Brush my teeth! I could do that.
Into the bathroom, out with the brush from the tooth glass, a drop of water and on with the white toothpaste. I brushed energetically for several minutes while studying myself in the mirror. The sound of the brush against my teeth seemed to fill the whole of my head from the inside, so I didn’t notice that Dad was up until he opened the door. He was wearing only underpants.
“Are you brushing your teeth before you’ve had breakfast? How stupid can you be? Put that brush down right now and go to your room!”
As I set foot on the red wall-to-wall carpet on the landing he slammed the door behind him and started pissing loudly into the toilet bowl. I knelt on my bed and looked up at Prestbakmo’s house. Was that two heads I could see in the darkness of the kitchen window? Yes, it had to be. They were up. It would have been good to have a walkie-talkie so that I could talk to Geir! That would have been perfect!
Dad left the bathroom and went into the bedroom. I could hear his voice, and then Mom’s. So she was awake!
I stayed in my room until she was up and on her way to the kitchen, where Dad had already been clattering around for a while. In the shelter of her back I sat down at my place. They had bought cornflakes, we almost never had them, and after she had put out a bowl and a spoon for me, and I had poured milk over the golden, somewhat perforated, irregularly formed flakes, I came to the conclusion that cornflakes were best when they were crispy, before the milk had soaked into them. But after I had been eating for a while and they were beginning to go soft, filled as it were with both their own taste and that of the milk, plus the sugar, of which I had sprinkled a liberal quantity, I changed my mind;
that
was when they were at their best.
Or was it?
Dad went into the living room with a cup in his hand, he didn’t usually have breakfast, but sat in there smoking and drinking coffee instead. Yngve came in, sat down on his chair without saying a word, poured out some cornflakes and milk, sprinkled sugar over the top, and started wolfing it down.
“Looking forward to it?” he said at length.
“A little,” I said.
“It’s nothing to look forward to,” he said.
“Yes, it is,” Mom said. “You certainly looked forward to starting school anyway. I can remember it well. Can you?”
“Ye-es,” Yngve said. “I suppose I can.”
He cycled to school, usually a little while before Dad left, unless Dad had some work to do before the first lesson, that is, which was sometimes the case. Yngve was not allowed to have a lift, except on very special occasions, such as when it had snowed a lot overnight, because he wasn’t to have any advantages just because his father was a teacher at the school.
When breakfast was finished and they had left, I sat with Mom in the kitchen. She read the newspaper, I chatted.
“Do you think we’ll have to write in the first lesson, Mom?” I asked. “Or is it usually math? Leif Tore says we’ll have drawing so that we can relax a bit at the beginning, and not everyone can write. Or add and subtract. Only me actually. As far as I know at least. I learned when I was five and a half. Do you remember?”
“Remember when you learned to read? What do you mean?” Mom said.
“That time outside the bus station when I read the sign? ‘Kaffe-fetteria?’ You laughed. Yngve laughed, too. Now I know it’s called ‘kafeteria.’ Shall I read some headlines?”
Mom nodded. I read aloud. Bit staccato, but everything was correct.
“You managed that nicely,” she said. “You’ll do really well at school.”
She scratched an ear as she read, the way only she could, she held her ear between her fingers and moved them back and forth incredibly fast, just like a cat.
She put down the newspaper and looked at me.
“Are you looking forward to it?” she asked.
“And how,” I said.
She smiled, patted me on the head, got up, and started to clear the table. I went to my room. School didn’t begin until ten o’clock as it was the first day. Nevertheless, we ended up being short of time, which was often the case with Mom, she was pretty absentminded when it came to matters like this. From the window I saw the excitement mounting outside the houses where there were children starting school, that is, in the families with Geir, Leif Tore, Trond, Geir Håkon, and Marianne, hair was combed, dresses and shirts were straightened, photographs taken. When it was my turn to stand outside, smiling at Mom, with one hand shielding my eyes from the sun, which had moved above the tops of the spruce trees by this time, everyone had gone. We were the last, and all of a sudden we were late, so Mom, who had taken the day off work for the occasion, hurried me along, I opened the door of the green VW, pushed the seat forward, and got in the back while she rummaged for the key in her shoulder bag and inserted it in the ignition. She lit a cigarette, reversed after casting a quick glance over her shoulder, put the car in first gear a few meters up the hill, and drove down. The roar of the engine resounded off the brick walls. I moved to the middle of the car so that I could see between the two seats at the front. The two white gas holders across Tromøya Sound, the wild cherry tree, Kristen’s red house, then the road down to the marina where we almost never went, along the route where in the course of the next six years I would become familiar with every tiniest clearing and stone wall, and out to the small places on the east of the island, where Mom didn’t know her way, which made her a bit agitated.
“Was it this way, Karl Ove, do you remember?” she said, stubbing out the cigarette in the ashtray as she peered into the mirror.
“I don’t remember,” I said. “But I think so. It was on the left, anyway.”
Below, there was a shop by a quay and a clump of houses encircling it, no school. The sea was a deep blue, bordering on black beneath the shadow of the buildings; untouched by the high temperatures, this fullness distinguished it from most of the other colors in the landscape, which were as though bleached after the weeks-long heat wave. The sea’s cool blue contrasted with the yellow and brown and the faded green.
Now Mom was driving along a gravel road. Dust whirled up behind us. As the road narrowed and nothing of any significance seemed to lie ahead, she turned and drove back. On the other side, down by the water, there was another road she tried. That didn’t lead to any school, either.
“Are we going to be late?” I asked.
“Maybe,” she replied. “Fancy not bringing a map with me!”
“Haven’t you been here before then?” I said.
“Yes, I have,” she said. “But my memory’s not as good as yours, you know.”
We drove up the hill we had come down ten minutes earlier and turned onto the main road by a chapel. At every sign and crossroads she slowed down and leaned forward.
“There it is, Mom!” I shouted, pointing. We still couldn’t see it, but I remembered the green to the right; the school was at the top of the gentle gradient that followed. A narrow gravel road led down to it, there were lots of parked cars, and as Mom turned into it, I spotted the school playground swarming with people and a man everyone was staring at was gesticulating on top of a rock, beneath the flagpole.
“We’ve got to hurry!” I said. “They’ve started! Mom, they’ve started!”
“Yes, I know,” Mom said. “But we have to find somewhere to park first. There, maybe. Yes.”
We had ended up right down by the woodwork-room-cum-gym hall. A large, white building from the olden days, and outside it, on tarmac, Mom parked the car. We weren’t exactly familiar with the school layout, so instead of going to the end and taking the shortcut across the soccer field, we followed the road on the other side up to the playground. Mom scooted along, with me in tow. The satchel bumped up and down so wonderfully as I ran, every bump reminding me of what I had behind me, shiny and glossy, and hot on the heels of that thought, the light-blue trousers, the light-blue jacket, the dark-blue shoes.
When we finally reached the playground, the crowd was slowly moving into the low school building.
“We seem to have missed the welcome ceremony,” Mom said.
“That doesn’t matter, Mom,” I said. “Come on!”
I caught sight of Geir and his mother, ran over to them with Mom holding my hand, they smiled in greeting, and we went up the steps in the middle of the crowd of parents and children. Geir’s satchel was identical to mine, as most of the boys’ satchels were, whereas, from what I could glean in passing, the girls sported quite a wide variety.
“Where are we going? Do you know?” Mom asked Martha, Geir’s mother.
“I’m afraid I don’t.” Martha laughed. “We’re following their teacher.”
I looked in the direction she nodded. And there, sure enough, was our Frøken. She stopped in front of the staircase and said that all those who were in her class should go ahead, and Geir and I ran down the stairs, through all the people, and along the corridor to the end. But Frøken stopped in front of a room close to the staircase, making us not the first, as we had imagined, but almost the last.
The room was full of children dressed in smart clothes and their mothers. Through the windows you looked down onto a narrow field; the forest was close behind. Frøken stood at her desk, which was on a little dais; on the blackboard was written HELLO, CLASS 1B in pink chalk with a flowery border around it. On the wall above the desk there were maps and charts.
“Hello, everyone,” Frøken said. “And welcome to Sandnes School! My name is Helga Torgersen, and I’m going to be your class teacher. I’m really looking forward to this, I can tell you! We’re going to have a lot of fun. And do you know what? You are not the only ones who are new to this school. I am new, too. You are my very first class!”
I looked around me. All the adults were smiling. Almost all the children were craning their necks and glancing at one another. I knew Geir Håkon, Trond, Geir, Leif Tore, and Marianne. And the boy who used to throw stones at us and had that frightening dog. I had never seen the others before.
“Now we are going to do a roll call,” Frøken said from the dais. “Do you know what a roll call is?”
No one answered.
“You call out a name and the person with that name answers,” I said.
Everyone looked at me. I put on a broad smile over my protruding teeth.
“That’s correct,” Frøken said. “And we start with the letter A. That’s the first letter in the alphabet, you see. You’ll learn all about that later. So, A. Anne Lisbet!”
“Yes,” said a girl’s voice, and everyone turned toward the sound, I did, too.
The voice belonged to a thin girl with shiny, black hair. She looked like an Indian.
“Asgeir?” Frøken said.
“Yes!” said a boy with big teeth and long hair.
After the roll call we sat down at our desks while our parents stood by the wall. Frøken gave everyone a recorder, an exercise book and a notebook, a schedule with our lessons printed on it, as well as a money box and a leaflet with a picture of a yellow ant on it from a local savings bank. Then she told us about some of the events that would be taking place during the autumn, one of which was a swimming class to be held in a pool at a school on the next island, as there wasn’t a swimming pool on Tromøya. She handed out a piece of paper with a slip you could fill in and return if you were interested. Then we did some drawing, with our parents still there watching, and then it was over. The following day school would start in earnest, we would catch the bus on our own, and be there for three hours without our parents breathing down our necks.
As we left the classroom I was still wide-eyed with all the newness and strangeness, and the feeling continued when everyone in the new class got into their respective cars with their parents, normally it was only on the seventeenth of May that there was this level of synchronous vehicle activity, that a location was left simultaneously by so many children, but as we were driving home disappointment began to set in, and I became more and more dejected the closer we came to home.
Nothing had happened.
I could read and write, and I had counted on having a chance to show that on the first day. A bit at least! And I had been looking forward to having break time, to the bell ringing at the end of one lesson and the start of the next. To using my new pencil case and the compartments in the satchel.
No, the day hadn’t lived up to my expectations, and I had to take off the clothes I looked so good in and hang them up in their place in my wardrobe, to await future formal occasions. I sat on the kitchen stool chatting to Mom while she made dinner, it was rare I had her to myself in the middle of the day, and on top of this she had been with me where it counted most, so I exploited the opportunity for all it was worth, and babbled away.
“I wish we had a cat I could play with,” I said. “Can’t we have a cat?”
“That would be nice,” Mom said. “I like cats. They’re good company.”
“So is it Dad who doesn’t like them then?”
“I don’t know,” Mom said. “He’s just not that interested, I think. And he probably thinks they’re a bit too much work.”
“But I can take care of it,” I said. “That’s no problem.”
“I know,” Mom said. “We’ll have to wait and see.”
“Wait and see, wait and see,” I said. “But if Yngve wants a cat, that’ll make three of us.”
Mom laughed.
“It’s not that simple,” she said. “You’ll have to be patient. Who knows what will happen.”
She put the peeled carrot on the board and chopped it up, lifted the board, and slid the pieces into the large pot where there were already bones and bits of meat. I looked out of the window. Through the many small holes in the orange curtain Mom had crocheted I could see the road outside was empty, which it invariably was in the middle of the day.
There was a sudden pungent smell of onions, and I turned to Mom, who was peeling one with her arms outstretched and her eyes full of tears.
When I turned back I saw Geir come bounding down the hill. He had also changed into his normal clothes. A second later I heard a crunch of gravel through the half-open window as he walked up the drive.
“Karl Ove, are you coming?” he shouted.