Beatles

  ‘Yes.’

  We arranged to meet by the fountain at half past six. My legs were numb. I was about to turn and troll home when Nina stopped me and became quite serious. She said, ‘Didn’t your uncle live in Marienlyst?’

  ‘Yes, he did,’ I said, beginning to walk in the right direction, the vertebrae in my back red hot.

  Nina laughed and beckoned to me with the hand she had kept in her pocket, and the red letters shone, blinded me into submission.

  Two old men dancing together on the beach! That was pretty mad. Nina walked beside me without saying a word, it was dark after the seven o’clock performance, wet tarmac shimmered beneath the streetlamps. I had another Japp bar in my pocket, but she didn’t want it, it was the fourth. Phew, I was so relieved we had been let in, no problems, didn’t even have to lie!

  Then we were back at the fountain. The water was shooting into the air behind us, a shining column that kept falling but still remained upright. We sat on the edge, quite close together, staring into space.

  ‘I feel sorry for him,’ Nina said in serious mood.

  ‘Sorry? Who for?’

  ‘For the old man.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘He was the one who was unhappiest, wasn’t he!’

  Zorba, I heard the voice say inside me. As if we had been on a long beach and the sea had come crashing in towards us and there was music everywhere, full blast, and we were dancing, dancing naked! Jesus, my mind was on wings. Suddenly I thought of Henny and went over all giddy. Henny would dance like that, that was a dead cert!

  Nina’s hand was close to me. I swallowed and said, ‘Feel like an apple?’

  ‘Apple?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Have you got apples with you as well?’

  ‘No, but I can get one from Tobiassen’s garden.’

  ‘Tobiassen?’

  I was already on my feet.

  ‘On the corner there,’ I said, pointing with my thumb.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘Won’t take long.’

  I sprinted to Farmers’ Hill. No one around, so I climbed over the fence and crawled towards the trees. There was light in two windows of the large wooden house. I heard the splashing of the fountain and saw Nina’s shadow sitting on the edge.

  The apples were so damned high up this year. I couldn’t even reach the lowest. I had to climb. I scrambled up the trunk, grabbed a thick branch and pulled myself up. I wanted to go even higher, the best were at the top, of course. I twisted my way through the foliage, searching for the best-looking apple, a big green one which I polished on my jacket and stuffed in my pocket.

  Then I heard voices. I sat perfectly still. Tobiassen was a nasty customer. I had heard on the street he kept an air gun handy. But the voices were not coming from the house, they were coming from the fence. Someone was sneaking through the grass. On the pavement someone was standing guard with crossed arms, shifting from one foot to the other.

  ‘G-g-get a move on,’ I heard Ola whisper.

  ‘Be quiet,’ Gunnar mumbled from the grass.

  Seb crept up beside him, carrying a big bag. I didn’t think, I just acted. I chucked an apple in the direction of the house. It landed on some branches.

  All went quiet on the ground.

  ‘Did you hear that?’ Gunnar muttered.

  They were crouched down, not stirring from the spot.

  I threw another apple, closer this time.

  ‘There it is again!’

  ‘P’raps it’s a vole,’ Seb said. ‘Or a hedgehog.’

  They set off again. Then I cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted:

  ‘No apples for thieves! No apples for thieves!’

  The grass came alive. They jumped up, screamed at each other, leapt over the fence and ran down Gyldenløvesgate.

  I waited for a while, then I carefully climbed down and ran over to Nina.

  ‘You were a long time,’ she said, clearly a bit annoyed.

  ‘Had to get the best one,’ I explained, giving her the big, green apple.

  She sank her teeth into it with a crunch and juice trickled down her chin. Breathing heavily, with the apple held in both hands, she made smacking noises and sucked greedily at the apple. And when we kissed, the taste was of apple, the smell was of apple, everywhere, and the water in the fountain fell and fell.

  Ola appeared at school without a plaster cast. His arms were limp and thin and he didn’t quite know what to do with them. They dangled down like two bits of string from his shoulders. He looked quite disconcerted. But he reckoned he would be able to get out of writing for another couple of weeks, he could barely raise a pencil and it was obvious he shouldn’t over-exert himself.

  ‘You’ll have to do finger gymnastics,’ Gunnar explained, displaying his fist. ‘Like this. That’s what Charlie Watts did, you know.’

  Ola tried to clench his fist, but it was slow work, he was already worn out after trying his thumb.

  ‘It’ll take t-t-time,’ he groaned. ‘Wait until C-C-Christmas. Then we’ll start practisin’!’

  The bell rang and we all went in separate directions. Outside the classroom Gunnar stopped me.

  ‘What are you up to at the moment?’ he asked.

  ‘Up to? Nothin’.’

  ‘We hardly ever see you!’

  ‘Homework,’ I said.

  Gunnar gave me a searching look.

  ‘Homework! Don’t give me that shit. You didn’t even bloody know where Africa was on the map!’

  ‘Bad luck that was.’

  ‘And you weren’t at the final trainin’ session, either.’

  ‘Forgot,’ I said.

  ‘There’s not gonna be a Denmark trip this autumn. It’ll be in the spring instead.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ I said.

  Then Hammer, the German teacher, came and the minutes crawled by like injured ants. Fred Hansen stood by the board being tested on vocabulary. You could hardly see him inside his large jacket and his haircut was a basin job. The girls giggled and Hammer barked.

  ‘Head,’ she shouted. ‘What’s head in German?’

  Fred Hansen was mute, motionless, behind his lips I imagined him clenching his teeth.

  Hammer thrust out her arms in despair and pointed at Fred’s lopsided haircut.

  ‘Dummkopf!’ she said, pushing him towards his desk.

  Then Goose was called to the dais and he knew the rules off by heart and Fred Hansen became even smaller and more cowed in the light of Goose’s polished halo.

  In the lunch break we went to the shed again. Ola had a bit of zip back in his arms, but the important thing was not to let the teachers see. Fred Hansen slunk along the wire fence with a huge packed lunch in his hands, perhaps another hand-me-down from his brother.

  ‘Everyone takes the piss out of him,’ Gunnar said quietly. ‘The teachers, too. It makes me bloody sick!’

  We glanced at him, he was standing alone, glued to the fence, it was like a picture of a concentration camp in our history book.

  ‘I’d like to see his brother,’ I said. ‘He must be pretty big.’

  ‘We’re off to buy cakes,’ Seb said. ‘Anyone got any money?’

  I pulled a tenner from my pocket and put it in the pot. They looked at me in astonishment.

  ‘You g-g-gettin’ money from Nina or what?’ Ola asked, and they all burst into fits of laughter. Nina, who was standing by the drinking fountain, looked across at us and blood suffused my face as if my skin were blotting paper.

  ‘Let’s go before the bell rings!’ I said and so we headed for the exit, and Gunnar, Seb and Ola were grinning so much bubbles of froth were forming at the corners of their mouths, and Nina was laughing, too. I was perhaps the only person in the entire playground who was not laughing, me and Fred Hansen.

  One Sunday we went to Nesodden to pick apples. I was standing on the deck of the ferry in my windcheater and scarf, even though the sun was shining and it hadn’t been so warm for ages, but Mum always said
this time of year was tricky, you had to take care and wrap up well. There were still a few yachts on the fjord, dazzling white canvas against black water.

  On our way up to the House Dad stopped to wipe the sweat from his brow.

  ‘Indian summer,’ he groaned gently.

  ‘What’s that?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s when you get a hot spell in the autumn. As though summer has returned.’

  I ran down to the little orchard. The four trees were heaving with apples, the branches were weighed down. The smell hit me like a soft wall, fruit, earth, tree, I ran through it, jumped up and grabbed an apple. And as I sank my teeth in it, Nina was there, in the juicy, succulent flesh, I could hear her breathing.

  Then Mum and Dad came with two rakes so that we could reach the top branches. Climbing was forbidden. We put the apples in boxes and carried them to the House. A large table stood in the centre of the dark sitting room. Mum covered it with a tablecloth and clamped it in place with four clips. Then we emptied the apples onto the table and took the empty boxes to refill them. After stripping two trees we ate currant buns and drank tea from a thermos flask, and I spat out all the candied lemon peel, for it was one of the things I hated most, candied peel and the skin on milk and the hard bits in stewed apples. Dad walked around blithely humming to himself, he had even brought his pipe along. Mum was happy too, straightening my scarf, for it wasn’t as warm as we thought, Mum always said.

  And then we stripped the last trees. On the table in the sitting room there was a mountain of apples. We filled the sacks and string bags we had with us.

  ‘We can get the rest later,’ Dad said. ‘When we have to shut up for winter.’

  We hurried down to the quay. The sun hung over Kolsås, to the west of Oslo, cold and spent. I stood on the deck going back, too. My hands smelt of apples.

  One evening I was sent to Uncle Hubert’s with a flower box full of apples. He lived on the fourth floor and could see down onto the NRK studio. Cycling through the dark, wet streets I wondered if Henny would be there and my legs went strangely heavy and the pedals began to squeak.

  We carried the box into the kitchen and emptied all the apples into the dirty-laundry basket. Uncle Hubert looked exhausted, his right arm was twitching. Henny definitely wasn’t there, that was for certain. Afterwards I sat on the sofa and drank Nesquik while Hubert paced to and fro across the floor, unable to find peace. It was always a mess in Hubert’s place, clothes, plates, drawings of palaces and women and doctors were strewn everywhere. That was how I liked it, but Hubert’s continuous perambulations were making me a bit dizzy. In the summer he had been different, now he was how he had been before, before Henny.

  ‘How’s school?’ he chatted.

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  He didn’t say any more. I walked over to the window and peered down at the white broadcasting building, wondering whether it was Erik Bye I could see in one of the windows.

  Hubert had sat down in my seat and finished the Nesquik.

  ‘Can’t you two come and visit us?’ I asked straight out.

  Confused, his head rotating, he looked at me.

  ‘Who?’

  ‘You and Henny.’

  His eyes were grey and overcast.

  ‘Maybe,’ he said, evincing a crumpled smile.

  Something was amiss, but I didn’t dare ask what. I carried the empty flower box down to my bike and put it on the luggage carrier. I freewheeled down Kirkeveien and the wind inflated my yellow raincoat like a balloon. In Tidemandsgate I stopped and rang my cycle bell. After a pause a door banged and Nina came running along the narrow gravel path.

  Mum was right. It was a tricky time of the year. October came and I seemed to go backwards, lying awake at night listening to Jensenius’s autumnal song and to the rain that hung heavy in the air and the trains racing against the wind and thundering along Frogner Bay. I delivered flowers to the whole town and fru Eng was in the back-room making wreaths, for autumn was the time when wreaths were in demand. And then there was Nina. Nina was here, there and on my brain. I was exhausted. We mooched the streets every night chewing gum, but for all that I didn’t forget the taste of apples, and on one such evening as we battled up Farmers’ Hill, heads bowed, we met Guri. She was with a kid from the second year at Maja realskole, and he was three heads taller than me, had a mod haircut and chains round his wrist. Guri’s face was stiff with make-up and lipstick, and it soon emerged that they were going to a rave-up in Thomas Heftyesgate. They asked if we wanted to join them and it would have been difficult to say no, so we tagged along. My stomach churned and Nina’s hand held mine in a vice-like grip.

  ‘Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson used to live here,’ the Maja mod said. ‘His great-granddaughter lives in the attic and hasn’t a clue where she is.’

  It was a large wooden house, dark brown, inside a rather untidy garden. Nina was mute, the Maja mod spat out his fag end and patted Guri’s bum, and so we traipsed after them through the gate and down a steep flight of stairs into the cellar. At length we found ourselves in a cold, dark room, but we could see people sitting and lying around. Mattresses were on the floor and there was a smell of booze and smoke and something quite different, wow, I could taste lifeblood in my mouth.

  Guri and the mod were gone. I stood there with Nina up against me. Someone lit a match and in the brief flash we saw what some were doing. We stayed where we were – what should we do? – and then slumped down onto the mattress near us, our coats wet and slippery, underneath we were steaming hot, we kissed, Nina opened her mouth and squirmed, our hands criss-crossed each other’s body like snowploughs where we lay, Nina’s hand firm and clammy, doing things to me, but all of a sudden pandemonium broke loose and everyone stampeded through the darkness. We struggled to our feet and that was when I could feel what had happened to me and I was glad it was pitch black. Someone shouted: ‘They’re comin’. They’re comin’.’ I grabbed Nina’s hand, dragged her after me, finally located the door and we hauled ourselves up the steps. Flashing blue lights, cops, they had already collared a few people, Bjørnson’s great-granddaughter was screaming and shrieking and beating a stick against the window frame. We ran in the opposite direction, jumped over a fence and went into a garden with a denuded apple tree that creaked eerily. We ran faster and sought refuge in the American church. Nina leaned against me and cried and said that Guri hadn’t been the same of late, since she had been with the mod, and that she would never go to a place like that again, that she had never been so frightened, and did I think it had been good.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, a bit confused, staring at the tarmac. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Could you have lunch with us on Sunday?’

  ‘Yeah,’ I said, even more confused, and so it was agreed. It was only when I got home that I realised that the cup final between Frigg and Skeid was on Sunday. Bloody hell! Shit. Shit. Shit!

  Nina’s father was Danish. He was small and tubby and had lots of beard, so his mouth was non-existent, but it did exist because from somewhere or other strange sounds emerged, fleeting, elongated sounds. Of course they ate early on Sundays, at two, and so I sat in their large, chilly living room, incapable of forcing down so much as a potato because in Ullevål stadium the first half was over and Gunnar, Seb and Ola were screaming from the corner flag, and, there was I, sitting like a baggy-trousered Sunday school pupil, unable to understand a word of what the father said, but I laughed when the others laughed, stained my shirt and kept my ears pricked for a nearby radio or the Ullevål roar reaching Tidemandsgate.

  But it was quite formal, too, for I had never eaten lunch at a girl’s house before and I had almost forgotten how to manipulate a knife and fork. Fortunately, the mother’s laughter was of the soothing variety that rubbed sun cream into red faces. Then, after a while, the atmosphere became quite congenial and the father had the odd dram, so, well, if only it hadn’t been cup final day, I had pins and needles all over my body.

  Afterwards we sat in Nina’s room, the wall
s were covered with pictures, and we began to argue about bands, she liked The Rolling Stones and The Yardbirds best, gulp, she was well up on music, had an older cousin in Copenhagen apparently who played electric guitar and lived in a bedsit. I was quite tactful and said that they were alright, in their way, but The Beatles were The Beatles, there was no one better, no one even close. Nina had the last word: The Beatles were the best at writing songs, but not so hot at playing.

  I was developing an antipathy to this cousin in Copenhagen, he must have been putting himself about and shouting his mouth off. But we had talked so much about Paul McCartney’s bass playing that I couldn’t be bothered to pick up the threads. Instead I lay on the floor with my eyes closed imagining the green sward in Ullevål, breathing in the smell of camphor, watching Per Pettersen dribble through the centre and lob Kaspar, who stood moon-gazing like a ninny.

  Then Nina gave me a deadly serious look and said, ‘Can you keep a secret, Kim?’

  ‘Course I can.’

  ‘Promise not to tell anyone?’

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to die.’

  ‘Guri’s pregnant.’

  I sat up with a start.

  ‘Bloody hell. With the mod from Maja?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What’s she gonna do?’

  ‘She hasn’t told her parents yet. I’m seeing her this evening.’

  ‘Far out,’ I said, lying back on the floor. ‘Far out!’

  Nina appeared pensive, concerned, seeming to change as she sat there, adding years to her age. I swallowed and said, ‘What does the f… father say?’

  ‘Nothing! He’s a shit!’

  I had seen that at once. A glib bastard. A couple of days after we went to the party, everyone at school was given a letter warning parents about what was going on at the place. Mum eyeballed me and said that I didn’t know anything about that sort of thing, did I? Of course not, I answered, and stole into my room with my insides on fire, reflecting that narrow escapes don’t come much narrower.

  Now the match was long over. I was the last person in the world to know the result. Nina put on a record, The Swinging Blue Jeans didn’t quite fit the atmosphere. She placed a hand on my stomach.