Beatles

  They gave me a Coke, drew up a chair and lit a cigarette for me, this was heavy, print run of 600.

  ‘Let’s get down to business,’ Kåre said, whetting his pen.

  ‘Fire away,’ I said.

  ‘Born when and where?’

  ‘51 Josefinesgate.’

  He looked me up and down.

  ‘Special characteristics? Club foot or hunched back?’

  ‘One arm has a limp,’ I riposted.

  Kåre wrote.

  ‘Hobbies?’

  ‘Collectin’ elephants.’

  ‘Which subject do you like best?’

  ‘Needlework.’

  The photographer grinned.

  ‘The man’s a wit.’

  ‘Which dancing school did you go to?’ Kåre continued.

  I smelt a rat.

  ‘No comment,’ I said diplomatically.

  ‘Shall we ring for a solicitor?’ Beanpole grinned.

  The photographer snapped away.

  ‘Favourite writer?’

  ‘John Lennon, Jim Morrison and Snorri Sturluson.’

  ‘What would you do if you were headmaster for a day?’

  ‘Sack all the teachers.’

  ‘Dream woman?’

  Kåre removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose.

  ‘Hasn’t stepped out of my dreams yet,’ I said.

  ‘Ooooh,’ the photographer intoned. ‘The man’s on the ball.’

  Kåre replaced his glasses.

  ‘Do you support the USA in Vietnam?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘Imperialism,’ I said. ‘A nation must be allowed to determine its own fate without outside interference.’

  Heavy.

  Beanpole stood up, almost hitting his head on the ceiling.

  ‘Can we print that lie, boss?’

  Kåre peered up.

  ‘This is a democratic newspaper in a democratic country. Everyone has a right to express their opinion.’

  The others nodded. The photographer zoomed in.

  ‘Do you support NATO?’

  ‘Not as long as NATO supports the USA in Vietnam.’

  Wow. Logic.

  ‘Favourite group?’

  ‘Beatles.’

  ‘There are persistent rumours that you climbed onto the roof of a certain house in Bygdøy. Any comment?’

  ‘No comment.’

  ‘Solicitor’s on the way,’ Beanpole smiled, opening a Coke.

  ‘Do you think long hair’s attractive?’

  ‘Especially under the arms.’

  ‘Why do you wear the ugliest jacket in the school?’

  ‘Disapprove of the question.’

  ‘Wow,’ said the photographer. ‘He’s a pro.’

  That was all there was to it, well, apart from having a few more pictures taken, and the photographer persuaded me to strip off, just the chest. Everyone was photographed like that when they were interviewed in The Wild West. Except the girls, of course, raucous laughter. I leaned against the wall, tensed my biceps and the camera flash swept across me, from the front, then the back.

  ‘I’d like to check through the interview first,’ I said to Kåre.

  ‘Impossible,’ he said. ‘It goes to press this evening. You can trust us.’

  He stared at me and even though he was quite friendly and jocular, I think he hated me somewhere, and I think I would have done too if I had been him. I had a nasty feeling that he was up to something sneaky, but I couldn’t work out what. And anyway, I was pretty high after being interviewed with photos and so on. I raced down the steps and met Cecilie at Dagmar Café. We had enough for a vanilla slice and I told her everything I had said. Then she had to go. Alexander the Great was waiting for her return, on pain of death, I have a feeling spring’s on the way, I told Cecilie.

  It was not. I knew that now. Kåre the Editor was out to cause trouble and he got it too, but he created more of a stir than he had bargained for. Needless to say I was the last to see the school newspaper, came back from the gym lesson, sweaty and sore, and from the moment I entered the classroom I knew that something was brewing, something big. Everyone stood with their noses in their copy of The Wild West. There was stamping and clapping when I arrived. I grabbed a copy and flicked through. Kåre the Editor had really gone to town. There was a picture of me from the rear and the front, and one where Beanpole, the layout manager, had mounted a model propeller on my back. Very smart. And that was not all. They had incorporated a skeleton too and written underneath: Kim Karlsen’s girlfriend in Copenhagen. What the hell! I caught sight of Cecilie. She was standing by the blackboard, a white, ice-cold silhouette. I read. The interview was fine. But in the lead-in Kåre from Ullern had disassociated himself from my demagogic opinions. I was confused rather than corrupt, he wrote. My addled brain was due, he presumed, to the fact that I had been in a long-term relationship with a girl from Copenhagen, and Copenhagen was the axis of evil and immorality in the world, as everyone knew, at least in Scandinavia. I looked at Cecilie. Black board. White face. Sphinx had written something on the board that had not been cleaned off: I think, therefore I am. I headed for the door and found Ola wandering round with a maths book. I swung him round.

  ‘Ola,’ I said, keeping my composure. ‘What the bloody hell did you say to that creep Kåre?’

  He was engrossed in an equation.

  ‘Say what to wh-wh-whom?’

  ‘Have you seen the school newspaper?’

  He shook his head.

  I showed him the page. It began to dawn on him.

  ‘He just wanted some p-p-personal information,’ Ola stuttered.

  ‘Right, yes, and so you told him about Nina?’

  ‘Was that so b-b-bad?’

  The bell rang. It was a hard path to tread. Seb met me outside the door.

  ‘I would advise against suin’ for defamation,’ he whispered. ‘Let the editors drown in their own shite!’

  Cecilie’s face was granite, her eyes ground me to sand and a small, insignificant snort blew me onto the mountain plains, abandoned for ever.

  Slippery Leif and Peder proffered their sincere congratulations, Peder not without Schadenfreude.

  And, God help me, I had to roll up my sleeves yet again to prove that I didn’t have a propeller.

  Cecile turned away in disgust.

  It was French with Madame Mysen, Madame Squint, a thin Parisian baguette with blue nails and an aquiline nose. She translated Sphinx’s words: Je pense, donc je suis.

  After precisely ten minutes I was hauled before the headmaster. Kåre was there, too. His glasses had steamed up. He didn’t grace me with a glance.

  Sandpaper sat behind the desk, leafing energetically through The Wild West. I wondered whether he had combed his moustache. Or whether it just grew like that. I ran my finger under my nose. Soft down. Fluff.

  Sandpaper peered up.

  ‘As editor of the school newspaper you should know about press ethics,’ he rasped, making the room vibrate.

  Perspiration was dripping off Kåre.

  ‘And you, Kim Karlsen, you should have kept the skeleton business quiet! I thought you had understood that!’

  Kåre spoke up.

  ‘This is my fault, sir. Karlsen knew nothing about it.’

  Honest. Kåre was an idealist. He looked at me out of the corner of his eye.

  Sandpaper flicked through the pages, shaking his head. The stakes had been too high for Kåre. It ended with him having to resign in disgrace as editor and the student council had to appoint a new one. I was disgraced, too, I lost Cecilie, but no one appointed someone new for me.

  I didn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of getting close to her, she slipped away again, shut her eyes to me, but saw me nevertheless. I could just enjoy myself with my girlfriend in Copenhagen. I tried to use Seb as a go-between, but he didn’t know the password, either. Gunnar thought Kåre was the slimiest bastard that had ever walked the earth. What about
if we ran an anti-Kåre sticker campaign and hung him out to dry once and for all. Ola was unhappy and said that he would never speak to the press again, that was for sure. Peder and Slippery Leif went back on the offensive, but Cecilie seemed impregnable to one and all, like a bunker.

  Seb and I stuck together, both despondent, again and again we told each other how unhappy we were and tortured ourselves even further. We sat at my house playing The Doors. We sat at Seb’s playing Bob Dylan and The Mothers of Invention. Freak Out. Seb took out some sheets of paper with lyrics on them. He reckoned he was well on the way with a great blues number, because this was the time for blues.

  He read the first, and hitherto only, verse while coughing into the harmonica from time to time.

  I was born down by Vika,

  That’s what I was told.

  Mother scrubbed steps

  Father’s soul was sold

  To the yard for forty years

  Before he worked his lease.

  Got a watch from the Boss

  Priest wished him peace.

  They know nothin’, no siree

  They know nothin’, can’t you see

  Don’t know nothin’, no siree

  Ain’t got nothin’ to do with me

  ‘Your mother doesn’t scrub the steps,’ I said. ‘And your father’s at sea!’

  Seb studied me for a long time, then shook his head.

  ‘When you write, you’ve got to lie, too,’ he said. ‘Just like Goose did that time when he wrote about the suicide in Bygdøy.’

  ‘Ye-es,’ I said. ‘Of course. But the secret is to lie well.’

  ‘Well, you would know,’ Seb smiled. ‘You’re the best liar of us all.’

  Then we played Sergeant Pepper and I started to unravel because Nina was in those grooves, and Cecilie was, too, in negative form, an absence, and we each sank into our own gloom and said nothing for several hours.

  Then Seb said, ‘I fought for Guri once. D’you remember?’

  ‘Course I do. How’s your grandma by the way?’

  ‘Alright. She shows up when Dad’s away.’

  We played ‘A Day In The Life’ again.

  ‘Any progress with Cecilie?’ Seb asked.

  ‘I’m a fetid sausage on her platter,’ I said.

  ‘Oh, boy,’ Seb said. ‘I’m gonna use that one.’

  He jotted things down in a little book till the sparks flew. Then he grabbed his harmonica, flicked the hair off his forehead and hollered away.

  ‘I’m a fetid sausage on her platter

  I’m a fetid sausage on her platter’

  He stopped.

  ‘What rhymes with platter?’

  ‘Matter,’ I said.

  ‘Jeez.’

  He blew up a seventh.

  ‘And she don’t care ’cos I don’t matter.’

  We took it again, and I sang. I really went for it, roared the moss off my lungs. Seb was red in the face, stomping with his stockinged foot. Seb and Kim, the Blues Howlers.

  ‘We’ll have to write more verses,’ he said afterwards.

  ‘About slalom snobs,’ I said.

  ‘And sneaky school newspaper editors and lousy girls.’

  They were in for it now. No one was safe now.

  ‘Heads will roll,’ Seb pronounced prophetically.

  On the day I saw Kåre suck up to Cecilie and inveigle her into a conversation that lasted a whole break I decided to write a letter to Nina. I had received four and sent none. I sat in my room writing all evening while thinking about Kåre and Cecilie; childhood friends, ex-sweethearts, that’s what they were, I was sure, she knew I had seen them together. I wrote a letter to Nina. About how boring school was, about whether she had heard The Doors, if there were lots of hippies in Copenhagen. Wrote until my ears buzzed. But said nothing about why I hadn’t replied earlier.

  Folded it up and popped it into an envelope. My mother was at the door.

  ‘Are you doing your homework?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  I was into monosyllables.

  Mum tiptoed in and took a seat behind me.

  ‘You’re not still depressed about the letter from the headmaster, are you, Kim?’ she said, and I loved her for that, but couldn’t show it, just couldn’t bloody do it.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘It’s all forgotten now,’ she said.

  Kind words.

  I slipped the letter under a book.

  ‘The girl… the girl you… were talking about… who is she?’

  Would have loved to talk too, relieve some of the pain, but there was a padlock on my mouth, a Jubilee clip round my larynx. I coughed and squirmed. Couldn’t tell her the whole story about the school newspaper, either, on the contrary, I was desperately hoping they would never get their hands on a copy of The Wild West, I think Dad would have expired on the spot. And that’s how it was, there was no conversation, as though we could not talk to each other any more, and the only comprehensible sounds to human ears came from Dad in the sitting room as he yelled, ‘Tell him to get a haircut. Tell him to get a haircut now!’

  ‘Jesus had long hair,’ I said.

  The next day I sent the letter to Nina.

  In April a new Beatles single came out. I wended my way down to Bygdøy Allé and bought it at Radionette. They had got quite a long way with the new building down from Gimle where the supermarket was going to be. I went home and played the record in peace and quiet. I was pretty enthusiastic. ‘Lady Madonna’. Yes. It was up to scratch. I gave Seb a call and played it over the telephone. He was pretty enthusiastic, wasn’t hanging from the ceiling, but the music held up, a pro job, resting on their laurels, they had every right. The piano swung. We discussed whether it was Paul or Ringo singing. It was Paul, might have had a cold. Dank climate in England in the winter. Anything else? Seb was working on a few new texts. He had borrowed Jan Erik Vold from the library.

  ‘The snow’s meltin’,’ I said. ‘Won’t be able to slalom in Kleiva now.’

  Seb sighed down the line.

  ‘Have you turned meteorologist or what? Heard of water skis? The creep’s got a homestead on Hankø in the fjord with fifty horses. Nobody loves you when you’re down and out.’

  He was quiet for a moment.

  ‘What rhymes with homestead?’ he asked at length.

  ‘Dead,’ I replied.

  ‘I’m slowly losin’ the will to live,’ he said.

  ‘What about bread?’ I suggested.

  ‘That’s more like it.’

  We rang off. I gave the disc another spin. The B side. ‘The Inner Light’. I was depressed, it was another useless Tuesday, crappy, boring, one of the days you could give a miss, drop completely, a grey hole in time. A Tuesday in April, 1968. Leftovers for dinner and a couple of jibes across the table about hair and clothes, pathetic they were, too. Homework. English. French. Passé simple. Kipling. If. Norwegian. Sagas. Filthy windows, nasty smell from Frogner Bay, sore balls, impossible to concentrate on anything. Lying on the sofa, staring at the ceiling. Not a lot to look at. Strange the silence coming from Jensenius. A door slams somewhere. Squeals of a car braking. But nothing has anything to do with me, one boring Tuesday in April, 1968.

  The doorbell rang, but I couldn’t even be bothered to shift my carcass, probably just a salesman trying to palm off some Tupperware on Mum. I heard someone come inside and then there was a knock on the cell door. I leapt to my feet. Cecilie was standing there. Cecilie. It was incredible. That such a Tuesday could bring Cecilie. Mum was standing in the wings peering in, Dad’s head was there, too, I quickly locked the door, had no idea what to say.

  ‘Cecilie,’ I said.

  She looked around as if she had come to rent the room. Looked at the records. The books. The clothes on the floor. The slippers, my idiotic slippers, looked like two ducklings with a red ball on the beak.

  I padded around barefoot, socks were full of holes. Would have to cut my nails soon. Embarrassing situation.
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  Say something.

  ‘Are you hungry?’

  She sniggered quietly and sat down.

  ‘He’s explained everything,’ she said, looking up at me.

  ‘Explained what?’

  ‘About you and the girl in Copenhagen, that it’s been over for some time.’

  ‘Who has?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Who has explained what?’

  ‘Ola, of course.’

  ‘Ola?’

  I sat beside her on the sofa.

  ‘Seemed it was sort of his fault,’ she said. ‘But now he’s explained everything.’

  She looked at me. With gentle eyes.

  ‘Ola,’ was all I could say.

  She laughed again:

  ‘It’s taken quite a long time, but I’ve got there!’

  Ola, my Ola! Comes in with a whimper and goes out with a roar! We caressed each other, ended up in a passionate embrace. She let me go for a moment, leaned back and tidied her face.

  ‘It was a rotten trick Kåre played on you,’ she said.

  I felt the time was ripe to be fair to the enemy. Could afford to be now.

  ‘At least he admitted his guilt,’ I said. ‘Over the skeleton business.’

  She nodded.

  ‘I thought you were cheating on me,’ she said, not mincing her words.

  ‘Course not,’ I stammered, raising my hand.

  ‘So it was over a long time ago then?’ she said with eyes cast down.

  ‘Yes,’ I said, suddenly remembering the letter I had sent, and my stomach started to churn.

  ‘Yes,’ I repeated, as if the words could change anything at all.

  Cecilie looked at me.

  ‘Lies and dishonesty are the worst things I know,’ she said in a serious tone.

  ‘But you lie to your parents,’ I suggested gently.

  She sniggered.