Spring. No doubt about it. Bands were tramping through the streets practising boring marches and runners were training for the Holmenkoll relay race, but the surest sign of spring was Jensenius. The whale was awake and singing in the green ocean. And one day we stuck our heads out at the same time and saw each other.
‘More beer!’ he shouted.
Then he dropped a heavy purse and a shopping net.
‘Export!’ he shouted.
He was waiting in the doorway as I staggered up, he waved me in. He followed me into the sitting room where he collapsed in his usual tatty chair and emptied the beer down him as if pouring it down a drain.
‘Take a seat,’ he said.
I took a seat. The dust whirled up giving off a smell of stale bread.
‘You haven’t been playing the Robertino record,’ he said.
I shifted uneasily.
‘Yes, I have. I think it’s very good.’
Jensenius was lost in dreams behind the foam.
‘An Italian youngster with a throat of the purest gold.’
He expelled a heavy sigh.
‘But now destiny has taken his voice. Life can be cruel, Kim.’
‘Is he ill?’ I asked.
‘Voice is cracking,’ Jensenius said. ‘The devil has polished his throat with coarse sandpaper. Robertino is no longer Robertino.’
He swigged more beer. His stomach flowed over his filthy trousers. His shirt was buttoned up wrong.
‘The same thing that happened to me,’ he said dolefully. ‘Destiny’s cruel and fickle musical score. Just in reverse order.’
He fell silent for a few moments, staring in front of him with a gaze that looked backwards.
‘Robertino lost his soprano voice and gained the miner’s vocal register. I lost my baritone and gained the eunuch’s vocal splendour.’
He took a long draught.
‘What’s an eunuch?’ I asked softly.
‘Life’s slave,’ he said. ‘Deprived of his virility but left with his desire intact. Sometimes it’s unbearable, Kim.’
I studied the floor. The carpet was threadbare from his nightly wanderings.
‘What happened?’ I asked.
Jensenius opened three bottles. There was a mountain of bottle tops under his chair.
‘I’ll tell you, Kim. I was due to sing at the University of Oslo Concert Hall in 1954, a sparkling spring day, almost like today.’ He pointed to the grubby windowsills. ‘I was going to sing Grieg and King Haakon would be present, Crown Prince Olav, the whole of the royal family, Kim! I took a taxi from here two hours before to be in good time. But I never arrived, Kim. King Haakon never heard Jensenius sing Grieg, Kim.’
He drank, his hand trembled around the bottle.
‘What happened?’ I whispered.
‘An accident is what happened, Kim. Where Parkveien crosses Drammensveien. A lorry coming from the left. The taxi driver was killed. I got the front seat in my lap. I was crushed, Kim.’
He emptied the remaining bottles without speaking. That was Jensenius’s story. And it was as true as everything that flows from my pen.
But on the woodburner was a bag of sweets, grey with dust and green with mould.
He turned sharply to me.
‘But you will be something great!’ he said.
I was apprehensive.
‘Me?’
‘Yes, Kim. You will be the greatest of us all!’
‘How?’
‘Singing, Kim! I’ve heard you at night. I hear you almost every night, Kim!’
I ran downstairs and rushed into my room. Outside, trees were exploding in green applause and bands never tired of doing encores.
‘The radio,’ I thought. ‘It must be the radio he’s heard.’
The first Saturday in May a car in Svoldergate was hooting up a storm, it had to be at least Jensenius trying to cross the road in one piece. I ran to the window. Dad! It was Dad in a new car, a bright red Saab gliding into Svoldergate like a giant ladybird. I sprinted downstairs, Dad had crawled out, was leaning against the warm car roof, having discarded his jacket and rolled up his sleeves, wow, what a spring. Mum came flying down, she fell around his neck and that’s how I prefer to remember Mum and Dad, beside the new car, their first car, a bright red Saab V4, arm in arm one May day in 1967.
First of all we picked up Hubert from Marienlyst. He couldn’t restrain himself, had to fiddle with various knobs, switch on the windscreen wipers and indicators and Dad became agitated. We had to move Hubert to the back seat to cool down.
‘Goodness me,’ Hubert said, patting Dad on the shoulder. ‘I hope you didn’t break into the safe in the vault!’
We laughed and rolled down the windows. Then we drove through the boiling hot town to Mosseveien and towards Nesodden. Dad picked up speed, the engine hummed like a happy bee, not a single car passed us, though Dad had to overtake a lorry by Hvervenbukta, quite close to a bend to the accompaniment of howls and screams from the back seat, but it was fine, Dad clung to the wheel as the sweat poured down over the big smile that I doubt had been there since the time he was a boy and believed in Father Christmas.
Bunde fjord was bright blue. Behind us the town lay bundled into dark green fields wrapped in yellow ribbons of sun.
The road to Tangen wasn’t so good, the car bumped and jolted and pebbles shot up round the bonnet. Dad was hunched over the wheel, but coped well with these conditions, and soon we were rolling down to the quay and parked on the headland, Signalen. Dad crawled round the car on all fours looking for scratches to the paintwork, but when he pulled out his handkerchief to polish the car, Mum intervened and took him with us to the House.
It smelt as it always did on the first day of spring in Nesodden, rank and acrid from the rotting leaves on the ground. I always thought the House looked a little creepy with shutters over all the windows, like a dead body, I thought, or maybe a human before it is born because when we removed all the shutters, light streamed through the house as though the walls were transparent and everything inside began to come alive. The flies on the windowsills knocked against the glass, everything rattled and creaked and the dust danced like milky ways in a sunbeam.
I ran up to the place where I knew wild strawberries grew, behind the well, in a damp green hollow. I counted the flowers. Summer would bring an abundance of wild strawberries.
Mum made coffee and we sat on the balcony. The sun was on its way over Kolsås, a shiny aeroplane passed by the golden orb and circled round us.
‘How are you enjoying the new job?’ Hubert asked, watching the plane as it sped southwards and disappeared from view.
‘Very much indeed,’ Dad said.
Hubert peered over his cup.
‘Kim said you had 350,000 kroner in the vault once,’ he said, impressed.
‘That can happen. Especially on Fridays when we have a lot of outgoing payments to make. Often have to send out for extra supplies from the main office.’
Hubert sipped his coffee.
‘That’s a lot of money,’ he said quietly. ‘Aren’t you nervous about having so much money on site?’
Dad laughed.
‘You and Kim have seen too many crime programmes, that’s for sure!’
And then we drove back to town. There was a gang of long-haired youths playing guitar in Hvervenbukta. They had lit a bonfire on the smooth rock by the sea. Mosseveien was steaming after a hard day. The cranes on Akershus quay were still, like huge dead animals, and the sky over Holmenkollen was blood-red. Dad accelerated and we hurtled into the sunset with open windows and the wind blowing in our hair and bringing tears to our eyes as insects splattered on the windscreen and spread in all directions.
At first I thought I had caught a cold from the car ride, I woke in the night with a constricted throat, gummed-up eyes, and feeling feverish all over. But when I saw myself in the mirror next morning, I had quite a shock. I looked like a confused pelican, my chin bulged down under my face and I could barely speak. The
fever had spread to my head, I shuffled back to my room, and when Mum saw me, she screamed.
I spent days on a white carousel. I lay in the desert with cold cloths over my forehead, juice in large glasses and the radio on. My nuts began to ache too, it was just like having toothache in your bollocks. That was when my mother went hysterical and sent for the doctor. He arrived with a stethoscope and did not look at all like the doctors Hubert drew for the weekly magazines. He poked and pressed me from forehead downwards. Afterwards he and Mum talked in low, sinister voices, but I caught occasional words, I heard mumps, mumps and boys, Mum kept going on about boys.
Bit by bit I recovered, the carousel slowed down, the fever was sweated out into my bed, the bulges shrank. And in fact it was quite nice lying there like that, sluggish and listless, listening to old records, Cliff, Paul Anka, Pat Boone, rounding off with the old 45s. I played Robertino too and Jensenius stamped on the floor with approval. Gunnar, Seb and Ola visited me one day, no danger there, they had all had mumps a long time ago. They stood around my bed grinning and telling me about Skinke’s shoes, which someone had filled with water, and Kerr’s Pink, who had given the whole class seed potatoes. But then they went serious and got to the heart of the matter.
‘What about Frigg this year then, eh?’ Gunnar asked.
We had been skiving football training all autumn, it would be quite hard to play our way back into the team.
‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Think we should give it a miss.’
The others nodded.
‘There’ll be no time for football when we go to the gymnas,’ Gunnar said.
‘No,’ we said.
‘But we could pop over and say hello to Kåre,’ Seb said. ‘To tell him we’re droppin’ out.’
‘Of course,’ we said.
When they had left, the fever returned and wrung me like a sponge. Mum managed to steer me into the sitting room where I sat, half-dead, waiting for her to change the bedding and air the room. Afterwards it was like lying in the wind, a wind with sun and freshly mown grass and juicy apples. I slept, woken once by some sounds, the rumble of the train, the tram squealing, bombs falling. Then, all of a sudden, it was still again and the next time I woke I was as fit as a fiddle and five kilos lighter.
That was my last childhood illness.
A Day in the Life
Summer ’67
We went to see Kåre in Theresesgate. He started looking for subscription cards, but Gunnar stopped him.
‘Won’t be any football for us this year,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no time for trainin’ when we start at the gymnas.’
Kåre leaned over the counter and studied us.
‘Big lads now,’ he said.
We shifted uncomfortably.
‘Just wanted to tell you,’ Gunnar went on. ‘It’s been great playin’ football for Frigg.’
Kåre gave a sad smile.
‘Far too many give up like you,’ he said. ‘How are we going to keep Frigg in the first division if players keep going?’
We shuffled our feet.
‘Don’t think we’d’ve got in the f-f-first team,’ Ola laughed with embarrassment.
Two juniors came in to pay their subs, in shorts with plasters on their knees and a key round their necks, only just able to reach the counter with their chins.
After they had left, Kåre said, ‘Might be a Petersen or a Solvang in those skinny legs. Who knows?’
No, you could never know, but for us the season was over.
We shook his hand.
Kåre smiled his crooked smile and breathed heavily through his flat nose.
‘Good luck, lads,’ he said. ‘All the best!’
We bought ten Craven A and trogged down to Bislett. Thinking about the team jersey, freshly washed, stiff, blue and white. Åge reading out the names of those in the team. The dressing rooms, the own goal in Slemmestad, the sending-off in Copenhagen. All the pitches: Voldsløkka, Ekeberg, Dælenenga, Marienlyst, Grefsen. Grass, gravel and particularly football in the rain, heavy, sluggish games like in slow motion while the rain bucketed down, that was what I thought about most on the boiling hot day we trogged down Theresesgate leaving Kåre for the last time: football in the pouring rain.
It was all systems go at school. Kerr’s Pink was reading from Petter Dass, Hammer was bursting with German verbs and Skinke was a barrel of gunpowder in the sun. The only cool place was in woodwork. I sat filing a teak ring I had thought about giving someone, but one day I dropped it on the floor and it broke. No point trying to stick it together. Couldn’t even give it away now. Wondered for a while whether to make a birdhouse, but it was too late anyway, wouldn’t finish it before summer. That was, in fact, the day the woodwork teacher brought in a snake skin from Africa, as big as a carpet. His brother had shot the snake while it was lying in the shade of an orange tree disgesting a sheep. We could see the bullet hole, too. The woodwork teacher’s brother was a missionary in Africa. Goose stayed behind after the lesson. He had made a cross in woodwork, now he wanted to hear more about the missionary in Africa. Just before the bell rang for the next lesson he came over to us at the drinking fountain and told us that snakes sleep for a whole month after eating a sheep. And the snake was the Devil’s Beast. That was why the woodwork teacher’s brother had shot it. We could remember what had happened to Holst, the teacher, couldn’t we?
‘Yeah,’ Gunnar said, looking away.
Goose was beginning at the Christian gymnas in the autumn. His eyes sparkled. Gunnar flicked through the English course book. I drank water.
‘God be with you,’ Goose said, he said that and left us.
And he was with us, for a while anyway. Norwegian lessons were going well. I wrote about space travel and thought I made a good fist of it. I wrote about humans that are so tiny and space that is so immense and I got something in about a door that has to be opened to enter the blue space. I was in the groove. If there was not enough room for us on earth, we could settle on other planets. When I had finished the rough copy and eaten my packed lunch, sweaty salami and wet goat’s cheese, I thought about Goose, he sat behind me and was scribbling away like a madman, I thought that out in space there was perhaps an old God, with a white gown and a middle parting, a bit like John Lennon, and he kept an eye on everything we wrote and knew exactly what we would write and what grade we would get. In that case there was not much point writing at all. Didn’t put that though.
Survived English as well. And German. Then came the wall. Maths. The evening before, I sat mugging up on equations and geometry sweating like mad while the summer simmered away and the gulls came in from the fjord with raucous screams and burning beaks and shat on my window. I read about x and y, twirled the compasses, drew triangles and angles and straight lines, while outside the gulls screamed. I thought about the snake skin, that the future was like a snake, a boa constrictor which dropped from the trees, and that we had already been swallowed, zero chance of escaping, we were already in the warm belly of the future and were being digested. Impossible to concentrate with the gull screams right outside the window. Then the doorbell rang. It couldn’t be Gunnar, Seb or Ola because they were at home swotting and at least as busy as me. I heard my mother open the door and then nothing because the gulls were screaming. Must have been a perspiring door-to-door salesman. But then there was a knock at my door and when it opened I forgot everything I had read, everything that had existed, everything that still existed.
Nina.
She stood in the doorway looking in at me.
Mum was in the background, she slunk away.
Hardly recognised her with hair down over her shoulders, a flower behind her ear, a long colourful skirt, narrow around the waist, almost like my arm, I gulped, gulped and clung to my mask.
Wished some girl had been with me in the same way that a boy had been with her that time in Denmark. All I had were my maths book and the compasses. Was everything supposed to be forgotten now, as though I had been sitting and waitin
g for her for a whole year? I was angry, why hadn’t there been someone here too, what did she think she was doing, just coming, without batting an eyelid, standing at my door and looking at me with those same eyes, the same smile, which nevertheless seemed so unfamiliar, for she had changed, and yet she was the same, she was Nina.
I was angry. I was confused.
‘Hello,’ I said.
She came in.
She went straight to the point.
‘Did you get my letter?’ she asked.
‘Yes.’
She closed the door.
‘Are you studying for an exam?’
‘Maths.’
‘Are you mad at me?’ she asked.
‘Mad? Why should I be?’
‘I could sit quietly,’ she said. ‘So that you can study.’
She had brought a parcel with her. Flat. Square. I didn’t want to ask, but couldn’t stop myself.
‘What’s that?’ I pointed to her hands.
‘For you,’ she smiled, putting the package on my maths book.
I felt her hair on my face. There would be thunder tonight.
‘For me?’
‘Yes.’
I unwrapped the paper, my hands were sticky with sweat.
Sergeant. Sergeant Pepper. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
‘The new Beatles LP,’ she whispered behind me.
Caught. Bound hand and foot. The new Beatles LP. Why weren’t the others here, Gunnar, Seb and Ola? Everything had gone topsy-turvy. And yet everything was as it should be.
I just stared. The faces stared back at me, a whole collection of heads, and at the front, in uniform between exotic plants they stood there expecting something from me, expecting me to do something, right now. The four faces when I opened the cover, close up, insistent, were forcing me to do something. On the back, with the lyrics in red, John, George and Ringo stared at me while Paul had his back to me. I was sitting with my back to Nina, could sense her behind me, I turned.