”

He passed me a small, square packet that had to be a cassette.

I opened it.

It was the new Wings cassette. Back to the Egg.

I looked at him. He looked out of the window.

“Do you like it?” he said.

“Oh yes,” I said. “It’s the new Wings cassette! I’ll play it now!”

“Hang on a moment,” he said. “You’ve got a couple of presents left.”

“Here’s a tiny one from me,” Mom said.

It was big but light. What could it be?

“Just something for your room,” she said.

I unwrapped it. It was a stool. Four wooden legs and a kind of net seat between them.

“What a great stool,” Yngve said.

“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “It’ll be good for when I read!”

“And here’s one from me,” Yngve said.

“Really?” I said. “I wonder what you’ve come up with this time?”

It was a book on how to play the guitar.

I looked at him with moist eyes.

“Thank you very much,” I said.

“It’s got scales, solos, everything,” he said. “Very simple. There’s a black dot for where you have to press. Even you can follow that.”

For the rest of the day I listened to Back to the Egg.

Yngve came in and said that John Bonham, the drummer in Led Zeppelin, was on one of the songs. And he had read in the newspaper that a Norwegian priest spoke at the beginning of one of the songs. It had to be at the start of the LP, we figured out, “Reception,” where there was a recording off the radio.

“There!” Yngve said. “Play it again!”

And then I heard it, too.

“Men la oss nå prøve et øyeblikk å se i dette lys av Det nye testamentet,” a faint, grating old man’s voice said.

The thought that neither Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Steve Holly, nor Laurence Juber had a clue what was being said there, but that Yngve and I did, as we were Norwegian, sent my senses into free fall.

As always, Dad was kind all Christmas, even in the morning. As New Year’s Eve approached and the shops finally opened for a few hours, Mom drove to Arendal to buy some food and fireworks. She must have intimated that perhaps it wasn’t necessary to spend hundreds of kroner on rockets, as Dad always did, at any rate, it was she who had the responsibility for buying fireworks while Dad kept well in the background.

It wasn’t a great success.

Dad usually showed us the rockets he had bought and said, well, this year we were going to knock Gustavsen into a cocked hat, for instance, or there were going to be a few really big bangs this year! When New Year’s Eve came we would see him standing outside on the shimmering snow astutely and meticulously arranging the launch site. With a strand of hair hanging down over his face, which his beard almost blotted out in the darkness, he would set up the clothesline in the snow and line the biggest rockets up against it, and place the others in a whole battery of bottles and hollow objects. Once the preparations had been made, he would wait until half past eleven. Then he would call us outside and the New Year was brought in with several salvoes. He started small, with a few little firecrackers or sparklers that Yngve and I were allocated, and then he gradually stepped up the power until the biggest rocket was launched at twelve. Afterward he would declare that there had been lots of wonderful rockets this year but we, as usual, had had the best. That, of course, was open to debate because we were not the only ones to invest money in fireworks, Gustavsen and Karlsen did, too.

But this New Year’s Eve Dad, the King of Fireworks, had abdicated.

I pondered quite a bit on the cause. Whatever it was, I suspected that the consequences would be of major significance. No, it wasn’t a suspicion, I knew.

When it was a few minutes after half past eleven and Mom said perhaps it was time to go out and light the rocket, my jaw dropped.

“The rocket?” I said. “Do we only have one? One rocket?”

“Yes,” Mom said. “Surely that’s enough? It’s a big one. They said in the shop it was the biggest and best they had.”

Dad smirked to himself. He went out after Yngve and me, stood beside us on the terrace at the back of the house where the launch was to take place.

The rocket really was big, she was right about that.

She put it in a bottle, but the bottle was too small, and both the bottle and rocket tipped over. She stood it up and looked around. Her light-colored leather coat was open, the zippers in her high boots were undone, making them seem as if they were unfolding as she moved, like two exotic plants. Around her neck she had wound her thick, rust-brown scarf.

“We could use something bigger to put this rocket in,” she said.

Dad said nothing.

“Dad normally uses the clothes horse,” Yngve said.

“That’s true!” Mom said.

The clothes horse, which was only used in the summer, was made of wood and leaned against the wall. Mom fetched it and set it up in the snow. She crouched down and positioned the rocket against it, but, seeing at once that it wouldn’t work, she stood up with the rocket in her hand. Around us fireworks were going off everywhere. The sky was lit with explosions, which we sensed rather than saw because it was overcast and misty, so of the showers of stars and all the colors and patterns not much more than flashes of light were to be seen.

“What about if you lay it on its side,” Yngve said. “Dad usually does that.”

Mom did as he suggested.

“It’s twelve o’clock now,” Dad said. “Aren’t you going to light our rocket soon?”

“Yes,” Mom said. She took a lighter from her pocket, crouched down, shielded the tiny flame with her hand, and averted her whole body, ready to run. The second the fuse was lit she dashed toward us.

“Happy New Year!” she said.

“Happy New Year,” Yngve said.

I said nothing because the rocket, which the burning fuse had reached now, sounded as if it was going to fizzle out. Then the flame died and the hiss stopped.

“Oh no,” I said. “It didn’t work! It was a dud! And we’ve only got one. Why did you buy only one? How could you do that?”

“That was New Year’s Eve then,” Dad said. “Perhaps I should be in charge of the fireworks next year?”

I had never felt so sorry for Mom as I did then, when we left the rocket and went into the warm, surrounded by neighbors’ exultant shouts and explosions. What hurt most was that she had done the best she could. She couldn’t do any better.

One afternoon two weeks later I was down by Lake Tjenna and my legs were absolutely freezing. Framlaget, the Socialist Party’s children’s organization, which I and almost all the other kids on the estate were in, had arranged a ski race. There were numbers on chests and medals for everyone, but above all else it was numbingly cold standing there and waiting your turn. And when my turn did come, my skis were slippery, I could never really get a decent speed going, and I finished way down the results list. As soon as I had passed the line and received my medal I set course for home. The darkness hung between the branches, the cold chafed at my toes, the skis kept slipping and sliding, I couldn’t even manage the steepest hill using the herringbone technique and had to ascend sideways. But at last the road was there with its illuminated street lamps like a luminous ribbon in the dusk, and our house was on the other side. I staggered across and into the drive, undid my skis and leaned them against the house, opened the door, and stopped.

What was that smell?

Grandma?

Was Grandma here?

No, out of the question, that was impossible.

Perhaps Dad had been to Kristiansand and had brought the fragrance back with him?

No, for Pete’s sake, there was someone talking in the kitchen!

I had my boots off in a flash, registered that my socks were wet, so I couldn’t walk in them, they would leave marks, and I jogged through the hall into the boiler room, where there was a fresh pair hanging from a line, put them on, strode up the stairs as fast as I dared, stopped.

The fragrance was stronger here. There was no doubt: Grandma was here.

“Is that you, champ?” Dad said.

“Yes,” I said.

“Come in here a moment!” he said.

I went into the kitchen.

There was Grandma!

I ran over and hugged her.

She laughed and ruffled my hair.

“How big you’ve grown!” she said.

“What are you doing here?” I said. “Where’s the car? Where’s Grandad?”

“I caught the bus,” she said.

“The bus?” I said.

“Yes. My son is alone with his children, I thought, so I can go and give him a bit of a hand. I’ve already made some dinner for you, as you can see.”

“How long are you staying?”

She laughed.

“Well, I’m catching the bus back tomorrow, I think. Someone has to look after Grandad as well. I can’t leave him alone for too long.”

“No,” I said, hugging her again.

“All right,” Dad said. “You go to your room for a while and I’ll call you when the food’s ready.”

“But he must have his present first,” Grandma said.

“Thank you for my Christmas present, by the way,” I said. “It was great.”

Grandma leaned forward, lifted her bag, and took out a little packet, which she passed to me.

I tore off the paper.

It was an IK Start mug.

It was white, with the Kristiansand club logo on one side and a soccer player in a yellow shirt and black shorts on the other.

“Wow, a Start mug!” I said and gave her another hug.

It was strange having Grandma there. I had hardly ever seen her without Grandad, and hardly ever on her own with Dad. They sat chatting in the kitchen; I could hear them through the door, which I had left ajar. There were intermittent pauses when one of them got up to do something. Then they chatted a bit more, Grandma laughed and told a story, and Dad mumbled. He called us, we ate, he was quite different from how he normally was, coming closer to us and distancing himself all the time. Sometimes he was completely in tune with what Grandma was saying, then he would be gone, looking elsewhere or getting up to do something, then he would look at her again and smile and make a comment that would make her laugh, and then he was gone again.

She left the following evening. She gave Yngve and me a hug, then Dad drove her to the bus station in Arendal. I put on Rubber Soul and lay down with a biography of Madame Curie. When the second song came, Norwegian Wood, I took my eyes off the book and gazed at the ceiling as the mood of the music in some incomprehensible way got into me and raised me to where it was. It was a fantastic feeling. Not only because it was beautiful, there was something else present that had nothing to do with the room I lay in or the world I was surrounded by.

I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me?

She showed me her room, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?

Fantastic, fantastic.

Then I went on reading about Madame Curie until ten and I switched off the light. As I drifted into sleep, as whatever existed in my room was somehow diluted with images, where they came from I had no idea, but I accepted them nonetheless, the door was suddenly thrust open and the light switched on.

It was Dad.

“How many apples have you had today?” he said.

“One,” I said.

“Are you sure? Grandma said she gave you one.”

“Really?”

“But you had one after dinner, too. Do you remember?”

“Oh yes! I’d forgotten that one!” I said.

Dad switched off the light and closed the door without another word.

The next day after dinner he called me. I went into the kitchen.

“Sit down,” he said. “Here’s an apple.”

“Thanks,” I said.

He handed me an apple.

“Sit here and eat it,” he said.

I glanced up at him. He met my gaze, his eyes were serious, and I looked down, started to eat the apple. Once it was finished, he handed me another. Where had he got it from? Had he got a bag behind his back or what?

“Have another,” he said.

“Thanks,” I said. “But I only eat one a day.”

“You had two yesterday, didn’t you?”

I nodded, took it, and ate it.

He handed me another.

“Here’s another,” he said. “This is your lucky day.”

“I’m full,” I said.

“Eat your apple.”

I ate it. It took me longer than the first two. The bite-sized chunks seemed to be lying on top of the food from dinner; it was as though I could feel the cold apple flesh down below.

Dad handed me another.

“I don’t want it,” I said.

“There were no limits yesterday,” he said. “Have you forgotten? You must have had two apples because you wanted them. Today you can have as many as you want. Eat.”

I shook my head.

He leaned down. His eyes were cold.

“Eat your apple. Now.”

I started eating. Whenever I swallowed my stomach contracted and I had to swallow several times not to throw up.

He was standing behind me, there was no way I could trick him. I cried and swallowed, swallowed and cried. In the end, I couldn’t go on.

“I’m so full!” I said. “I simply can’t eat any more!”

“Eat up,” Dad said. “You like apples so much.”

I tried a couple more bites, but it was no good.

“I can’t,” I said.

He looked at me. Then he took the half-eaten apple and threw it in the trash can in the cupboard under the sink.

“You can go to your room,” he said. “Now I hope that has taught you a lesson.”

Inside my room there was only one thing I longed for, and that was to grow up. To have total control over my own life. I hated Dad, but I was in his hands, I couldn’t escape his power. It was impossible to exact my revenge on him. Except in the much-acclaimed mind and imagination, there I was able to crush him. I could grow there, outgrow him, place my hands on his cheeks, and squeeze until his lips formed the stupid pout he made to imitate me, because of my protruding teeth. There, I could punch him in the nose so hard that it broke and blood streamed from it. Or, even better, so that the bone was forced back into his brain and he died. I could hurl him against the wall or throw him down the stairs. I could grab him by the neck and smash his face against the table. That was how I could think, but the instant I was in the same room as he was, everything crumbled, he was my father, a grown man, so much bigger than me that everything had to bend to his will. He bent my will as if it were nothing.

That must have been why, unwittingly of course, I was converting the inside of my room into an enormous outside. When I read, and for a while I did hardly anything else, it was always the world outside I moved in as I lay still on my bed, and not just the world that existed in the here and now, with all its foreign countries and foreigners, but also the one that had been, from Stokke’s Bjørneklo, the Stone Age boy, to the one in the future, such as in Jules Verne’s books. And then there was the music. It, too, opened my room with its moods and the strong emotions it evoked in me, which had nothing to do with those I normally felt in life. Mostly I listened to The Beatles and Wings, but also to Yngve’s music, which for a long time was bands and solo artists like Gary Glitter, Mud, Slade, The Sweet, Rainbow, Status Quo, Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Queen, but who in the course of his secondary school years were changing, as other, quite different, music began to sneak its way between all these old cassettes and records, like The Jam single and a single by The Stranglers, called No More Heroes, an LP by the Boomtown Rats and one by The Clash, a cassette by Sham 69 and Kraftwerk, as well as the songs he recorded off the only radio music program there was, Pop Spesial. He started to have friends who were interested in the same music and also played the guitar. One of them was called Bård Torstensen, and one day at the beginning of May when Dad was out for a few hours and thus the house was left unguarded, he joined Yngve in his room. They sat playing guitar and listening to records. After a while there was a knock at my door, it was Yngve, there was something he wanted to show Bård. I was reclined on the bed reading and got up when they came in.

“Look,” Yngve said, going over to the Elvis poster I had on the wall over the desk. “Can you guess what’s on the back?”

Bård shook his head.

Yngve loosened the drawing pins, took the poster down, and turned it around.

“Look,” he said. “Johnny Rotten! And he hangs it up with Elvis on the front!”

Both of them laughed.

“Can I buy it off you?” Bård said.

I shook my head.

“It’s mine.”

“But you’ve got it up the wrong way round!” Bård said, laughing again.

“I haven’t,” I said. “That is Elvis, you know!”

“Elvis is the past!” Bård said.

“No, he isn’t. Not Elvis Costello,” Yngve said.

“That’s true,” Bård said.

After they had gone I looked at the two pictures for a while. The one called Johnny Rotten was ugly. Elvis was good-looking. Why should I swap the ugly one for the good-looking one?

Outdoors, we did what we always do every spring: cut branches off the birch trees, tie bottles onto the remaining stumps, collect them the next day, full of light-colored, viscous sap, and drink it. We cut branches off the willow trees and made flutes from the bark. We picked large bunches of white wood anemones and gave them to our mothers. Well, we were too big for the latter really, but it was a gesture, it was us being good, then one morning, when we had only three hours, I dragged Geir with me into the forest, I knew a place where there were so many anemones that from a distance it looked like snow on the ground. Not without some self-torment, though, for flowers were living beings, picking them was killing them, but the cause was good, with their help I could spread happiness. The light fell in shafts through the branches, the bog was a luminous green, and we each picked an enormous bunch, which we ran home with.

When I arrived Dad was at home. He was in the laundry room at the bottom of the house. He turned to me, anger in every movement.

“I picked you some flowers,” I said.

He reached out with his hand, took them, and threw them in the large sink.

“Little girls pick flowers,” he said.

He was right. And he was probably ashamed of me. Once some of his colleagues had come home and they had seen me on the stairs, with my blond hair quite long, because it was winter, and I was wearing red long johns.

“What a nice girl you’ve got,” one of them said.

“It’s a boy,” Dad answered. He had smiled, but I knew him well enough to know the comment had not gladdened his heart.

There was my interest in clothes, my crying if I didn’t get the shoes I wanted, my crying if it was too cold when we were in the boat on the sea, indeed my crying if he raised his voice in situations when it would have been absolutely normal to raise your voice. Was it so strange he thought: what kind of son have I got here?

I was a mama’s boy, he was constantly telling me. I was, too. I longed for her. And no one was happier than I when she moved back for good at the end of the month.

When summer was over and I was about to start the fifth class it was Dad’s turn. He was going all the way to Bergen, to stay at something called the Fantoft Student Town, to major in Nordic literature and become a senior teacher.

“I’m afraid I won’t be able to come home every weekend,” he said during dinner just before leaving. “Perhaps no more than once a month.”

“That’s a shame,” I said.

I went into the drive to see him off. He put his suitcases in the trunk, and then he got in on the passenger side because Mom was driving him to the airport.

It was one of the strangest sights I had seen.

Dad didn’t look right in a VW Beetle, he didn’t. And if he was going to sit in one, it definitely shouldn’t be as a passenger, it verged on the grotesque, especially when Mom got in beside him and started the engine, turned her head, and reversed.

Dad wasn’t a passenger; that much was obvious.

I waved, Dad raised a hand, and they were gone.

What should I do now?

Go into the workshop room, hammer and saw, chop and cut for all I was worth?

Go into the kitchen and make waffles? Fry an egg? Brew up some tea?

Sit with my feet on the table?

No, I knew what.

Go into Yngve’s room, take out one of his records, and put it on full volume.

I chose Play by Magazine.

Turned up the volume almost full blast, opened the door, and went into the living room.

The bass was making the walls vibrate. Music was belting out of the room. I closed my eyes and I swayed back and forth to the rhythm. After doing that for a while I went into the kitchen, took the bar of cooking chocolate, and ate it. The music was booming out around me, but I wasn’t inside it, it was more like part of the house, the dining-room table, or the pictures on the wall. Then I started swaying back and forth again and it was as though I were devouring the music and had it inside me. Especially when I closed my eyes.

Someone downstairs was calling me.

I opened my eyes and gasped.

Had they forgotten something and come back?

I dashed into the bedroom and turned the volume right down.

“What are you doing?” Yngve called from downstairs.

Oh. What a relief.

“Nothing,” I said. “I borrowed one of your records.”

He came up the stairs. Followed by another boy. I hadn’t seen him before. Perhaps someone from volleyball?

“Have you gone completely nuts?” Yngve said. “You can burst the speakers. They’re probably ruined now. You damned idiot!”

“I didn’t know,” I said. “Sorry. Really sorry.”

The other boy smiled.

“This is Trond,” Yngve said. “And this is my stupid little brother.”

“Hi, little brother,” Trond said.

“Hi,” I said.

Yngve went into his room, turned up the volume, and placed his head against the speakers.

“You haven’t burst them, fortunately,” he said, straightening up. “You were lucky. You’d have bought me some new ones otherwise. I would have personally made sure you did.”

He looked at me.

“Have they been gone long?”

I shrugged.

“Half an hour,” I said.

Yngve closed his bedroom door, and I hung around in the living room for a while until I spotted Marianne and Solveig outside. They were pushing a stroller. I went out and ran after them.

“Why don’t we walk together?” I said.

“All right,” they said. “Where are you going?”

“Up.”

“Who are you going to see?”

I shrugged.

“Whose baby is that?”

“The Leonardsens’.”

“How much are you getting?”

“Five kroner.”

“Are you saving up for something?”

“Nothing special. A jacket maybe.”

“I’m going to buy a new jacket, too,” I said. “A black Matinique. Have you seen it?”

“No.”

“The sleeves are long and they’re made of a different material from the rest. Sort of wavy. And it’s got a little flap down the middle covering the zipper. What kind of jacket are you going to get?”

Marianne shrugged.

“A coat, I was thinking.”

“A coat? A light color?”

“Maybe. Quite short.”

“You’re the only boy who talks about clothes,” Solveig said.

“I know,” I said. And it was something I had discovered recently. It was so difficult to talk to girls. Once you had taken their hats or shouted a few bad words after them that was where it usually ended. Well, you could talk to them about homework. But nothing else. Then I suddenly realized. Clothes, that was what they were interested in. All you had to do was chat away.

As we got closer to B-Max, I said bye and ran down the slope to the play area, which was deserted, then up the grass slope to the old car wreck, which was deserted, then over to the soccer field, which was deserted, and over the fence to Prestbakmo’s and the front of the house, where I rang the bell. But Geir was having dinner, and afterward he was going up to Vemund’s.

Oh, yes.

The road too was deserted. It was Sunday, dinner time, kids were eating or they were out visiting or they were on a trip with their parents.

Then I had a sudden brainwave: Yngve had a friend with him! Perhaps I could join them?

I ran down the hill, but their bikes had gone, they must have already left.

What could I do?

It was cloudy and not very warm. There probably wasn’t anyone at the Rock.

Slowly I started walking down to the pontoons. Probably no one there, either, but if nothing else I could look at the various boats and breathe in the distinctive smell of fiberglass and wood, gasoline and salt water.

No, a whole crowd was there.

I mingled with them unobtrusively. Some of them had boats, they were sitting on board and spitting into the water while listening to those on the pontoon who didn’t have a boat but had come to be close to those who did. I stood with them although I had no dreams of ever owning a boat, it was so unrealistic that I might just as well have dreamed about waking up in the Viking Age the next morning, as a boy had done in one of the books I was reading. No, if I dreamed about anything, it was a pair of new, white sneakers with the light-blue Nike logo, like the ones Yngve had, or new light-blue Levi jeans, or a light-blue Catalina jacket. Or a new pair of Puma soccer cleats, an Admiral tracksuit or a pair of Umbro shorts. Or Speedo trunks. I thought a lot about the black-and-white Adidas Olympia sneakers. Then there was a pair of shin pads with instep protection I wanted, and a Puma bag, and for winter Atomic slalom skis and Dynastar slalom poles. I wanted slalom pants and a genuine down jacket. Splitkein fiberglass skis, new Rottefella bindings. And light-colored, Sami reindeer-hide boots, the ones with the little curled-up toe. I wanted a new, white shirt and a red college sweater. I had mentally chosen white rubber boots instead of the dark blue ones I had now. I would also have liked a pink coral necklace I had seen, white in a pinch.

Boats, mopeds, and cars interested me less. But as I couldn’t say this to anyone I had a few favorite brands among them, too. Boat: a ten-footer With Dromedille with a five-horsepower Yamaha engine. Moped: Suzuki. Car: BMW. These choices had a lot to do with the unusual letters. Y, Z, W. For the same reason I was drawn to Wolverhampton Wanderers, it was the first soccer team I supported, and even after Liverpool took over that role, my heart still beat for the Wolves, who else when their ground was called Molineux and their logo was a wolf’s head on an orange background?

Trousers, jackets, sweaters, shoes, and sports gear were on my mind a lot because I wanted to look good and I wanted to win. When John McEnroe, whom I rated as perhaps the all-time greatest, got that dangerous glint in his eye after a line judge’s decision, when he glared up at the umpire while bouncing the ball on the court before serving, I thought desperately, No, don’t do it, don’t do it, it won’t help, you can’t afford to lose the point, don’t do it! — and could barely watch when he did it anyway and started to swear at the line judge, perhaps even sling his racket to the ground so hard it bounced up several meters. I identified with him to such a degree that I cried every time he lost, and couldn’t bear to be indoors, but had to go out onto the road, where I sat on the concrete barriers mourning the defeat, my cheeks wet with tears. The same applied to Liverpool. A defeat in the FA Cup Final drove me outside onto the road with my face streaming. On that team I liked Emlyn Hughes best, he was the one I rooted for, but I liked the others, too, of course, especially Ray Clemence and Kevin Keegan, before he went to Hamburg and Newcastle. In one of Yngve’s soccer magazines I had read a comparison of Kevin Keegan and his replacement, Kenny Dalglish. They were compared point by point, and even though they had their own strengths and weaknesses, they came out of it fairly even. But one thing that had been written left a searing mark on me. The article said that Kevin Keegan was an extrovert while Kenny Dalglish was an introvert.

Just seeing the word introvert threw me into despair.

Was I an introvert?

Wasn’t I?

Didn’t I cry more than I laughed? Didn’t I spend all my time reading in my room?

That was introverted behavior, wasn’t it?

Introvert, introvert, I didn’t want to be an introvert.

That was the last thing I wanted to be, there could be nothing worse.

But I was an introvert, and the insight grew like a kind of mental cancer within me.

Kenny Dalglish kept himself to himself.

Oh, so did I! But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be an extrovert! An extrovert!

An hour later, after I had taken the road through the forest and climbed a tree to find out how far I could see, I ran onto the road the moment Mom’s Beetle came up the hill. I waved, but she didn’t see me and I ran as fast as I could after the car, up the hill, across the short, flat stretch, and into the drive, where she got out of the car, hitched her bag over her shoulder, and shut the door.

“Hi,” she said. “Would you like to help me bake some bread?”

That might have been the year Dad lost his grip on us.

Many years later he was to say Bergen was where he started drinking.

It came up casually, I was visiting him one summer at the beginning of the nineties, he was drunk, and I said I was going to move to Iceland that winter, and he said, Iceland, I’ve been there, to Reykjavik.

“Have you really?” I said. “When would that have been?’

“It was when I was living in Bergen, you remember,” he said. “I had a girlfriend there, she was Icelandic, and we went to Reykjavik together.”

“While you were with Mom?”

“Yes. I was thirty-five and living in student housing.”

“You don’t have to make an excuse. You can do what you like.”

“Yes, I can. Thank you, son.”

None of this came to our ears at the time, of course, and we didn’t have the experience to imagine it, either. All that counted for me was that he wasn’t at home. But even though the house opened up, and for the first time in my life I could do what I wanted, in a strange way he was still there, the thought of him went through me like a lightning strike if I brought dirt in with me to the hall or if I dropped crumbs on the table while eating or even if juice ran down my chin while eating a pear. Can’t you even eat a pear without making a mess, boy, I could hear him saying. And if I did well in a test it was to him I wanted to bring the news, not Mom, that wasn’t the same. However, what was happening outside was slowly changing character, it was becoming both better and worse, it was as though the gentle world of the child, where the blows that fell were muted and somehow untargeted, in the sense that they were intended for everything and nothing, became sharper and clearer, any doubt was removed, it is you and what you say that we dislike, and this was a red line, while something else opened and this something else had nothing to do with me personally, although perhaps it affected me to an even greater degree, because I was a part of it, and that part had nothing to do with my family, it belonged to us, to those of us who were out there. I was tremendously attracted to almost all the girls that autumn as I started the fifth class, but I didn’t perceive them as radically different, I had something inside me that enabled me to approach them. I had no idea this was a huge blunder, actually, the biggest blunder a boy can commit.

We had an older woman teacher that year, her name was Fru Høst, she taught us a range of subjects and she liked to set up role plays. Often she chose little events for dramatization, and I always volunteered, it was my favorite activity, everyone looked at me and I could be someone else. I had a special talent for acting girls’ parts. I was good at it. I flicked my hair behind my ears, pouted a little, swung my hips as I walked, and spoke in a slightly more affected voice than normal. Fru Høst sometimes laughed so much tears were rolling down her cheeks.

One evening I was hanging out with Sverre, who also liked role plays and was also a good student and bore a strong enough resemblance to me for two substitue teachers to think, independently of each other, that we were twins, and I suggested going to visit Fru Høst. She lived three kilometers or so east of the estate.

“Good idea,” Sverre said. “But my bike’s got a flat. And it’s a bit of a hike on foot.”

“Let’s hitch,” I said.

“OK.”

We walked down to the crossroads and stood by the curb. I had hitchhiked quite a lot the previous year, mostly with Dag Magne, to Hove or up to Roligheden or some of the other places we found appealing, and we had never stood there for more than an hour without getting a lift.

This evening the first car stopped.

There were two guys inside.

We got in. They were playing loud music; the windows were vibrating from the bass. The driver turned to us.

“And where are you going?”

We told him, he put the car in gear, and drove off so fast we were pinned back against the seat.

“Who lives out there?”

“Fru Høst,” Sverre said. “She’s our teacher at school.”

“Aha!” the one in the passenger seat said. “You’re going there to cause some mischief. We did that, too, when we were younger. Went to the teachers’ places and tormented the hell out of them.”

“Well, we’re not going to do that exactly,” I said. “We’re just going to visit her.”

He turned and looked at me.

“Visit her? Why? Something to do with homework or what?”

“No-o,” I said. “We just felt like it.”

He turned back. They were silent for the rest of the journey. Braked sharply at the crossroads.

“Looks like the end of the road,” the driver said.

I had a bit of a bad conscience, knowing we had disappointed them, but lying wasn’t an option. So I thanked them as warmly as I could.

They raced off into the darkness with the bass pounding.

Sverre and I trudged up the gravel driveway. Large leafy trees with outstretched branches on both sides. We had never been to her house, but we knew where it was.

There were two cars outside and all the windows were lit.

I rang the bell.

“My goodness,” Fru Høst said in surprise, opening the door.

“We thought we would visit you,” I said.

“Can we come in?” Sverre said.

She hesitated.

“I’m afraid I have visitors here. It’s not such a convenient time. But did you come all this way just to visit me?”

“Yes.”

“Come on in then! You can stay for half an hour if you like. In fact, I have some cookies. And some juice!”

We went in.

The living room was full of adults. Fru Høst introduced us, we sat down at the table, on stools, and she gave us a plate with three cookies on it and a glass of juice.

She said we were her favorite students and we were such good actors.

“Could they perform something for us now?” someone asked.

Fru Høst glanced at us.

“Could do,” I said. “OK with you?”

“Of course,” Sverre said.

I tucked my hair behind my ears, pouted, and we were off, improvising, and it made everyone there laugh. After the performance we bowed, slightly flushed but happy to hear the applause.

I repeated the success at the fancy dress party just before Christmas when both Dag Magne and I dressed up as women, complete with makeup, dress, and handbag, and my impersonation was so good that no one recognized me, not even Dag Lothar, who I was standing next to for at least five minutes before he suddenly realized who the stranger really was.

Although I wasn’t ashamed about dressing up as a girl, nor about discussing girlish things with them, I also actually went out with some of them. The best was Mariann, it lasted two weeks, we went skating together, she sat on my lap and kissed me, I went to her birthday party, the only boy, and she sat on my lap and I held her while she chatted to her friends, we made out there, too, but after a while I grew tired of it — she was without doubt one of the best-looking girls at school, although not at the absolute top — and perhaps I also felt a little sorry for her because she lived alone with her mother and sister and they were quite poor, for example, she almost never had any new clothes, her mother did the best she could with old ones and hand-me-downs, so I felt an emptiness when I was in her room and claustrophobia when we kissed, I just wanted to leave as soon as possible, and finally I persuaded Dag Magne to tell her it was over. That same day I made a terrible mistake, she was running behind me in the wet weather shelter, and as a purely reflex action I stuck my foot out, she tripped, and hit her face on the tarmac, there was blood and she cried, but that wasn’t the worst, the worst was the ensuing fury she poured over me, which the other girls united behind as they gathered round to help her. It would be wrong to say that I was popular for the next few weeks. That I hadn’t meant anything by it, that I had only done it for fun, didn’t get much of a sympathetic response. At times it was as though the girls really hated me, considered me some sort of scum; at others it was the opposite, not only did they want to talk to me but at the class parties we had begun to arrange, in one another’s houses and at school, they also wanted to dance with me. My attitude to them was also ambivalent, at least as far as the girls in my class were concerned. On the one hand, I knew them so well that after close to five years at school I was completely indifferent toward them; on the other hand, they had started changing, the bulges under their sweaters were growing, their hips were widening, and they were behaving differently, they had risen above us, suddenly when they looked at boys, they were from two or three classes up. With our high-pitched voices, more or less furtive glances, as we admired all the attributes they now possessed, we were no more than air to them. But even though they were so important, they knew nothing about the world they were moving toward. What did they know about men and women and desire? Had they read Wilbur Smith, where women were taken by force under stormy skies? Had they read Ken Follett, where a man shaves a woman’s pussy while she lies in a foam-filled bathtub with her eyes closed? Had they read Insect Summer by Knut Faldbakken, the passage that I knew by heart, when he takes her panties off in the hay? Had they ever gotten their hands on a porn magazine? And what did they know about music? They liked what everyone liked, The Kids and all the other crap on the hit lists, it meant nothing to them, not really, they had no idea what music was or what it could be. They could barely dress, they turned up at school wearing the strangest combinations of clothes and didn’t realize. And they were looking down on me? I had read Wilbur Smith and Ken Follett and Knut Faldbakken, I had been flicking through porn mags for years, I listened to bands who really counted, and I knew how to dress. And was I supposed to be inferior to them?

To demonstrate the true state of affairs, I pulled off a little coup in the music lesson. Every Friday we had something we called “Class Top of the Pops.” Six of us would bring along a song that everyone voted on afterward. Mine always came last, whatever I played. Led Zeppelin, Queen, Wings, The Beatles, The Police, The Jam, Skids — the result was the same, one or two votes, last. I knew they were voting against me and not the music. They weren’t really listening to the music. This irritated me beyond endurance. I complained to Yngve and he not only understood how irritating it was, because he disliked hit list music, too, but he also came up with a way to trick them. The Kids’ second record hadn’t been released yet. One Friday I took with me The Aller Værste!’s first LP, Materialtretthet, which Yngve had bought a few days before, and said that I had an advance copy of The Kids’ new record. The music teacher was in on my ruse and played the first song off the LP, which was still in a white inside sleeve because, as I told them, the record was so new that the cover hadn’t been designed yet. For them The Aller Værste! was the worst of the lot, the last time I had played a song by them, the single “Rene Hender,” they had shouted, Rene Hender! Rene Hender! after me for several days, but when the first notes of the band’s first song sounded in the classroom it was to mumbles of appreciation and mounting enthusiasm, which culminated when the vote was taken and it transpired that The Aller Værste! under the pseudonym of The Kids, had won hands down. How the triumph shone in my eyes as I was able to stand up and say that they had not voted for The Kids but for The Aller Værste! I said this proved that they weren’t interested in the music, there were other issues determining their votes. How angry they were! But there was nothing they could say. I had fooled them too well for that.

Of course, I never heard the last of it. I was conceited, I thought I was quite something, I always had to like weird things, not what everyone else liked. That wasn’t true, though, in fact I liked good music and not bad music, surely that wasn’t my fault? — and I learned more and more about it, thanks to Yngve and his music magazines, which I plowed through, and to the records he played me. Bands like Magazine, The Cure, The Stranglers, Simple Minds, Elvis Costello, Skids, Stiff Little Fingers, XTC, the Norwegian groups Kjøtt, Blaupunkt, The Aller Værste! The Cut, Stavangerensemblet, DePress, Betong Hysteria, Hærværk. He also taught me more and more chords on the guitar, and when he wasn’t at home, I would play by myself with the black Gibson plectrum in my hand and the black Fender strap over my shoulder. To be on the safe side, I also bought a teach-yourself drums book, carved two sticks, placed some books around me in a circle on the floor, the one on the left was the hi-hat, the one next to it the snare drum, and the three books above them the tomtoms. The only person on my wavelength was Dag Magne, with whom I was spending more and more time. We were mostly up at his house, playing records and trying to copy the songs on his twelve-string guitar, but he also came down to ours, where we read magazines because Mom’s ban was no longer absolute, while listening to my cassettes and talking about girls or the band we were going to start, especially what we were going to call it. He wanted it to be Dag Magne’s Anonymous Disciples; I wanted it to be Blood Clot. Both were equally good, we agreed, and we didn’t need to make a decision until the time was ripe and we were performing on a stage.

In this way winter passed, with the first class parties, where we played spin the bottle and danced slow ones, round and round on the floor holding some of the girls we had been in the same class with for five years and knew better than our sisters, and my head almost exploded when I held Anne Lisbet’s body so close to mine. The fragrance of her hair, the sparkling eyes that were bursting with life. And, oh, the little breasts under the thin, white blouse.

Wasn’t that a fantastic feeling?

It was completely new, unknown for all these years, but now I knew it, now I wanted to go there again.

Winter passed, spring came, with its light, which every day held the passage to night open for a little longer, and with its cold rain, causing the snow to slump and dwindle. One of these March mornings, oppressed by the darkness and the rain, I went into the kitchen to have breakfast as usual. Mom had already left, she was on the early shift. She had forgotten to switch off the radio. Even in my room I had gathered that something had happened in the night because the voices on the radio — I could hear the resonance but not the words — sounded unusually dramatic. I buttered a piece of bread, added a slice of salami, and poured milk into a glass. There had been an accident in the North Sea, an oil platform had capsized. Raindrops slid slowly down the outside of the windows. The faint thrum of the rain on the roof surrounded the house like a membrane. The gutters were running. Up at Gustavsen’s a car was started, the headlights were switched on. It was a catastrophe, a number of people were missing, no one knew how many. When I arrived at B-Max half an hour later, my trousers tucked into my boots and my waterproof hood tied tightly around my face, no one spoke of anything else. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had a father or a brother working on that particular platform. Alexander Kielland, it was called, and apparently one leg had given way. Was it a hundred-year wave that had caused it? A bomb? A construction fault?

In the first lesson the teacher talked about the accident, even though it was a math class. I wondered what Grandad would be saying now. He always told us we should find a job in oil. Oil was the future. But other signals were coming in from elsewhere: an item on the news had opened with a forecast that the oil reserves would soon be running out, it was happening faster than anyone would have believed, within a mere twenty-five years it would all be gone. I was fascinated by the year that was quoted, 2004, because it was so far into the future, and actually unreal, but treated here as a sober reality, different in kind from the one you met in science fiction books and magazines and hence shocking: would 2004 ever really arrive? In our lifetimes? At the same time I was also unnerved by the doom and gloom in these men’s voices warning of terrible things to come and despondent that something was going to come to an end. I didn’t like that; I wanted everything to last and go on forever. All ends were frightening. Therefore I hoped that Jimmy Carter would get a second term and that Odvar Nordli and the Socialist Party would win the next election. I liked Jimmy Carter. I liked Odvar Nordli even though he was always so drained and exhausted. I didn’t like Mogens Glistrup or Olof Palme, there was something smarmy about them, about their lips and eyes. Einar Førde and Reuilf Steen also had it, though not so much. But I liked Hanna Kvanmo. Not Golda Meir and not Menachem Begin, despite the Camp David Agreement. It was hard to judge Anwar Sadat. The same applied to Brezhnev, on quite a different scale, though. When I saw him standing there in his fur coat and hat, with the bushy eyebrows above the narrow Mongolian eyes in his expressionless face, mechanically waving to the parade below, as one artillery rocket after the other rolled past, surrounded by thousands of identical goose-stepping soldiers, I didn’t see him as human, he was something else, impossible to relate to.

Did I like Per Kleppe?

Yes, in a way, I certainly hoped with a passion that Kleppe’s anti-inflation packages would work.

I liked Hans Hammond Rossbach, but I considered Trygve Bratteli a bit odd with that low, whispering voice of his and his strange r’s, the narrow shoulders and the big, skull-like head with the thick, black eyebrows.

The accident in the North Sea was the main topic of conversation for a quarter of an hour, then the lesson proceeded as usual, that is, we worked on sums in our books while the teacher walked between the rows of desks helping whoever needed it as the hand of darkness outside released its grip on the morning and it slowly became lighter. In the break someone said there might be air pockets inside the platform where you could survive for several days. Others said no parents from our school had been on board, but the father of a pupil at Roligheden was missing. It was hard to know where all the rumors were coming from, or how true they were. In the next lesson we had Norwegian. When Frøken sat down at her desk I put up my hand.

“Yes, Karl Ove?”

“Have you corrected our essays?”

“You’ll have to wait and see,” she said.

But she must have because the next thing she did was to go through some words and rules on the blackboard, which presumably were examples of the mistakes we had made in the essays we had handed in the Thursday before.

Yes indeed. The big pile of exercise books was taken from her bag and put on the desk.

“There were lots of excellent essays this time,” she said. “I could have read out all of them, but there wasn’t enough time, so I chose four. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are the best, as you know. Everyone in the class writes good essays.”

I stared at the pile to see if I could recognize mine. It wasn’t the one on top, that was for sure.

Anne Lisbet put up her hand.

She was wearing a white sweater. It suited her so well. Her black hair and black eyes went well with white, and her red lips and the redness in her cheeks, which always flushed when she came into the warm, did too.

“Yes?” Frøken said.

“Can we knit while you read?” Anne Lisbet said.

“Yes, I don’t have a problem with that,” Frøken said.

Four of the girls leaned forward and took out some knitting from their satchels.

“Can we do our homework as well?” Geir Håkon said.

Someone giggled.

“Put your hand up like everyone else, Geir Håkon,” Frøken said. “But the answer is, of course, no.”

Geir Håkon smiled, blushing, not because he had been put in his place but because he had ventured to speak. He was always pink-faced when he spoke in class.

Frøken began to read. The first was not mine. But there were three left, I thought, stretching my legs out under the desk. I liked the first lessons, when it was dark outside and it was like we were sitting in a bright capsule, all of us with slightly messy hair and sleepy eyes and these soft-focus movements that the day seemed to sharpen until everyone was running around shouting over one another with wide-open eyes and flapping limbs.

The second essay wasn’t mine, either. Nor the third.

I peered up uneasily as she lifted the fourth book. That wasn’t mine, was it?

Oh. She wasn’t going to read it.

Something inside me slumped with disappointment. While something else soared. My essay was the best, I knew that, and she knew that. Yet she hadn’t read it the previous time, nor this. What was the point of writing well if that was what happened? The next time I would write as badly as I could.

Finally she put the wretched essay down.

I put up my hand.

“Why didn’t you read mine?” I said. “Wasn’t it any good?”

Her eyes narrowed for a second, then opened, and she smiled.

“I have received twenty-five essays. I can’t read all of them out. Surely you can understand that? Your essays are in fact among those I read out most often. This time it was someone else’s turn.”

She clapped her hands.

“And they were really fantastic this time. What imagination you have! I really enjoyed all of them.”

She nodded to Geir B, who jumped to his feet and went to the desk. He was the class monitor and had to hand out the essays. I scanned mine. About a mistake a page. At the end she had written: “Imaginative and elegant, Karl Ove, but perhaps the story finished a little abruptly? Very few mistakes, but you have to work on your writing more!”

We had to write about something in the future. I had written about a journey in space. That is, I had spent so much time describing the various training programs the astronauts went through that ten pages were already covered before the day of the launch, so after some deliberation I decided the trip would be cancelled at the last moment because of a fault and the astronauts would go home with their work left undone.

Somewhere in the essay I had written Hotel’, and she had added an extra “l” in her red looped script. I put up my hand and she came over.

“Hotell is spelled with one l. I know that. I saw it in a book, so I’m absolutely sure.”

She leaned over. Soap fragrance rose from her hands, and from her neck a faint scent of a summery perfume.

“Ah, well, in one way you’re right. ‘Hotel’ with one l is English. There are two l’s in Norwegian.”

“Hotel Phønix has one l,” I said. “And that’s in Norway. And on top of that, it’s in Arendal!”

“You’re right.”

“So it’s not a mistake after all?”

“No. Let’s say that. And it was a good essay, Karl Ove.”

She straightened up and went back to her desk. Her words were warming, even though they were only meant for my ears.

Outside, the rain and the wind continued. The trees beyond the school grounds swayed and creaked, and when we went into the gym at the end of the break, the wind was gusting against the external walls with such force that it sounded like waves hitting them. The ventilation grilles howled and wheezed as though the building were alive, a huge beast full of rooms, corridors, and shafts that had settled here beside the school, and in its despondency sang lonely laments. Or perhaps it was the sounds that were alive, I wondered, sitting on the bench in the changing room and undressing. They rose and fell, whirled around for a while, drifting here, drifting there, as if in the middle of a game. I stood up, naked, took my towel, and went into the shower, which was already hot with the steam. I found a place among the throng of pale, almost marble-white boys’ bodies, and was engulfed by the hot water that first hit the top of my head and then ran in steady streams down my face and chest, neck and back. My hair stuck to my forehead and I closed my eyes. That was when someone shouted.

“Tor’s got a hard-on! Tor’s got a hard-on!”

I opened my eyes and looked over at Sverre, the boy who had shouted. He was pointing across the narrow room to where Tor was standing, with his arms down by his sides, his dick in the air, and a smile on his face.

Tor had the biggest dick in the class, well, perhaps, in the whole school. It dangled between his legs like a classic pork sausage and it was no secret because he always wore tight trousers and he placed it at an angle, pointing upward, so that everyone could see. Yes, it was big. But now, in its erect state, it was enormous.

“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat,” Geir Håkon shouted.

Everyone looked at him, there was a sudden excitement in the atmosphere, and it was obvious something had to be done. Such an extraordinary circumstance could not be allowed to go to waste.

“Let’s take him to Fru Hensel!” Sverre shouted. “Come on, quick, before it’s too late!”

Fru Hensel was our gym teacher. She came from Germany, spoke broken Norwegian, was strict, neat, and prim, which was emphasized by her narrow glasses and her tightly pinned-up hair. She was meticulous yet distant, in sum what we called snooty. As a teacher she was a nightmare because she had a predilection for gym apparatus and hardly ever let us play soccer. When Sverre suggested taking Tor to her — she was tidying up in the gymnasium, still with her whistle around her neck, wearing her blue tunic and white tights — we all knew it was perfect.

“No,” Tor said. “Don’t do that!”

Sverre and Geir went over and grabbed him by the arms.

“Come on!” Sverre shouted. “We need a couple more of you!”

Dag Magne went over, and with Geir B, they grabbed Tor’s legs and lifted him. Tor protested and writhed as they carried him out of the shower, but rather halfheartedly. The rest of us followed. And it was quite a sight. Tor, stark naked with an enormous bone, carried by four boys, also naked, followed by a procession of more naked boys, through the changing room and into the large, cold gymnasium where Fru Hensel, who was around thirty years old, turned to us from the stage at the far end.

“What do you want?” she said.

Those carrying Tor ran over with him. Once in front of Fru Hensel, they straightened him up as though he were a statue to be examined, left him like that for five seconds or so, then laid him down, and charged back to the changing room.

Fru Hensel said nothing, other than No, no, boys, this really is not a good idea and she did nothing. There were no screams, no howls, no bulging eyes, and no gaping mouth, as perhaps we had hoped. Nevertheless, it had been a success. We had shown her Tor’s massive hard-on.

In the changing room afterward we discussed what would happen now. Few believed there would be any consequences, for the simple reason that it would be embarrassing for her to take the matter any further. We were wrong. It turned into a big affair, the headmaster came to the class, the four boys who had carried Tor were given detentions, and the rest of us a lecture we would never forget. The only person to come out of this with his honor intact was Tor, who now emerged as a victim — the headmaster, the class teacher, and Fru Hensel regarded the incident as a case of bullying — and a winner, for now everyone knew, also the girls, this sensational detail of his physique without his having to lift a finger.

That night I posed naked in front of the mirror for a long time.

It was easier said than done. The only full-length mirror we had was in the hall by the stairs. I couldn’t exactly stand there naked, even if there was no one in the house because someone could come at any moment and even if I reacted quickly they would still see my butt beating a swift retreat up the stairs.

No, it had to be the bathroom mirror.

But it was designed solely for faces. If you got up close and had your legs as far back as possible you could catch a glimpse of your body but from such a bizarre angle that it told you nothing.

So I waited until Mom had finished washing up after dinner and taken a seat in the living room with the newspaper and a cup of coffee. Then I went into the kitchen and fetched a chair. If she asked what I was doing with it, I could say I was going to put the cassette recorder on it while I was in the bath. If she asked why it couldn’t be on the floor as usual, I could say I had heard water and electricity were dangerous if they came into contact, and water often slopped on the floor when I had a bath.

But she didn’t ask.

I locked the door, undressed, placed the chair by the wall, and clambered up.

First I looked at the front of my body.

My dick wasn’t like Tor’s, not at all. More like a little cork. Or a kind of spring because it quivered when you flicked it lightly.

I put it in my hand. How big was it?

Then I turned and looked at it from the side. In fact, it seemed a bit bigger then.

Anyway, it looked like all the dicks in our class, apart from Tor’s, didn’t it?

I fared worse with my arms. They were so thin. And my chest was thin. I had a sudden image of it from a Norway Cup photo and the way it tapered the closer it came to my head. And that was definitely not how it was meant to be. I was supposed to do push-ups in training, but I always cheated because in reality, and only I knew this, I couldn’t do a single one.

I climbed down from the chair, ran the water into the bath, and while it splashed out from the tiny mouth under the miniature iron girder construction that the two eyes, one red and one blue, rested on, I hurried into my bedroom, grabbed the cassette recorder, inserted Outlandos d’Amour, which for me was bath music, put it on the chair, pressed play, and carefully stepped into the bathtub. The hot water stung my skin so much it was impossible to sit. But I managed. I sat, got up, sat, got up, sat, got up until my skin was used to the temperature and I could lie there letting the heat wash over me while the music poured from the little recorder and I sang at the top of my voice, dreaming about becoming famous and what all the girls I knew would say then. I feel lo lo lo, I sang. I feel lo lo lo, I feel lo lo lo. I feel lo lo lo, I feel lo lo lo, I feel lo lo lo. Lo, I feel lo. I feel lo. I feel so lonely. I feel so lonely. I feel so lonely lonely lonely lo. I feel so lonely lonely lonely lo. I feel so lonely lonely lonely lo. Lonely lone. Ah I feel SO LONELY! So lonely. So lonely. So lonely. So lonely. So lonely. I feel so lonely. I feel so lonely. I feel so lonely.

I caught every little nuance in Sting’s voice, even the whimper at the end. Now and then I banged my fists on the edge of the bath in my enthusiasm. When the song had finished I dried my hands on a towel, turned the cassette over, and wound forward to “Masoka Tanga,” another favorite of mine.

Oh, “Masoka Tanga”!

Afterward I stood in front of the wardrobe in my bedroom looking for clothes to wear. There were still some hours of the evening left.

It had to be the light-blue shirt with the white buttons and the dark-blue Levi’s.

“When are we going to buy clothes for the 17th of May?” I said to Mom, stopping in front of her in the living room.

“It’s only the end of March now,” she said. “We’ve got plenty of time.”

“Perhaps it would be cheaper now?” I said.

“We’ll have to see,” she said. “We haven’t got much money now, either, you know, as Dad is studying.”

“But we’ve got a little?” I said.

She smiled.

“Of course you’ll have new clothes for the 17th.”

“And shoes.”

“And shoes.”

The 17th of May was still the high point of spring for us, as Christmas was of the winter. At school we sang “Vi Ere En Nasjon Vi Med,” “Norge I Rødt,” “Hvitt og Blått,” and “Ja, Vi Elsker,” we learned about Henrik Wergeland and what happened at Eidsvoll in 1814. At home, ribbons and flags were taken out and all the flutes and horns we could find. On the day itself flags were hoisted on all the masts, and from very early morning families came out of their houses wearing traditional costume, dresses or suits, covered with capes or coats, as it was cold or raining, children with flags in their hands, now and then an instrument case, for quite a few of my neighbors played in marching bands and wore uniforms instead of their finery, which they changed into later. The uniform of the Tromøya school band consisted of a mustard-yellow jacket and black trousers with a white stripe down the sides and a black Foreign-Legion-style kepi on top. Their chests were festooned with medals acquired at the innumerable gatherings they had attended. Then car after car left front drives, onto the road and into Arendal, where you had to park well outside the center because people were trickling in from every direction and the streets were packed with crowds lining the long road along which the procession would pass. And the procession, that was us. We assembled in Tyholmen, beneath the standard of Sandnes School, which we were proud to walk behind in an almost endlessly long line consisting not only of all Arendal’s schools but all the schools in the district. Then we walked in two lines up and down the streets, in a sea of people, which you had to keep a constant eye on, because your parents, whom you had to wave to and who had to take a photo of you, could be anywhere.

That day, the 17th of May 1980, was different from all the other Constitution Days I had experienced. It was raining when we got up, and I was upset about that because I had to wear a waterproof anorak and trousers over my new clothes. I had been given light-blue Levi’s, a pair of white Tretorn tennis shoes, and a grayish-white, waist-length jacket. I was especially pleased with the jeans. Outside the houses up the hill there were sporadic protracted laments from the instruments the kids were carrying. Car doors slammed, shouts carried across garden paths, the atmosphere was feverish but expectant. As we approached the assembly area in Tyholmen, with the skies opening in unfailingly regular bursts of drizzle, it became clear that we would be walking side by side with a class from Roligheden School. I played soccer with some of them, but I had never seen many of the faces.

A girl turned.

She had wavy blonde hair, large blue eyes, and she smiled at me.

I didn’t smile back, but I held her gaze and then she turned forward.

The procession began to move. Somewhere far ahead a band was playing. One of our teachers began to sing and we joined in. After marching for perhaps twenty minutes many began to find their patience waning, especially the boys, we started laughing and fooling around, and when some boys used the flag to lift girls’ skirts, and the idea caught on, I made my way toward the blonde girl, along with Dag Magne, fortunately, so that I was part of something and not just on my own. I put the flag under the pleat of her skirt and lifted, she spun on her heel, held it down with one hand, and shouted, Don’t you dare, don’t you dare. But the eyes that looked at me were smiling.

I did it to some other girls as well, until it would no longer be suspicious if I approached her again.

“Don’t do that!” she said this time, and ran ahead, away from me. “Don’t be so childish!”

Was she really angry?

Seconds passed. Then she turned and smiled. Briefly, but it was enough, she wasn’t angry, she didn’t think I was childish.

But wasn’t that an Østland accent?

Was she not from here? Was she only visiting?

Then I would never see her again.

No, no, no. Relax. Visitors wouldn’t be allowed in the school procession!

I suddenly noticed the flag I was holding and raised it. Last 17th of May Dad was annoyed I had let the flag droop as I passed them.

Dag Magne beamed his broadest smile. A camera flashed. His parents were in the front row. They were unlike their normal selves, their Sunday best looked strange on them.

I observed the girl again.

She wasn’t very tall and she was wearing a pink jacket, a light-blue skirt, and thin, white stockings. Her nose was small, her mouth large, and she had a little cleft in her chin.

I felt pains in my stomach.

When she spun round to stop her skirt being lifted I had seen that she had big breasts, her jacket had been open and the white sweater beneath insubstantial.

Oh, dear God, please let me go out with her.

“Hi, Karl Ove!” Mom shouted from somewhere. I scanned the rows of people. There they were, on the other side of the street from Hotel Phønix. Mom waved and lifted her camera to her eye, Dad sent me a nod.

On our way back to the center she turned and looked at me again. Straight afterward the procession broke up and she was lost in the crowd.

I didn’t even know her name.

After the school procession in Arendal everyone drove back home to the estate, where clothes were changed, food was eaten, and perhaps also TV broadcasts of the children’s processions around the country were watched before everyone piled into their cars, rather more informally dressed, and headed for Hove, where the climax of the celebrations would take place. Here there were stalls selling hot dogs, ice cream, and pop, stalls where you could buy a lottery ticket and play tombola, organized games, and a huge crowd of children with ten-krone notes burning a hole in their pockets, running here to buy a hot dog, running there to jump in a sack race, with ketchup on their sleeves and ice cream smeared around their mouths and a bottle of Coke with a straw in their hands. We hadn’t quite outgrown that, but the speed with which we did everything had perhaps dropped, compared with the previous year. For my part, I searched for the girl in the procession all afternoon, if I caught sight of a pink jacket or a blue skirt my heart almost stopped beating, but it was never her, she wasn’t there. Even if I knew which class she was in and even if I played soccer with two boys who were in the same class as her, I couldn’t ask them, they would realize straightaway what was going through my mind and wouldn’t hesitate for a moment, they would spread it far and wide. However, sooner or later I would see her again, that much I did know, Tromøya was not that big.

Dad moved home two weeks later, proud to have finished his studies in a matter of months. He had sold his stamp collection, he had given up his political commitments, the garden was immaculate, he was so on top of his teaching it was boring. What he was doing was applying for new jobs. And if he got one, we would move. He hoped the coming year as a bog-standard ungdomskole teacher would be his last.

He bought himself a boat at the beginning of the summer, a Rana Fisk 17 with a twenty-five-horsepower outboard motor. Mom, Yngve, and I were standing on the pontoons when he came back from Arendal for the first time. He was standing behind the wheel as the boat skimmed across the water and although he didn’t smile or wave to us I could see he felt proud.

He eased back on the throttle and the prow of the boat sank, but not enough for him to be able to turn into our berth as he had planned, the boat overshot and bumped into the pontoon. He reversed, put the engine into gear, and glided in. Threw the mooring rope to Mom, who didn’t quite know what to do with it.

“Does it go well?” I said.

“Yes, it certainly does,” he said. “You saw, didn’t you?”

He jumped ashore with a red gasoline canister in his hand. Secured the tarpaulin, stood for a moment inspecting the boat, then we got into the car and drove up toward home, with Dad at the wheel even though it was Mom’s car.

When the school year began I had to join him casting nets in the afternoons and pulling them up at the crack of dawn. We gulped down a couple of pieces of bread, our faces drawn with tiredness, and then we went into the darkness. He started the car and drove down to the pontoons, which lay quiet and deserted, undid the green tarpaulin on the boat, put the red canister of gasoline in its place, loosened the mooring ropes, got the engine going, and carefully reversed out. I sat at the front, behind the windshield, shoulders hunched, arms close to my body, and hands in my pockets because it was cold, and even though the boat was faster than the old double-ender, the trip to the far side of the island still took over half an hour. Dad stood at the wheel concentrating on steering through the narrow passage between the shore and the island of Gjerstadholmen, where there was some sunken rock he had run onto earlier that summer. As we emerged into Tromøya Sound he sat down and we plowed across, with the waves thumping against the underside of the plastic propeller and spray hurtling through the air. He usually set the nets quite close to the shore and it was my job to sit in the bow and grab the floats to which they were attached. It was difficult, they were slippery, and if I didn’t succeed the first time Dad told me to get my act together, all I had to do was pick them up. My hands were already freezing, the water was obviously ice cold, and out here, in open sea, there was always a wind blowing early in the morning. Dad’s hair was in wild disarray, his eyes flashed with annoyance as he reversed and steered into the wind again, and if I didn’t grab the float this time, he would shout at me and I would start to cry, and then he would become even more angry and perhaps stomp forward to grab it himself, while telling me to take the wheel, steer into the fricking wind, he would say, into the wind, I told you, you idiot! Can’t you do anything! Steering’s not so easy, I said, and he replied, it’s not steewing, it’s steering! RRR. STEERING! I was crying and frozen and Dad leaned over the railing and pulled the float on board. Then, as we rocked on the waves, with the dawn light a stripe on the horizon, and he pulled up the net, the glow of fury in his eyes gradually abated and he would try to mitigate the effect of his outburst, but it was too late, the cold was as deep in my soul as it was in my hands, I hated him as you can only hate your father, and on the way back, with the fish still squirming in the white tub, not a word passed between us. While he gutted the fish in the utility room I packed my satchel and left for the day, which for my classmates had only just begun, but which for me had already lasted several hours.

That same autumn our band finally became a reality. The name I chose won the day, it was to be Blood Clot we wrote on our jackets and satchels, and we practiced in the basement of the new chapel. Dag Magne had arranged it, his mother did the cleaning for a doctor who was also on the church committee. He was also the only one of us who could play or evince anything that was redolent of musical talent. He played the guitar and sang, I played the guitar, Kent Arne played the bass his mother had bought for him, Dag Lothar played the drums. At the end-of-term Christmas party we were lined up to play in the gymnasium. Yngve had taught me the chords for Forelska I Lærer’n, The Kids’ big hit, In Love with the Teacher, and even though playing that song of all songs was like sucking up, at least for me, it was the easiest song Yngve knew, and probably the only song in existence that was simple enough for us to play. Although the band came apart at the seams in the process, everyone played at their own tempo, and Kent Arne started tuning the bass in the middle, and although most of the audience was critical, even the fourth-years ventured a few remarks, and rightly so, we couldn’t play, the feeling among us afterward, standing in the school playground, dressed in ripped jeans and denim jackets, and with scarves around our necks, could not be surpassed. We were in the sixth class, would soon be in the ungdomskole, and we were in a band. The fact that the band split up straight afterward, as neither Dag Lothar nor Kent Arne wanted to continue, was a setback, but Dag Magne and I carried on as a duo, for as long as it lasted, recording songs in his house, listening to music, dreaming of a breakthrough, for example at the locally famous Saga Nights, which would be in Arendal during the summer and at which new bands were allowed to play. I went up to see Håvard, who played in the town’s only punk band, was five years older than us, and lived by Tromøya Bridge, and asked him if he could help us to get in. He couldn’t promise anything, but he would put in a good word and we would have to wait and see.

That spring, at a school parents’ evening, we performed two songs, Dag Magne on guitar and me on snare drums, first of all one I had written myself, “Tramp på en Soss,” Stamp on a Snob, and then Åge Aleksandersen’s “Ramp,” Riff-Raff. Before we played, I gave a little introductory talk about punk to the parents.

“In recent years a completely new form of music has sprung up in the English working classes,” I explained. “Some of you may have heard about it. It’s called punk. Those who play punk are not great musicians but rebels who want to rebel against society. They wear leather jackets and studded belts and they’ve got safety pins everywhere. You could say the safety pin is their symbol.”

I gazed enthusiastically across the assembly of hairdressers, secretaries, nurses, house helpers, and housewives. I was twelve years old and before every Christmas and summer for the last five years they had seen me standing on the stage, either as Joseph in the Nativity play or the mayor in Borgmester I Byen, and now here I was again, this time as a spokesman for punk and a member of Blood Clot.

“We’re going to give you a sampler of this type of music. We’ll begin with a song we wrote ourselves. It’s entitled ‘Tramp på en Soss.’ ”

Then Dag Magne, who had been standing beside me with his twelve-string guitar over his shoulder, started to play while I hit the snare drum when the whim took me.

Our next performance was in a lesson. We played the same two songs. After we had finished, most of the class whistled and the teacher, the red-bearded Finsådal, went over to Dag Magne and said his guitar playing was beginning to take off.

That hurt.

In response, in the deepest secrecy, I sent a letter to NRK, who broadcast a program where children could perform with their idols, and I wrote that I would like to play “Ramp” with Åge Aleksandersen.

For a long time I lived in hope, but no answer ever came, and slowly the dream of overnight fame as a pop star faded while another appeared: our coach, Øyvind, gathered us together at the end of a training session and said that we might be playing the pre-match game before IK Start versus Mjøndalen. For me, who, the year before, had been at the League Cup Final in Kristiansand Stadium and had seen Start win the match in the dying seconds, who had charged onto the field with several hundred others, stood under the building where the changing rooms were, singing and cheering and paying tribute to the players and even getting my hands on Svein Mathiesen’s shirt, only to have it ripped from my grasp by a grown man with piggy eyes a second later, for me, who every alternate Sunday over many years had been to all the home games and whose uncle Gunnar actually knew Svein Mathiesen a little, enough to get an autograph for Yngve, for me, playing at Kristiansand Stadium, with the opportunity to be seen not only by the whole of the immense crowd but also by the players themselves, this was charged with enormous significance. The team I played for was one of the region’s best, we won most matches by several goals, and had won the league every single year I had been involved, and I always thought my being one of the worst players in the team, slow and without much skill, was a temporary state of affairs, actually I was good, actually I could do everything as well as the others, it was just a question of time before it would become evident. I felt like this because in my mind I could knock in goals from every conceivable and inconceivable angle, like John, and steam past whoever was on the wing, like Hans Christian. All I needed to do was align my actions with my thoughts, making them one and the same, and then it was done. Why couldn’t that happen during a pre-match game at Kristiansand Stadium just as easily as at a training session in Hove? Was it not the case that I always got better over the weeks in the autumn? In fact, from out of nowhere could I not actually ghost past one player after the other?

Yes, that was how it was. It was all in my head. And despite the fact that I still hadn’t shown any of what I hoped for, strangely enough, I still had a regular spot in the midfield. Early that spring we had played our first practice match on the shale field outside the new Tromøya Sports Hall above Roligheden School, and when I was brought off at some point during the second half, my eyes were full of tears as I left the field. Even though I was looking down, the trainer realized and ran after me as I headed for the changing room. I should have stayed to see the rest of the match, but partly I was so disappointed to have been taken off that I couldn’t be bothered, and partly I didn’t want anyone else to see me crying.

“What’s up, Karl Ove?” he said.

“Nothing,” I said.

“Is it because you were taken off? Everyone has to have a go, you know. It doesn’t mean you’ve been dropped from the team. It doesn’t. It was just for today. It’s a practice match.”

I smiled through my tears.

“It’s nothing,” I said. “It’s OK.”

“Sure?”

“Yes,” I said, feeling fresh tears building up.

“Good,” he said.

After that I wondered perhaps if I would be allowed to play because he felt sorry for me, or if he didn’t want to repeat the experience. It wasn’t a pleasant thought, but actually being on the team meant a great deal to me, my shortcomings notwithstanding.

We trained and played home games at Kjenna, a ground immediately below the big estate in Brattekleiv and most of the boys I played with came from there.

That was when I saw her again.

The beginning of June, blue sky, not a cloud in sight. We played between cones placed in the middle of one half of the field because around the goals and in the center circle the grass was already cut up and the soil eroded, and even though the sun was low and the shadows from the trees stretched across the field it was so hot that sweat ran down my face and neck as we ran around after the ball. Birds sang in the trees on both sides of the field, gulls screamed, the occasional car roared past, somewhere in the distance the drone of a lawnmower rose and fell, and down by the makeshift changing rooms came squeals and laughter, a group of children in the hot, brown water of the Tjenna, all while we panted and puffed and kicked and the ball thudded between us. I was in the best team this season, playing with boys a year older than me whereas, because of how my birthday fell, I would be doing the same next year as last year, playing with boys a year younger. We were on top of the league by some distance, and in a month’s time we would be going to the Norway Cup again, not without some hope of going all the way and playing the final in Ullevål Stadium. I had white Umbro shorts and a pair of Le Coq Sportif boots, which I polished after every session and could still turn round in my hand and admire with immense pleasure and satisfaction.

This evening four girls jumped off their bikes at the end of the field, pressed down the kickstands, and strolled laughing and chatting over to the side by the rocks, where they sat down to watch us. Girls did sometimes come and watch us like this, but I had never seen her there before. For it was her, there was no doubt. This time she was wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt.

For the rest of the session my awareness of her never left me for a moment. Everything I did, I did for her. When we had finished playing, done our stretching exercises, and the XL1 bottles had been passed around I sat down on the grass below them with Lars and Hans Christian. They shouted some insults up to the girls and received laughter and more insults in return.

“Do you know them?” I said as warily as I could.

“Yes,” said Lars, bored.

“Are they in your class?”

“Yes. Kajsa and Sunnva. The others are in HC’s class.”

So she was called either Kajsa or Sunnva.

I leaned back with my hands behind my head on the grass and my eyes squinting into the rays of the orange sun. One of the others ducked the whole of his head into a bucket of water by the touchline. He straightened up and tossed his head. The drops of water formed a glittering arc in the air for a brief instant before dissipating. With prong-like fingers he plowed both hands through his wet hair.

“I’ve seen one of them before,” I said. “The one on the far right. What’s her name?”

“Kajsa?”

“Oh, really?”

Lars glanced at me. He had curly hair, freckles, and a slightly cheeky expression, but his eyes were warm and always had a glint.

“We’re neighbors,” he said. “I’ve known her since I learned to walk. Are you interested?”

“No-oo,” I said.

Lars bored a rigid finger in my chest a few times.

“Ye-es,” he grinned. “Shall I introduce you?”

“Introduce?” I said, my mouth suddenly dry.

“Isn’t that what it’s called, you who knows everything?”

“Yes, I suppose it is. No. Not now. That is, not at all. I’m not interested. I was just wondering. I thought I had seen her before.”

“Kajsa’s nice, she is,” Lars said. Then he whispered: “And she’s got big breasts.”

“Yes,” I said. I turned without thinking and looked at her. Lars laughed and got up. She looked at me.

She looked at me!

I got up too, and followed Lars down to the changing rooms.

“Can I have some?” I said.

He threw me the XL1 bottle, I leaned back and squirted the greenish liquid through the long, narrow plastic pipe and down my throat.

“Are you going for a shower?” he said.

“No, I’ve got to go home,” I said.

“Perhaps Kajsa will be in the showers, too,” he said.

“You think?” I said. He eyed me. I shook my head. He smiled. Behind us the others straggled in. In the changing room I just put on my T-shirt, tracksuit top, and shoes, then I placed my bag on the rack of my bike and cycled home along the old gravel road through the forest where the air soon cooled in places the sun hadn’t been shining for a while, and I had to close my mouth because these cool, gray pockets buzzed with large swarms of insects. The sun shone on the ridge close by, still bare after a fire the previous year, before it disappeared where the hills began and tall, dense spruce trees lined both sides of the road like a wall. My bike was the same one I’d had since I was small, a DBS kombi, with the seat and the handlebars raised as far as they would go, which made it look like a kind of mutant, a bike’s first, clumsy transition from a bike. I sang at the top of my voice as I raced between all the bumps and potholes and sometimes skidded sideways with a static rear wheel.

Shoot, Shoot!

Dodiddilidodo

Shoot, Shoot!

Dodiddilidodo

Shoot, Shoot!

Dodiddilidodo

You come all flattarp he come

Groovin’ out slowly he got

Ju ju eyeball he won

Holy roller he got

Here down to his knees

Got to be a joker, he just do what he pleases

Shoot, Shoot!

Dodiddilidodo

Shoot, Shoot!

Dodiddilidodo

Shoot, Shoot!

Dodiddilidodo

That was the opening track on the Abbey Road LP, “Come Together,” or at least how it sounded to my ears. Well, I knew it wasn’t exactly what they sang, but what did it matter as I whizzed down the hill in the forest, absolutely throbbing with happiness? Down at the crossroads I braked in front of a car, then picked up speed and pedaled as hard as I could up the gravel on the other side. I swallowed a midge or two and tried in vain to cough them up, crossed the main road at the top of Speedmannsbakken, and followed the cycle path down to the Fina station, where a gang of kids was sitting at the tables outside and not, as in winter, in the café. Their bikes and mopeds were parked a little way from them. I wasn’t frightened of going in there anymore, the worst that could happen was that someone might make a comment, but I still didn’t like it, so when I passed them it was on the other side of the road. There were three from my class with them this evening, John and I also saw Tor and Unni, and then Mariann from the parallel class. I had been out with her. No one took any notice of me, if indeed they saw me at all.

The quickest way to cycle home was along the main road, but I jumped off on the way up to the path and began to push my bike uphill. As soon as the trees closed off the view of the main road behind me the scenery became rural and I liked the change enough to relish the extra minutes it took.

Then it was all forest, not a house or a road to be seen, there were trees everywhere, tall, broad-crowned deciduous trees, crammed with green leaves, full of chattering birds. The path, which was no more than beaten earth and bare rock face, was crossed in several places by huge roots resembling prehistoric animals. The grass growing alongside the bed of a stream was thick and lush, in the wilderness at the bottom there were fallen trees with smooth trunks, and many plants covered the bed between the dry, lifeless branches, which had been there for as long as I could remember, and behind them there was a ridge of stumps between the long grass and the new trees that had shot up. Walking down the first hundred meters of the path, you could imagine the forest was deep, indeed, endlessly deep, and full of mystery. It wasn’t hard to dismiss the thought that between the branches in autumn and winter you could glimpse the long, rocky slope down from the road that went around the estate or glimpse the orange roof of one of the houses. The problem is not so much that the world limits your imagination as your imagination limits the world. But this time I was not outside to play but to surround myself with nature and to cultivate the feeling of liberation Kajsa’s gaze had given me.

Kajsa, her name was Kajsa!

With my bike bumping along beside me, I trudged up the hills, across the gentle slope, then jumped on my bike again when I emerged on the road, just below the parish hall. Outside Ketil’s house the road teemed with kids playing soccer. His father sat in a camping chair on the terrace wearing shorts, with his belly bulging out of an open, short-sleeved shirt. Smoke wafted over from a barbecue not far away from him.

Oh, the smell!

On the other side, Tom was washing his car. He was wearing large aviator glasses and denim shorts with long, frayed threads hanging down his thighs, otherwise nothing. I recognized the music blaring out through the open doors, which made the car look like a small, plump airplane, it was Dr. Hook. Then I reached the hill and saw the distant blue of Tromøya Sound behind the green trees, and the white gas holders on the other side. The wind forced tears from my eyes as I hurtled downhill. Another crowd of kids was playing kids on the road outside our house. Marianne’s little brother, Geir Håkon’s little brother, Bente’s little brother, and Jan Atle’s little brother. They said hello, I didn’t say hello back, I jumped off my bike, and trundled it down the drive, where there were two cars. There was Anne Mai’s big Citroën and Dagny’s 2cv. I had completely forgotten they were coming, and a little shiver of pleasure went through me when I saw them.

They were sitting in the living room with Mom. She had baked a cake, perhaps there was a third left, and she had made coffee. Now they were chatting, wreathed in clouds of smoke. I said hello, they asked how I was, I said fine, I had been at soccer practice, had the school holiday started, they asked, I answered yes, and it was wonderful. Anne Mai took out a packet of Freia Ms.

“I suppose you’re too old for these now?”

“Not for Ms,” I said. “You’re never too old for them, are you?”

I took the bag and turned to go into the kitchen when Anne Mai said: “What on earth’s that on your back? Trauma?”

She laughed.

“His soccer team’s called Trauma,” Mom said.

“Trauma!” Dagny said. Now all three of them were laughing.

“What’s wrong with it?” I said.

“That’s what we work with, you know. It’s when something terrible happens. You can have trauma. It was quite funny to see it on your back.”

“Oh,” I said. “But that’s not what it means. It comes from Thruma, the old name for Tromøya. From Viking times.”

They were still laughing when I went to my room. I put The Specials on the cassette recorder and lay down to read while the last rays of sun were shining on the wall beyond the bed, and the estate outside was slowly draining of noise.

Kajsa was constantly on my mind over the following weeks. I had two recurrent images of her. In one she was turning to me, with her blonde hair and blue eyes, wearing the pink and light-blue clothes of the 17th of May. In the second she was lying naked in front of me in a field. The latter I saw every night before I went to sleep. The thought of her big, white breasts with the pink nipples made my body ache. I lay writhing while imagining various indistinct but intense things I did with her. The second image aroused something else in me, and at other moments: jumping from a cliff on the island, floating in the air with the sun on my face, I caught a glimpse of her and a wild cheer broke free from my innards, more or less at the same instant as my feet hit the surface and my body plunged into the bluish-green sea water, breaking my fall of several meters, and, surrounded by a rush of bubbles and with the taste of salt on my lips, I headed for the surface again with slow arm movements and a quiver of happiness in my chest. Or at the dinner table, while I was peeling the skin off a piece of cod, for example, or chewing a mouthful of hashed lung, which had such an unpleasant consistency, it swelled and filled my mouth at first, but when I chewed, my teeth went right through the mass, which only resisted at the last, when it stuck to my gums, then the image of her could suddenly appear and she was so radiant that everything else was pushed into the shadows. But I didn’t see her at all in reality. The distance as the crow flew between our two estates could have been only a few kilometers, but the social distance was greater and could not be covered by either bike or bus. Kajsa was a dream, an image in my head, a star in the firmament.

Then something happened.

We were playing a match on the Kjenna field, the spring season was actually over, but a game had been cancelled and moved forward, so there we were, running around the grass in the heat with the usual ten to fifteen spectators when from the corner of my eye I espied three figures walking along the touchline, and I knew at once it was her. For the rest of the match I watched the spectators standing on the slope as much as the ball.

After the match a girl came over to me.

“Can I have a word with you?” she said.

“Yes, of course,” I said.

A hope so wild it made me smile was lit inside me.

“Do you know who Kajsa is?” she said.

I reddened and looked down.

“Yes,” I said.

“She wants me to ask you a question,” she said.

“Pardon,” I said.

A wave of heat surged up inside me, as though my chest were filling with blood.

“Kajsa was wondering if you would like to go out with her,” she said. “Would you?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Great,” she said. “I’ll tell her.”

She made a move to leave.

“Where is she?” I said.

She turned.

“She’s waiting over by the changing room,” she said. “Will we see you there afterward?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s fine.”

As she went away I looked down at the ground for a second.

Thank God, I said to myself. Because now it had happened. Now I was going out with Kajsa!

Was it true?

Was I really going out with Kajsa?

With Kajsa.

Dazed, I began to walk along the touchline. Suddenly it struck me that I had a big problem. She was there and waiting for me. I would have to speak to her. We would have to do something together. What would it be?

On my way into the changing room I could either pretend I didn’t see her or just flash a fleeting smile because I had to go in and change. But when I had to go out again …

It was a mild evening, the air smelled of grass and was filled with bird song, we had won, and the voices rising from the changing room were animated. Kajsa was standing in the road nearby with two other girls. She was holding her bike and glanced at me when I looked over. She smiled. I smiled back.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

“I’ll just get changed,” I said. “Be out afterward.”

She nodded.

In the shed-like changing room I undressed as slowly as possible while feverishly trying to find a way to extricate myself with honor. To go off with her, unprepared, was inconceivable, it would never work. So I had to find a convincing excuse.

Homework? I wondered, loosening a shin pad, slippery with sweat on the inside. No, that would give a bad impression of me.

I put one shin pad in the bag and took off the other, staring at the lake through the small window. Unwound the bandage from my foot and rolled it up. The first boys had already gone out. “Jesus Christ, are you crazy or what?” John said to Jostein, who was smacking John’s face with a goalie’s glove. “Give it up, you bastard,” John shouted. I’m going out with Kajsa, I felt like saying, but I didn’t, of course. Got up and put on my light-blue jeans instead.

“What posh pants,” Jostein said.

“You’re the one with posh pants,” I said.

“These?” he said, motioning toward his red-and-black-striped trousers.

“Yes,” I said.

“They’re punk trousers, you jerk,” he said.

“They’re not,” I said. “They’re from Intermezzo, and that is definitely a posh shop.”

“Is the belt posh, too?” he said.

“No,” I said. “It’s a punk belt.”

“Good,” he said. “But your pants are definitely pretty posh.”

“I am not posh,” I said.

“But you are a bit of a jessie,” John piped up.

A jessie? What did that mean?

“Ha ha ha!” Jostein laughed. “Come on, Jessie!”

“What did you say, you daddy’s boy?” I said.

“Is it my fault my father has a lot of money?” he said.

“No,” I said, zipping up the blue-and-white Puma top.

“Bye,” I said.

“Bye,” they said, and I went out to Kajsa, without having prepared anything.

“Hi,” I said, stopping in front of them, with my hands around the handlebars.

“You were so good, all of you,” Kajsa said.

She was wearing a white T-shirt. Her breasts bulged beneath it. Levi’s 501 with a red, plastic belt. White socks. White Nike sneakers with a light-blue logo.

I swallowed.

“Do you think so?” I said.

She nodded.

“Are you coming back with us?”

“In fact, I don’t have a lot of time this evening.”

“No?”

“No. I really should be going now.”

“Oh, that’s a shame,” she said, meeting my eyes. “What have you got to do?”

“I promised I would help my father with something. A wall he was building. But can’t we meet tomorrow?”

“Of course.”

“Where then?”

“I can go to your place after school.”

“Do you know where I live?”

“Tybakken, right?”

“Yes, that’s right.”

I swung a leg over my bike.

“Bye!” I said.

“Bye!” she said. “See you tomorrow!”

I cycled off, casually to the observer, until I was out of sight, then I stood on the pedals, leaned forward, and began to pump like a wild man. It was absolutely fantastic and absolutely awful. Go to your place, she had said. She had known where I lived. And she wanted to be with me. Not only that. We were going out. I was going out with Kajsa! Oh, everything I wanted was now within reach! Though not yet. What would I talk to her about? What would we do?

When I turned into our drive half an hour later, Mom was sitting on the terrace behind the house reading the newspaper with a cup of coffee on the camping table in front of her. I went over and sat down.

“Where’s Dad?” I said.

“He’s gone fishing,” she said. “How was the match?”

“Good,” I said. “We won.”

Brief silence.

“Has something happened?” Mom said, looking at me.

“No,” I said.

“Something on your mind?”

“No, not really,” I said.

She sent me a smile and went on reading the newspaper. The sound of a radio wafted over from Prestbakmo’s. I looked up. Martha was sitting, like Mom, in a camping chair with a newspaper spread out in front of her. Nearby, next to the stone wall facing the forest, Prestbakmo himself was bent over a bed in the vegetable garden with a trowel in his hand. Then a movement on the path made me turn my head. It was Freddie, I saw at once, he was an albino and his white hair was unmistakable. He was in the fourth class and had an archery bow on his back.

I looked at Mom again.

“Do you know what a jessie is, Mom?” I said.

She lowered the newspaper.

“A jessie?” she said.

“Yes.”

“No, not really. But it is a girl’s name.”

“So, like a girl?”

“I suppose so. Why do you ask? Have you been called a jessie?”

“No, not at all. I just heard it after the match today. Someone else was called it. I just hadn’t heard it before.”

She glanced at me, I could see she was on the point of saying something, and I got up.

“Oh well,” I said. “Better bring my soccer gear in.”

After supper I went into Yngve’s room and told him what had happened.

“I got together with Kajsa this evening,” I said.

He looked up from the school books spread over his desk and smiled.

“Kajsa? I haven’t heard her name before. Who’s she?”

“She’s at Roligheden. In the sixth class. She looks really good.”

“I don’t doubt that,” Yngve said. “Congratulations.”

“Thanks,” I said. “But there’s just one thing … I need some advice …”

“Yeah?”

“I don’t know … Well, I don’t know her at all. I don’t know … what should we do? She’s coming over tomorrow, and I don’t even know what to say!”

“It’ll be fine,” Yngve said. “Just don’t think about and it’ll be fine. You can always make out instead of talking!”

“Ha ha.”

“It’ll be fine, Karl Ove. Relax.”

“Do you think so?”

“Goes without saying.”

“OK,” I said. “What are you doing?”

“Homework. Chemistry. And then geography.”

“I’m looking forward to starting at gymnas,” I said.

“Lots of reading to do,” Yngve said.

“Yes,” I said. “All the same.”

Yngve turned back to his book and I went to my room. Yngve had just finished the first year at gymnas and I understood he wanted to do social studies while Dad wanted him to do natural sciences, so that was what he had to do. It was a bit odd because Dad’s subjects were Norwegian and English.

I put on McCartney II and lay down on the bed wondering what I could say and do the next day. Every so often I had an attack of the shivers. Imagine me actually going out with her! Perhaps she was lying in bed, in her room, in her house, thinking about me this very minute? Perhaps she had gone to bed, perhaps she was wearing only panties in bed? I rolled over onto my stomach and rubbed my groin against the mattress while singing “Temporary Secretary” and thinking about all that lay in store for me.

She arrived an hour after we’d had dinner. I had been pacing by the windows facing the road and was as prepared as I could be. Nevertheless, it was a shock to see her cycling up the hill. For a few seconds I was unable to breathe normally. Kent Arne, Geir Håkon, Leif Tore, and Øyvind were outside, hanging over the handlebars of their bikes, and when they all turned to look at her a rush of pride surged through me. No one had ever seen a more attractive girl in Tybakken. And it was me she had come to see.

I put on my shoes and jacket and went out.

She had stopped by them and was chatting.

I grabbed my bike and pushed it over.

“She was asking where you lived, Karl Ove!” Geir Håkon said.

“Oh yes?” I said to him. Meeting Kajsa’s gaze. “Hi,” I said. “You found your way here?”

“Yes, it was no problem,” she said. “I didn’t know exactly which house it was, but …”

“Shall we go?” I said.

“All right,” she said.

I mounted my bike. She mounted hers.

“See you!” I said to the four boys. I turned to her. “We can go up there.”

“Fine,” she said.

I knew they were watching us and that they were more than ordinarily envious of me. How on earth had he done it? they were thinking. Where had he met her? And how in the name of all things living and moving had he managed to land her?

After we had cycled part of the way up, Kajsa got off her bike. I did the same. A wind rose through the forest, rustling the leaves beside us, and then it dropped. The sound of tires on tarmac. Trouser legs rubbing against each other. The cork heels of her sandals on the road.

I waited for her to come alongside.

“That’s a nice jacket,” I said. “Where did you get it?”

“Thank you,” she said. “At Bajazzo’s in Kristiansand.”

“Oh,” I said.

We reached the crossroads with Elgstien. Her breasts were swaying; my eyes were permanently drawn to them. Did she notice?

“We can go over to the shop and see if anyone’s there,” I said.

“Sure,” she said.

Was she regretting this already?

Should I kiss her now? Would that be right?

We were at the top of the hill and I swung a leg over the bike saddle. Waited until her feet were on the pedals, then I set off. Another gust of wind blew past us. I cycled with one hand and half-turned to her.

“Do you know Lars?” I said.

“Lars, yes,” she said. “We’re neighbors. And we’re in the same class. Do you know him? Of course you do. You’re on the same team.”

“Yes,” I said. “Did you watch the whole match last night?”

“Oh yes. You’re a very good team!”

I didn’t answer. I put my other hand on the handlebars and freewheeled down the little hill to B-Max. It was closed and there was no one around.

“Doesn’t seem to be anyone here,” I said. “Want to go to your house?”

“All right,” she said.

I decided I would kiss her if a glimmer of a chance arose. And definitely hold her hand. Something had to happen. After all we were girlfriend and boyfriend now.

Kajsa was my girlfriend!

But no chance arose. We cycled along the old gravel road up to Kjenna, which was deserted, up the hills to her house and stopped outside. We hadn’t exchanged many words on the way, but enough to know it hadn’t been a disaster.

“Mom and Dad are home,” she said. “So you can’t come in.”

Did that mean I could when they weren’t?

“OK,” I said. “But it’s late. Maybe I should be getting back.”

“Yes, it’s pretty far!” she said.

“Shall we meet again tomorrow?” I said.

“I can’t,” she said. “We’re going out in the boat.”

“On Thursday then?”

“Yes. Will you come up here?”

“Yes, of course.”

The bikes were between us the whole time. It wasn’t possible to lean over and kiss her. And perhaps she wouldn’t have wanted it either, right in front of her house.

I got back on my bike.

“I’ll be off then,” I said. “See you!”

“Bye,” she said.

And I cycled off as fast as I could.

Well, it could have been worse. I hadn’t gotten very far, but nothing had been ruined forever. It couldn’t continue like this, I realized, we couldn’t just talk, if we did, everything would wither and die. I had to kiss her; we had to do what real boyfriends and girlfriends did. But how to make the move? I had fooled around with Mariann, but I hadn’t been that excited about her, it hadn’t been a problem, I had just put my arms around her, pulled her to me, and kissed her. I had just taken her hand when we walked side by side. I couldn’t do that with Kajsa, though, couldn’t just put my arms around her, out of the blue. Imagine she didn’t want it! Imagine if I couldn’t pull the move off! It had to happen, and it would have to happen next time, that much was certain. And in a suitable place where no one could see us.

Thank God for the boat trip. It gave me two whole days to plan.

As I was about to fall asleep I remembered we had soccer practice on Thursday. That meant I would have to call and tell her. For all of the next day I dreaded it. Our telephone at home was in the hall, everyone could hear what was said, unless I closed the sliding door, but that was bound to arouse their curiosity, so the best would be to call from a telephone booth. There was one by the bus stop opposite the Fina station and I cycled down as late as I could, to be precise, a little after eight. If there was nothing special going on, I had to be home by half past eight, because I had to be in bed by nine-thirty on weekdays, the rule was still inflexible, even though everyone I knew stayed up later.

Having parked my bike outside, I searched for their home number in the telephone directory. What I was going to say had been reverberating around my head.

I dialed the whole number, apart from the last digit, very quickly. Then I waited a few seconds to get my breathing under control and dialed the last digit.

“Pedersen,” a woman’s voice said.

“May I speak to Kajsa please?” I said hurriedly.

“Who’s calling?”

“Karl Ove,” I said.

“Just a moment.”

There was a pause. I heard footsteps fading into the distance, voices. A bus came down the hill and slowly pulled into the bus stop. I pressed the receiver tighter against my ear.

“Hello?” said Kajsa.

“Is that Kajsa?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“This is Karl Ove,” I said.

“I could hear that!” she said.

“Hi,” I said.

“Hi,” she said.

“I have to go to soccer tomorrow,” I said. “So I can’t make it to your house as we agreed.”

“Then I’ll see you down there. You’ll be at Kjenna, won’t you?”

“Yes.”

Pause.

“Was it nice?” I said.

“Was what nice?”

“The boat trip? Was it nice?”

“Yes.”

Pause.

“See you tomorrow then!” I said.

“Yes. Bye,” she said.

“Bye.”

I put down the receiver and my eyes were met by those of an old teacher in his forties who worked with Dad; he was on the bus and looked away when I saw him. I opened the dusty door and went out. The air was warm and full of the fumes from the idling bus engine. A family with two children was sitting outside the Fina station eating ice cream. As I cycled by, John came out the door. He was holding a helmet in one hand. Bare chest, clogs on his feet.

“Hi, Karl Ove!” he called.

“Hi,” I shouted back.

He put on his helmet, it was black with a black visor, and he got on the back of a motorbike. The driver started it up with two hefty kicks. Afterward they roared up the hill behind me. John waved an arm in the air as they raced past. My forehead was soaked with sweat. I ran my hand through my hair. My hand was sweaty, too. But my hair was fine; I had washed it the night before so that it would be perfect for the following day and the date with Kajsa. At the bus stop, on the crest of the hill, outside B-Max, I stopped. Rested my foot against the curbstone.

Suddenly I knew how I would do it.

Only a few weeks ago I had been here, surrounded by a whole crowd of people, with Tor as the center of attention. He had built his own bicycle, mounted a motorbike saddle and an enormous, new cogwheel at the front. He was doing wheelies, back and forth, spitting great gobbets of saliva across the tarmac. Merethe, his girlfriend, was also there. I had just been hanging out, with Dag Magne, and we had bumped into them and stayed there. Tor cycled over to Merethe and kissed her. Then he took a watch from his inside pocket, it was on a chain, glanced at it, and said, “Want to see how long we can make out?” Merethe nodded, and then they leaned toward each other and kissed. You could see their tongues working in each other’s mouths. She had her eyes closed and her arms around him; he stood with his hands in his pockets and his eyes open. Everyone was watching them. After ten minutes he held up his watch and straightened his back. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Ten minutes,” he said.

That was how to do it. I would take off my watch and ask if we could see how long we could kiss. And then all we had to do was kiss.

I pushed off with my foot and cycled down to Holtet. It was important to find a suitable place. In the forest, of course, but where? Up at her place? No, I didn’t know my way around there. It should be somewhere nearby here.

Perhaps not too close to either of us.

We were meeting at her house.

But of course. Oh, yes. In the forest, by the path up from Fina. Under the trees there. That was perfect. No one would see us. The ground was soft. And the light was so wonderful as it fell between the treetops.

So as not to be the very first to arrive at soccer practice the next afternoon, I pushed my bike up all the hills, not that it made much difference, because when I saw the field in front of me it was deserted, covered with clicking, murmuring jets spraying water around, each at its own rhythm. Christian and Hans Christian were sitting on the gate by the entrance squinting at me in the sunshine.

“Anyone have a ball?” I said.

They shook their heads.

“Is it true you’re going out with Kajsa?” Christian said.

“Yes,” I said, biting my lip to stop myself smiling.

“She’s pretty,” he said.

Christian had never gone out with any girls, he wasn’t the type. But at the Norway Cup the previous summer he had bought a porn magazine from the kiosk outside the school the evening we arrived. Unfortunately for him his father, who coached the juniors, found him lying in his sleeping bag ogling the hypnotic pictures. With everyone on the team watching, he had to go and throw the magazine in the trash and apologize to his father.

“Ye-es,” I said.

Soon after, Øyvind came with the balls and keys, and we ran out between the sprinklers to the goal furthest away and we began to take shots while Øyvind switched off the water and moved the sprinklers off the field. When everyone was there we ran around the field a couple of times, did some stretching exercises, and practiced some set pieces before playing seven against seven on half of the field. Kajsa didn’t come until close to the end, with the three girls she had been with before. She waved to me; I waved back.

“Concentrate, Karl Ove!” Øyvind shouted. “Training first, girls later!”

After the session I dipped my head in the bucket of water on the touchline and tried to act as normal. But it wasn’t easy; the knowledge that she was up there, and not just her, but also her friends, looking at me, was burned into my consciousness.

Then she came down.

“Are you going to get changed?” she said.

I nodded.

“I’ll come with you. I’ve got something to tell you afterward.”

Tell me? Was she going to finish it?

I started walking. She stretched out her hand. It brushed against mine. Had it been by chance? Or could I hold it?

I looked at her.

She smiled at me.

I grabbed her hand in one swift movement.

Someone was whispering behind us. I turned. It was Lars and John. They were rolling their eyes. I smiled. She gently squeezed my hand.

The walk across the field had never been as long as it was this evening. Holding her hand was almost more than I could bear; all the time I felt an urge to withdraw my hand to bring this unbearable happiness to an end.

“Hurry up,” she said when we were there.

“OK,” I said.

On the bench I leaned back against the wall. My heart was pounding and pounding. Then I pulled myself together, threw on my clothes, and left. Kajsa’s friends were standing on the road beneath the field with their bikes. I went over and stood beside Kajsa. She looked happy. She stroked a strand of hair from her face with her small hand. Her nails were painted in a semitransparent pink varnish. Her friends got on their bikes as if at a signal and cycled off.

“This Saturday I’ll be at home without my parents,” she said. “I’ve told Mom that Sunnva’s coming. So she’s going to make a pizza and buy Coke for us. But Sunnva isn’t coming. Would you like to come?”

I swallowed.

“Sure,” I said.

Some of the other boys on the team cheered us from the shed. Kajsa stood with one hand on the handlebars and the other down by her side.

“Shall we go?” I said.

“Let’s,” she said.

“Down?” I said.

She nodded and we got on our bikes. We pedaled along the shaded gravel road, me in front, Kajsa right behind. At the crest of the long hill I braked so that we could race down side by side. The sun lit up the ridge on the other side. The insects swarming in the air were like glitter someone had scattered. Halfway down, there was an old forest track to the right and it suddenly struck me that it might lead to a suitable place, so with the wind streaming through our hair I shouted to Kajsa that we would go up there, she nodded, we turned off and must have gone ten meters before our bikes slowed down and we dismounted. She said nothing, I said nothing, we walked up the grassy track strewn with bark and bits of tree. Reaching the top and looking into the forest I could see it wasn’t suitable. The ground was covered with tree stumps and where they stopped, the spruces were so close together it was like a wall.

“No,” I said. “That’s no good. Let’s go on.”

Kajsa still said nothing, just got on her bike as well and coasted down, standing on the pedals and braking harder than me.

No, the path above the Fina station was the place to be.

The thought sent a wave of terror through me. It was like having climbed up a rock too high and looking down at the water, knowing you either had to conquer your fear and dive or chicken out.

Did she know what was going to happen?

I sneaked a glance at her.

Oh, the ripple of her breasts.

Oh, oh, oh.

But her face was serious. What did that mean?

We jumped off our bikes and walked up the hill to the main road, beneath the deep shadows from the trees whose tops stretched far above us. We hadn’t said a word since we were in Kjenna. If I said something now it had to be important, it couldn’t be some triviality.

Her trousers were cotton, a pastel green color and secured around the waist by a rope belt. They hung loose over her thighs but were tighter around the groin and across the bottom. On her chest, she was wearing a T-shirt with a thin cardigan over it, which was white with a hint of yellow. Her sandaled feet were bare. Her toenails were painted with the same polish as her fingers. She had a chain around one ankle.

She looked fantastic.

When we came to the main road and only a long hill down and a long hill up separated us from what was to happen, what I most wanted to do was cycle off and leave her. Just step on the pedals and cycle out of her life. And then why stop at that? I could cycle from our house. Tybakken, Tromøya, Aust-Agder, Norway, Europe, I could leave everything behind me. I would be called the Cycling Dutchman. Damned forever to cycle around the world, with a ghostly light from the lamp on the handlebars illuminating the country roads.

“Where are we going actually?” she said as we sped down the hill.

“I know somewhere nice,” I said. “It’s not far.”

She didn’t say anything. We cycled past the Fina station, I pointed up the hill between the trees, again she jumped off as soon as the road became steeper. A thin layer of sweat glistened on her forehead. We walked past the old, white house and the old, red barn. The sky was clear and blue. The sun hung over the ridges to the west, a silent blaze. Its light gave the leaves on the trees in front of us an intense glow. The air was filled with bird song. I was close to throwing up. We entered the path. Light filtered down between the treetops, as I had imagined it. It was refracted in a similar way to the way it was refracted under water. Pillars of light sloped into the ground.

I stopped.

“We can put our bikes here,” I said.

We did. Both of us kicked out the stands and stood our bikes upright. I started walking. She followed. I looked for a suitable place to lie down. Grass or moss. Our footsteps sounded unnaturally loud. I didn’t dare look at her. But she was right behind me. There. There was a good spot.

“We can lie down here,” I said. Without looking at her I sat down. After some hesitation she sat down next to me. I put my hand in my pocket and located my watch. I took it out and held it in my open palm in front of her.

“Shall we time how long we can kiss?” I said.

“What!” she said.

“I’ve got a watch,” I said. “Tor managed ten minutes. We can beat that.”

I put the watch down on the ground, it was eighteen minutes to eight, I noted, placed my hands on her shoulders and gently leaned her back while pressing my lips against hers. When we were both lying down I inserted my tongue in her mouth, it met hers, pointed and soft like a little animal, and I began to move my tongue round and round inside. I had my hands alongside my body, I wasn’t touching her with anything except my lips and my tongue. Our bodies lay like two small boats laid up on land beneath the treetops. I concentrated on getting my tongue to go round as smoothly as possible while the thought of her breasts, which were so close to me, and her thighs, which were so close to me, and what was between her thighs, under her trousers, under her panties, was seared into my consciousness. But I didn’t dare touch her. She lay with her eyes closed rotating her tongue around mine, I had my eyes open, groped for the watch, found it, and held it within reach. Three minutes so far. Some saliva ran down from the corner of her mouth. She wriggled. I pressed my groin against the ground letting my tongue go round and round, round and round. This wasn’t as good as I had imagined, in fact, it was quite strenuous. Some dry leaves crunched beneath her head as she shifted position. Our mouths were full of thick saliva. Seven minutes now. Four left. Mmm, she said, but this was not a sound of pleasure, there was something wrong, she stirred, but I didn’t let go, she moved her head while I continued to rotate my tongue. She opened her eyes, but didn’t look at me, they were staring up at the sky above us. Nine minutes. The root of my tongue ached. More saliva from the corners of our mouths. My braces occasionally knocked against her teeth. Actually we didn’t need to continue for more than ten minutes and one second to beat Tor’s record. And that was now. We had beaten him now. But we could beat him by a large margin. Fifteen minutes, that ought to be possible. Five left then. But my tongue ached, it seemed to be swelling, and the saliva, which you didn’t notice much when it was hot, left you with a slight feeling of revulsion when it ran down your chin, not quite so hot. Twelve minutes. Isn’t that enough? Enough now? No, a bit more. A bit more, a bit more.

At exactly three minutes to eight I took my head away. She got up and wiped her mouth with her hand without looking at me.

“We did fifteen minutes!” I said, getting up. “We beat him by five minutes!”

Our bikes gleamed at the far end of the path. We walked toward them. She brushed leaves and twigs off her trousers and cardigan.

“Hang on,” I said. “There’s something on your back as well.”

She stopped and I picked off bits and pieces that had got caught in her cardigan.

“There you go,” I said.

“I’d better go home now,” she said as we reached the bikes.

“Me too,” I said, pointing upward. “There’s a shortcut through the forest.”

“Bye,” she said, getting on her bike and coasting down the bumpy path.

“Bye,” I said, grabbing the handlebars and walking up.

That night I lay fantasizing about her breasts, milky-white and large, and all the things we could have done on the forest floor, until I fell asleep. I had to ring her because we hadn’t arranged when I should go to her house on Saturday, but I put off doing it all the next day and also part of the Saturday until there was no avoiding it and at two o’clock I jumped on my bike and pedaled down to the telephone booth again. There was another problem as well, which was that I had to be home by half past eight, which was not at all in tune with the life I was leading now. I couldn’t leave her place at eight because I had to go home to bed, what would she think of me? I hinted to Mom that I had something important to do that evening; couldn’t I come home at nine-thirty, or even ten? She wanted to know what and I said I couldn’t tell her. If you can’t tell me, you can’t have permission, she said. We have to know where you are and what you are doing. Then perhaps you can have permission. You do understand, don’t you? Yes, I did understand and I was prepared to toe the line and tell her about Kajsa. But first I had to get in touch with her.

The sky was overcast and the gray, matte cloud cover seemed to suck the colors out of the countryside. The road was gray, the rocks in the ditch were gray, even the leaves on the trees had a weft of matte gray in their greenness. Also the heat from the previous days had gone. It wasn’t cold, it was maybe sixty degrees, but enough for me to button up to the neck as I cycled down. My jacket ballooned out in the air. Two vehicles were at the bus stop, which in fact was a mini bus station, with buses often parked there all night. Now they were standing there, engines idling, ready to proceed on their way, one to the other side of the island, the other to Arendal, and the two drivers had parked so that they could chat to each other through the open windows.

I stood my bike behind the green, hat-shaped fiberglass shelter. A stream flowed nearby, through branches and bushes and litter, mostly candy wrappers, probably from the Fina station; I could see Caramello, Hobby, Nero, Bravo, and a blue Hubba Bubba wrapper, but there were also some shiny bottles without labels, some newspapers, and there was a cardboard phone booth full of assorted junk. I took the money from my pocket, went into the phone booth and placed it on top of the machine, ready. Dialed the number in the directory as various jokes went through my head. Why are there so many Hansens in the phone book? They’ve all got phones. Followed by: Why don’t the Chinese have a phone book? Too many Wings and Wongs, and you might wing a wong number. Operator, operator, call me an ambulance. OK, you’re an ambulance. With my finger under the number and the receiver in my hand I stood for a long time staring through the dusty glass without quite registering what I saw until I plucked up the courage, put the phone to my ear, and dialed.

“Hello?” a voice said.

It was Kajsa’s!