Beatles (25 page)

Seb chuckled.

Gunnar walked at the rear scratching the bites on his forehead.

‘Had a wild dream last night,’ Seb grinned, rubbing his eyes. ‘Dreamt I was a fish.’

‘What s-s-sort of fish?’ asked Ola.

‘Dunno what sort of fish, do I, you puddin’. Just a fish. Swimmin’ like mad. And we were talkin’ to each other. I mean, we, the fish. Talkin’ with little screeches. I know physically what it feels like to be a fish. Mad, eh! And under the water it was totally clear.’

‘Was no one fishin’?’ I asked.

‘Yeah. Spotted a big hook. And I was just goin’ to bite when you woke me.’

It was five o’clock when we finally found Lake Bjørnsøen. That was what Ola said anyway. He could see it from the colour of the clouds. We burst into the Kikut lodge and ordered open sandwiches with liver paste on, Cokes and Ascot cigarettes. A huge clock hung on the wall. It was five past five. We looked at Ola. He was tuned in to time.

Footsore, sunburnt and exhausted, we sat there for quite a while. There was an old codger behind the counter and two women in the
kitchen. And none of them complained about our lack of activity. Gunnar calmed down a little.

‘No one knows
we
did it,’ I whispered across the table. Gunnar looked straight at me.

‘That’s got nothin’ to do with it, has it!’

We found a place to camp a bit closer to the mouth of the river, right out on a flat headland that protruded into the water like an index finger. We erected the tent and took out our fishing tackle. The rainworms were beginning to go limp, there was very little resistance when we squeezed them onto the hook. The floats didn’t move. Slowly the water turned black as the clouds rose in the sky. A current of cold air blew against the back of our necks. The forest began to sough.

We crept into the tent. It was late enough anyway and we were dead on our feet. The sleeping bags lay end to end. The tent shook in the wind. Far in the distance, perhaps over Frogner, we heard thunder.

‘Isn’t it a bit s-s-stupid to be outside,’ Ola said.

‘Worse in the forest,’ Seb said. ‘A tree could fall on your head.’

We lay listening, heard the wind and the waves beating against the rocks. It was dark. It was very dark.

‘Let’s count bands,’ Gunnar suggested.

Seb kicked off.

‘The Beatles,’ he said. Obvious really.

Then it was Ola’s turn.

‘The Beach B-B-Boys.’

Gunnar: ‘Gerry and the Pacemakers.’

And me: ‘The Rollin’ Stones.’

And so it went on: The Animals. The Pretty Things. The Who. The Dave Clark Five. Manfred Mann. The Yardbirds. The Byrds. Lovin’ Spoonful. The Kinks. The Snowflakes.

‘Who said that?’ Seb shouted.

It was Ola.

‘Doesn’t count. The Snowflakes doesn’t count!’

We continued, we weren’t asleep yet. The Supremes. The Pussycats. The Tremeloes. The Shadows. Dave, Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich. The Swingin’ Blue Jeans.

‘The Snafus!’ said Seb and then the thunder struck. The darkness was chopped up by blue knives. The ground shook beneath us. The rain hammered down on the canvas. Then it hammered down on us. It streamed in from all sides. The tent leaked like a sieve.

We got up and went out. The sky was grinding its teeth. The thunder rolled down. The wind beat against our faces.

‘We’ll have to go to Kikut!’ Gunnar yelled.

He lit the torch, but it wasn’t a lot of use. We packed everything up as best we could and fought our way through the storm, stumbled in the mud, were sent flying by the wind. Now and then there was a blue flash, as if from a huge crackly TV set.

All the windows in Kikut Lodge were dark. We banged on the door, but no one heard us. Seb pointed to another door. It was the toilet. We ran over. It was just as cold there, but it was dry. An unsavoury smell emanated from the cubicles and the tin urinal.

‘Let’s go home tomorrow,’ said Seb.

We tried to sleep, but our sleeping bags were too wet. We tried to light the pipe, but the matches were too wet. We tried to argue, but we were much too wet. Then we must have fallen asleep despite everything, because we woke and were stuffed up and frazzled at the edges. And it wasn’t raining. It was just the urinal behind us dribbling. The sun was shining. We staggered out, stiff-legged and sore, bought some broth and rolls and hung ourselves out to dry for a couple of hours in the rising sun.

‘D’you recognise that smell?’ Seb asked.

‘I do,’ I said.

The worms. The worms had gone rotten. We went into the forest and emptied them out. A couple of trees instantly lost their needles. Then we hung our clothes and sleeping bags on the back of our rucksacks and started the trek home. We had a rest by Lake Skjærsøen and ate the rest of ‘Dead Man in a Tin’.

‘Been a great trip,’ Seb said.

We could all vouch for that.

Gunnar took out his camera, knelt down, wound it on and squinted. Then an old man appeared on the path and we asked him to take the photo.

So we all were in the picture.

With our last coins we ate hotpot and drank malt beer in Ullevålseter. Now it was downhill to Lake Sognsvann and even though it was nice to be going home to a bed and records and a toilet, we felt an urge to drag the trip out. We took a detour to Lille Åklungen which lay dark and deep beneath the steep scree in the west. We settled down on a green promontory and checked our fishing gear.

‘What’s the time?’ we asked Ola.

He looked around a bit puzzled, counted on his fingers and reckoned it was five.

We put on spinners and cast. Seb’s hit the bottom and the line broke. He packed up his things and couldn’t be bothered to fish any more. Ola went for a walk in the woods. Eventually Gunnar also gave up.

Seb pointed.

‘Look at those pylons over there! They look like huge robots!’

They towered over the trees, hatless, arms outstretched, colossal steel skeletons. If we kept quiet, we could hear the wires singing. It sounded eerie.

‘That woman was pretty crazy,’ I said.

‘The gnome too,’ Gunnar said.

‘But he was right about us not catchin’ any more fish in Daltjuven,’ I said.

Ola rummaged through the rucksacks. We strolled up to him. He jumped like a frog as we approached, trying to hide something he was holding in his hand. We forced it open. His watch.

He went a hideous red and developed a twitch in his left ear. It flapped. We just looked at him. A star went out. A cuckoo said goodnight.

‘H-h-haven’t used it until n-n-now!’ he stuttered.

‘Oh, no. No, of course not,’ we said. ‘What’s the time now, eh? Can you work that out?’

He stared at his watch.

‘It’s s-s-stopped,’ he said. ‘It’s not waterproof.’

He peered up at the sky as one ear flapped wildly.

‘Think it’s h-h-half past six,’ he said.

I cast for the last time, swung the rod, the spinner flew in a wonderful arc and landed with a sigh out in the middle of the inlet. I let
it sink and wound slowly. Then I felt it jerk my arm. The line quivered and sang like the high tension wires above. It wasn’t snagged on the bottom. It jerked.

‘Got one!’ I shouted.

I let the line run. The fish took it. I gave more. Then it stopped. I reeled in carefully. It wouldn’t give in, tried to swim away, but it was too tired and the hook was firmly in position. It surrendered. It came with the line. When it was close enough we saw it glistening in the dark water. I landed it. It weighed at least half a kilo. It was a rainbow trout.

‘Shall we eat it now?’ I asked.

‘Take it home,’ Gunnar said, patting me on the back.

We set out on the last stage, trudged past the Gaustad fields. It had been a wonderful trip. Everyone was agreed on that. Some people were coming towards us, a strange procession, ten to fifteen men, all dressed the same, with shaven skulls and deep-set dark eyes and pale blue skin. At the front and rear were two men who did not look remotely like the others, they wore different clothes and looked quite strong, more like guards. They passed us without a word, looking nowhere, their hands grey protuberances and all I could hear was the shuffling of feet.

I stopped and froze from top to toe, impaled by an ice cold pillar. Then I ran after the others.

‘Did you see them?’ I said. ‘Bloody hell!’

‘Who?’ Gunnar asked.

‘Who! The nutters of course. The nutters from Gaustad!’

I pointed up the road. They weren’t there. A flock of birds suddenly alighted from the yellow meadow.

‘Bet England will win the world championship,’ Gunnar said.

‘What about Brazil then?’ Ola said. ‘P-Pelé!’

I turned round once more. The road was deserted.

Ola was in ecstasies. Ringo was the greatest singer in the world. Ringo was the one and only. He sat with his arms and legs round Gunnar’s record player, sweat glistening on his neck.

‘When I’m called up I’m gonna join the m-m-marines!’ he cried.

We pressed Repeat. ‘Yellow Submarine’, full blast, opened the
window and the whole town became a yellow submarine, the sky was the water and we were the crew.

‘Have to hurry or we’ll be late,’ Gunnar harried. He still had a couple of scars on his forehead from the worst of the mosquito bites.

We managed the flip side before leaving at a run. And suddenly the mood was different. The street was metamorphised into a cemetery, for some moments the sun disappeared behind a cloud and autumn stole in. ‘Eleanor Rigby’. We sat listening in silence, thinking it strange that everything could change so abruptly inside us, as soon as we flipped the record, just as though we had been split in two: an A side and a B side, happiness and sorrow.

And then we sprinted off to Vestheim. It was the first day at school after the summer. The first day of the second year at
realskole
.

The
gymnas
students stood in Skovveien smoking and showing off, and by the wire fence stood the dwarfs, eyes darting to and fro, only just able to see over their shoes. We ambled past them, recognising a couple of faces from Urra. They tried to say hi and be friendly, but it didn’t cut any ice. Had we ourselves not made it through the first year? Exactly. We walked right past them. But one persistent leech with trousers at high tide and a porcupine haircut padded after us.

‘What’s the initiation ceremony like?’ he said, clearing his throat.

We stopped and gave him a searching look.

‘Have you got any ID?’ Seb asked.

‘Eh?’

‘This is not a film for kiddies.’

‘But what’s the initiation ceremony like?’ he insisted.

‘Don’t even think about it,’ I said. ‘Or you’ll never return.’

He went white.

‘Is it that bad?’

‘Worse,’ I said. ‘Either they get you now, block the drain in the urinal with bog paper and up-end you until your ears are full of piss, known as the Ernst system, that is, or they wait till the winter and ram your head into a snowdrift and screw you in tight. Take your pick.’

He tottered off to the fence and sat on the ground. The other midgets flocked around him.

The girls had grown. How the girls had grown. We quietly slipped away.

Goose turned up with a crease in his trousers and an apple under his arm.

‘Hiya,’ he said cautiously.

‘Hiya, Christian,’ we said and he beamed from ear to ear and stood like that until the bell rang.

The desks were too small now. There was a stale smell after the summer and we opened all the windows. The sponge on the teacher’s desk was hard and dry. Goose moistened it. The girls sprayed perfume on him. Yep. Nothing had changed. Except that something was missing. A desk was missing.

Fred was missing.

Kerr’s Pink arrived, took a seat behind his desk and fidgeted with some books.

‘Sit down,’ he said at last.

We sat down.

Kerr’s Pink started talking.

‘First of all, I have some sad news to announce. Our classmate, Fred, Fred Hansen, is dead. He drowned this summer.’

I don’t think I have ever heard a silence like that. And I can’t remember anything else until we told Seb and Ola after the lesson. The words were so heavy in my mouth. Seb didn’t believe me. He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. Then he believed it.

We walked home. Our brains churned in our heads. Gunnar said what we were all thinking, but couldn’t quite think through.

‘How could Fred’ve drowned? He was so good at swimming!’

Not a word more was said. I thought about those old clothes of his. I thought about the rat and his mother’s red hands.

Fred was dead.

We went to the photographic shop in Bygdøy Allé where Gunnar had handed in the film of the fishing trip. The assistant found the packet.

‘Some light must have got into the film,’ he said, taking the negatives from the plastic sleeves.

All that was left of the summer was a strip of black pictures.

There was a lot of devilry that autumn. We played
Revolver
that autumn. That was the autumn we were confirmed.

Once a week we went to confirmation classes at Frogner church, every Wednesday. The cramped stone room smelt of mildew and wet socks. There were at least twenty of us, each with our Bible and psalm book. The priest was the skier type with a dewdrop hanging from his nose and vertical wrinkles. His voice boomed. He preached about all the things we had promised when we were baptised.

And of course Goose was there. After the lesson he hung around as we lit up a fag in Bygdøy Allé.

‘Do you like the priest?’ we asked.

‘Crap,’ said Goose.

‘Quite a slog to get those presents,’ I said.

‘I’ve asked for a Hammond organ,’ Goose said.

‘Wow. You can play then, can you?’ Gunnar asked.

‘Piano.’ He hesitated. ‘Going to start a band.’

‘Band? Which one?’

The breath caught in our throats.

‘Have to see,’ he said, staring at the ground.

A rainworm was wriggling up the pavement. He trod on it.

‘What did you do that for?’

Gunnar pointed to the mess and grimaced. Goose gave a strange smile.

‘Felt like it.’

He shrugged his shoulders and walked off down the street.

We shuffled up to the fountain. It was out of operation for the winter, even though it was only September. A man rode a horse down the the middle of the avenue, wow, what an impressive sight, a shiny brown horse in the rain.

‘How long’s your dad goin’ to be at home?’ I asked.

‘Three months,’ Seb said, plucking out a Teddy cigarette. He looked gloomy.

‘Isn’t that alright?’ Gunnar lit a match and cupped it with his big hands.

‘Ye-es. But he and Mum are arguin’ all the time. And he keeps hasslin’ me to have a haircut.’

‘M-m-my dad moans as well,’ Ola mumbled, adjusting his fringe.

We pulled out our combs and tidied our locks. We didn’t talk much that autumn, but we had to say something, so we talked about Frigg being fourth in the league with a chance of going top, about the new Stones LP,
Aftermath
, and about the training sessions we had missed. But the thing we all wanted to talk about we repressed. About Fred.

We mooched home wearing yellow raincoats, silent and downhearted.

‘Not sure I want to continue with the lessons,’ Seb exclaimed.

We pulled up short.

‘Stop? Don’t arse about,’ I said. ‘We won’t have any instruments for The Snafus if we don’t get confirmed!’

The others nodded.

‘Right. But why should we go there if we don’t believe a word?’

‘I told you, you puddin’. The presents!’

We went back to Gunnar’s and played
Revolver
. One, two, three, four! Seb was lying stretched out when he heard the first chords of ‘Taxman’. And there was ‘Eleanor Rigby’ again. We pushed closer to the speaker as if we were freezing and the record player were a fire. I was hacked off that Paul had a soppy number on every LP, this time ‘Here, There And Everywhere’, but ‘For No One’ went straight to the heart like an arrow and we thought of all the girls, Unni, Klara, Nina and Guri. At the same time we had to listen to ‘Girl’, we sat there with clenched fists giving the cold shoulder to girls all over the globe. George’s sitar penetrated bone and marrow, it was like being at the dentist’s. And ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ was pretty crazy. Sounded like John was singing with his head in a flowerpot while no one in the entire orchestra in the background could give two hoots about cinema tickets.

‘John Lennon’s startin’ to get fat,’ Seb said once his pulse had dropped under a hundred.

Gunnar was annoyed and pinched his stomach to test for excess fat.

‘Is he buggery. Just looks like it. It’s his shirt that’s too big!’

‘D-d-definitely want some of those sunglasses for the summer,’ Ola said, pointing to Ringo.

Outside, the rain fell, diagonal and unremitting.

September 1966.

‘Yes,’ we said. ‘For the summer.’

And once again we repressed what we most wanted to say and slunk home, each with a heavy stone in our hearts.

Mum was waiting with supper. Dad was reading a thick book with an English title. After Christmas he would be branch manager.

‘You’ll have to come with us to the theatre soon now,’ Mum said.

It sounded like a call to war. I didn’t want to go with them to the theatre.

‘Aren’t you happy?’

‘Yes, I am,’ I said because Mum looked happy.

Night broke to the sound of Jensenius. He didn’t walk so much now, just sat in a chair I imagined, singing. Some evenings he could sing for two hours at a time with a fifteen-minute break. Then I suppose he dreamt applause and stamping and allowed himself to be cajoled into an encore.

Jensenius sang before winter came and snowed on his vocal cords.

I couldn’t sleep. A light shone from under the door. Mum and Dad were sitting in the sitting room talking in loud whispers. I held my breath and listened.

‘He’s an idiot!’ I heard Dad say.

Mum was quiet.

‘Resigning like that!’

‘Taking leave of absence,’ Mum interjected.

‘And to Paris! To this… this… girl!’

I crept back under the duvet and laughed in the dark. Hurrah for Hubert! Then I had to hold on tight, a dream appeared and launched me through the walls, this was the dream I had that autumn of ’66. I dreamt about the War of the Staple in 1962, in the middle of the
Cuba crisis, when I saw my father frightened for the first time, frightened, and when I saw that, fear swept through me with twice the force. Dad bought thirty kilos of canned foods, stored them in the cellar in Nesodden in case, just in case. No one was allowed to touch them, but gradually he calmed down, forgot the cans and did crosswords instead. That’s the cans I’m living on now, so thanks Dad, you showed foresight there, we are always at war. But, well, the War of the Staple, the three-day war, in ’62, when Skarpsno and Vika met head-on, and we in Skillebekk were caught in the crossfire with fragile hairgrip catapults which were no match for the enemy’s canons. But we had one advantage, we knew the battlefield well, we knew about secret doors, holes in the fence and underground
passages
. It started one Thursday. By Saturday afternoon it was over. When we heard Jakken scream. Jakken was disabled, he had some illness or other, he couldn’t walk properly, moved out of the area a long time ago now. Jakken screamed, he was standing in the middle of the street with a metal staple in his eyeball. Blood was streaming out. Jakken screamed and screamed. The war was over. We emerged from the trenches and the bunkers. He lost his sight there and then, in both eyes. Standing in a pool of blood screaming. The war was over. Mum could keep her hairgrips. The cans were in the cellar in Nesodden.

That’s what kept me awake at night.

I dreamt about staples and war.

One day, a day like any other that autumn, with a low gurgling sky and rain-bearing winds, we plucked up courage and bought four roses which were so red in all that grey, so dazzlingly red, and we went up to the Nordre Gravlund, to Fred’s grave. We dreaded it like the plague and walked in silence down the long road to the cemetery squeezed between Ullevål Hospital and the school gardens.

The graves lay in lines, large stones, wooden crosses, wreaths. Beyond the hedge, an ambulance howled past. Our polished shoes were grey with dirt.

An old man in black came down the gravel path and peered at us.

‘Where are you going?’ he grumbled.

‘We… we’re looking for Fred Hansen’s grave,’ Gunnar said.

The man shivered and pulled the black coat round his neck. Then he motioned us to follow, down a path between the gravestones. There was a smell of wet earth.

He pointed to the corner of the cemetery under the yellow birch trees.

‘Down there where the lady is standing. That’s his mother. Here every day, she is.’

Couldn’t turn back now. We walked slowly towards her. Seb was holding the flowers. The rain came in cold gusts.

She spotted us as we approached, recognised us at once and a slanted smile traversed her face.

‘It’s you,’ she whispered.

We went closer, wiped our hands on our thighs and practised the word in our heads that we had been taught by Kerr’s Pink when the class sent her the card and the flowers.

‘Condolences,’ we said, each in turn, proffering a hand and the lump in our throats grew into a pomegranate, it was good it was raining.

‘We’ve brought some flowers,’ Seb said, taking off the wet paper. We looked at the grave, at the inexorable numerals that had been engraved in stone:

14/8/1951 – 25/6/1966.

‘You must come home with me,’ the mother said suddenly. ‘Please!’

We mumbled our thanks and accompanied her across town to Schweigaardsgate and the Trans-Siberian railway.

We took a seat in the sitting room, she made tea. There was still a smell of stale clothes. And the door to Fred’s room was open. Nothing was changed, nothing had been moved.

‘Fred was the only person I had,’ she said quietly.

‘We miss F-F-Fred, too,’ Ola managed to say. We stole a grateful glance at him. Ola said the right things when it mattered.

‘He didn’t have so many friends,’ his mother went on. ‘You don’t know what it means to me that you have come here, to talk to you…’

And so she talked about all the things Fred would have been, would have done and she seemed to breathe life into him and now, I thought, now at any rate he would never be able to disappoint her.

‘Have more tea,’ she said at last. ‘I’ll get you something to nibble!’

She came back with a bowl full of biscuits.

‘Alphabet biscuits,’ she smiled.

We chewed the dry biscuits, drank the sweet tea, which was lukewarm. And it seemed to me the only letters to be found in the bowl were F and R and E and D. And I experienced something, it must have been what the priest called holy communion, at least it felt like that, body, blood, and the whole time we were looking at the open door and the room where the maths book lay open at the logarithms page.

On the way home, the weight of the stones in our hearts was too much. The rain cascaded down around us and we seemed to be sinking.

‘Fred died on June 25,’ I said.

The others, smoking their wet fags, said nothing.

‘That was the day we met the woman in Katnose,’ I continued.

‘So?’ Gunnar challenged.

I swallowed the stone.

‘Perhaps it was the woman the gnome told us about, Iris.’

Gunnar clenched his teeth in a huge sneer.

‘Shut up!’ He was right in my face. ‘Shut up!’

‘The p-p-priest says God has predetermined everythin’,’ Ola whispered, running his hand nervously through his hair.

‘And what kind of God would do that, eh! Who would let Fred drown!’

Gunnar fumbled with a cigarette, gave up and threw the matches at the house wall.

‘I’ll ask the priest that next time,’ Seb said and spat.

‘Fred drowned,’ Gunnar said in a low voice, as quietly as he could. ‘Fred drowned. No one predetermined that! People drown every summer. Fred was one of them. No one can help that.’

‘No,’ we said.

Fred is dead.

We went home. It was good to have said that. No matter what. It was good to have been there. We felt lighter somehow, as though we could swim away in the rain.

We stood in front of the hall mirror, Mum and I, and it was a bit like the summer in Nesodden when we had dressed up. She was wearing a long dress and gleamed from top to toe, and I, hair trimmed, freshly scrubbed, in a blazer with shiny buttons, ground my teeth.

‘You’ll get a suit for your confirmation,’ Mum said, and there was a hoot outside, for, so help me, she had ordered a taxi as well. And that was fine. I sneaked out of the door, slipped onto the back seat and sat with bowed head, loath to be recognised wearing that outfit.

In the taxi my mother whispered to the back of my neck, ‘Aren’t you happy? Just think, Toralv Maurstad in
Brand
!’

I was scared stiff.

We hung up our coats and Mum had to stand in front of the mirror again. I wished I were elsewhere, I wished I were infinitely far away, but it was no use. Mum took my arm, held me tight, pointed and showed me how wonderful everything was, told me about Hauk and Alfred and Peer. I tried to calm my pumping heart, at least here I wouldn’t meet anyone I knew, that had to be a certainty.

Then a bell rang and people began to make for the entrances. We snaked along our row and found our seats. There was a smell of moths. Moths and perfume and aftershave, it was worse than the church and the gymnasium rolled into one. My tie pressed against my Adam’s apple, the elastic was suffocating me. Then the curtain went up, someone started speaking in a demented voice and I passed out.

I was woken by a strong light, applause and stamping.

‘Has it finished?’ I asked.

‘It’s the interval,’ Mum laughed.

We rushed up to the first floor because Mum wanted a Martini. I had a Solo. There were no seats so we had to stand along the walls. Mum leaned back and gave a sigh of pleasure.

‘It’s so overwhelming,’ she said.

‘Mmm,’ I mumbled.

‘I’m sure you’ll be reading
Brand
at school. Or
Peer Gynt.
’

That was when I choked on my lemonade. Right in front of us stood Nina’s parents. There was no mistaking them. Sweat was running out of my trouser legs.

‘Have to go to the loo,’ I said.

Mum looked at her watch.

‘You’ll have to make it snappy then. It’s on the ground floor.’

I sneaked out and passed through the glass doors unobserved. I made my way down the stairs and eventually found the gentlemen’s toilet. My heart was doing the sixty-metre sprint. I shouldered open the door. No one there. I gave a sigh of relief.
This
was drama. I stood in front of the urinal and discharged in peace and quiet. But then the door burst open and a short man with a beard took up position next to me. My fountain dried up. It was Nina’s father. He rummaged and fiddled and jerked into action, glanced at me and just as I had packed away my tackle and buttoned up, he recognised me.