On their way home they stopped by the bus station, where there was an ice machine in the middle of the square, and his grandfather put two kroner in the slot and a big block of ice slid down, and it was so cold you would burn your hands if you touched it. Grandfather wrapped it in coarse sacking and put it in the front of the Long John delivery bike.
‘If you lean against it you’ll get a cold shoulder,’ he said, and burst into laughter again, but Arvid kept his distance, for the ice was as hard as a diamond and cold as the North Pole, and with a shiver he felt the goose-pimples spreading, and his grandfather cycled as fast as he could to get home before the ice started melting in the sun. Back in the shop, he put it in the box on top of the ice chest. Then they went up to have breakfast with the others.
Grandmother came from the kitchen with the large coffee pot in one hand while the other tried to catch a loose lock of hair from the bun at the back of her head. Her mouth was fine now, but her eyes were red-rimmed as she poured the coffee and milk into Arvid’s cup. Gry was squirming on her chair and his mother was staring stiffly out of the window. Finally she turned to Arvid and said: ‘Look at you, boy! Go and change your shirt!’
Arvid rose from the table, went into the bedroom, tugged off the Hawaiian shirt and slung it into the corner with as much force as he could. He rummaged through the suitcase and found the Texas shirt, put it on and went back to the table.
After breakfast Grandfather went to his workshop to finish a dresser he had promised for the day before.
‘No children allowed,’ he said, and was gone down the stairs.
They cleared the table and Gry and his mother went to help Grandmother in the shop and his father and Arvid fetched their bikes. They cycled down Lodsgade, alongside the harbour and headed out of town. Frydenstrand Hotel towered up behind a scruffy willow hedge and was white and ghost-like, with boarded-up windows, and Arvid was glad to turn away from it and into Strandvejen. The tall poplar trees rose above them, sunlight filtered through the foliage forming yellow pools on the tarmac, and they cycled right through them, and the sea spread out vast and grey in the distance, and ahead of them stood the lighthouse on the low island and was a raised index finger on the horizon. The old kiosk wasn’t open yet, so they cycled past it, and past the jetty and right out to where the tarmac ended and the gravel road began. There they dropped their bikes in the lyme grass and walked down to the beach. It was wide and a greyish-brown, stretching as far as he could see, and was lovelier than anywhere else he had been.
Arvid’s father held his hand, and although it was embarrassing, Arvid didn’t pull his hand away. Behind them they left two lines of footprints, one big and one small, Robinson Crusoe and Man Friday out scouting to see if a ship would come and take them off this godforsaken island. But it wasn’t an island, it was Denmark and the lighthouse didn’t quite fit the scene.
Along the beach a belt of rushes rippled in the wind, like a green river, like the Mississippi in Huckleberry Finn, if you thought about it and wanted it enough, and whenever you walked back from the beach, you could see the mouth of a creek dividing the rushes, and there were small boats lying there reflected in a zigzag pattern in the brackish water.
He tore himself from his father’s hand and ran up the beach, turned so fast the sand flared out, and he ran back and said in a breathless voice: ‘Dad?’
Yes?’
‘I need a pee.’
‘Just have a pee then. You can go to the edge of the rushes and pee. That’s a good place.’
Arvid went to the edge of the rushes and peed. It was nice to pee outdoors. He only did it in the summer and only when he was here.
‘Peeing outdoors is being on holiday,’ Dad said, looking as if he had just proclaimed one of the Ten Commandments, from where he stood smoking a cigarette and gazing at the lighthouse. Then he threw the butt into a wave that lapped up against the shore, almost reaching their feet before retreating. The cigarette went out with a hiss and Arvid’s father said: ‘If you ever start smoking, Arvid, you must do what I do. Only smoke in the holidays because smoking damages your body and you shouldn’t let that happen. Your body is a gift.’
‘I know,’ Arvid said, and then he said, ‘Oh no!’
‘What’s up?’
‘I peed a bit in my trousers when I was doing up my flies.’
‘Never mind. You know what they say: no matter how hard you shake your peg, the last drop goes down your leg.’
His father laughed and Arvid laughed too, although he didn’t think it was all that funny and when he saw from his father’s face that he thought it was extremely funny, he could feel himself blushing.
It was out here he first realised he could swim. One day he just fell forward into the water and moved his arms and legs and he was off. So long as he kept his back arched and didn’t lose his nerve he was fine, but his mother, who saw what he was doing, said: ‘That’s all very good, Arvid, but don’t you ever swim beyond the third sandbank, there are dangerous riptides out there!’ And she told him about the German tourist who had been showing off and hadn’t listened to what people said. He had been caught by a riptide and pulled down to the bottom. They never found him, his mother said, and it happened just after the War, so God knows how hard they tried.
The following nights Arvid dreamed about the German who disappeared: a white arm sticking out of the sea in the distance and him standing on land shouting: ‘Achtung, Schweinehund!’ again and again, which were the only words in German he knew.
But that was several years ago, it was low tide now and the first two sandbanks rose from the sea. From afar they looked like the crests of waves, but up close the sea was still, and above what appeared to be the tips of the waves, there were long lines of gulls strutting along on dry land.
He got up from the rock they were sitting on and ran into the water, gym shoes and all. He waved his arms and shouted and the white birds took off and merged into flapping clouds making one hell of a racket. He screamed and the gulls screamed back and began to circle like a tornado, he leaned back and looked up and it was wonderful, but as he waded back across the shallows, his mouth felt dry, his trousers were soaking wet and inside his shoes wet sand chafed against the soles of his feet.
‘Damn it, Arvid, couldn’t you have taken your shoes off first?’ his father said, but Arvid shrugged and answered: ‘Why is Grandmother crying?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Why is Grandmother crying and why does Mum get so angry every time we come here?’
‘Do they? I haven’t noticed,’ his father said and blushed, and he looked very uncomfortable.
‘Right, sure you haven’t,’ Arvid said, and walked towards his bike, picked it up, climbed on and cycled down the gravel road. It was difficult to stay upright because nothing had been done to this road for at least twenty years. There were rocks sticking up that caught the wheels, he almost came off, and he was barely round the first bend and there, straight ahead on a field, a hare was sitting with its ears sticking up like two antennae.
He stopped and left the bike in the ditch, lay down and began to crawl across the field. The hare watched him, but it didn’t move, and very silently he drew closer and slowly stretched out his arm, and he said so softly in a tone of voice he had never heard himself use before: ‘Hey, little hare, hey, come over here.’ He reached out his arm and held it there for a long time, and it wasn’t heavy because he put all his strength into the arm until it glowed and felt like a magnet, and the hare jumped twice and was suddenly very close, its nose touched his hand, he made a grab for it and the hare shot off towards the beach like a bullet. He let his arm fall, and his face sank into the sandy earth.
There was the clatter of a bike behind him.
‘Hey, Arvid, what are you doing?’
‘Nothing,’ he murmured into the ground, and his lips were covered in sand, and he heard his father put down his bike and stride across the grass. A shadow fell over his body and he felt his father’s hand
on his head.
‘Hey, come on, what’s up?’ his father said, and Arvid jumped up spitting sand, and he yelled:
‘Don’t you touch me!’
TORO! TORO!
ARVID AND MOGENS raced along the road by the beach. Arvid on his second-hand Svithun and Mogens on his standard black Danish boneshaker with the laughably small luggage rack. They stopped at the old kiosk and each bought a Giant Eskimo and pedalled on with one hand holding the ice cream and the other pointing to the sky, which was fine because the bikes themselves knew where they were going. The chocolate ice cream tasted cold and good and vaguely of seaweed, and they heard the wind in the poplars and the distant voices of shimmering shapes against the light walking in the shallows with forks and buckets digging for fat worms in the sand that had just been exposed.
The sea could be grey or green or close to brown, but today it was shiny and blue, and that meant it wasn’t so warm. But the sun was boiling hot, and the sky and the ocean merged on the horizon, and you couldn’t see where one finished and the other started, it was like a huge silk blanket, soft and cool, and if you were close to your body and you weren’t fat or old, but were a boy and had your body wrapped tight around you, you could throw yourself into that blanket with all your strength and return just as whole.
And that’s what they did. They jumped off their bikes as they were still moving and let them carry on until they toppled over and landed in the grass next to each other, and Arvid and Mogens changed into bathing trunks while eating what was left of the ice cream. They ran along the brown rotting timbers of the old jetty that they feared might collapse beneath them and as they dived from the edge they threw the lolly sticks which hung like butterflies in all the blue.
Mogens was thirteen and a half, and Arvid first met him in the toilet. He had taken the key from the bottom of the stairs and walked across the yard, but when he was about to turn the key he saw the door wasn’t locked, so he opened it and there was Mogens sitting on the toilet with his trousers down below his knees, reading a magazine.
‘Hi, my name’s Mogens,’ Mogens said. ‘Have you read this? What rubbish!’ He waved the newspaper and Arvid could see it was one of Grandmother’s missionary magazines. He agreed; he had read papers that were more fun.
He went out to wait until Mogens was finished and when Mogens came out he said: ‘Let’s go for a swim.’
Then they went for a swim, and now they had done that so many times.
Mogens was taller than Arvid, his body was full of sinews and muscles, he was in a sports team at school and did loads of training, and when he wanted to point out something to Arvid, he placed the hand he wasn’t pointing with on Arvid’s shoulder and held it there until he had finished explaining. Arvid didn’t know what to think about that, except that he could feel the hand, even after Mogens had removed it.
Mogens’ father was a welder down at the shipyard, where they drank beer and aquavit in the lunch break, and Arvid liked Mogens so much because he came out with so many unexpected things and had such a tongue on him and could be so foul-mouthed with Arvid, without him taking offence. Mogens could cycle faster than Arvid, but Arvid was a better swimmer, and that was fine by Mogens.
‘You idiot. I can see your bollocks!’ Mogens was the first in the sea, he was treading water and stared right up into Arvid’s crotch as Arvid came after him with a monster jump. Arvid didn’t blush, because Mogens was the only person who could say ‘bollocks’ out loud without making him embarrassed, and Mogens was right of course, he had put on his trunks so quickly they weren’t on straight, and he hit the sea with a happy snigger. He adjusted his trunks before he came up again to the surface.
‘Hey, watch out for the jellyfish!’ Mogens shouted, and Arvid rolled over like a seal, narrowly avoiding an orange creature the size of a serving platter. Fortunately the current was moving in the opposite direction and the stinging tentacles billowed past Arvid, and he thought, how strange that such a thing is alive.
They raced each other back to the beach under the jetty and Arvid counted the posts the whole way in, seeing nothing else, and he gave it all he had and when his belly scraped the sandy bottom he had swum past more than twenty and was several metres ahead.
They were sitting in the sun drying off, but the sun was cold and his body was slowly going stiff.
‘Your back looks like a plucked chicken,’ Mogens said. ‘Let’s run, come on!’
The beach was several kilometres long and they could run as far as they wanted, slowly at first for a good while, then a spurt, the heat pounding through their legs and up their backs to their shoulders, it was like oiling all the joints and their legs were going like pistons. There’s nothing like being almost twelve years old, he thought, nothing! And he threw his arms into the air and shouted: ‘Viva Garibaldi!’ to the sea and the island. Mogens came to a sudden halt in front of him and hurled him to the ground, they rolled around in the sand, which stuck to their sweaty stomachs, to their backs and legs, there was sand everywhere, it crunched between their teeth, and he tried to get a grip around Mogens’ neck, but every time he got an arm round him, Mogens slipped away.
‘Ha!’ Mogens shouted, made a feint and wrestled Arvid to the ground. ‘Do you surrender?’
‘Never,’ Arvid said, and started to laugh because he was quite stuck. ‘You look like an old man,’ he laughed. Mogens’ hair was white and his eyebrows were bushy with sand. He brushed his hair and face and the sand drizzled down on to Arvid, who had to close his eyes and spit it out.
‘Let’s wash the sand off in the sea,’ Mogens said. ‘Last one in’s a sissy.’
‘OK,’ Arvid said, but Mogens didn’t move, just sat on top of him smiling, and then he laughed.
‘OK!’ He jumped up and raced to the sea without seeming tired at all. They swam underwater to get completely clean, jellyfish glided past like crystal balls and the sun shone back from the ridged sandy bottom. When they re-emerged their hair was slicked back and Mogens said: ‘You look like a mafioso. Do you want to do some rowing?’
‘Sure.’
‘My father’s got a boat nearby. We can row up the creek. You haven’t been there before, have you?’
‘No.’
‘Great, wait here and I’ll go and get it.’ Mogens waded out of the water and jogged towards the rushes where the creek met the sea, and the boats were there. Arvid lay back and floated, the salty water lifted him up and down with the waves, he bobbed like a cork and then he stood up and walked back through the shallows.
He wasn’t alone. Some distance away a man was jumping up and down in the water. The man was laughing out loud, and then Arvid saw the man wasn’t on his own either. A knee stuck up on either side of his chest above the water and when the man turned Arvid saw her face against his neck. Her long dark hair hung straight down, heavy and wet. She was quite still, clinging to the man, and Arvid walked off through the water in the opposite direction, back to the rushes.
He knew he would turn round and look at them again, but he tried not to and pushed his hands down into the sand, dug as deep as he could and took them out again and all they brought up was sticky sand and small white shells that cut his palms. He was grey and sticky up to his elbows, so he went back to the water’s edge to rinse his arms and then he turned and saw them running out of the sea. Water was dripping from their bodies, glinting in the sun and the blue, and then they sort of sank slowly to the beach and kissed each other, their legs intertwined, she was tanned while he was paler, it looked odd. He bit her ear and she stuck her tongue out and he took it in his mouth. Arvid held his breath. Then they sensed he was there and she lifted herself up on her elbows, dry white sand along the length of her brown arm and she called out teasingly: ‘Hey, come here, boy!’
‘Don’t you touch me!’ he yelled.
‘For Christ’s sake, I wasn’t going to touch him,’ she said to her boyfriend, but Arvid didn’t hear that and he sprinted off into the rushes and didn’t stop until he came to a cle
aring and there he stood panting and pulling up long reeds from the ground, one by one, until his hands were full.
He couldn’t see the couple any more, but he could see the creek, it ran past nearby, and suddenly a whole family of swans waddled out of the rushes and into the water, six splashes one after the other and the splashing didn’t stop, but it sounded different now and Mogens came rowing along with a huge grin on his face.
‘Did you see them?’ he said.
‘Sure,’ Arvid said. ‘He almost bit her ear off. Wild stuff.’
He clambered into the boat and Mogens said: ‘What the hell are you talking about? I meant the swans. Swans don’t have ears. Not as far as I know.’
‘I guess they don’t,’ Arvid said, and sat down on the rear seat.
‘You losing your marbles or what?’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
Mogens rowed on and they came to a bend in the creek and when they were past it, the rushes on one side were gone and a large field sloped down to the bank. A herd of cows was grazing a short distance from the water and behind them was a small, grey tumbledown hay barn, which could be handy if it started to rain.
Mogens steered towards the bank for this was a good place to go ashore and discover things. In the water there were lots of eel traps, they could see the labels flapping and Mogens leaned over the side and pulled one up, but it was empty and Arvid was glad because eels were as disgusting as snakes.
The boat struck land with a thud. Arvid stood up to jump over the side, and then he couldn’t stop thinking about them and there was a bulge in his trunks, it was quite sudden, he gasped for breath and it showed because all he had on was a pair of thin red bathing trunks with no pockets.