‘You can go,’ he rasped.
And I left.
In the break Peder and Slippery Leif slunk over to me with green faces and swollen eyes.
‘Did Sandpaper issue a press release?’ asked Slippery Leif, resorting to his usual grandiloquent humour.
‘He’s drafted a missive to my parents,’ I parried, quick on my feet.
Peder ran his fingers through his thick hair.
‘You didn’t say… you didn’t say anything about the alcohol, did you?’
I didn’t lose my temper, but still couldn’t believe they could think that of me.
‘Arseholes,’ I said and the bell rang.
I wasn’t Karlsen-on-the-roof any more. I was Skeleton-at-the-dance. The whole school already knew. The dwarfs from the realskole surrounded me. The editor of the school newspaper wanted to interview me, the teachers tested me every bloody lesson, and three days later the letter arrived. I was called into the sitting room, Mum was on the sofa with a tear-stained face and Dad stood with the letter in his hand, his whole body shaking.
And still the fear was not there.
Dad could not control his voice.
‘What is this supposed to mean? What have you done? How could you do this to us?’
To them?
‘It had nothing to do with you,’ I said.
Dad yelled even louder.
‘Are you being rude as well?’
His hand was glowing, Mum’s crying rose like the sea at high tide, Dad lowered his arm.
I realised I was going to have to lie to make them understand.
‘It was a bet,’ I said. ‘I won.’
‘You were drunk!’
‘Everyone was drunk,’ I said. ‘It won’t happen again.’
I thought that sounded quite professional.
‘No, that’s for certain and make no mistake about it!’ Dad bellowed.
Mum was sniffling on the sofa, dried her eyes with the back of her hand and looked at me.
‘A bet?’ she said. ‘Did you win?’
‘Yes.’
‘What?’
‘A girl.’
The carrot and the stick. Mum and Dad were the stick. They were somewhat upset after receiving Sandpaper’s letter. It was important to keep a low profile for a while. I wore the tweed jacket and grey trousers for a whole month, and the atmosphere improved a bit when I came home with a B+ in English, I was a specialist on the Magna Carta, at least so long as Sphinx didn’t sniff out the crib I kept hidden under my bockwurst. And the carrot was Cecilie. At school she was the same, sat three seats in front of me with stiff neck muscles and didn’t speak to me in the playground. But she had kissed my foul, stinking mouth without hesitation and we sometimes met after school, walked together, further and further, I had accompanied her all the way to Olav Kyrres plass, but that was the limit for a heathen like me.
Ola was slogging away at maths, shrinking over logarithms and square roots like a shrivelled up missionary in the deepest jungle. He was better at writing letters, the postman in Trondheim had a busy winter that year. Gunnar and Sidsel went out together if they didn’t have any homework, they were good like that. Sidsel was studying natural sciences at Fagerborg, but couldn’t understand how I had dared to touch the skeleton. It was plastic, I said. Ye-es. Hard times. Evang moved to our school and taught us all about hash. Uproar. Only Seb was a bit at sea. As musically confused as a black man in Telemark. He sat in his room blowing the harmonica, not knowing whether to go for Mayall or The Doors. The Beatles were not the thing, not for a man with a harp, and The Snafus were over and out. In addition, he had tuned himself into The Mothers of Invention and Vanilla Fudge, sat with his legs crossed, and his head, too, confused, trying to meditate, but that didn’t work with all the racket going on in the sitting room, his father was on leave and the slamming of doors was like castanets.
‘I’m movin’ out,’ Seb sighed. ‘It’s like this all the time.’
That didn’t sound good.
‘Mum looks forward to him comin’ home like a child. And when he is at home, it’s non-stop noise and rowin’. Can’t live in this house.’
‘Play The Doors,’ I said.
Seb played The Doors.
Strange Days.
They certainly were.
He calmed down a little.
‘Greatest thing since Pepper,’ he said. ‘“When The Music’s Over”. Just listen to the nerve of the guitar, the soul of the organ! And the voice from the guts!’
We listened with eyes lowered. The silence afterwards was overwhelming, even in the sitting room they had taken a break.
Seb straightened up.
‘Wrote a poem in the French lesson yesterday,’ he said, unfolding a piece of paper. ‘Wanna hear? Inspired by “The Walrus”.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
Seb read with the sweat running down him:
Have you climbed up the City Hall while you think like a venomous cobra and laugh yourself to death?
Sitting on the top of a flagpole, believing your head is attached to the sky.
Dying all the time, trying to find the words, but you have forgotten how to read, can’t see through the wall in front of your brain.
We’re all going to die, we’re all going to die one day!
Staring at the shop windows where glucose covers plastic souls.
Rats and bats fly out of your eyes and acid runs down from your dead ears.
We just smile, we’re all going to smile one day!
The picture on the screen chases you, the shadow turns in front of the mirror, suddenly you are lying in a heap of animals, but you cannot see your friends, you shout, but your voice is alien.
They have gone, we’re all going to go one day!
Meet subterranean creatures, bury yourself in a rock, plastic hearts beat 380 times a minute, patients die like beautiful blowflies while slalom skiers race through the woods like shaven elks.
You are alone, we’re all going to be alone one day!
Fake advertisements blow your mind, blood donors queue at tram stops, you can hear the screams when the brain police come and arrest the innocent.
We’re all in prison, we’re all going to prison one day!
I gave it some thought. The rowing had resumed downstairs. Seb folded the piece of paper.
‘It’s about Guri really,’ he said.
‘Guessed as much,’ I said.
‘If I sort out the rhythm, rewrite it in English, insert a few cool rhymes, we could do a blues number with it. You sing. I play the harp and tap my foot!’
He blew a minor key on the mouth organ.
‘Seb and Kim the Bluesbeaters,’ I said.
‘Wow, yes!’
‘Would sound good to sing the blues in Norwegian,’ I said.
‘Yep, of course it would.’
Of course it would. Seb, musically confused and warped, would end up with the blues no matter what. It was still winter and Guri had a monthly ski pass and the Slalom Prince was beginning to make serious inroads into Seb’s pastures. Seb was a bit down.
‘How’s it goin’ with Cecilie?’ he asked.
My head shot up. Seb understood most things.
‘Don’t really know,’ I said.
‘She’s a tough nut.’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Patience,’ he said, sounding like one of the wise men from Oslo Observatory, patted me on the head and flipped Mayall’s ‘Broken Wings’ onto the turntable.
Well, I was patient. We continued to meet, Cecilie and I, as though we shared a secret, something forbidden and dangerous. And in some strange way it appealed to me. Night-time activities, deserted streets, a gateway, the harbour front one dull afternoon, or in the middle of a bridge. One day when we were stealing around Bislett, we met Goose, I was carrying Cecilie’s schoolbag and we were on our way south, going down quiet, narrow streets where few people were about. He was walking towards us and at first I didn’t know who it was, just knew there was
something familiar about him, and my stomach went queasy, as though I had been caught in the act. Then I realised it was Goose in his blue poplin coat buttoned to the top and a leather cap with flaps tied under his chin. He stopped. His eyes were blue and calm beneath the fleece rim.
‘Hello, Christian,’ I said.
He looked straight at me, straight into my pupils. It hurt.
‘Long time, no see,’ he said, as if we were pensioners.
‘Time passes,’ I said sagely. ‘How’s it goin’ at the Christian school?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘I’ve found my path in life.’
There was a pause. Cecilie regarded us with curiosity.
‘Sounds good,’ I said.
‘I can thank you for that,’ he said.
‘I beg your pardon?’ I answered in shock.
‘You led me along the right path,’ he said. ‘You were God’s instrument.’
Didn’t want to go down that route. But his gaze was serene now, even though it pained me, like water where there were no fish. And no waves and no wind.
‘Must be off,’ he said gently and went.
‘Who was that?’ Cecilie asked after a while.
‘Pal from realskole and folkeskole.’
‘What did you do to him?’ she continued, as grave as grave could be.
I tried to laugh it off.
‘I have a good influence on people,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you hear that? I’m God’s instrument.’
I held Cecilie’s hand. I thought of the passage in the Bible, I knew it off by heart, I know it off by heart: What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?
I knew a huge backwash was on the way, spray would splash through my head and the moon would draw up the sea like an eagle sucking an egg dry.
Cecilie said, ‘You tell too many fibs, Kim.’
Snow covered the ground for ever that winter. Seb was unhappy, played the blues on his own. After Håkon Mjøen sniffed gold in Grenoble, no one could get Guri and the Slalom Prince off the slopes. Cecilie and I went skiing in Nordmarka on Sundays. I chased after her in her tracks, she set out to torture herself, or me, and I hardly had the energy to peel an orange when we arrived in Kikut.
The smell of hot broth and ski wax.
We sat in the warming sun.
The roof was dripping.
We had to remove our anoraks and sweaters.
I asked her straight out: ‘Are we a couple?’
Felt pretty stupid. Would have swapped places with the jigger standing on Lake Bjørnsøen pulling at nothing.
Cecilie laughed, a rare sound from her.
‘Of course we are.’
Then she leaned her head against my shoulder and I put my arm round her, and a moment like that was worth quite a lot of lapses, scandals, threatening letters and deranged parents.
Yes, we became bolder and bolder. Cecilie seemed to soften, slowly, like the frozen ground after a long hard winter. The sun rose higher in the sky every day. The light became stronger. Water murmured and trickled around us. But I didn’t venture out to the palace in Bygdøy, it was out of the question, Alexander the Great would have turfed me out like a sack of rubbish. But we went to the cinema, sat in the blue auditoriums with hot, moist hands. We saw Bonnie and Clyde, Cecilie squeezed my hand to jelly, but films did not do it for me, I just sat wondering why people ooohed and aaahed and jumped in their seats, it was all fakery. No one could trick me after The Sound of Music. Walking home afterwards, she could talk and talk about the films, I tried to respond, to say something, but it all seemed so unreal, as though we were talking about shadows, talking about our own shadows, just like the man who attacked the picture with an axe, a picture! It was hard to believe. It was hard to understand.
After the seven o’clock performance at the Colosseum one night I suggested nipping down to Valka, I had earned a few tenners and could afford a treat. We found an unoccupied booth and the atmosphere was cosy with grey smoke and laughter in the darkened room. I spotted a few celebrities, nudged Cecilie in the ribs and nodded discreetly over to Harald Heide-Steen and Rolv Wesenlund. We almost killed ourselves laughing. It was cool to sit in the same pub as the Wesensteen duo, just like being in the TV programme. Cecilie wanted a Coke and I ordered a beer. Cecilie sent me an angry look.
‘We won’t be a couple if you drink,’ she said. I had been drunk twice.
‘Spirits is quite a different matter,’ I said.
The drinks arrived. I liked Cecilie’s mouth when she drank from a glass.
I rolled a cigarette.
‘Won’t touch Leif ’s medicine again,’ I said.
Cecilie started chatting about the film and I was bored. What happened on celluloid meant nothing to me. I wanted to talk about Cecilie, about us, but she wanted to talk about the film.
I interrupted her.
‘Is your father still angry?’ I asked.
She seemed taken aback, then her face stiffened and retreated into the hard features that frightened me.
‘Don’t know,’ she said, obviously not interested.
‘Do you think he would give me the heave-ho if I visited you?’
She just hunched her shoulders as though it were irrelevant whether I was dragged out on my face or not.
I drank some beer. My heart clawed in my chest. Someone at a table was laughing hysterically.
‘I hate my parents,’ she burst out.
And at that moment Uncle Hubert came in, stood in the middle of the floor squinting in all directions and nodded. He had been there before, no doubt about that.
‘Hate?’ I managed to get out before Hubert was upon us, his eyes softened by the sight of beer, his coat hanging around his shoulders like a tarpaulin.
‘Kim,’ he said. ‘What a surprise.’
He looked at Cecilie. He looked at me. I began to feel nervous.
‘This is my Uncle Hubert,’ I explained, sweat forming on my brow. ‘And this is Cecilie.’
I pointed in all directions.
‘I’ll take a seat here,’ Hubert said, sitting down. There was a short silence. Cecilie’s words were burning in my brain. Hate?
‘We’ve been to the cinema,’ I conversed. ‘Very nice.’
Cecilie smiled.
‘He didn’t like it at all. Kim hates going to the cinema.’
So she had known. I tried to laugh.
Hubert gave a kind of gurgle.
‘Say what you think, Kim. Don’t be afraid.’
‘The film was crap,’ I said. ‘All films are the same.’
Another silence. The glasses were empty. Hubert treated us. I had to go to the toilet, the pressure on my bladder was terrible, I couldn’t wait, but I was reluctant to leave Cecilie on her own with Hubert. What if he had a fit and started throwing beer over her? But I had to go to the toilet, wriggled my way out and while I was standing there having a sprinkle, another thought struck me: What if he started chatting about Nina? Panicked, gave it a last burst, it sprayed back, I scrambled through the banks of mist and there was Cecilie with her head thrown back, laughing with abandon, I wondered what Hubert had said or done to make her laugh like that.
Squeezed in and sat down.
‘I was talking about Granddad eating his earplugs,’ Hubert chuckled.
I drank and laughed. Everything was fine.
But still it rankled, the thought about Nina, suddenly remembering her like that, having a guilty conscience. But then hadn’t she been knocking about with Jesper Salami? Anyway, I had already forgotten her.
Hubert talked about Paris, about the restaurants and bars, about warm nights, colours, fruit, trees that caressed the river, green cardboard boxes and a woman called Henny. His shoulders twitched, but the spasms subsided. The memories had been so strong and clear, in his mind he was still there and was almost happy.
‘When is Henny coming back?’ I ventured to ask.
Hubert didn’t answer. He said, ‘When I have some money
I’ll go there and settle.’
Hubert was dreaming.
‘Where will you get the money from?’ I enquired.
He looked sheepish.
‘I do the pools,’ he said. ‘And the lottery. Every month without fail. The draw’s tomorrow.’
‘Here’s to you winning,’ we toasted.
Cecilie looked at her watch and had to go.
Hubert sat with his bock beer, huge coat and red scarf, and a distant look that penetrated the wall and crossed Majorstuen and Europe.
‘Was that your uncle?’ Cecilie said as we waited for the bus.
I nodded.
‘I liked him,’ she said gently.
‘He’s an okay uncle,’ I said.
‘Is he like your father?’
‘They aren’t identical twins,’ I said.
I was reminded of what she had said.
‘Do you hate your parents?’ I asked in a hushed voice.
Cecilie looked at her watch.
‘He’ll be sitting there timing me,’ she answered.
That unsettled me.
‘Does he know you’re with me?’
Cecilie looked me in the eye.
‘I say I’m with Kåre,’ she said, straight out.
I was punctured.
‘Kåre? The editor!’
She nodded.
The bus drew up in front of us.
‘By the way, he wants to interview you for the school newspaper,’ she said quickly, jumping onto the footboard. The bus roared off towards Bygdøy, leaving me behind like a flat tyre jettisoned in the gutter.
But on the way home I found the repair kit. In fact, Kåre was the loser, Kåre with the straight parting down the middle and the round glasses, the class above me, the coat hanger shoulders, the intellectual snob from Ullern, the spotty pseudo. He was the one left with egg on his face, he was the whipping boy for our clandestine meetings.
I felt on top of the world.
The bad news was that something came of the interview. The following Friday Kåre the Editor swanned over to me in the last minute of the break and asked if I would mind doing a pupil-of-the-week feature for the school newspaper. Of course I didn’t mind. I turned up in the newspaper office after school, on the top floor, slanting ceiling, cramped, empty bottles, typewriter and papers everywhere. The beanpole Gunnar had argued with at the dance sat on a box squinting, the layout manager, fidgeting with Letraset; the photographer was in the top class, he smiled and kept pulling lengths of pink bubble gum out of his gob. The editor sat behind the only table with a pencil behind his ear and a cap over his skull. They had all rolled up their sleeves. This was the editorial team of The Wild West.