Beatles (28 page)

‘I’m going to write a letter to Nina,’ Guri said. ‘Should I say hello from you?’

And I said yes.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Of course. Just say hello.’

‘You’re not angry with her, are you?’

And I said no.

‘Course not,’ I beamed. ‘Why should I be?’

I stormed up to Solli. The telephone box was empty. I inserted a coin and dialled Goose’s number. In the crime hour on TV they talked through handkerchieves. I didn’t have a handkerchief, so I cleared my throat properly and tried to make my voice deeper. I supposed they wouldn’t recognise my voice, although Goose would. Signals sparked across Frogner, then there was a woman’s voice in my ear.

‘Ellingsen,’ it said.

‘Is herr Ellingsen there?’ I asked.

The receiver in my hand was a sponge.

There was a brief pause.

‘He’s not at home at this moment. Who am I talking to, please?’

I took the plunge.

‘It’s about your son,’ I said. ‘I’m the owner of a tobacconist’s nearby Uranienborg school. Some time ago I caught him trying to steal a comic.’

Silence at the other end.

I continued, ‘I may have been a little hard on him, but you know how it is. It’s not the first time I’ve had pilfering in my shop.’

‘A comic?’

‘A… Davy Crockett comic. I don’t think he was alone.’

‘Alone?’

‘There was a gang of boys standing outside the shop waiting.’

‘I see,’ she said.

I doubted that. I had to change ear. The first one was melting.

‘I thought you might be interested to know, even though it is quite some time ago now. But I consider the matter closed.’

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘Thank you very much.’

She rang off. I hung up. I assumed she would be going into Goose’s room and slapping him stupid. I staggered out, stood on the pavement, the tram came across the roundabout, and suddenly took on the features of a ship, gliding past me with voices and music. I felt the pull in my whole body, the enormous backwash, I was dragged into the blue darkness beneath the starry sky, I beat Aldrin’s record from the day before, when he hovered outside Gemini 12 for two hours, nine minutes and twenty-five seconds.

Then I came back to earth.

Standing in two lines in the central aisle, in white gowns with pale faces and large Adam’s apples, we resembled albino bats. The organ washed over us. Ola rolled his eyes looking as if he could throw up at any moment. Goose stood to attention, chuntering occasionally, but his eyes were no longer so full of fear. The organ faded away. The noise from the lines of pews took over, people coughing, clearing their throats and coughing, a sweet falling on the floor, a child’s scream. It was worse than in the cinema. Mum and Dad sat by the door with one of my godparents, an old girlfriend of my mother’s from the time when she was going to be an actress. She was married to a sports maniac who apparently became the national decathlon champion in 1947. My other godparent was not there. Hubert was in Paris.

The priest came down from the altar and walked among us in squeaky shoes. He stopped right at the back, next to an outsider from Hoff, his gown flapping around him, ready for lift-off. The church went quiet.

‘What’s the name of the town where Jesus was born?’ the priest asked.

Brain seized up. Mental block. Total blank. The silence in the church was nearing bursting point. The priest repeated the question, the red-haired boy in the gown trembled, a man in the congregation
was on the point of standing up and shouting something, must have been the boy’s father. The boy’s knees gave way, all that could be seen was a flame-red head sinking into the gown.

The priest moved on quickly and the answers came in rapid succession. The atmosphere picked up, applause hung in the air. Goose answered that the holy trinity consisted of God the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost. Ola answered that it was Barabbas who was released when Christ was to be crucified. And I, I answered that Judas was the name of the man who betrayed his master.

Afterwards there was more organ, then we had to go up to the altar and kneel in a semi-circle. The priest walked around the low altar rails and placed his hand on our heads. That was, I supposed, the confirmation. I felt nothing, just knelt there, it wasn’t bad, and I didn’t scream as Mum said I had done at my baptism. The only thought I had was that there was a fusty smell coming from the railings we were leaning against, from the material they were covered with, it smelt like the black leather bindings of bibles or old clothes in Nesodden.

Then it was over and we raced down to the cellar and changed, just like after a football match. Ola sat beside me and breathed out with relief.

‘D-d-did you see my th-th-thigh twitchin’?’ he hissed. ‘Thought the gown would fall off. The s-s-safety pin under my arm came undone!’

We had a little grin. Goose stood in a corner unwilling to part with the gown, seemed to feel happy in it.

‘That b-b-bastard phoned after all,’ Ola said.

I nodded.

‘Deserves to be sh-sh-shot!’

Then it was the priest’s turn again. He spoke softly and said he was proud of us. He shook our hands in turn and we each received a pocket-sized New Testament, a little red book, no bigger than a pocket calendar. And inside he had written a brief dedication to us all and a passage from the Bible to take with us on the way.
Kim Karlsen. Confirmed 1 December 1966. James 2:14. What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him?

Goose appeared by my side as we were leaving. He was holding the book tightly with both hands.

‘Congratulations,’ I said.

He stared straight ahead.

‘Mum’s been to talk to the shop-owner,’ he said.

My heart constricted. I almost snapped in two. Ola, right behind us, stuck his head forward.

‘Was there any t-t-trouble?’

‘He said he hadn’t phoned,’ Goose said with a perplexed look.

Ola forced his way between us.

‘H-h-hadn’t phoned! Did he say that!’

‘Yes. But Mum had talked to him, so how could he deny it?’

Goose sounded almost pleased and produced a smile on his rumpled face.

‘I’m happy about everything that happened,’ he declared.

We looked at him. He looked at us.

‘That night I found redemption.’

I felt something plummet inside me, deeper than ever before. Redemption through fear, I thought. I really thought that. Redemption through fear.

Then Goose opened the sluggish, heavy door and from the darkness and smell of moths we went out into the winter, which blinded us with all its light.

Soon I was standing there, in my first suit, dark blue, cut in at the waist and double-breasted, all I needed was a sword to take possession of Akershus. I stood there, and everyone looked me up and down while I sent sidelong glances to the gift table without registering anything that remotely resembled an amplifier or a microphone stand.

I started to unwrap the presents. There was a Ballograf fountain pen from my godmother and her husband, a leather wallet with a hundred kroner in it from my grandmother, a compass from my grandfather, and even Jensenius had remembered me: To Kim from Jensenius, congratulations on the big day. A record: Robertino.
O Sole Mio
. Then there was a little present from Mum and Dad. I tore off the paper and held an electric shaver in my hand. Dad grinned and stroked his chin, I did the same and felt nothing, absolutely
nothing, I was not there yet. And finally there was something flat. It was a bank book, five hundred kroner had been paid in. Five hundred! I was saved!

‘You have to keep that until you come of age and start studying,’ Mum said.

That was that. It was an ice age till then. I did the rounds and thanked everyone. Decathlon man squeezed me to pulp and said something about the pole vault, my godmother was all over me with thick lipstick. And Grandma could not restrain the tears.

‘You have really become a man,’ she sniffled. ‘You’ll have to remember to shave every morning!’

Granddad was not quite with it, either. He was looking in the wrong direction, but he made a wonderful impression in his old suit.

‘Thank you for the compass!’ I shouted into his ear.

He turned slowly towards me. Things had gone a bit downhill for Granddad of late. He complained about all the noise the trains made as they raced past his room night and day. So the nurses gave him a box of wax ear plugs. Granddad ate them and had to take an enema for three days in a row.

‘They’ll have to change the points soon,’ he said. ‘Otherwise we’ll collide. That’s what happened in Dovre. In ’47.’

Mum came in carrying a tray of sherry, I had to take a glass. I remembered watching a character on TV crime hour pouring a drink in a potted plant so as to avoid being poisoned. Couldn’t do that in the middle of the room. I wormed my way out to the telephone, said I was going to call Ola to find out what he had been given. I emptied the glass in a cactus pot in the hall. The prickles went limp. Afterwards Ola was on the line.

‘How’s it goin’?’ I asked.

‘H-h-hard work,’ he whispered. ‘The suit’s a bit tight.’

‘What did you get?’

‘Fountain pen. And a sh-sh-shaver.’

‘Same here.’

‘Seb got a fountain pen, too. And a m-m-mouth organ.’

We were quiet for a moment.

‘Doesn’t look as if anythin’ will come of The Snafus,’ I said gloomily.

‘D-d-doesn’t look like it.’

We rang off. I had that same unpleasant void in my stomach that just grew and grew. And I wasn’t hungry, either. Things looked bleak.

I had red wine with the meal. Everyone kept toasting me all the time and my godmother, she must have thought she had done her job now, made sure I had had a Christian upbringing, she filled my glass and I couldn’t keep my eyes off her breasts which bulged out of the top of her dress and bobbed up every time she opened her mouth. I drank the wine and suddenly heard a click, just as though someone had flicked a switch on or off.
Click
I heard and was quite frightened from where I was sitting because I couldn’t see properly. Everything seemed to slide away, Mum became two people sitting opposite each other and my godmother was leaning across the table with a split face and four tits.

‘I
knew
you would turn out to be a handsome fellow,’ I heard her say. ‘I saw it when you used to play in the buff in Nesodden!’

‘You should’ve become a
tennis player
,’ the sportsman broke in. ‘I remember the summer we played badminton. When was that? Seven years ago? Yes, in ’59. You were just a toddler then, but you had the
power
, Kim. You had the
swing
. Do you play tennis, Kim?’

I shook my head. I shouldn’t have done that. Everything collapsed. A washing machine started in my head. I didn’t know what programme it was on.

‘I play football,’ I whispered.

‘Football!’ he snorted. ‘
Team
sport. Individuals don’t come into their own there, Kim. Tennis is good. Running, too. Boxing.’

Someone was trying to break a glass. It was Dad. He stood up with someone else. I strained my eye muscles and got him in focus. Dad was standing behind a chair with a small piece of paper in his hand. Everyone went quiet, but my heart was in my throat pecking like a demented chicken at a soft-boiled egg.

‘Dear Kim,’ Dad began.

Had never heard him be so formal before. Mum was crying.

‘Dear Kim,’ he repeated.

And then he held a speech for three quarters of an hour. He couldn’t have had all that written down on the slip of paper. It had to be a world record at the very least because a man had contrived
to write the Lord’s Prayer twenty times on the back of a stamp which he sent to China, and Dad had beaten that hands down. I thought of all the speeches I had heard, Lue’s, the headteacher’s, the priest’s, they didn’t expect such small things of us, we were their eternal lives. Why shouldn’t we be able to become the President of America? Eh? It would be so easy to disappoint them when
expectations
were so high, when the piste they set up was so steep and so straight that even the slightest deviation was synonymous with a catastrophe, sabotage, the grinding of teeth and a heart attack. I didn’t think that then. Not then because my head was a spin-drier full of dirty clothes, loose buttons, combs, chewing gum, tram tickets and dead frogs. I think it now, now that I have already
disappointed
them. Mum was dabbing her eye with a napkin and, after Dad had talked for such a long time that we could have skated on the game sauce, Granddad stood up and shouted with the powerful lungs of a track-layer:

‘Train’s coming! Train’s coming!’

Dad and the freestyle wrestler had to carry him into the bedroom where he slept in Mum’s bed. We finished eating in silence. And afterwards I was unable to stand up. I tried, but I couldn’t move. The others gave me a strange look. Mum came over and gave me a hug. Grandma was all over me with her thin, bony arms. Everyone talked at once.

I couldn’t move.

‘The boy wants more food!’ the boxer laughed.

‘Come on,’ Mum said.

I tried, I did try, but couldn’t move from the spot.

‘Thank you for all the presents,’ I said, scraping the plate of ice cream clean.

The faces took on an expression of concern. Dad grabbed my shoulder.

‘Let’s go into the sitting room now and drink coffee and eat cake,’ he announced.

I took a deep breath and tore myself off the chair. It worked. I jumped up and lurched backwards against the wall, knocking over the chair, and stood swaying.

‘Just a bit dizzy,’ I said.

While we were drinking coffee, the telephone rang. It was Uncle Hubert ringing from Paris to congratulate me.

‘Hello, Uncle!’ I shouted.

‘You didn’t think I’d forgotten, did you!’

‘Of course not.’

‘I’ll bring you something nice when I’m back for Christmas,’ Hubert shouted. He sounded happy. No knots in the wiring.

‘How’s Paris?’ I asked.

‘You should be here! It’s indescribable!’

There was some noise in the background, Hubert’s voice disappeared, then there was another voice, Henny, Henny’s voice.