Kenny Dalglish kept himself to himself.
Oh, so did I! But I didn’t want that. I wanted to be an extrovert! An extrovert!
An hour later, after I had taken the road through the forest and climbed a tree to find out how far I could see, I ran onto the road the moment Mom’s Beetle came up the hill. I waved, but she didn’t see me and I ran as fast as I could after the car, up the hill, across the short, flat stretch, and into the drive, where she got out of the car, hitched her bag over her shoulder, and shut the door.
“Hi,” she said. “Would you like to help me bake some bread?”
That might have been the year Dad lost his grip on us.
Many years later he was to say Bergen was where he started drinking.
It came up casually, I was visiting him one summer at the beginning of the nineties, he was drunk, and I said I was going to move to Iceland that winter, and he said, Iceland, I’ve been there, to Reykjavik.
“Have you really?” I said. “When would that have been?’
“It was when I was living in Bergen, you remember,” he said. “I had a girlfriend there, she was Icelandic, and we went to Reykjavik together.”
“While you were with Mom?”
“Yes. I was thirty-five and living in student housing.”
“You don’t have to make an excuse. You can do what you like.”
“Yes, I can. Thank you, son.”
None of this came to our ears at the time, of course, and we didn’t have the experience to imagine it, either. All that counted for me was that he wasn’t at home. But even though the house opened up, and for the first time in my life I could do what I wanted, in a strange way he was still there, the thought of him went through me like a lightning strike if I brought dirt in with me to the hall or if I dropped crumbs on the table while eating or even if juice ran down my chin while eating a pear. Can’t you even eat a pear without making a mess, boy, I could hear him saying. And if I did well in a test it was to him I wanted to bring the news, not Mom, that wasn’t the same. However, what was happening outside was slowly changing character, it was becoming both better and worse, it was as though the gentle world of the child, where the blows that fell were muted and somehow untargeted, in the sense that they were intended for everything and nothing, became sharper and clearer, any doubt was removed, it is
you
and what
you
say that we dislike, and this was a red line, while something else opened and this something else had nothing to do with me personally, although perhaps it affected me to an even greater degree, because I was a part of it, and that part had
nothing
to do with my family, it belonged to us, to those of us who were out there. I was tremendously attracted to almost all the girls that autumn as I started the fifth class, but I didn’t perceive them as radically different, I had something inside me that enabled me to approach them. I had no idea this was a huge blunder, actually, the biggest blunder a boy can commit.
We had an older woman teacher that year, her name was Fru Høst, she taught us a range of subjects and she liked to set up role plays. Often she chose little events for dramatization, and I always volunteered, it was my favorite activity, everyone looked at me and I could be someone else. I had a special talent for acting girls’ parts. I was good at it. I flicked my hair behind my ears, pouted a little, swung my hips as I walked, and spoke in a slightly more affected voice than normal. Fru Høst sometimes laughed so much tears were rolling down her cheeks.
One evening I was hanging out with Sverre, who also liked role plays and was also a good student and bore a strong enough resemblance to me for two substitue teachers to think, independently of each other, that we were twins, and I suggested going to visit Fru Høst. She lived three kilometers or so east of the estate.
“Good idea,” Sverre said. “But my bike’s got a flat. And it’s a bit of a hike on foot.”
“Let’s hitch,” I said.
“OK.”
We walked down to the crossroads and stood by the curb. I had hitchhiked quite a lot the previous year, mostly with Dag Magne, to Hove or up to Roligheden or some of the other places we found appealing, and we had never stood there for more than an hour without getting a lift.
This evening the first car stopped.
There were two guys inside.
We got in. They were playing loud music; the windows were vibrating from the bass. The driver turned to us.
“And where are you going?”
We told him, he put the car in gear, and drove off so fast we were pinned back against the seat.
“Who lives out there?”
“Fru Høst,” Sverre said. “She’s our teacher at school.”
“Aha!” the one in the passenger seat said. “You’re going there to cause some mischief. We did that, too, when we were younger. Went to the teachers’ places and tormented the hell out of them.”
“Well, we’re not going to do that exactly,” I said. “We’re just going to visit her.”
He turned and looked at me.
“Visit her? Why? Something to do with homework or what?”
“No-o,” I said. “We just felt like it.”
He turned back. They were silent for the rest of the journey. Braked sharply at the crossroads.
“Looks like the end of the road,” the driver said.
I had a bit of a bad conscience, knowing we had disappointed them, but lying wasn’t an option. So I thanked them as warmly as I could.
They raced off into the darkness with the bass pounding.
Sverre and I trudged up the gravel driveway. Large leafy trees with outstretched branches on both sides. We had never been to her house, but we knew where it was.
There were two cars outside and all the windows were lit.
I rang the bell.
“My goodness,” Fru Høst said in surprise, opening the door.
“We thought we would visit you,” I said.
“Can we come in?” Sverre said.
She hesitated.
“I’m afraid I have visitors here. It’s not such a convenient time. But did you come all this way just to visit me?”
“Yes.”
“Come on in then! You can stay for half an hour if you like. In fact, I have some cookies. And some juice!”
We went in.
The living room was full of adults. Fru Høst introduced us, we sat down at the table, on stools, and she gave us a plate with three cookies on it and a glass of juice.
She said we were her favorite students and we were such good actors.
“Could they perform something for us now?” someone asked.
Fru Høst glanced at us.
“Could do,” I said. “OK with you?”
“Of course,” Sverre said.
I tucked my hair behind my ears, pouted, and we were off, improvising, and it made everyone there laugh. After the performance we bowed, slightly flushed but happy to hear the applause.
I repeated the success at the fancy dress party just before Christmas when both Dag Magne and I dressed up as women, complete with makeup, dress, and handbag, and my impersonation was so good that no one recognized me, not even Dag Lothar, who I was standing next to for at least five minutes before he suddenly realized who the stranger really was.
Although I wasn’t ashamed about dressing up as a girl, nor about discussing girlish things with them, I also actually went out with some of them. The best was Mariann, it lasted two weeks, we went skating together, she sat on my lap and kissed me, I went to her birthday party, the only boy, and she sat on my lap and I held her while she chatted to her friends, we made out there, too, but after a while I grew tired of it – she was without doubt one of the best-looking girls at school, although not at the absolute top – and perhaps I also felt a little sorry for her because she lived alone with her mother and sister and they were quite poor, for example, she almost never had any new clothes, her mother did the best she could with old ones and hand-me-downs, so I felt an emptiness when I was in her room and claustrophobia when we kissed, I just wanted to leave as soon as possible, and finally I persuaded Dag Magne to tell her it was over. That same day I made a terrible mistake, she was running behind me in the wet weather shelter, and as a purely reflex action I stuck my foot out, she tripped, and hit her face on the tarmac, there was blood and she cried, but that wasn’t the worst, the worst was the ensuing fury she poured over me, which the other girls united behind as they gathered round to help her. It would be wrong to say that I was popular for the next few weeks. That I hadn’t meant anything by it, that I had only done it for fun, didn’t get much of a sympathetic response. At times it was as though the girls really hated me, considered me some sort of scum; at others it was the opposite, not only did they want to talk to me but at the class parties we had begun to arrange, in one another’s houses and at school, they also wanted to dance with me. My attitude to them was also ambivalent, at least as far as the girls in my class were concerned. On the one hand, I knew them so well that after close to five years at school I was completely indifferent toward them; on the other hand, they had started changing, the bulges under their sweaters were growing, their hips were widening, and they were behaving differently, they had risen above us, suddenly when they looked at boys, they were from two or three classes up. With our high-pitched voices, more or less furtive glances, as we admired all the attributes they now possessed, we were no more than air to them. But even though they were so important, they knew nothing about the world they were moving toward. What did they know about men and women and desire? Had they read Wilbur Smith, where women were taken by force under stormy skies? Had they read Ken Follett, where a man shaves a woman’s pussy while she lies in a foam-filled bathtub with her eyes closed? Had they read
Insect Summer
by Knut Faldbakken, the passage that I knew by heart, when he takes her panties off in the hay? Had they ever gotten their hands on a porn magazine? And what did they know about music? They liked what everyone liked, The Kids and all the other crap on the hit lists, it meant nothing to them, not really, they had no idea what music was or what it could be. They could barely dress, they turned up at school wearing the strangest combinations of clothes and didn’t realize. And they were looking down on me? I had read Wilbur Smith and Ken Follett and Knut Faldbakken, I had been flicking through porn mags for years, I listened to bands who really counted, and I knew how to dress. And was I supposed to be inferior to them?
To demonstrate the true state of affairs, I pulled off a little coup in the music lesson. Every Friday we had something we called “Class Top of the Pops.” Six of us would bring along a song that everyone voted on afterward. Mine always came last, whatever I played. Led Zeppelin, Queen, Wings, The Beatles, The Police, The Jam, Skids – the result was the same, one or two votes, last. I knew they were voting against me and not the music. They weren’t really listening to the music. This irritated me beyond endurance. I complained to Yngve and he not only understood how irritating it was, because he disliked hit list music, too, but he also came up with a way to trick them. The Kids’ second record hadn’t been released yet. One Friday I took with me The Aller Værste!’s first LP,
Materialtretthet,
which Yngve had bought a few days before, and said that I had an advance copy of The Kids’ new record. The music teacher was in on my ruse and played the first song off the LP, which was still in a white inside sleeve because, as I told them, the record was so new that the cover hadn’t been designed yet. For them The Aller Værste! was the worst of the lot, the last time I had played a song by them, the single “Rene Hender,” they had shouted,
Rene Hender! Rene Hender!
after me for several days, but when the first notes of the band’s first song sounded in the classroom it was to mumbles of appreciation and mounting enthusiasm, which culminated when the vote was taken and it transpired that The Aller Værste!, under the pseudonym of The Kids, had won hands down. How the triumph shone in my eyes as I was able to stand up and say that they had
not
voted for The Kids but for The Aller Værste! I said this proved that they weren’t interested in the music, there were other issues determining their votes. How angry they were! But there was nothing they could say. I had fooled them too well for that.
Of course, I never heard the last of it. I was conceited, I thought I was quite something, I always had to like weird things, not what everyone else liked. That wasn’t true, though, in fact I liked good music and not bad music, surely that wasn’t my fault? – and I learned more and more about it, thanks to Yngve and his music magazines, which I plowed through, and to the records he played me. Bands like Magazine, The Cure, The Stranglers, Simple Minds, Elvis Costello, Skids, Stiff Little Fingers, XTC, the Norwegian groups Kjøtt, Blaupunkt, The Aller Værste!, The Cut, Stavangerensemblet, DePress, Betong Hysteria, Hærværk. He also taught me more and more chords on the guitar, and when he wasn’t at home, I would play by myself with the black Gibson plectrum in my hand and the black Fender strap over my shoulder. To be on the safe side, I also bought a teach-yourself drums book, carved two sticks, placed some books around me in a circle on the floor, the one on the left was the hi-hat, the one next to it the snare drum, and the three books above them the tomtoms. The only person on my wavelength was Dag Magne, with whom I was spending more and more time. We were mostly up at his house, playing records and trying to copy the songs on his twelve-string guitar, but he also came down to ours, where we read magazines because Mom’s ban was no longer absolute, while listening to my cassettes and talking about girls or the band we were going to start, especially what we were going to call it. He wanted it to be Dag Magne’s Anonymous Disciples; I wanted it to be Blood Clot. Both were equally good, we agreed, and we didn’t need to make a decision until the time was ripe and we were performing on a stage.
In this way winter passed, with the first class parties, where we played spin the bottle and danced slow ones, round and round on the floor holding some of the girls we had been in the same class with for five years and knew better than our sisters, and my head almost exploded when I held Anne Lisbet’s body so close to mine. The fragrance of her hair, the sparkling eyes that were bursting with life. And, oh, the little breasts under the thin, white blouse.
Wasn’t that a
fantastic
feeling?
It was completely new, unknown for all these years, but now I knew it, now I wanted to go there again.
Winter passed, spring came, with its light, which every day held the passage to night open for a little longer, and with its cold rain, causing the snow to slump and dwindle. One of these March mornings, oppressed by the darkness and the rain, I went into the kitchen to have breakfast as usual. Mom had already left, she was on the early shift. She had forgotten to switch off the radio. Even in my room I had gathered that something had happened in the night because the voices on the radio – I could hear the resonance but not the words – sounded unusually dramatic. I buttered a piece of bread, added a slice of salami, and poured milk into a glass. There had been an accident in the North Sea, an oil platform had capsized. Raindrops slid slowly down the outside of the windows. The faint thrum of the rain on the roof surrounded the house like a membrane. The gutters were running. Up at Gustavsen’s a car was started, the headlights were switched on. It was a catastrophe, a number of people were missing, no one knew how many. When I arrived at B-Max half an hour later, my trousers tucked into my boots and my waterproof hood tied tightly around my face, no one spoke of anything else. Everyone knew someone who knew someone who had a father or a brother working on that particular platform. Alexander Kielland, it was called, and apparently one leg had given way. Was it a hundred-year wave that had caused it? A bomb? A construction fault?
In the first lesson the teacher talked about the accident, even though it was a math class. I wondered what Grandad would be saying now. He always told us we should find a job in oil. Oil was the future. But other signals were coming in from elsewhere: an item on the news had opened with a forecast that the oil reserves would soon be running out, it was happening faster than anyone would have believed, within a mere twenty-five years it would all be gone. I was fascinated by the year that was quoted, 2004, because it was so far into the future, and actually unreal, but treated here as a sober reality, different in kind from the one you met in science fiction books and magazines and hence shocking: would 2004 ever
really
arrive? In
our
lifetimes? At the same time I was also unnerved by the doom and gloom in these men’s voices warning of terrible things to come and despondent that something was going to come to an end. I didn’t like that; I wanted everything to last and go on forever. All ends were frightening. Therefore I hoped that Jimmy Carter would get a second term and that Odvar Nordli and the Socialist Party would win the next election. I liked Jimmy Carter. I liked Odvar Nordli even though he was always so drained and exhausted. I didn’t like Mogens Glistrup or Olof Palme, there was something smarmy about them, about their lips and eyes. Einar Førde and Reuilf Steen also had it, though not so much. But I liked Hanna Kvanmo. Not Golda Meir and not Menachem Begin, despite the Camp David Agreement. It was hard to judge Anwar Sadat. The same applied to Brezhnev, on quite a different scale, though. When I saw him standing there in his fur coat and hat, with the bushy eyebrows above the narrow Mongolian eyes in his expressionless face, mechanically waving to the parade below, as one artillery rocket after the other rolled past, surrounded by thousands of identical goose-stepping soldiers, I didn’t see him as human, he was something else, impossible to relate to.
Did I like Per Kleppe?
Yes, in a way, I certainly hoped with a passion that Kleppe’s anti-inflation packages would work.
I liked Hans Hammond Rossbach, but I considered Trygve Bratteli a bit odd with that low, whispering voice of his and his strange
r
’s, the narrow shoulders and the big, skull-like head with the thick, black eyebrows.
The accident in the North Sea was the main topic of conversation for a quarter of an hour, then the lesson proceeded as usual, that is, we worked on sums in our books while the teacher walked between the rows of desks helping whoever needed it as the hand of darkness outside released its grip on the morning and it slowly became lighter. In the break someone said there might be air pockets inside the platform where you could survive for several days. Others said no parents from our school had been on board, but the father of a pupil at Roligheden was missing. It was hard to know where all the rumors were coming from, or how true they were. In the next lesson we had Norwegian. When Frøken sat down at her desk I put up my hand.
“Yes, Karl Ove?”
“Have you corrected our essays?”
“You’ll have to wait and see,” she said.
But she must have because the next thing she did was to go through some words and rules on the blackboard, which presumably were examples of the mistakes we had made in the essays we had handed in the Thursday before.
Yes indeed. The big pile of exercise books was taken from her bag and put on the desk.
“There were lots of excellent essays this time,” she said. “I could have read out all of them, but there wasn’t enough time, so I chose four. This doesn’t necessarily mean they are the best, as you know. Everyone in the class writes good essays.”
I stared at the pile to see if I could recognize mine. It wasn’t the one on top, that was for sure.
Anne Lisbet put up her hand.
She was wearing a white sweater. It suited her so well. Her black hair and black eyes went well with white, and her red lips and the redness in her cheeks, which always flushed when she came into the warm, did too.
“Yes?” Frøken said.
“Can we knit while you read?” Anne Lisbet said.
“Yes, I don’t have a problem with that,” Frøken said.
Four of the girls leaned forward and took out some knitting from their satchels.
“Can we do our homework as well?” Geir Håkon said.
Someone giggled.
“Put your hand up like everyone else, Geir Håkon,” Frøken said. “But the answer is, of course, no.”
Geir Håkon smiled, blushing, not because he had been put in his place but because he had ventured to speak. He was always pink-faced when he spoke in class.
Frøken began to read. The first was not mine. But there were three left, I thought, stretching my legs out under the desk. I liked the first lessons, when it was dark outside and it was like we were sitting in a bright capsule, all of us with slightly messy hair and sleepy eyes and these soft-focus movements that the day seemed to sharpen until everyone was running around shouting over one another with wide-open eyes and flapping limbs.
The second essay wasn’t mine, either. Nor the third.
I peered up uneasily as she lifted the fourth book. That wasn’t mine, was it?
Oh. She wasn’t going to read it.
Something inside me slumped with disappointment. While something else soared. My essay was the best, I knew that, and she knew that. Yet she hadn’t read it the previous time, nor this. What was the point of writing well if that was what happened? The next time I would write as badly as I could.
Finally she put the wretched essay down.
I put up my hand.
“Why didn’t you read mine?” I said. “Wasn’t it any good?”
Her eyes narrowed for a second, then opened, and she smiled.
“I have received twenty-five essays. I can’t read all of them out. Surely you can understand that? Your essays are in fact among those I read out most often. This time it was someone else’s turn.”
She clapped her hands.
“And they were really fantastic this time. What imagination you have! I really enjoyed all of them.”
She nodded to Geir B, who jumped to his feet and went to the desk. He was the class monitor and had to hand out the essays. I scanned mine. About a mistake a page. At the end she had written: “Imaginative and elegant, Karl Ove, but perhaps the story finished a little abruptly? Very few mistakes, but you have to work on your writing more!”
We had to write about something in the future. I had written about a journey in space. That is, I had spent so much time describing the various training programs the astronauts went through that ten pages were already covered before the day of the launch, so after some deliberation I decided the trip would be cancelled at the last moment because of a fault and the astronauts would go home with their work left undone.
Somewhere in the essay I had written
Hotel
’, and she had added an extra “l” in her red looped script. I put up my hand and she came over.
“
Hotell
is spelled with one
l
. I know that. I saw it in a book, so I’m absolutely sure.”
She leaned over. Soap fragrance rose from her hands, and from her neck a faint scent of a summery perfume.
“Ah, well, in one way you’re right. ‘Hotel’ with one
l
is English. There are two
l
’s in Norwegian.”
“Hotel Phønix has one
l
,” I said. “And that’s in Norway. And on top of that, it’s in Arendal!”
“You’re right.”
“So it’s not a mistake after all?”
“No. Let’s say that. And it was a good essay, Karl Ove.”
She straightened up and went back to her desk. Her words were warming, even though they were only meant for my ears.
Outside, the rain and the wind continued. The trees beyond the school grounds swayed and creaked, and when we went into the gym at the end of the break, the wind was gusting against the external walls with such force that it sounded like waves hitting them. The ventilation grilles howled and wheezed as though the building were alive, a huge beast full of rooms, corridors, and shafts that had settled here beside the school, and in its despondency sang lonely laments. Or perhaps it was the sounds that were alive, I wondered, sitting on the bench in the changing room and undressing. They rose and fell, whirled around for a while, drifting here, drifting there, as if in the middle of a game. I stood up, naked, took my towel, and went into the shower, which was already hot with the steam. I found a place among the throng of pale, almost marble-white boys’ bodies, and was engulfed by the hot water that first hit the top of my head and then ran in steady streams down my face and chest, neck and back. My hair stuck to my forehead and I closed my eyes. That was when someone shouted.
“Tor’s got a hard-on! Tor’s got a hard-on!”
I opened my eyes and looked over at Sverre, the boy who had shouted. He was pointing across the narrow room to where Tor was standing, with his arms down by his sides, his dick in the air, and a smile on his face.
Tor had the biggest dick in the class, well, perhaps, in the whole school. It dangled between his legs like a classic pork sausage and it was no secret because he always wore tight trousers and he placed it at an angle, pointing upward, so that everyone could see. Yes, it was big. But now, in its erect state, it was enormous.
“Jumpin’ Jehoshaphat,” Geir Håkon shouted.
Everyone looked at him, there was a sudden excitement in the atmosphere, and it was obvious something had to be done. Such an extraordinary circumstance could not be allowed to go to waste.
“Let’s take him to Fru Hensel!” Sverre shouted. “Come on, quick, before it’s too late!”
Fru Hensel was our gym teacher. She came from Germany, spoke broken Norwegian, was strict, neat, and prim, which was emphasized by her narrow glasses and her tightly pinned-up hair. She was meticulous yet distant, in sum what we called snooty. As a teacher she was a nightmare because she had a predilection for gym apparatus and hardly ever let us play soccer. When Sverre suggested taking Tor to her – she was tidying up in the gymnasium, still with her whistle around her neck, wearing her blue tunic and white tights – we all knew it was perfect.
“No,” Tor said. “Don’t do that!”
Sverre and Geir went over and grabbed him by the arms.
“Come on!” Sverre shouted. “We need a couple more of you!”
Dag Magne went over, and with Geir B, they grabbed Tor’s legs and lifted him. Tor protested and writhed as they carried him out of the shower, but rather halfheartedly. The rest of us followed. And it was quite a sight. Tor, stark naked with an enormous bone, carried by four boys, also naked, followed by a procession of more naked boys, through the changing room and into the large, cold gymnasium where Fru Hensel, who was around thirty years old, turned to us from the stage at the far end.