‘Spotlight, yes. Aren’t you joinin’ the drama group?’
He had me.
‘Ye-ah. One line.’
‘And so you don’t want to hand out leaflets?’
‘Didn’t say I didn’t want to.’
‘What are you sayin’? Do you think the revolutionary movement has time for such trivialities? Monopoly capitalism is earnin’ fat profits on that crap. Are you gonna distribute leaflets or not?’
‘Give me them, you bugger.’
He counted a hundred of each and grinned.
‘Good, comrade Kim. You’ll get another pack next month.’
I put the leaflets in the drawer where I used to hide pornographic films in the old days, and Gunnar was already on his way out. A wild sound came from the sitting room. He stopped and looked at me.
‘It’s just Pym,’ I said.
‘Pym?’
‘Dad’s budgie.’
In fact, he had taught it to whistle on command now. He coaxed the notes out of the poor green creature by chirping himself. Sometimes I wondered who had the upper hand, wondered whether it might be Pym who was making Dad sing. It was beginning to get on my nerves.
We stood listening for a while, Gunnar and I. Now Dad was whistling.
‘Not havin’ a great time, our fathers, are they,’ Gunnar whispered.
I shook my head.
‘Dad’s on the point of packin’ it in. And Mum’s joined a Christian sewin’ circle.’
That was when I noticed Gunnar was trying to grow a beard.
‘Can lend you my mower,’ I grinned, stroking his chin.
He blushed and hurried out of the room. In the hall my mother was staring at the badges on his jacket. He had the full complement: Marx, Engels, Lenin, Mao, Ho Chi Minh, FNL. Gunnar puffed out his chest and then scooted off.
Mum held me back.
‘Is Gunnar a Young Socialist?’ she said.
It sounded so comical. She said it as though it were a venereal disease, worse than syphilis, incurable and contagious for many generations to come. I think she felt she ought to wash her mouth out with turps after saying it. Young Socialists. Her lips were cracking.
‘What are you laughing at?’ she shouted.
‘Nothing.’
‘You didn’t answer. Is Gunnar… a Young Socialist?’
She rubbed the back of her hand across her mouth.
‘Don’t know,’ I said.
‘Are you?’
Pym and Dad were whistling in unison.
‘Are you?!’ Mum repeated, sounding demented.
‘No,’ I said.
‘They do weapon training, you know! In Nordmarka. They’ve got supplies of arms!’
‘I don’t know anything about that.’
‘They said so on TV!’
‘If you believe everything they say on the box, things are in a bad way.’
I made a beeline for my room.
Mum stomped after me.
‘Are you suffering from nerves, Kim?’
‘Nerves? Why?’
‘You walk so fast. I’ve noticed that for a long time now. You walk… as though someone’s after you!’
‘Take it easy now, Mum. There’s no one following me, is there!’
‘Are you sure you’re not taking drugs?’
‘Have you read that somewhere too? That addicts walk fast, eh?’
‘Answer me honestly, Kim!’
‘I’ve just been elected to the Supreme Soviet and I’ve been a junkie for nine years.’
I slammed the door behind me. Mum tore it open.
‘Don’t you dare talk to me like that, Kim! Don’t you dare!’
‘And you keep your hands off my wallet. From now on I want my contraceptives left alone!’
Her face fell, all her strength seemed to ebb away, she slowly closed the door.
Then she ran into the sitting room and I heard a medley of her sobs and Dad and Pym.
Those were the days.
After the class party which I did not attend I was met by glares everywhere I went, I became agitated, I was unable to take a step in peace, felt the eyes all over my body, like suckers. In one break Beate ambled up to me and stood there with that vinegary smile of hers and faced me down.
‘Shame you couldn’t come to the class party,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said, staring beyond her. Over by the rubbish bins there was a group of girls grinning and whispering.
‘You’re such fun at parties, aren’t you?’ Beate continued.
I scented a crisis looming and began to look for a way out.
‘False rumours,’ I said.
‘It was in the school paper,’ she cooed.
‘The editor got the boot,’ I parried.
‘But you and Jørgen had a cosy time, did you?’
My voice stuck in my throat. Beate tossed back her hair.
‘There he is by the way. I won’t disturb you.’
She wiggled back to the circle, they stood watching Jørgen and me.
‘What the hell did the bitch mean by that?!’ I said.
‘Nothing to worry about,’ Jørgen mumbled. ‘Have you learned your line?’
‘Napoleon’s comin’! Think she’s got it in for me. Why’s Beate so bloody pissed off with me, eh?’
‘You have to put more feeling into the words, Kim. You have to make the audience quake!’
The bell rang and we trooped off to class. There was a suspicious silence when we arrived, a gasp ran through the rows. Jørgen took his seat, distant, condescending, superior. I stopped, stared at the blackboard. Dick was there, a strapping lad from Smestad, closeset eyes, he had drawn a large heart and written names inside. Jørgen + Kim. Something hot and painful descended into my stomach, my head burned. The laughter exploded and Dick stood there, grinning proudly, the laughter washed over me, sticky and sour like mildewed syrup, wet sugar, I had to fight my way out of the laughter lava streaming from their gaping, red, slavering mouths.
‘Wipe it off,’ I said.
The class went quiet.
Dick wrote on the board: Please leave!
The laughter burst out anew, I was drowning in the laughter, gasping for air and I knew I was on the point of losing control.
Dick walked back to his desk. I stopped him. He peered down at me. Then I spat into his face, a magnificent, thick green gobbet.
It went quiet again. A squeal of surprise emerged from Dick, he raised his hands.
Then I struck. I hit him with a force I never knew I possessed. My arm was a bomb, a canon, my fist an iron ball, and Dick folded in the middle like a french loaf. I grabbed him by the scruff of his neck, hauled him up to the board and wiped it with his face and hair.
The room was stunned into silence.
Blood and fury raged through my veins.
I let Dick go and sat down. Jørgen was white, motionless. No one looked at me.
The teacher burst in as Dick was crawling along the floor. I had to keep a firm hold on my chair. The backwash was on the point of dragging me through the window.
‘What’s going on here?’ Klausen whined.
No one answered. There was a two-fold silence. Dick lugged himself onto his chair. Klausen tapped with her pointer and then she began to talk about case and conjugations.
So I no longer had a low profile, I was as visible as a rose-painted monolith. But strangely enough I was not pestered any more, they directed their suckers elsewhere now, Jørgen and I were left in peace. I was allowed to go in peace in the way a leper is: everyone avoids him. Everyone knows what he is like. Jørgen was the only person who wanted to know anything about me. He didn’t once make any mention of the drawing on the board.
Things continued like this until I lost my self-confidence. I quite simply lost my confidence and couldn’t bring myself to distribute leaflets at the gate, it was like putting yourself in the firing line, I couldn’t do it. I lied to Gunnar’s face and accepted more leaflets about rationalisation at school, VAT, class
cooperation, Vietnam, the pile grew in the drawer, my bad conscience grew in my stomach, I had the same feeling I had when I didn’t eat the packed lunches my mother made and they swelled in my school bag, green and foulsmelling. I couldn’t bring myself to throw away the leaflets, either. Every day I put it off. Soon I would be wading in leaflets and I still hadn’t received an answer from Nina, the only letter I had received was from the army, I would be summoned to a call-up medical in April next year.
My mother was overjoyed when she heard I had joined the drama group. She changed from that very instant, as though she had snapped her fingers and decided to trust me in the future, not a word about Young Socialists or drugs, she just talked about the theatre and said something very similar to what Jørgen had said, that the theatre was the truth. I didn’t quite understand that, but I was relieved that my mother had calmed down and would not be having a nervous breakdown every time I went to the toilet or picked my nose. But the truth they had talked about, I couldn’t see that. Sometimes I lay awake at night thinking about what truth was, I did, and I tried to list a few examples. Dick is a shit. But Beate certainly didn’t think so. She was positive I was the shit. The Beatles is the best group in the world. But my mother and father definitely did not agree. I compressed my thoughts: I am me. My brain was steaming. Who the hell was I? Who was I in others’ eyes? Jørgen’s? Gunnar’s? Was I just as many people as there were eyes? In Nina’s?
Didn’t sleep a lot on such nights.
There were many such nights.
And I didn’t discover the truth in the drama group, either. That was for certain. We rehearsed in the gym every Thursday. The coach was a huge woman with a bosom that projected into the room like the Alps. Her name was Minni. She insisted that War and Peace was about people today even though it had been written in the previous century. Tolstoy was ahead of his time, like all great artists. As background music she had chosen Jan Johansson’s Jazz in Russian, she almost went weak at the knees at the brilliance of her own idea: it would give the audience a hint that the play was also about our time, wouldn’t it. I suggested projecting pictures from The War Game on a big canvas in the background, but that didn’t meet with approval, on the contrary, it was a pathetic idea. One must not frighten the audience, alienate them, it was a balancing act, a balancing act between war and peace, between the performers and the audience, as Minni expressed it. That sounded impressive. And I was searching for the truth, but I could not find it. Tolstoy’s brick of a novel had been planed down to a one-act show. Jørgen played someone called Pierre. His counterpart was a girl from the second class, Astrid, she was to bring Natasha to life. There were nine others plus me, the messenger with one fateful line. In Tolstoy’s novel there were a good five hundred characters.
But we all looked forward to receiving our costumes from the National Theatre.
Seb’s place was jumping and I didn’t want to be part of it. A grotty clique sat there smoking spliffs and drinking tea, hookahs were gurgling and chillums puffing, and incense hung in the room like the smoke spewed out of a perfume factory chimney. I dropped by some nights but soon gave it a miss, don’t know quite what it was, I was bored with them sitting there, wasted, not looking at each other, just picking fluff out of their navels, putting on mystical smiles and rolling their eyes. Solo sprints in their heads, ego trips on package tours. But one evening Seb had swept the Slottsparken crew off the floor, it was going to be the great night, it was set up to be the greatest night for many years. Gunnar was there, without his leaflets, Ola was there, didn’t bat an eyelid when we called him Gigola. And Seb was compos mentis and freshly scrubbed. We were all there and on the turntable was the new Beatles LP Abbey Road. We passed the cover round, scrutinised it minutely, ran our fingertips over it. The silence was pregnant with hot anticipation, it was now or never. We pinned back our ears, Seb started the record player and we didn’t say a word for forty-six minutes and twenty seconds. Then we lay on the floor, burnt out, staring at the ceiling with eyes closed, and each of us, every one of us, wondered for how many years, how many LPs, we had lain like that, a whole century rushed through our brains, a pile of calendars flipped their pages through our hearts. We were drained and happy. Then we lit the goodies, Capstan laid a smokescreen around the room and comments were fired off from all sides. Seb’s two songs were the best he had ever done, he had surpassed himself, produced two pearls from the oyster, the tunes sat like silver coils in our ears. Gunnar rocked his socks off on ‘I Want You’ and was pretty heavy on ‘Come Together’. Even Ola had knocked together a groove that was up there, ‘Octopus’s Garden’, he lay on his back with a proud smile winding round his face.
‘I’m gonna join the navy after all!’ he shouted. ‘I’m gonna join up!’
And I loved the singing on ‘Oh Darling!’, the voice was on the point of breaking, but it didn’t, it hovered and quivered towards the impossible, on the brink, on the brink. And on ‘Because’ all the voices intertwine, they were the best harmonies we had ever heard, the Beach Boys and Sølvguttene could pack up their larynxes and start tap dancing instead. We put it on again and didn’t say a word for forty-six minutes and twenty seconds. Then we played the B-side again and there was no doubt. It was the best. It wasn’t necessary to say anything. It was the best. It was The Beatles. We dispatched all impure thoughts into the cellar, about splitting up, about arguing, and we worked ourselves up into a state of extreme optimism: this was just the beginning. We were on the threshold of a new calendar: from 28 October 1969, one bitterly cold evening between autumn and winter. We began to talk about The Snafus again, perhaps it wasn’t too late after all, the hell it was. After sailing through our final exams we could soon find a job to earn some cash for instruments and amplifiers. Ola was already there. Fantastic. Seb had a pile of songs already written. Neat. That was how we spoke, we raised each other’s spirits and held them there, we had a bedsit in heaven, it was late at night and the sun was shining all around us, we were floating in light and music and the vibes were as gentle as a kitten’s paws.
Then the door creaked and the comedown started. Pelle and the gang burst in with bloodstained faces and torn jackets. They stood there swaying and were way off course.
‘The pigs cleared the park,’ Pelle groaned. ‘Shit. Went berserk. Must have had fly agaric soup for supper.’
The boss had spoken and they collapsed on the floor. Scattering earth from their hair and clothes.
‘They arrested at least twenty of us,’ whispered a white-faced jessie.
‘Did you have anythin’ on you?’ Seb asked nervously.
Pelle gave a little smile and pulled out an oval tin.
‘The gods are with me. I sought shelter behind Camilla Collett. Said I was her grandson.’
He put the tin on the table and the others crowded round it, went down on their knees as if it were a damned altar. Gunnar looked annoyed, Ola tried to put a record on.
Pelle pointed to the cover with a filthy finger.
‘A con,’ he scoffed. ‘Abbey Road is utter junk.’
He fiddled with the tin and removed the lid.
Now Chief Sitting Bull had gone too far.
‘What do you mean by that?’ I demanded to know, and pronto.
He squinted at me, screwing up his face as if it were a dishcloth.
‘Paul McCartney’s dead,’ he said. ‘He isn’t on the record at all.’
I couldn’t believe my own ears. They froze to ice. They fell off. Ola and Gunnar inched closer.
‘Dead? When?’
‘Four years ago. Car accident.’
‘Four years! He wasn’t on Sergeant Pepper either, then! Or Revolver! Come down to earth, you flyin’ Dutchman!’
Pelle rolled his eyes and held a pill in the air.
‘Got a cousin in the States who knows a chick in the Midwest.’
‘Last time it was a chick who had a cousin!’ I yelled.
Pelle interrupted.
‘It was in the papers, pea-br
ain. He died in a car accident in ’65. So they got hold of a guy who looked like the guy and used him instead.’
‘Who could sing just the same as Paul too! Are you a complete idiot or what!’
‘The boys in the studio fix that, you know, you turnip. Distortion and so on.’
Pelle’s composure was getting on my nerves. I could see that he had the ace of spades up his sleeve.
He placed the LP sleeve in front of him on the floor.
‘Look here, mister. McCartney’s left-handed, isn’t he. D’you think a left-handed person’d hold a cigarette in their right hand? And McCartney isn’t walkin’ in synch with the others. Eh? Is he! Now keep up, brother. He’s barefoot. And that’s an ancient symbol of death. Right from Vikin’ times, man.’
Pelle looked around with a triumphant expression. My eyes were burning like dry ice. Couldn’t get a word out.
Pelle snapped his fingers.
‘And look at his clothes. John’s dressed in white like a priest. Ringo’s dressed in black, mournin’ clothes. And George’s in workin’ gear, he’s the gravedigger.’
Pelle rolled a pill in his hand.
‘Can you see the VW there? Have a good look at the number plate, man. 28IF. Black on yellow. Paul would’ve been twenty-eight, if he’d lived. What about that?’
I had to counter-attack.
‘Why are they showin’ that now, eh?’ I stammered. ‘When he’s been dead for four years!’
‘Because The Beatles are washed up, anyway. The Beatles have split up, man. Can’t you get that into your skull?’
I could have strangled Pelle on the spot, grabbed the broad leather belt he swanked around in and strung him up from the lamp.
‘Not only that,’ he continued. ‘Not only that, this isn’t the first time they’ve presented him in this way.’
He eased Sergeant Pepper out of the pile, turned it over and pointed.
‘Can you see the badge on Paul’s shoulder? OPD. You know any English? Because that stands for Officially Pronounced Dead.’
I crumbled. The pipe was cold. My head was a blasted plain. My blood crept through my body like an earthworm.
Pelle grinned.