Beatles

  That’s what kept me awake at night.

  I dreamt about staples and war.

  One day, a day like any other that autumn, with a low gurgling sky and rain-bearing winds, we plucked up courage and bought four roses which were so red in all that grey, so dazzlingly red, and we went up to the Nordre Gravlund, to Fred’s grave. We dreaded it like the plague and walked in silence down the long road to the cemetery squeezed between Ullevål Hospital and the school gardens.

  The graves lay in lines, large stones, wooden crosses, wreaths. Beyond the hedge, an ambulance howled past. Our polished shoes were grey with dirt.

  An old man in black came down the gravel path and peered at us.

  ‘Where are you going?’ he grumbled.

  ‘We… we’re looking for Fred Hansen’s grave,’ Gunnar said.

  The man shivered and pulled the black coat round his neck. Then he motioned us to follow, down a path between the gravestones. There was a smell of wet earth.

  He pointed to the corner of the cemetery under the yellow birch trees.

  ‘Down there where the lady is standing. That’s his mother. Here every day, she is.’

  Couldn’t turn back now. We walked slowly towards her. Seb was holding the flowers. The rain came in cold gusts.

  She spotted us as we approached, recognised us at once and a slanted smile traversed her face.

  ‘It’s you,’ she whispered.

  We went closer, wiped our hands on our thighs and practised the word in our heads that we had been taught by Kerr’s Pink when the class sent her the card and the flowers.

  ‘Condolences,’ we said, each in turn, proffering a hand and the lump in our throats grew into a pomegranate, it was good it was raining.

  ‘We’ve brought some flowers,’ Seb said, taking off the wet paper. We looked at the grave, at the inexorable numerals that had been engraved in stone:

  14/8/1951 – 25/6/1966.

  ‘You must come home with me,’ the mother said suddenly. ‘Please!’

  We mumbled our thanks and accompanied her across town to Schweigaardsgate and the Trans-Siberian railway.

  We took a seat in the sitting room, she made tea. There was still a smell of stale clothes. And the door to Fred’s room was open. Nothing was changed, nothing had been moved.

  ‘Fred was the only person I had,’ she said quietly.

  ‘We miss F-F-Fred, too,’ Ola managed to say. We stole a grateful glance at him. Ola said the right things when it mattered.

  ‘He didn’t have so many friends,’ his mother went on. ‘You don’t know what it means to me that you have come here, to talk to you…’

  And so she talked about all the things Fred would have been, would have done and she seemed to breathe life into him and now, I thought, now at any rate he would never be able to disappoint her.

  ‘Have more tea,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll get you something to nibble!’

  She came back with a bowl full of biscuits.

  ‘Alphabet biscuits,’ she smiled.

  We chewed the dry biscuits, drank the sweet tea, which was lukewarm. And it seemed to me the only letters to be found in the bowl were F and R and E and D. And I experienced something, it must have been what the priest called holy communion, at least it felt like that, body, blood, and the whole time we were looking at the open door and the room where the maths book lay open at the logarithms page.

  On the way home, the weight of the stones in our hearts was too much. The rain cascaded down around us and we seemed to be sinking.

  ‘Fred died on June 25,’ I said.

  The others, smoking their wet fags, said nothing.

  ‘That was the day we met the woman in Katnose,’ I continued.

  ‘So?’ Gunnar challenged.

  I swallowed the stone.

  ‘Perhaps it was the woman the gnome told us about, Iris.’

  Gunnar clenched his teeth in a huge sneer.

  ‘Shut up!’ He was right in my face. ‘Shut up!’

  ‘The p-p-priest says God has predetermined everythin’,’ Ola whispered, running his hand nervously through his hair.

  ‘And what kind of God would do that, eh! Who would let Fred drown!’

  Gunnar fumbled with a cigarette, gave up and threw the matches at the house wall.

  ‘I’ll ask the priest that next time,’ Seb said and spat.

  ‘Fred drowned,’ Gunnar said in a low voice, as quietly as he could. ‘Fred drowned. No one predetermined that! People drown every summer. Fred was one of them. No one can help that.’

  ‘No,’ we said.

  Fred is dead.

  We went home. It was good to have said that. No matter what. It was good to have been there. We felt lighter somehow, as though we could swim away in the rain.

  We stood in front of the hall mirror, Mum and I, and it was a bit like the summer in Nesodden when we had dressed up. She was wearing a long dress and gleamed from top to toe, and I, hair trimmed, freshly scrubbed, in a blazer with shiny buttons, ground my teeth.

  ‘You’ll get a suit for your confirmation,’ Mum said, and there was a hoot outside, for, so help me, she had ordered a taxi as well. And that was fine. I sneaked out of the door, slipped onto the back seat and sat with bowed head, loath to be recognised wearing that outfit.

  In the taxi my mother whispered to the back of my neck, ‘Aren’t you happy? Just think, Toralv Maurstad in Brand!’

  I was scared stiff.

  We hung up our coats and Mum had to stand in front of the mirror again. I wished I were elsewhere, I wished I were infinitely far away, but it was no use. Mum took my arm, held me tight, pointed and showed me how wonderful everything was, told me about Hauk and Alfred and Peer. I tried to calm my pumping heart, at least here I wouldn’t meet anyone I knew, that had to be a certainty.

  Then a bell rang and people began to make for the entrances. We snaked along our row and found our seats. There was a smell of moths. Moths and perfume and aftershave, it was worse than the church and the gymnasium rolled into one. My tie pressed against my Adam’s apple, the elastic was suffocating me. Then the curtain went up, someone started speaking in a demented voice and I passed out.

  I was woken by a strong light, applause and stamping.

  ‘Has it finished?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s the interval,’ Mum laughed.

  We rushed up to the first floor because Mum wanted a Martini. I had a Solo. There were no seats so we had to stand along the walls. Mum leaned back and gave a sigh of pleasure.

  ‘It’s so overwhelming,’ she said.

  ‘Mmm,’ I mumbled.

  ‘I’m sure you’ll be reading Brand at school. Or Peer Gynt.’

  That was when I choked on my lemonade. Right in front of us stood Nina’s parents. There was no mistaking them. Sweat was running out of my trouser legs.

  ‘Have to go to the loo,’ I said.

  Mum looked at her watch.

  ‘You’ll have to make it snappy then. It’s on the ground floor.’

  I sneaked out and passed through the glass doors unobserved. I made my way down the stairs and eventually found the gentlemen’s toilet. My heart was doing the sixty-metre sprint. I shouldered open the door. No one there. I gave a sigh of relief. This was drama. I stood in front of the urinal and discharged in peace and quiet. But then the door burst open and a short man with a beard took up position next to me. My fountain dried up. It was Nina’s father. He rummaged and fiddled and jerked into action, glanced at me and just as I had packed away my tackle and buttoned up, he recognised me.

  ‘Well, if it isn’t Kim,’ he said in Danish, locating an orifice in the beard.

  I nodded, unsure quite where I should look.

  ‘So you’ve come to the theatre,’ he continued blithely, shaking, pointing and holding.

  Couldn’t argue with that.

  ‘Isn’t it dreadful!’ he sighed, performing the final adjustments. ‘I’ve already taken three aspirins.’

  We both went to a washbasin.
/>
  ‘Well, how was the football match?’

  ‘We won 1–0’.

  ‘That was fantastic. Come with me and say hello to Nina’s mother. We’re only visiting. Nina isn’t with us.’

  He dragged me with him and the mother recognised me at once, grabbed my hand, and it was rather embarrassing because I hadn’t dried my hands. She got wet and had to take out a handkerchief.

  ‘You disappeared so quickly last time we saw you,’ she smiled.

  I stared down at the red floor, noticing that I had laced up my shoes wrongly.

  ‘Nina was so sorry,’ the mother continued. ‘She’s coming home for summer.’

  And then the bell rang again, twice, the interval was over.

  I wandered around for some time unable to find the door to the stairs. All the dresses and dinner jackets streamed towards me trying to take me in the opposite direction. I stood like a salmon before a waterfall, slowly beginning to panic, and eventually found the way to the restaurant where Mum was angrily waiting for me.

  We got to our seats as the lights were being dimmed. The curtains opened and it was strange, but it is true, that when I saw the stage set and heard the loud voices making the chandelier above us tinkle, I had already switched off, just like at The Sound of Music. I could not understand how anyone could be taken in, be so completely fooled for so long. I closed my eyes, turned down the sound and thought of Nina. Pincers nipped at my stomach. She was alone now in Copenhagen. Alone with Jesper. I almost screamed, but caught myself. Did I give a shit? Yes, I did.

  On returning home, I went straight to bed, had hot milk with honey and was absent from school for a week. I was exhausted, dreams played tag with me and I couldn’t escape. Images and sounds merged into a red nightmare: Jensenius’s singing, the war on TV, an air alarm, a telephone that no one would answer. And on the walls surrounding me: the pictures of The Beatles. I didn’t recognise them. That wasn’t how they looked any more. We didn’t resemble ourselves any more.

  And, when I get up now, just as alien to myself after a disturbed but dreamless night, I can feel the same fever in my skull, the pincers in my midriff. My stomach cannot take water from the well, it’s brown when it comes out of the tap. I have to go outside to melt snow, to boil it. I wrap up in old clothes and shuffle through the room. On the table are white sheets of paper, like windows in the dark. I go out onto the kitchen steps and am blinded, have to shade my eyes, my head is thumping. And I’m cold, my head is cold, that is the worst of it all because my hair won’t grow.

  Then I see them: the footprints in the snow. I follow them. They come from the gate. Someone has been here. They lead around the House. They stop by one window where the shutters have been taken off.

  Someone has been watching me.

  We continued the confirmation classes, sat in the mouldy cellar every Wednesday. We didn’t get around to asking why Fred had drowned or whether God had predetermined it. But one evening our appetite was whetted. John had said that The Beatles were greater than Jesus. Christ, what a stink! It was worse than Luther. Seb wanted to throw that into the priest’s face. But Father MacKenzie got his oar in first and asked Seb to reel off the table of contents in the New Testament. Seb couldn’t. He got as far as the Acts of the Apostles, but came to a dead halt. The priest’s wrinkles tautened and hardened. The girls in the first bench giggled. I covertly took out the holy book and stole a glance. Next were St Paul’s letters, the letter to the Romans, the letter to the Corinthians, to the Galatians. Seb was sent back to his bench. Then the priest pointed at me.

  ‘Go on,’ said the priest.

  I stood up.

  ‘Paul’s letter to the Romans. Paul’s letter to the Corinthians.’

  ‘First!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘First letter to the Corinthians!’

  I breathed in.

  ‘Paul’s letter to the Galatians.’

  ‘Second letter!’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Second letter to the Corinthians. Mercy be upon you and the peace of God, our Father and our Lord Jesus Christ.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Go on!’

  ‘Paul’s letter to… to the Galatians. Paul’s letter to the Ephe… Ephesians.’

  I got no further. I was almost halfway. The cellar went quiet. I glanced down at Gunnar. Resigned, he shook his head. Seb sat with a huge grin on his face and could not care less. Ola looked as if he were going to explode with laughter at any moment. Mercy be upon him.

  ‘Haven’t you done today’s homework, either.’

  ‘Yes. My mind just went blank.’

  So the priest tried to elicit it from me. But his skills did not extend that far. He had to turn to one of the plaits on the first bench. She stood erect in her pleated skirt and rattled off the Philippians, the Colossians, Timothy, Titus and Philemon.

  After the lesson was over, the priest stopped us and asked us to remain behind. Seb and I were in detention. We were not allowed to leave until we had learned the homework off by heart. We slogged our way through the crazy names, it went fine at first: Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. But the Ephesians and the Colossians finished us off. After twenty minutes the priest told me to have another go. I managed it after three attempts, just got the Colossians and Timothy the wrong way round. But Seb got into a mess again. The hair on his neck stood up like a brush. After the Corinthians his tongue went on strike.

  ‘You can go,’ the priest told me.

  ‘I’m waiting for Sebastian,’ I said.

  The priest looked at him.

  ‘Don’t you want to learn this?’ he asked.

  ‘No!’ came the resounding response.

  Seb stood up and threw the holy book over to the priest.

  ‘I don’t want to be confirmed! Do you think anyone believes what you say! They’re doin’ this for the presents!’

  The priest stared in disbelief. He could not believe his own ears. Seb marched into the cloakroom. I ran after him. Followed by the priest. He was waving his hands.

  ‘Aren’t you coming back?’

  ‘No!’ Seb said, slamming the heavy door after us.

  On the street he had a fit of the shakes, fumbled out a cigarette and then burst into laughter. ‘Christ, that was the greatest thing since the resurrection. John Lennon was chicken-feed by comparison.’

  Gunnar and Ola were waiting at Gimle.

  ‘Seb got one up on the priest!’ I shouted.

  They came running over.

  I told them everything. They listened with mouths agape and huge eyes. Told them again. They stared at Seb in awe and admiration.

  ‘But w-w-what about the instruments then?’

  Seb flicked the cigarette in the gutter.

  ‘I’ll get presents anyway,’ he said. ‘Mum said so.’

  He had worked it out in advance! No chance of my mum and dad agreeing. No point even asking.

  ‘So you’ve asked for an electric guitar!’ Gunnar said.

  ‘Yep. Kawai. With a mike and tremolo arm. I can use the radio as an amp. Three hundred spondulicks.’

  We traipsed towards Urra. Couldn’t go home now.

  Seb went serious.

  ‘I mean,’ he began. ‘I mean it’s not right to kneel there and be blessed when you don’t believe a word. Is it!’

  Gunnar stopped.

  ‘Kneel? Where?’

  ‘At the altar. At the confirmation ceremony. You’ve got to receive the blessin’ and say you believe.’

  Gunnar was ashen-faced. He gritted his teeth.

  ‘Do you have to?’

  ‘That’s the whole point of confirmation! A repeat of the baptism. You skip the water though.’

  Gunnar’s voice wilted.

  ‘I won’t get any presents if I’m not confirmed.’

  Seb tapped out four Craven As and passed them round. We trudged on. The Man on the Steps was closing. But there was a corner shop further down the street open till half past eight. We turned into Briskebyveien. It alw
ays looked like a Wild West town in the evening with its low creaking wooden houses and the yellow light behind the curtains. All it needed was some whinnying and a bloody duel. All of a sudden someone stood in front of us in the darkness between two street lamps.

  Came to a halt.

  Goose.

  ‘Hi, Christian,’ we said. ‘What are you doin’ here? Almost midnight, isn’t it!’

  He came closer. Looked like he had walked through a car wash. Hair plastered down to his skull. He kept licking round his mouth all the time.

  ‘Have you had another lesson with the priest?’ he asked.

  ‘Yep,’ I said.

  ‘What did he do?’

  Seb grinned.

  ‘He didn’t do anythin’! It’s what we did that counts. Buggered off. For good.’

  Goose gasped, his mouth hung open.

  ‘Bloody hell, he didn’t!’ he said.

  We exchanged glances. Goose had sworn.

  ‘Served him right. The prick!’ Goose went on.

  Ola leaned forward.

  ‘Nothin’ up, is there, Christian?’

  He didn’t hear.

  ‘I can nick a comic from the shop, I can,’ he declared.

  Silence. No one said anything.

  ‘I can nick a comic from the shop, I can,’ he repeated, louder.

  ‘You don’t dare,’ I said.

  Goose came a step closer.

  ‘Don’t I?’ he whispered.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘You don’t think I dare pinch a comic,’ he shouted.

  ‘You’ll have to get a move on then. The shop closes at half eight.’

  Goose looked at us all. Then he turned on his heel and crossed the street to the illuminated shop on the corner. We heard a bell ring as he opened the door.

  We saw the silhouettes through the window. There was just an old dear behind the counter and one customer. Goose was by the magazine stand. He unzipped his velveteen jacket. We held our breath. Just so long as he wasn’t stupid enough to run right out. He had to buy at least some sweets first. Shit. Goose was standing with his back to the counter and sliding a little comic into his jacket. Right. That was okay. Zip up again now.