And when moose happen to stray among humans they’re shot, I say, miming a stray moose being shot and dying a gruesome death. So, I say, it’s best for you to wait here. I’ll be back in a couple of hours, then we can get together and do something nice.
I wait for a sign that it’s understood me and that it agrees, but it’s not forthcoming. And despite all my explaining and all my kind intentions it still follows me. In the end I tie it to a tree. That settles that.
The manager at ICA is dubious. I can read him like a book. The doubt oozes from every pore. Help a poor old hunter-gatherer, I say, but I can see he thinks it’s weird.
We’re standing in the stockroom and he’s trying to put on a stoic attitude, but despite all the smiling training and theories about how the customer is king, he radiates scepticism. What I’m asking is, of course, way beyond all the rules and regulations. I offer him moose meat in exchange for milk and a handful of other wares from his rich assortment, and he doesn’t like it. I know that most people think that this type of economy is a throwback, I say, but here I am anyway, and the meat is good, and besides it’s an excellent economic system. You barter. You do things for other people. I’m sure it’s on its way back, I say. It’s coming back, and if you go along with this you can boast later that you were ahead of your time. You were a trendsetter because it’s absolutely certain that bartering is coming back. In ten years’ time bartering will be the norm. It’s obvious, I say. Things can’t go on the way they are doing now. It’s no good. Open virtually any paper or magazine and you will see that nowadays there are hardly any discerning people who are in any doubt about how we have to change our consumer ways if we’re going to keep things going for more than a few decades. And I see that’s your view too, I say. You’re a thinker. I notice you haven’t said no.
He’s in his mid-thirties and actually pretty pleased with himself. It’s quite clear that he’s well-trained, for a shopkeeper, and thinks it’s exciting to be involved in building up ICA at Ullevål Stadium. The shop has been done up and everything. One of the country’s most modern supermarkets. Refrigerated counters as far as the eye can see, including, incidentally, Parma hams costing thousands of kroner, cheeses as big as houses and no doubt a great work environment where people matter to each other and are committed to their workplace. And he’s in a quandary. He’s got a lot to lose, but what are the chances of anyone finding out, and anyway he likes moose meat. In a way, there’s no arguing with moose.
He looks around to make sure none of his staff is close enough to take note of what he’s going to say. What are you after? he says.
I say I’m after several items, but the most important thing is to set up a milk deal. A milk deal? he says. I nod. I, that is, my organs and cells, in short, my body, need a good litre of skimmed milk a day, I say. Therefore I’d like to find, every Monday and Thursday morning, when the shop opens at seven, three and four cartons respectively of skimmed milk placed outside the stockroom, for example between the waste skip and the wall.
Why skimmed milk of all things? he asks.
My good man, I say, skimmed milk represents the peak of human achievement to date. Any idiot has always been able to get ordinary cow milk, I say, but the leap up to skimmed milk requires a stroke of brilliance and sublime separation technology, which has only been made possible in modern times. And, in fact, I fear that humankind will progress no further. Skimmed milk will probably always reign supreme. But it does give us something to aspire to.
Skimmed milk ennobles mankind.
How many weeks is this supposed to go on for? he asks. As many as necessary, I say. Necessary for what? he asks. Time will tell, I say. And also I need some batteries and a few other small items from the shop. How much meat are we talking here? he asks. You can have what I’ve got in the sack here today, up front, and if this deal continues after Christmas, you’ll get more. Done, he says, and gives me his hand.
This is great. It’s a victory for the hunter-gatherer culture. Knife-slaughtered moose is exchanged for milk and other consumer goods. This is a breakthrough.
Maybe the world can still be saved.
Inside the shop I meet my wife of all people.
She’s usually at work at this time of day, but obviously not today. She has her reasons, I suppose.
Hi there, I say.
You look dreadful, she says.
I’m not exaggerating when I say my wife thinks it’s strange that I’m living up in the forest now. She doesn’t think much of it, it seems. I don’t blame her. I don’t know that I think much of it myself. My father had just died and been buried and my mother and my sisters and I had sorted out all the practical details and I was out cycling. That was in the springtime. And it was a joy to cycle in the forest again after a long winter. Of course I cycle all year. To work and home again. I’m a cyclist. Maybe I am a cyclist first and foremost. No road conditions can hold me back. In winter I use studded tyres. I’ve got a helmet. Cycling gloves. Specially designed pants and jackets. A cycle computer. Lights. I cycle four thousand kilometres a year. And I think nothing of snapping off window screen wipers when cars don’t behave. I bang on bonnets. I bang on side windows. I shout myself hoarse and I’m not frightened when motorists stop and want to have a go at me. I argue them into the ground, sticking to my rights as a cyclist. And I move around fast. Much faster than cars. Best of all is the morning rush hour. For example, down Sognsveien, across Adamstuen and on down Thereses gate and Pilestredet. There are loads of cars and often several trams. The trams stop in the middle of Thereses gate and as there’s almost always oncoming traffic, the cars have to stop too, but I pull the bike up onto the pavement, steer well to the right of those about to get on the tram and shoot out again onto the road four to five metres in front of the tram and with plenty of time to spare before the tram sets off again. The pavement is a bit higher than normal just there and not only that there’s a slight incline, it’s a bit risky, and sometimes I land with both wheels wedged between the tramlines. It’s showy, but I don’t make a big song and dance about it. Whoever sees it, sees it. Perhaps some of them might be inspired to buy a bike. The thought of that is reward enough. I feed off that for the rest of the day while cycling to the next hurdle, which is the Bislet roundabout where I’ve also got a consummate technique that occupational drivers dislike and which may not be entirely legal. But as a cyclist you’re forced to be an outlaw. You’re forced to live on the wild side of society and at odds with established traffic conventions which are increasingly focussed on motorised traffic, even for healthy people. Cyclists are an oppressed breed, we are a silent minority, our hunting grounds are diminishing all the time and we’re being forced into patterns of behaviour which aren’t natural to us, we can’t speak our own language, we’re being forced underground. But be warned because this injustice is so obvious, and it cannot surprise anyone that anger and aggression are accumulating in cyclists and that one fine day, when non-cyclists have become so fat that they can hardly manoeuvre themselves in and out of their cars, we will strike back with all our might and main.
I am a cyclist. And I’m a husband and a father and a son and an employee. And a house owner. And lots of other things. We are so many things.
Well, I was out cycling. This spring. And then I fell. Quite badly. As you know, the path goes downhill into the forest. And the margins are often small. I had left a kind of path and found myself in the heather on my way down a gentle slope when the front wheel got stuck between two rocks. I flew over the handlebars and hit my hip on a root and the bike landed on my head as well. I was knocked flat. At first it hurt like hell. I couldn’t move. I just lay still, looking up at some branches swaying in the breeze. And for the first time in several years everything was so quiet. Once the worst of the pains had subsided I experienced a blissful peace. There was only forest around me. The usual mixture of all types of complex feelings and thoughts and duties and plans was gone. Suddenly there was just forest. And I didn’t have any of the
enervating children’s songs on my brain. Which I usually had. The songs that accompany the films my son and his chums watch on DVD. They’re so insistent, so insidious. And they sit so heavily on my central nervous system. When I fell they’d been buzzing round my brain for months. They had been tormenting me for the whole winter. When I was at work, in my free time and when my father died. I considered seeking help because of it. Pingu, for example. This German-produced video-penguin that my son loves. Baa, baa, bababa, baa, baa, bababa, baba, baba, baba, baba, baba, baba, baaa, ba, ba, baa, BAAA! It could churn round my head for days on end. From when I opened my eyes in the morning until I went to sleep at night. When I was having a shower, having lunch, cycling to work, at meetings, cycling home again, shopping for tea, fetching the kid from the nursery school, and so on and so on. It was Pingu morning, noon and night. And on other days it was Bob the builder. For crying out loud. Booob the builder, can we fix it? Yes we can! Boom, boom, boomboomboomBOOOM! Or the Teletubbies. Horror of horrors. These, pardon my language, bloody quasi-cuddly figures which apparently were devised by a British psychologist to satisfy small children’s curiosity and hidden needs. It grooves like crazy if you’re two years old, but drives all the rest of us up the wall. Tinky Winky! Dipsy! La La! Po! Teletubbies. Teletubbies. Say HE-LLO! You feel like shoving them through a compost grinder. And Thomas the Tank Engine. Well, OK. Perhaps not so bad. At least not the first fifty to sixty times. With his optimistic Ta-ta-ta-ta-tata-taaaaaa, ta-ta-ta-taaa-ta, ta-ta-ta-taaaa-ta and so on, accompanied by punctiliously constructed model railway landscapes which look a bit like England even though in fact the stories take place on the island of Sodor where the tiny engine happily chugs hither and thither with its carriages Annie and Clarabel and its locomotive friends Percy and Toby and James and whatever they’re called, as well as Harold the helicopter, Bertie the bus, Terrence the bulldozer and the fat controller, or Mr Hat as we call him in our house, who constantly praises the trains when they’ve done something good, and that’s quite often. My word, you’re a useful little locomotive, Thomas, I can hear him say, or he can be tough like the time when the big locomotives got on their high horses and refused to pull their carriages themselves. He didn’t want to know.
But Mr Hat was gone from my mind as I lay there in the heather. The songs had fallen quiet. And by some miracle all my bathroom thoughts had called it a day. I could hardly remember the last time I wasn’t thinking about the bathroom. But now it had gone from my mind. All of a sudden I wasn’t thinking about whether we should have Italian tiles or Spanish ones or matt or gloss, or whether we should simply treat ourselves to glass mosaic, which of course my wife was really keen on. Not to mention colour. I wasn’t even thinking about colours. Not about blue. Not about green. Not about white. It wasn’t that I no longer cared about the colour of the ceiling or the tiles, but the very idea of it had simply disappeared. I had been spared this eternal merry-go-round in my head. And I wasn’t thinking about the mixer taps, either, even though they are available in seven hundred different types and can be delivered in six weeks if they are in brushed steel or quicker if you’re happy with the standard model, but why make do with the standard model, or the bathtub which we’d had to discuss the same day as USA and England had begun their campaign in Iraq. I remember being irritated when I discovered that now we would also have to take a stance on this war. It was very distracting. As if it wasn’t enough to have to decide on all this bathroom stuff. Now we would have to take sides in Iraq. I didn’t like things going on in the world which in effect reduced what I used my brainpower on to trivia. Not only did I not have my perspectives clarified, but I didn’t want them to be. For weeks it had irritated me that they couldn’t wait to start the bombing down there until we had finished doing up the bathroom. To hell with them, I thought. Should we go for the Polish tub which was considerably cheaper than the Swedish one which we were also quite fond of? Or should we take a hard line and consistently go for quality over economy? After all there were good and bad things to be said about both tubs. It wasn’t as if the Swedish one was better in every respect. We discussed where to place the bath and drew up lists of the pros and cons with the Polish and Swedish models while the bombs rained down on the Euphrates, or maybe the Tigris, or both, on the TV, though we had turned down the sound, and this process is so exhausting, so absorbing that if you suddenly don’t think it’s important any more the whole project collapses, and perhaps the marriage, too.
And I wasn’t thinking about the toilet, either, as I was lying in the heather. Whether it should be wall mounted, which is the most stylish at the moment, or whether we could make do with a more classical floor-mounted model. And the conversations with the plumber were also light miles away that afternoon in the forest. Especially the upsetting conversation when he expressed his opinion that the first plumber had made it impossible for the poo to get to where it should be going in the concrete and, for that reason, in a few seconds he was going to set about breaking up the whole floor and installing new pipes.
All that was gone. There were a lot of things I suddenly wasn’t thinking about any more.
What on the other hand I did think about as I lay injured in the heather, letting the spring sun warm my face, was that my father was gone and would always be gone and that I had never really known him and that I didn’t even feel anything special when my mother told me he was dead. He had died in the course of the night. Very suddenly. And very peacefully. But in the heather all of this hit me with all its gravity. The drama of it all. You’re here and then you’re not. From one day to the next. I saw it all in a flash and realised that the difference is so overwhelming that the mind has to acknowledge its limitations and pass. All the things you can be and have, and then at the drop of a hat all things you cannot be and have because you have been and had for the last time. It’s a repugnant construct. One of the alternatives contains everything and the other nothing. The emptiness following from these thoughts, combined with the bang on the head, caused me to go to drop off for a while. On waking I thought of something my sixteen-year-old daughter had said a few days earlier when we were sitting in a café after seeing Lord of the Rings – The Two Towers at the Colosseum cinema. She’d seen it eleven times before and now she considered that it was shameful that I hadn’t seen it. Anyway, she no longer wanted to accept that her father couldn’t be part of what for her was an adrenalin rush of historic dimensions. She had lain in a queue on the pavement for a couple of weeks to get tickets for the premiere. She and her boyfriend and her girlfriends and their boyfriends. Dressed as elves. We had had a few tough sessions with the school to get them to accept her being absent for so long in the middle of the school year, but she is a model pupil and the English teacher had vouched for her, and what’s more Tolkien is great when it comes to stimulating young people’s curiosity, they say, so, fine, and we’ve got a warm sleeping bag and all that. Anyway. In the film there is a sequence when the evil Saruman, incidentally very reminiscent of the late Hamas boss - the one with the white hair and beard who was in a wheelchair and said in a squeaky voice that the Palestinians would never give in no matter what - has his mines and tower dramatically destroyed after he had spent a long time rearing what are known as orcs, bad troll-like monsters whom he has now sent on a mission to kill everything good. His plans are thwarted by some living trees which the hobbits have persuaded to go into action. Among other things they destroy a dam with the result that the water floods out and causes a lot of damage to Saruman. On the way out of the cinema I happened to say that it would be quite some time before Saruman built a new tower at the foot of a dam. My daughter let the comment pass, but on arriving at the café she had a wild look in her eyes. I was keen to know what was up with her, though I wouldn’t say that I was afraid of what she might come out with. From my perspective, she was so inscrutable that I was constantly on the alert for anything. Teenage girls have always seemed mysterious to me, not least when I was their age. Since then the distance bet
ween us has just increased, as is natural, and now of course I have my own, and the way I saw things that evening almost six months ago, the possibilities were endless. Take the most irrational thing you can think of and multiply it by the biggest number you can imagine, and you’ve got my daughter down to a T, I would say.
We arrived at the café and sat down. What’s up? I said at length.
She said she was shocked that my first comment after seeing an epic like that could be so cynical and so unaffected by the marvellous story I had just been immersed in.
Immersed? I’m not so sure about that, I said. We’ve seen an unusually expensive film about trolls. It was exciting. And I’m happy I’ve seen that side of life which means so much to you.
She said she couldn’t accept that and it confirmed to her that the distance between her and me was as great as she feared, or if possible, even greater.
What do you want me to say? I asked.
We’ve seen a tale about good and evil, my daughter said. Do you feel nothing in your heart?
Yes, I certainly do. I’ve already said it was exciting. I understand that the ring is treacherous and that many people want to get hold of it, and it was very well done, he, what’s his name, the transparent one who eats fish …?
Gollum, she said.
That’s the one, I said. He was very well done. I don’t quite know how they did it, but it was impressive. And the battle scenes were great and everything.