Beatles

  We listened.

  ‘That tells you where the struggle is, boys! Down with monopoly capitalism! We’re gettin’ a taste of it first-hand, aren’t we!’ Stig rose to his full height, stroked his beard and peered down at us.

  ‘Dad’s not the enemy. Dad’s one of the victims. It’s the workin’ class and the lower middle class that have to suffer!’

  He darted through the door and was gone.

  ‘He’s right,’ said Gunnar.

  We chewed on this for some considerable time. That was how it seemed. He was right. But beer was cheaper at Bonus.

  However, things between Cecilie and me were in neutral gear. That was fine with me. Cecilie was my anchor that winter and I was pleased that Slippery Leif, Peder and Kåre and the rest of the gang were being neglected. We met in the evening, somewhere or other, because I did not want to take her home with my father in the shape he was. And going to her house was out of the question, I was excommunicated and would never be allowed to cross Olav Kyrres plass. We roamed the streets, the snow-covered streets, went to the cinema where I was bored out of my mind, but was permitted to hold her hand and that was enough. We were in neutral and I was happy. But sometimes I was frightened. She had left off going to Dolphin, didn’t talk any more about guitar chords and didn’t mention the din Seb and I had made at the folkies’ head office. It was as if she had grown tired of a toy and chucked it out of the pram like a spoilt child who gets everything she points to. That was what I thought in my darkest hours. It was not that often. But when I was under the thrall, I considered myself one of those toys she might chuck out at any point. Nevertheless, I was happy, we were together in the evenings, sat on benches, went skiing, watched the snow melt and the sun grow stronger, heard the snow drip and trickle. Cecilie and I were in neutral until the badgers came onto the scene.

  It all started with the dustbins. Every morning they lay on their sides and refuse was scattered everywhere. The first suspects to be questioned by furious janitors were the young kids. But they swore they hadn’t touched the bins, why on earth would they have done, the time was past when you could find jewels and postage stamps in the dustbins, and no one could be fagged to collect beer caps any more. But the bins were up-ended every night and after a while watchmen were stationed in backyards. The news came as a shock. Skillebekk was almost evacuated. Beasts had been spotted. Rumours spread as the snow melted. It could have been anything from a rat to a bear. It was the sole topic of conversation in shops, at the tram stops, people stopped each other in the streets, people who had never exchanged a word before, theories were aired, everyone racked their brains as to what kind of creature could be preying on Skillebekk. Even Dad had pricked up his ears. The flood of rumours streamed on, dinosaurs and crocodiles, no creature was exempt, until a vigilant hunter in Gabelsgate was able to lay the facts on the table: a badger. There were badgers afoot.

  It was the start of spring, or the end of winter. The snow ran in dirty rivulets down the streets, skis were stowed in cellars, cycle chains were lubricated, snow boots put away and new shoes brought into the house. The badger hunt was on. It didn’t rummage through the rubbish any more, it had been frightened into hibernation, but it had to be found. It was not right and proper that there should be a badger in Skillebekk.

  One evening Cecilie came to my house. It had been the warmest day so far that year, one great river of a day, and the hunters were out in force on the streets. I wanted to join the hunt, too.

  ‘Let’s go out and find the badger,’ I said.

  Cecilie gave me an old-fashioned look.

  ‘Badger?’

  ‘That’s right.’

  She followed me out. We walked up Gabelsgate. People were standing and peering into gateways, crawling along hedges, climbing up trees. Cecilie was at my side.

  ‘A badger?’ she repeated.

  ‘That’s right.’

  ‘How did a badger get here? In the middle of the town?’

  This was a question that had vexed many people’s minds. Some thought it had swum into Oslo fjord. The most stupid claimed it had come through the sewers. The hunter in Gabelsgate said it had come from Nordmarka in the autumn and found itself a place to hibernate and slept there all winter.

  ‘Doesn’t matter how it got here,’ I said. ‘The fact of the matter is that it’s here. We have to find it.’

  We trekked down Drammensveien and I knew where to search. We should search the land in Robsahmhagen, between Gabelsgate and Niels Juels gate, where the old wooden house was, with the storeroom and the stable. If it was a badger, it would be there.

  We met the hunter. He was coming out of a gateway and looked frenzied, walking as if he had lead between his toes and this was not too far from the truth.

  ‘Have you found anything?’ I asked.

  ‘We’re on its trail,’ he said. ‘We’ve observed droppings. The dogs have its scent.’

  He was pulling a couple of dogs, he was not the only one, dogs were sniffing everywhere, they were dragging their tongues along the ground and wagging stiff tails.

  He looked at my feet.

  ‘You don’t go out on a badger hunt wearing casual footwear,’ he jeered.

  I had my new boots on, suede, pointed, quite high heels, iron tips, didn’t take a step without them.

  He pointed to his boots.

  ‘See! Rubber boots! With coke inside! If the badger bites, it’ll make his jaw crunch, my lad! Hence the coke. It’ll let go as soon as it hears the sound of coke!’

  He cast a contemptuous glance at my boots and waddled down the street with the dogs panting behind him.

  I knew the way to Robsahmhagen and would find the badger first. We crept through a few gardens, clambered over a fence, and there we were, in the filthy slush, in the middle of the reserve, in the middle of Oslo, a little ridge, tall trees, the large wooden house, the stable and the storeroom on pillars.

  ‘Where are we?’ Cecilie whispered as though we were somewhere sacred.

  ‘The badger has to be here,’ I mumbled into her ear, she smelt good, had to grab her, she wriggled out of my grasp with a smile.

  ‘What will you do if you find it?’

  I hadn’t considered that.

  ‘Come on,’ I said.

  We crept this way, then that, no one saw us from the house, we didn’t see anyone, either. Darkness began to settle. We could barely see each other and I switched on a torch.

  Cecilie stood in the light.

  ‘Is it dangerous?’ she asked.

  I didn’t know much about badgers.

  ‘Dangerous? A badger! It’s no bigger than a frog!’

  I shone the light around me. Snow, brown grass, trees, branches. We stood still and listened. Only heard the tram in Drammensveien.

  Then the light caught a wire netting door that had been ripped through and some steps leading down into the ground.

  Cecilie clutched my arm and pointed.

  ‘It’s bound to be there,’ she said.

  I shone the torch away, lit up a fence.

  She guided my hand back to the door.

  ‘It must be there,’ she repeated, pulling me along.

  We stopped by the old air-raid shelter.

  ‘You’ll have to go down,’ she said.

  ‘Badgers don’t live in houses,’ I ventured. ‘They build lairs.’

  Cecilie looked at me.

  ‘You go first,’ she said.

  I tried to hold the torch still, but had to use both hands. I shone the torch down the steps. They were steep. At the bottom there was a half-open door.

  ‘Come on then,’ Cecilie prompted, impatient.

  Didn’t she know, wasn’t she aware, that no one in the whole of Frogner would have dared go down? Some had gone as far as the door. They had never been the same since. Even during the War of the Staple, despite being surrounded on all sides, no one had dared hide in there. It was said there was a German in there, a German who hid there when the war was over.

&nbs
p; I shone the torch down the steps.

  Cecilie nudged me forward.

  I started to walk. The steps in front of me jumped in the torch light. Cecilie was right behind me. I stopped at the half-open iron door.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Cecilie.

  I opened the door. The creaking sound was terrible. I shone inside. The beam lit up a pitted wall, pitted with bullet holes, a pile of planks, a box, another door.

  Cecilie pushed me. I went on. It was quiet, as if the world around us no longer existed. I gripped the torch tightly, stood by the next door.

  I held my breath. I held my breath and my heart pounded inside me. The veins throbbed in my hand, pulsated in my neck. Fear washed through me, red and burning.

  Cecilie was right behind me.

  I cast the light into the next room.

  I went in.

  Cecilie stayed where she was.

  The smell hit me at once. An acrid stench that stung my nose. My hand went walkabout, the light floated round and when I finally had it under control I found myself looking into the eyes of a furious badger. It was lying across the floor and stabbed its pointed features in my direction growling feebly like a sick dog. I stood rooted to the floor, the foul stench in my nostrils, then I slowly retreated, but my back didn’t meet the door, I backed straight into the clammy wall and was stuck there.

  I shone the torch at the badger.

  It glided towards me as if it had no feet. It flashed its teeth, red and white, I slid sideways along the wall, tripped over something, screamed, but was unable to utter a sound. The badger crawled closer, the stench became more and more overpowering. I was trapped in a corner. The badger came closer. Sweat poured down my back. The terror came from below, like a precipice. I was in a corner. The badger came closer, black, white, with bristles protruding from each cheek like antennae. I flashed the torch at it, I didn’t dare do anything else, didn’t dare let it lie there in the dark, didn’t dare stand in the dark. We exchanged flashes. Then it rushed towards me, scraping along the floor. I squeezed into the corner, felt the rough, clammy angled walls against my shoulders and head. It crawled towards my legs, the stench made my eyes water, then it came to a sudden halt. It stopped, got its foul-smelling mouth into position and ran its snout across my feet. I was jammed in a corner with a badger smelling me. It sniffed and snuffled for an eternity with its revolting pointed snout, it seemed to be smiling, grinning, then it turned its backside to me, sat on my boots and rubbed for a good long time, never seemed to finish. I was shaking, I shone the light on the crazy animal rubbing itself clean on my immaculate boots. Then, satisfied, it crawled into another corner from where I heard squeaking and whimpering. I followed the badger on the floor, up onto some twigs and leaves, and there lay four furless carcasses with pink heads and gummed-up eyes. I stood watching. The smell rose up my nostrils like a putrid column. Then I heard Cecilie’s voice, she was shouting to me from somewhere in the dark. I pointed the torch and followed the sound.

  We scampered up the steps.

  ‘You found it,’ Cecilie said.

  I shone the beam on her.

  I could hardly breathe.

  ‘You bastard,’ I said.

  Her eyes went strange in the light.

  ‘You bastard!’ I shouted.

  She looked straight at me, she didn’t understand what I was saying.

  I had blood in my throat, I was bringing it up, acidic and grey. My voice was slurred.

  ‘I’m not some plaything!’ I shrieked. ‘You can’t just get me to do whatever takes your whim! D’you understand?’

  I walked down Gabelsgate. She followed. My ears were pounding, as though my forehead was too small, too tight. I stopped again and shone the beam on her.

  ‘I’m not your servant!’ I yelled.

  Cecilie stood stock still. The torch shook. I hurt, right out to my extremities, right out to my mangled finger.

  ‘What did you do to it?’ she asked, touching me.

  And before I could answer, I was surrounded by furious dogs. They came from all sides with evil, gleaming eyes and drooling jaws, they growled and groaned and gnashed their teeth, and their coats bristled. That was too much for me, I ran, but they came after me, an army of dogs, and in the end they were all over me, barking round my feet, biting at the leather, pulling and tugging. In the end I peeled off one of my boots and threw it over a fence. The dogs bounded after it, howling.

  Cecilie was standing at the top of the street.

  I limped home.

  The next day, my boot was returned. Cecilie brought it with her to school. She had repaired and impregnated it.

  ‘Almost as good as new,’ she smiled.

  It was not. It looked like a biscuit someone had chewed and spat out.

  She gave me back the boot and I stood in the playground feeling like a mentally deficient shoemaker.

  Cecilie just laughed.

  ‘I’m not angry at you,’ she said.

  I looked at her in amazement. She wasn’t angry? At me? Didn’t understand.

  She picked some strands of tobacco off my jacket. Peder and Slippery Leif were standing by the fountain scowling with incomprehension.

  ‘Don’t give it another thought,’ she said. ‘I’m not angry.’

  A host of thoughts whirled around my head, but the foremost image in my mind was Carlsberg: the distance, the subservience, the loyalty, the manicured lawn, the black servant’s long fingers.

  She had stunned me into silence.

  ‘Aren’t you going to try it on?’ she persisted.

  I whipped off my slip-on and stuck my foot in the boot. Didn’t fit at all.

  With a resigned laugh, she said, ‘Wrong foot!’

  I forced my toes in, the big toe cracked.

  ‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘Perfect.’

  After the badger, of course, nothing could be the same again. My boot lay at the back of the wardrobe, bitten to pieces and disfigured, unwearable, like some hidden shame lying there in the dark, and I had to wear slip-ons for the rest of the spring and felt very flat-footed. But Cecilie came to school with her thin legs in red high-heeled shoes as if she was keen to humiliate me even more, she strode around like a wading bird in the pond, all the frogs drooled in the reeds, and me, I splashed after her with webbed feet and a snorkel and a diving suit that was much too tight, I began to get low on oxygen, but I followed, it seemed almost to amuse her, I didn’t really understand everything that was going on that spring. My mother, nonplussed, wondered what had happened to my boots, I said I had tripped over a barbed wire fence when we were hunting the badger, it would have been impossible to retell the whole story, about the German hiding in the air-raid shelter in 1945, she would never have believed me. But I told the story to Granddad at the old folks home one afternoon when I was alone with him and a bag of oranges. He chuckled for three quarters of an hour and told me badgers’ bristles were used to make shaving brushes in the old days. He stroked his rough chin and nodded for a long time. Didn’t get brushes like that any more. Badger was the best. But I had an electric razor and zero beard.

  One day Cecilie wanted me to go with her to town after school to buy clothes. It was April, the snow was gone, there was the faint smell of spring in the air, patches of green.

  Cecilie grabbed my arm.

  ‘What happened to the badgers?’ she asked, straight out, as though nothing had happened.

  ‘They were put in a zoo somewhere in Sørland,’ I answered, ruffled.

  We walked past the American embassy. I spat on the pavement three times.

  ‘Pig,’ Cecilie said.

  We stopped in Universitetsplass. Someone had erected a huge tent there and it wasn’t the scouts. We took a closer look. The square was packed with people. A horrible sound locked itself onto your ear, it was like an impaled heart, beating and throbbing without end. It was the counting mechanism by the entrance. For every heartbeat a number rose with a clock-like tick. In luminous letters the sign said: The populatio
n of the earth has increased by 100,054 people since nine o’clock today. While we read, there were forty-three more. We looked at each other. Wow. We went into the tent.

  There were large photographs on all the walls showing pollution, the population explosion, cars, motorways, factories and coffee plantations. We walked in silence and took it all in, it was not very cheerful viewing. We were living on a time bomb. We were living in a sewer. We were shitting on our own food. We were digging our own graves. The earth we had inherited and for which we should be so grateful was just a dirty tennis ball smashed out of court in the first set. There were new images for my darkroom, for my cabinet of horrors. The photographs burned a stronger pessimism in my eyes than the optimistic messages the texts tried to convey. They said we could do something about the situation, about the crisis. The whole thing was a political question, a question of economics, distribution, power, profit, solidarity. All the time I could hear the throb of the counting mechanism, another heartbeat every second, several times a second, adding to the global choir of screams.

  Cecilie beckoned me over to another wall. It was an overview of contraceptive devices. It looked like cutlery for a big meal. Condoms, coils, pessaries, the pill. I discreetly felt my back pocket, my wallet, where I kept my Rubin Extra, pink, purchased some time at the beginning of the Stone Age, ordered in the name of Nordahl Rolfsen and never paid for. The pack of twelve was still complete.

  48,246 people were born while we were there. The Band of the Royal Guards came down Karl Johan and drowned the heartbeats.

  ‘Would you like to have children at some point?’ Cecilie said.

  ‘No,’ I said, hearing my heart beat in my ear. ‘Never.’

  It was a strange spring. It arrived without Jensenius. There was something missing that spring, it was like a spring without birds. May 1 was around the corner and Stig harangued every one of us, the meeting place for the Red Front procession was outside the electricity station at two thirty, the main slogans were No to VAT, Oppose the TUC’s class co-operation policy, NATO out of Norway, Full support for the triumphant Vietnamese people! Gunnar would be there, naturally, Ola had to study maths, Seb promised to come too, but it was never easy to know what Seb would get up to, life jumped the rails that spring for Seb after his parents got divorced. He put his harmonica on the shelf, it was The Doors now, Waiting For The Sun, did nothing but quote Jim Morrison, turned up zonked for a couple of lessons and was skiving school big-time. Seb couldn’t give a shit that spring. But he would try to come. Yep. If they let him in. Seb grinned from under his wispy moustache. Stig interrogated me. But it was difficult because I had received an invitation, I was pretty taken aback, an invitation from Cecilie to dine at her house on May 1. I told Stig that I would make every effort to turn up, but when May 1 came and the Internationale boomed out from Solli plass, I was making my way towards Bygdøy in freshly pressed cords and a tweed jacket wondering what the hell the purpose of this was.