A little gasp of joy escaped my lips. I hurried over to the garbage can, carried it to its place, put the garbage bag back in, folded it over the edge, and dashed back to the window. To my horror, I saw that the container had left marks in the grass. Quite deep marks, too. I ran my hand over the grass and tried to ruffle it to cover the patches where the edge had sunk in and formed a ridge in the muddy soil. Straightened up and regarded my handiwork.
You could still see it.
But if you had no idea it was there, perhaps it was more difficult to see?
Dad saw everything. He would see it.
I crouched down and ruffled the grass some more.
There.
That would have to do.
If he saw it I could always deny all knowledge. I doubted he would be able to imagine I had carried the garbage can onto the lawn and put it under the window to climb in. No, if he saw the mark it would be a mystery to him, utterly unfathomable, and so long as I denied all knowledge in a normal voice and with a normal expression he would have nothing else to go on.
I wiped my moist, dirty hands on my thighs and went up to my room with my satchel. Opened the wardrobe door and was about to put on my white shirt, warmed by the happy thought that Anne Lisbet would think it looked good, when I came to my senses and dropped the idea, in case Dad asked why I had changed clothes and I got myself into a tangle that he would be able to unravel.
Then I locked the front door, climbed up onto the hot water tank, turned around, stuck my feet through the window, gently lowered myself until I let go, and landed on the ground with a bump.
Picked myself up, down to the drive as fast as possible, acting as if nothing had happened.
There were no cars to be seen now. John Beck, Geir Håkon, Kent Arne, and Øyvind Sundt were standing at the crossroads. When they saw me they cycled over. I stood still, waiting for them.
“Have you heard?” Geir Håkon said, braking just in front of me.
“Heard what?”
“A workman on Vindholmen was cut in two by a steel cable early today.”
“Cut in two?”
“Yes,” John Beck said. “The wire snapped while towing. One end hit a man and cut him in two. Dad told me. Everyone was given the day off.”
I imagined a man on a tug being cut in two, the top half, the past with the head and arms, standing beside the bottom half, the part with the legs.
“You still have a puncture?” Kent Arne said.
I nodded.
“You can sit on the back of mine.”
“I’m off to see Geir,” I said. “Where are you going?”
Geir Håkon shrugged.
“Down to the boats maybe?”
“Where are you two going?” Kent Arne said.
“To see someone in the class about homework,” I said.
“Who, if I might ask?” Geir Håkon said.
“Vemund,” I said.
“Do you two hang out with him?”
“Nope,” I said. “Just today. I’ve got to get going.”
I ran up the hill and shouted for Geir, who came out right away with a slice of bread in his hand.
Twenty minutes later we walked past B-Max again, along a flat stretch that, after a bend, ascended to the highest point on the estate where the road began that led to where Anne Lisbet, Solveig, and Vemund lived. It was also possible to get to it by walking in the opposite direction from our house because the road that linked all the side roads and housing areas on the estate went in a circle, inside which was our own circular Ringvei. As if that wasn’t enough, the main road outside also went in a circle, around the whole island. So we lived inside a circle inside a circle inside a circle. A hundred meters past the supermarket the two outermost roads ran parallel, but you couldn’t see that because they were separated by a rock face, perhaps ten meters high, molded into a brick wall. Above this wall was a green wire fence, beyond that there was a rocky slope, and then came the road we were following. But even though we couldn’t see the cars whizzing past beneath us we could hear them. The sound of the cars was exciting, and we climbed down to the fence. At first we heard them as a faint drone as they came up the hill from the Fina station, then the volume rose and rose until they were racing past beneath us, the roar of their engines amplified by the rock face. We decided we would throw stones at them. As we couldn’t see the cars, the trick was to time the sounds exactly. We each took a stone in our hands and waited for the next car. The stones were big, bigger than our hands, but not so heavy that we couldn’t heave them over the fence, from where they fell vertically, ten meters down to the carriageway. Geir started. He threw as the car was beneath us, and missed, of course, we heard the faint, hollow clunk as it landed on the tarmac and rolled downward. When it was my turn, however, I threw much too soon; when the stone hit the road the car was probably fifty meters away.
A woman walked along the sidewalk carrying a bag in each hand. She stopped and spoke to us, even though we had never seen her before.
“What are you doing down there?” she said.
“Nothing much,” Geir said.
“Come on up,” she said. “It’s steep and dangerous there.”
She set off walking again, but kept an eye on us, so we did as she said and went up.
We balanced on the curb all the way up to Vemund’s house. Outside, his sister was on her knees playing in a sandpit. Her waterproof jacket and bottoms were yellow, the bucket blue, and the spade green.
“Want to go and see Vemund first?” Geir said.
“No, let’s not,” I said. “Let’s start with Anne Lisbet.”
The sound of her name was electric, thousands of crackling nerve channels opened inside me as I articulated the words in my mouth.
“What is it?” Geir said.
“What’s what?” I said.
“You went a bit funny.”
“Funny? No. I’m quite normal.”
After a few steps up the road, covered on one side by a film of water running downward, so thin that it quivered rather than ran, we could see the gable end of the house where Anne Lisbet lived. It was situated at the top of a hill, with a lawn at the front, trees below. A window on the top floor, there was a light on, was that her room perhaps? On the other side of the road was Myrvang’s house and the house where Solveig lived, below them the forest, green and dark and wet. We passed them, and the road ended in a gravel cul-de-sac on the edge of the forest. From there a drive led to Anne Lisbet’s house. A light shone above the front door.
“Will you ring?” I said when we were there.
Geir stretched up on his toes and pressed the doorbell. My heart was fluttering. A few seconds passed. Then her mother opened the door.
“Is Anne Lisbet in?” I said.
“Yes,” she said.
“We’re from her class,” Geir said. “We’ve brought her homework.”
“How nice of you,” she said. “Would you like to come in?”
She had blonde hair and blue eyes, so completely different from Anne Lisbet, but she was good to look at as well.
“Anne Lisbet!” she called. “You’ve got visitors from your class!”
“Coming!” Anne Lisbet called from above.
“Isn’t she ill?” I said.
Her mother shook her head.
“Not anymore. We were just keeping her here for another day to be on the safe side.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. Footsteps sounded on the stairs, and Anne Lisbet appeared. She was holding a slice of bread in one hand and smiling at us with her mouth full.
“Hi!” she said.
“We thought you were ill,” I said.
“We’ve brought you the homework,” Geir said.
She was wearing a white sweater with a high neck and a red pattern, and blue trousers. The skin above her lips was as white as milk.
“Wouldn’t you like to go outside and play?” she said. “I’ve been indoors all day. And all day yesterday too!”
“Sure,” I said. “Is that all right, Geir?”
“Why not,” Geir said.
She put on her white boots and the red raincoat. Her mother went upstairs.
“See you, Mom!” she called and ran out. We ran after her.
“What should we do?” she said, stopping where the gravel finished and suddenly turning to us. “Want to go down to Solveig’s?”
We did. Solveig came out, Anne Lisbet suggested doing some skipping, so we stood there, Geir and I, with elastic around our legs while Solveig and Anne Lisbet hopped and skipped to and fro in accordance with the intricate patterns they mastered to such perfection. When it was my turn Anne Lisbet showed me what to do. She placed her hand on my shoulder and a quiver ran through me. Her dark eyes sparkled. She burst into laughter when I messed it up, and, oh, I smelled the fragrance of her hair as it flew past my face.
It was absolutely fantastic. Everything was absolutely fantastic. Above us the cloud thickened, the gray had taken on a tinge of bluish black, the sky was like a wall above the forest, soon afterward it began to rain. We put up the hoods on our rain jackets and continued to skip. The rain fell on our hoods and ran down our faces, the gravel crunched beneath our feet, the lamp on top of the pole at the end of the cul-de-sac suddenly came on. A little while later a car approached slowly.
“That’s Dad!” Anne Lisbet said.
The car, a Volvo Estate, stopped at the end of the drive, and a large, powerful man with a black beard stepped out. He waved to her, she ran over to him, he bent down and gave her a hug, then went in.
“We’re having dinner now,” she said. “What was for homework?”
I told her. She nodded, said bye, and was gone.
“I have to go, too,” Solveig said, standing there with her sad eyes and rolling up the elastic.
“Us, too,” I said.
When we reached the crossroads I suggested running all the way to the shop, which we did. There, Geir suggested we didn’t go home via Grevlingveien, nor through the forest, but take the main road down to Holtet. Which we did. A path led from there up through the heath to Ringveien, which we then followed home. But after we had gone a few meters along the road, something strange happened. The bus came down, instinctively I turned, and in the window, only a little way from me, at the same height, sat Yngve!
What on earth was he doing there? Was he going to Arendal? Now? What was he going to do there?
“That was Yngve,” I said. “He was on the bus.”
“Oh yes,” Geir said, not very interested. We crossed the lawn outside the house there and walked onto the road.
“That was really fun up there,” Geir said.
“Yes,” I said. “Shall we go up again later?”
“Yes,” Geir said. “But perhaps it’s best not to tell anyone? After all, they’re girls.”
“Well, there’s no reason why we should.”
From the top of the hill I could see that Dad’s car was parked outside our house. Geir’s father was home, too. They were teachers and finished work earlier than other fathers.
I recalled the garbage can I had used to get indoors.
“Shall we do something else?” I said. “Go somewhere else? Down to the tree swing?”
Geir shook his head.
“It’s raining. And I’m hungry. I’m going home.”
“OK,” I said. “Bye.”
“Bye,” Geir said, and ran to his house. He slammed the door so hard the glass rattled. I gazed across at Gustavsen’s house. There was a light on in the kitchen. Had they come back home or was it the father? They had a garage, so it was impossible to know whether the car was there or not.
I turned and looked up the hill. Marianne’s father took off the lid of the garbage can and threw in a scrunched-up plastic bag. He was wearing a woollen cardigan and was unshaven. He always looked angry, but I wasn’t sure if he was, I had never spoken to him or heard anything about him. He was a seaman and away for large parts of the year. When he was at home he was there all the time.
He closed the door without noticing me.
From the crossroads came an enormous yellow truck with rocks on the back. The ground vibrated as it passed. Thick smoke rose from an exhaust pipe at the front.
Yngve had once shown me a picture of the biggest vehicle in the world. It was in a book about the Apollo program he had borrowed from the library. Everything about it was the biggest in the world. It had been especially built to transport the rocket the few kilometers to the launch pad. But it was as slow as it was big and moved at a snail’s pace, Yngve said.
The most appealing part was the launch itself. I could look at photos of it any number of times. Once I had seen it on TV, too. You might expect the rocket to shoot off from the platform at an incredible speed, but that was not the case; on the contrary, for the first few meters it rose very slowly, the fire and the smoke it emitted formed a kind of cushion underneath, which it seemed to rest on for a brief instant before gently moving upward, almost waveringly, with a colossal roar that could be heard from a distance of several kilometers. And then it soared faster and faster until its speed was as mind-blowing as you had imagined, and it flew like an arrow or lightning into the crystal-blue sky.
Sometimes I imagined a rocket being launched from this forest. Hidden behind a mountain, it would be erected in secret and one day we would see it rise slowly, very slowly, above the trees just down there, pure and white against the green and gray, with a cloud of fire and smoke beneath it, and then it would be clear of them, almost hanging in the sky for a moment, before gaining speed and soaring faster and faster upward with the roar from the gigantic engines reverberating between our houses.
It was a good thought.
I jogged down to the house, crossed the gravel to the door, opened it, and was taking off my boots on the doormat when Dad came into the hall from his study.
I glanced up at him.
He didn’t look particularly angry.
“Where have you been?” he said.
“Playing with Geir,” I said.
“That wasn’t what I asked you,” he said. “
Where
have you been?”
“We were up at B-Max,” I said. “Behind it.”
“Oh,” he said. “What were you boys doing there?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “Playing.”
“You’ll have to go back,” he said. “We need some potatoes. Can you buy some, do you think?”
“Yes,” I said.
He took his wallet from his rear pocket and produced a banknote.