Authors: Tore Renberg
‘Now, now, now, you know we’ve talked about this—’
‘I mean it, Beverly, I have a well-run business, I can increase the staff, I could be a good husband to you, I can provide considerable sums of money, I—’
She pouts and slaps her tongue against the roof of her mouth, as though there were poultry in the room. She tilts her head slightly forward and Jan Inge sees her eyelashes quiver. Beverly undoes her dressing gown. It feels like womanhood itself issuing forth and filling up the whole room as he watches her breasts spill out from behind the terrycloth; he gasps and forgets what it was he was going to say.
‘Shh,’ she says, ‘you need to be released from whatever it is which is stirrin’ up such a thunderstorm in you. Come now and let Beverly from Louisiana take you for a little stroll into the master bedroom.’
Jan has begun to cry, like he does every Wednesady. He sniffles and nods to Beverly, and she takes a gentle hold of his left hand, guides it to one of her naked breasts. He puts his other hand in his pocket, pulls out fifteen-hundred kroner which he places on the coffee table, while his left hand still rests on her breast. Beverly closes her eyes, brings her hand down to his crotch, and Jan Inge takes a big gulp as she takes her hand away, as he watches her walk across the floor towards the bedroom.
Rudi parks the Volvo outside Food Story in Hospitalsgata. Free parking for a quarter of an hour.
He removed five skirting boards. It’ll be nice for Jani to be able to wheel freely through the house. You have to respect him for exercising as much as he does, hauling himself off, week after week. Although it’s sad never to see any results. Just as flabby and overweight.
Rudi crosses Klubbgata towards Dropsen the confectioners, passes Ostehuset Café, which he thinks is for wankers. He was in there once, asked them for a simple raisin bun but could he get it? No problem ordering an ecological cock with a wreath of gash marinated asparagus on a bed of spinach with sprinkled herbs, but a classic raisin bun, that was beyond them.
He peels off into Laugmannsgata up the hill in the direction of Sølvberget. It’s a little unpleasant being in such close vicinity to the Nokas building, scene of the biggest heist in Norwegian history. Nobody in the company talks about that. Kind of a touchy subject, especially when they felt they were close to being picked by Toska and his gang. When such a high-profile team comes to town, takes on such a big job and manages to bag over fifty mill, then not being picked can be a sore point. Even though they’re opposed to hold-ups. And to violence. Still, you have to draw the line somewhere as far as principles are concerned. They could at least have kept watch or contributed in some kind of consultancy role. They are sitting on a lot of know-how and a good deal of knowledge about the region after all. What did Toska want with Swedes and people from Sandnes? Maybe a few of them would still be at large if they’d been along? Who knows, maybe that
policeman never would have been killed if they’d been in on it. All in all, it’s hard to be passed over. Everybody needs to be noticed.
Rudy passes a beggar in a knitted sweater, an apron and headscarf sitting outside 7-Eleven. Her face looks blackened from soot, her hair is jet black, she’s holding a paper cup between her hands and she looks at him with two sad eyes as she holds it out and shakes it. Rudi feels her looking at him but he restrains himself; remember what Jan Inge says:
No matter how much you babble away within these four walls, we can live with it, but when you’re out in public you need to button your lip.
But his mouth won’t obey and Rudi halts abruptly in front of the beggar.
‘You there,’ he says resignedly. ‘Come on. Eh?’
She looks at Rudi, puzzled, and says something in a language he doesn’t recognise.
‘Seriously,’ says Rudi, arms out in an expression of exasperation. ‘Where are you from? Lithuania? Romania? Andorra? Eh? Listen, I’m in a hurry, but this disappoints me. You sitting here. In a foreign country. In tatters and rags and looking the way you do. In broad daylight. You’re sitting there, messing up our city and waving a paper cup from 7-Eleven around collecting halfpennies. Jesus. How low can you sink? Look at yourself, honey. Once you were a sweet little girl with pigtails. Once you sat in your Chechen granny’s lap while she sang you nursery rhymes. What is it that makes you think you can get up in the morning, go out and receive – RECEIVE – money from people, while the rest of us have to work to earn a wage? Self-respect, have you heard of that? Would I go off to your country, find a nice spot to sit with a paper cup and beg for money? Jesus! And don’t go telling me that you’ve an uncle from Azerbaijan who beats the shit out of you and your thirteen kids if you don’t sit here degrading yourself. You have a choice, Miss Poland! You can stand up, right this moment, and walk from this with your head held high. You can walk into … Christ … you see that shop there? Ting? Yeah, Ting it’s called. You can go in there and you can say:
Hi, I’m a washed-up woman from Estonia. My husband was blinded in the civil war, I have cervical cancer and my kids have tapeworms but I want to do something with my life. Give me a job, I’ll do anything at all.
But no, you just want
to sit here polluting the cityscape. Fuck me. You make me feel so depressed.’
‘Excuse me?’
Rudi shakes his head and clicks his tongue with a disapproving
tsk
. He rummages in his pockets. Produces a five kroner coin and drops it in her cup. The woman casts her eyes downward and bows her head.
‘And the next time I’m walking through my city, I don’t want to see you. By then you’ll have returned to the loser land you’re from and participated in it’s reconstruction, or else you’ll have got your act together, found a job and gone on a course to learn Norwegian. Yeah, who knows Aunty Bulgaria, before you know it you could be standing for a political party in elections in our country and speaking up on behalf of the immigrants’ cause, and then I’ll hear you say:
Don’t abuse people’s hospitality! Pull yourselves together! Put away the paper cup!
’
She bows again and Rudi hurries off towards Arneageren Square. He stops when he reachs the open area in front of
Kulturhuset
.
Fuck, really
in your face,
this city.
Too much bloody ruckus, pain in the hole with people pestering, trying to get you to do one thing or another, people putting on plays, writing books, arguing in the papers and kicking up a fuss about one thing or another, not to mention them earning so much money. In that respect it’s not so strange Toska and his gang decided to head here.
The quiet, peaceful times are gone, thinks Rudi. Back when you could sit in Granny’s garden, look around at nature and think deep thoughts.
Rudi realises he’s lost in thought and he hurries on towards Platekompaniet record shop. He comes to a halt as he walks in the door. It’s a long time since he’s been here, hasn’t bought a lot of albums in the last few years and the ones he has he’s picked up at Statoil. He looks around in surprise. He walks along the shelves. Games, DVDs, Blu-ray. Fuck’s sake, where the hell are the CDs? Jesus, isn’t this supposed to be a record shop? He goes further down the aisles, films, films, games, games, reaches the counter
and at the very end on the right-hand side he spots a few shelves of CDs.
A shop assistant walks past, a smallish guy with a crew cut.
‘Oi,’ says Rudi. ‘Not too many bloody albums in here. What’s going on?’
The assistant smiles. ‘No, well, we don’t sell many CDs any more—’
‘You don’t sell many?’ Rudi says, raising his voice slightly. ‘Well, that’s not so strange, seeing as you don’t have any.’
The guy in the blue Platekompaniet T-shirt shrugs: ‘So what is it you’re looking for?’
‘Ah, you know,’ Rudi says, lowering his voice and taking a glance around to see if there’s anybody he knows around. ‘Metallica, Motörhead, Slayer…’
‘We do have a selection of metal, lot of Maiden on special offer, for instance—’
‘Don’t you think I’ve got Maiden? The entire collection!’ says Rudi, with a dismissive wave. ‘No, you see, it’s a present, for a niece of mine, and y’know, kids today, they only like pop—’
‘Well, actually a lot of them are into metal too, they—’
‘Maybe they are,’ Rudi says, in an irritated tone, ‘but my niece isn’t. She wants…’
Rudi clears his throat.
‘Yeah?’
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Coldplay’.
‘Coldplay, yeah,’ says the guy, ‘great band. Which album were you thinking of?’
Rudi squirms. He bends towards the guy.
‘Y’know … that one … eh…’ He clears his throat again. Then, in a low voice, he hums: ‘Du-du-du-du-du-du-du-du-du…’
The record shop guy smiles and Rudi feels an urge to plant a fist in his face.
‘Viva La Vida,’ the guy says. ‘The Beatles couldn’t have done better. We’ve got it over here.’
‘Hm,’ Rudi says, nodding while the guy goes to get the CD. ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’ Then, raising his voice says: ‘But listen, record dude, you really need to do something about this shop!’
The guy walks back around the counter with the CD in his hand. ‘Is it a present?’
‘Yeah,’ Rudi hastens to reply, ‘you don’t think I bloody well want that shit for myself, do you? You don’t actually think Rudi—’ He stops himself, no names. ‘You don’t actually think a metal man like me is going to sit in the Volvo—’ Again he checks himself, no details. ‘You don’t actually think a regular guy who works in an office…’ – that’s nice, yeah, an office – ‘…has a good job in an office listens to that kind of poppy shit on his PC while he’s shuffling papers around?’
The record shop guy laughs. Again. Rudi clenches his fists. What the fuck is he chuckling about?
‘No,’ Rudi says, restraining himself, producing his wallet and extracting a two hundred kroner note, ‘I’ll tell you this – back when I was a kid, this was a cool town to live in. When I moved in with my granny after my folks split up, there must have been at least five record shops in Stavanger, and they were
record
shops,
capisce?
’
The guy laughs. Again. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I worked in a few of them so I know what you’re talking about.’ And then he gets a kind of serious look on his face. He leans across, begins tapping the gift-wrapped CD lightly on the counter. ‘No,’ he says, ‘things are really going downhill. I had to remove a whole rack of CDs just a couple of weeks back. It’s just the way things are. People don’t buy music any more. Now they download everything, you know. They steal.’
‘Jesus,’ Rudi says, feeling a degree of sympathy for the guy with the crew cut. ‘Hard times.’
The guy nods. ‘They are indeed.’
‘Just constant grief,’ says Rudi, looking around. There’re hardly any other people in the shop. ‘But what can you do? We’ve all got work to do, don’t we? We all try and land the good jobs, and sometimes the big fish come to town, but you don’t always—’ Rudi stops himself. ‘No, it’s not as though an office job in local government is that great either, if you know what I mean.’
The guy behind the counter nods. ‘I remember the old days. Fåsen Records. Fona. Platon Discs. Free Record Shop. Toots Music.’
‘The good old days,’ Rudi says with a sigh.
‘Yeah,’ says the guy. ‘Thousands of records.’
Rudi places the two hundred kroner note on the counter. ‘I feel for you, hombre. You’re upagainstsomerealshithere and I think you know what I’m referring to. The internet. The black death of the modern age. If you ever need any help, all you have to do is pick up the phone and—’
Rudi stops himself again.
‘Respect to you and your loved ones,’ he says. ‘And fuck Coldplay, metal up your ass!’
‘I like Coldplay,’ says the guy behind the counter.
‘Heh heh,’ Rudi chortles, ‘that is your massive problem! No, but seriously, my niece is going to be made up when she gets this pop shit from Uncle Rudi.’
The guy behind the counter laughs. ‘Yeah, if she has a CD player, that is.’
Rudi leans towards him. ‘Listen, mate, I’m going to level with you. Rudi – this is Rudi here in front of you. Come here, let me shake your hand. Rudi’s going to level with you. I don’t have a niece. That’s just some shit I made up. I’m an honest-to-God metal man. A pen-pusher. Have to work hard to earn a crust. Shuffle papers for the council. At the moment we’ve got our hands full with that new crossroads in Tjensvoll. Tonnes of people complaining about how it takes twice as long for the lights to change since the new intersection was finished. And who is it has to deal with these complaints? Who is it has to answer the calls when people ring up to give out yards about us regular local council employees? And who do you think suffers? It’s the little people. The old and the sick. It’s the old people who ring us up, desperation in their voices because their hearing aid isn’t working, because they can’t find their bedpan or because they don’t have a grandchild to go and look after them. That’s my working day. I’m a straight-up metal man. Got a best friend who weighs 120 kilos. Got a woman I’m never planning to let go. You know. It’s like Judas Priest say, you remember, “Fever”? “Fever. You set my soul on fire. You fill my nights with desire.” And people say there’s no soul in metal? People sit around listening to Coldplay? Christ, I’m telling you,
here we are, living in the wealthiest city in the world, the city David Toska and his handpicked crew chose to …. and … well, you can just get so bloody depressed thinking about it. Where’s the humanity? Yeah. No. You could go on about it all day, eh? Pleasure meeting other people who are sound. There’re not many of us left, brother! I thought you were a tosser, but you’re not – you’re the last man standing. And now I’ll give you a little quiz here – what two metal tracks am I thinking of?’
‘What?’
‘Last man standing. Two metal songs called ‘Last Man Standing’.
‘What?’
‘Hammerfall. Bon Jovi. You’ve a lot to learn. And I’ve a lot to do.’
Rudi takes out his mobile. He feels buoyed. He may have shot off at the mouth a bit, but first and foremost he’s aware of having done a good deed, offered a little inspiration to a working man in his daily toil, in a business on the way down.
Text message. From Cecilie.
‘No, for fuck’s sake!’
The guy behind the counter clears his throat. Rudi looks up.
‘Christ, if it’s not one fucking thing then it’s another.’ He draws a deep breath then exhales slowly. ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Sometimes you’ve just got to suck it up, like the man said. No, you take away a man’s car, you take away his freedom. So it’s a good thing to have a friend with a van. Okey-doke! Rudi signing out.’
At which point he sets off, more agitated than when he arrived, out the doors of Platekompaniet, in the direction of Hospitalsgata. By Havana department store he catches sight of the beggar who had been sitting outside 7-Eleven and, reaching her in a few quick steps, bends down into her terrified face, tears the paper cup out of her hand, plucks out the five kroner he gave her a few minutes earlier and scatters the rest of the small change she’s received on to the cobblestones. ‘Seriously,’ hisses Rudi, ‘didn’t you understand a word I said? I just ran into a real working man and here you are!’ Rudi spits on the ground. ‘I despise you,’ he whispers, ‘you and everything you represent.’
Rudi leaves the beggar and strides past Ostehuset Café. When he reaches the car he sees a parking ticket for five hundred kroner under the window wiper. He rips it into pieces and gets in. He feeds the CD into the player, taps forward to ‘Viva La Vida’, leans back and closes his eyes.