“What’s up?” Geir said. He was sitting, fully clothed, on the opposite bench watching me.
“I can’t find my other sock,” I said. “Can you see it?”
He leaned forward and looked under the bench.
“It’s not there,” he said.
Oh no!
“But it’s got to be somewhere,” I said. “Can you help me look? Please!”
I could hear my voice quivering. But Geir didn’t let on that he’d noticed, if indeed he had heard anything at all. He leaned over and looked under all the benches while I walked toward the showers in case it had got caught up in my towel and dropped out. It wasn’t there, either. Perhaps, inadvertently, I had packed it in my bag with the other swimming things?
I hurried back and emptied the contents of my bag on the floor.
But no. No sock.
“It wasn’t anywhere there?” I said.
“No,” Geir said. “But we have to get going, Karl Ove. The bus is leaving soon.”
“I have to find the sock first.”
“Well, it’s not here. We’ve looked
everywhere.
Can’t you just go without it?”
I didn’t answer. Once again I shook all the clothes, crouched down, and scanned the floor under the benches; once again I went into the shower room.
“We’ve got to go now,” Geir said. He held his watch in front of me. “They’ll be angry if I miss the bus.”
“Can you search while I get dressed?” I said.
He nodded and halfheartedly wandered around examining the floor. I put on my T-shirt and sweater.
On the top shelf perhaps?
I stood on the bench and peered along.
Nothing.
I put on my trousers and quilted vest, zipped up my jacket, and sat down to tie my laces.
“We’ve
got
to go now,” Geir said.
“I’m getting there,” I said. “You wait outside.”
After he had left I hurried back into the shower room. I looked in the trash can, ran my hand along the windowsills, and even opened the door to the pool.
But no.
Geir was standing by the hill when I went out. He started running down before I had even caught up with him.
“Wait for meee!” I cried. But he showed no signs of stopping, he didn’t even turn, and I sprinted off after him. Down into the darkness, past the gray trees, into the light on the road below. For every step I took the bare foot rubbed against the coarse leather of my boot.
I’ve lost my sock,
a voice inside me said.
I’ve lost my sock. I’ve lost my sock.
A ticking started in my head. It happened now and again when I was running, my head ticked, somewhere inside my left temple,
tick tick,
it went, but although it was alarming, sounding as if something had come loose or perhaps it was rubbing against something else, I couldn’t tell anyone, they would just say I had a screw loose and laugh.
Tick, tick, tick
Tick, tick, tick
I ran behind Geir all the way down to the candy shop where we went; the bag of candy we came out with was always the high point of these trips. Geir was waiting outside, impatiently shifting from one foot to the other. I stopped in front of him. As a result of the snowplows’ work we were standing half a meter higher than usual, and the new angle changed our view of the candy shop. It had a cellar-like feel to it, and this feel transformed everything, at a glance I saw the shelves were only “shelves,” that the goods were “goods,” displayed in a very ordinary room in a house, in short that the shop was a “shop,” although I didn’t articulate this to myself, it was just an idea that struck me and disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Geir opened the door and went in.
I followed.
“Are we very short of time?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “It goes in eleven minutes.”
In the back room the assistant put the newspaper down, came into the shop, and stood behind the counter with a bored, even slightly disdainful expression on her face. She was old and repulsive; there were three long, gray hairs growing out of a mole on her chin.
The whole of one wall was covered with pipes and pipe cleaners, cigarette rolling machines and papers, tobacco pouches and cigarette packets, cigar boxes and snuff tins of various shapes and colors, all with different writing and small, stylized images of dogs, foxes, horses, sailing ships, racing cars, black men smiling, sailors smoking, and women in casual poses. The candy shelf, which we were both looking at now, covered the whole of the second wall. Unlike the tobacco products, the candy had no packaging; chocolates, hard candies, and gumdrops were in transparent plastic jars and represented themselves, with no pictures between them and us: what you saw was what you got. The black ones tasted of salt or licorice, the yellow ones of lemon, the orange ones of orange, the red ones of strawberry, the brown ones of chocolate. The small, square pieces of chocolate with the hard surfaces, called
Rekrutts,
were filled with hard caramel, just as the promised shape; the heart-shaped chocolates, for their part, were filled with a soft, jelly-like mass tasting of apricot, also as expected. The color codes applied to the candies and the gumdrops, with a few exceptions, which on these evenings we tried to narrow down. Some black candies could taste dark green while some dark-green ones tasted green in a throat pastille or eucalyptus kind of way – in other words lighter – and not a sweet-type green, which you would imagine from the color. And then there were the black candies that actually tasted like the King of Denmark aniseed candies, an orangey brown. The strange thing was that it was never the other way around, there were no orangey-brown King of Denmark candies that tasted black, nor had we ever come across any eucalyptus-green candies that tasted like sweet green or black ones.
“What would you like?” the assistant said.
Geir had put the money he would spend on the glass counter and leaned forward to see the range of candies better, the signs of time pressure evident on his face.
“Errr …,” he said.
“Hurry up!” I said.
Then it all came out in a rush.
“Three of those, three of those, and three of those, and four of those and one of those and one of those,” he said, pointing to the various jars.
“Three of …?” the assistant said, opening an empty paper bag and turning to the stand.
“The green ones. Oh, make that four. And then three of the red and white ones. You know, polka d … and then
five
babies’ dummies …
When we emerged from the shop, each with a small bag in hand, there were just four minutes to go before the bus left. But that was enough time, we told each other, running down the stairs. The steps, covered with hard-trodden snow and ice, were slippery, so we had to hold on to the banisters, which was at odds with the speed we were after. Beneath us lay the town, the white streets appearing almost yellow in the reflection from the lamps, the bus station, where the buses skidded in and out like sleds in the snow, and the tall church with the red tiles and green spire. The black sky arched above everything, strewn with twinkling stars. When there were only ten to fifteen steps left Geir let go of the banister and set off at a sprint. After a couple of strides he lost balance and his only chance to stay upright was to run as fast as he could. He swept down the hill at a blistering pace. Then he changed tactics and decided to slide instead, but his upper body had more momentum, he was pitched forward and plunged headlong into the drift beside the road. It had all happened so fast that I didn’t start laughing until he was lying in the snow.
“Ha ha ha!”
He didn’t move.
Was he seriously hurt?
I walked as briskly as I could over the last stretch and stopped beside him. At first he drew breath in short, sob-like bursts. Then came a long, hollow groan.
“
Shit
,” he whispered, holding his chest.
“Shit. Shit. Shit.”
“I wish you wouldn’t swear,” I said.
He sent me a brief, withering glare.
“Did you hurt yourself?” I said.
He groaned again.
“Did it knock the breath out of you?”
He nodded and sat up and started breathing normally again. He had tears in his eyes.
“We’ve missed the bus now anyway,” I said.
“It knocked the breath out of me,” he said. “I’m not crying.”
He held his side as he struggled to his feet with a grimace.
“Can you walk?” I asked.
“Yep,” he said.
From the entrance of the Arena Shopping Center we saw our bus depart, turn onto the road, and disappear around the street corner. The next bus would be in half an hour.
We sat down inside the bus station, on a bench beside a photo machine, and ate our candy. There weren’t many people around. Two youths buying hamburgers and fries while their car idled outside, a drunk sitting on the floor with his head down, asleep, and a friend of the girl working in the kiosk.
Geir put one of the red-and-white candies in his mouth.
“What color does it taste like?” I said.
He looked at me with raised eyebrows.
“Red and white, of course!” he said. “It was a red-and-white candy.”
“It doesn’t necessarily follow,” I said. “Suppose I ate it and it tasted green.”
“What are you talking about now?” he said.
“Suppose it tasted of jam, for example,” I said.
“Jam?”
“Don’t you understand anything?” I said. “We can’t know if a piece of candy tastes the same as the color!”
But he didn’t understand. I wasn’t absolutely sure I even understood myself. But Dag Lothar and I had once put a piece of candy shaped like a black bolt in our mouths, exchanged glances, and said, both at the same time, it tastes
green
! And later that autumn we’d had visitors, Grandma, Grandad, Gunnar, Dad’s uncle Alf, and his wife Sølvi had been staying at our house, we ate shrimp, crab, and a lobster, which Dad had caught in the net only a few days before, and while we were eating Sølvi looked at Dad and said:
“Imagine you catching this lobster yourself. It tasted
delicious.
”
“It really was delicious,” Grandma said.
“Nothing tastes as good as lobster,” Dad said. “But we can’t know if it tastes the same for all of us.”
Sølvi stared at him.
“What do you mean by that?”
“I know how it tastes to me,” Dad said. “But I have no idea how it tastes to you.”
“It tastes of lobster, of course!” Sølvi said.
Everyone laughed.
I didn’t understand what they were laughing about. What they said was right. But I laughed, too.
“But how can you know that lobster tastes the same to me as it does to you?” Dad asked. “For all you know, it could taste like jam to me.”
Sølvi was about to say something, but held back, looking down at the lobster, then up at Dad. She shook her head.
“I don’t understand,” she said. “The lobster’s there. And it tastes of
lobster.
Not jam!”
The others laughed again. I knew Dad was right, but I didn’t know exactly why. For a long time I sat musing. It was as if I was constantly on the point of understanding, but then as I was beginning to comprehend, it slipped from my grasp. The thought was too big for me.
But it had been even bigger for Geir, I remembered, and looked up as the door opened. It was Stig. His face lit up when he saw us and came over.
“Hi,” he said.
“Hi,” Geir said.
“Hi,” I said.
“Missed the bus?” he said, sitting down beside us. Geir nodded.
“Want one?” he said, holding out the bag to him. Stig smiled and chose a baby’s dummy. So I had to offer him one afterward, too. Why on earth had Geir done that? We didn’t exactly have a lot of candy.
Stig was in the class above ours and did gymnastics training in Arendal three times a week. He competed at the national level, but there wasn’t a touch of arrogance about him, as there was with Snorre, who swam for the national squad and wanted nothing to do with us. Stig was nice, one of the nicest boys I knew, in fact. When the bus came he sat in the seat in front of Geir and me. By the end of Langbrygga the conversation had petered out, he turned round and sat like that for the rest of the journey. Geir and I were quiet, too, and the thought of the missing sock returned with renewed vigor.
Oh no, oh no.
What was going to happen?
What
was going to happen?
Oh no oh no oh no.
No, no, no!
Perhaps he had noticed that we were late. Perhaps he would be standing there waiting. On the other hand, he might not be, he might be busy with something else, in which case I was safe; if I could get from the hall to the boiler room unnoticed everything would be fine because I had my other socks there and I could change into them.
The bus drove onto Tromøya Bridge and was buffeted by the wind. The windows vibrated. Geir, who always wanted to be the first to pull the bell cord, reached up and rang, even though we were the only passengers to get off here. The bus stop was right at the bottom of the hill, and I always felt guilty when I alighted here because the bus would have to set off again and wouldn’t be able to pick up speed until it had passed the brow of the hill a few hundred meters further on. Sometimes this feeling was so strong in me that I didn’t get off until the next stop, up by B-Max, especially when I was on my own. Even now, with thoughts of the sock burning in my consciousness, I felt a little pang as Geir pulled the cord and the bus braked with a sigh of irritation to drop us off.
We stood by the drifts of snow and waited until the bus had pulled out again. Stig raised his hand to say goodbye. Then we crossed the road and walked up the path to the estate.
Usually I would kick my boots against the doorstep a couple of times to shake the snow off and then brush my trousers with the broom leaning against the wall for that very purpose, but this time I skipped the kicks, fearing he might hear, just brushed my trousers and cautiously opened the door, sidled in, and closed it behind me.
But that was enough. From inside, I heard his study door open, and then the door to the porch.
He stood in front of me.
“You’re late,” he said.
“Yes, I’m sorry,” I said. “But Geir fell and hurt himself on the road, so we missed the bus.”