Beatles (33 page)

First of all we picked up Hubert from Marienlyst. He couldn’t
restrain himself, had to fiddle with various knobs, switch on the windscreen wipers and indicators and Dad became agitated. We had to move Hubert to the back seat to cool down.

‘Goodness me,’ Hubert said, patting Dad on the shoulder. ‘I hope you didn’t break into the safe in the vault!’

We laughed and rolled down the windows. Then we drove through the boiling hot town to Mosseveien and towards Nesodden. Dad picked up speed, the engine hummed like a happy bee, not a single car passed us, though Dad had to overtake a lorry by Hvervenbukta, quite close to a bend to the accompaniment of howls and screams from the back seat, but it was fine, Dad clung to the wheel as the sweat poured down over the big smile that I doubt had been there since the time he was a boy and believed in Father Christmas.

Bunde fjord was bright blue. Behind us the town lay bundled into dark green fields wrapped in yellow ribbons of sun.

The road to Tangen wasn’t so good, the car bumped and jolted and pebbles shot up round the bonnet. Dad was hunched over the wheel, but coped well with these conditions, and soon we were rolling down to the quay and parked on the headland, Signalen. Dad crawled round the car on all fours looking for scratches to the paintwork, but when he pulled out his handkerchief to polish the car, Mum intervened and took him with us to the House.

It smelt as it always did on the first day of spring in Nesodden, rank and acrid from the rotting leaves on the ground. I always thought the House looked a little creepy with shutters over all the windows, like a dead body, I thought, or maybe a human before it is born because when we removed all the shutters, light streamed through the house as though the walls were transparent and everything inside began to come alive. The flies on the windowsills knocked against the glass, everything rattled and creaked and the dust danced like milky ways in a sunbeam.

I ran up to the place where I knew wild strawberries grew, behind the well, in a damp green hollow. I counted the flowers. Summer would bring an abundance of wild strawberries.

Mum made coffee and we sat on the balcony. The sun was on its way over Kolsås, a shiny aeroplane passed by the golden orb and circled round us.

‘How are you enjoying the new job?’ Hubert asked, watching the plane as it sped southwards and disappeared from view.

‘Very much indeed,’ Dad said.

Hubert peered over his cup.

‘Kim said you had 350,000 kroner in the vault once,’ he said, impressed.

‘That can happen. Especially on Fridays when we have a lot of outgoing payments to make. Often have to send out for extra supplies from the main office.’

Hubert sipped his coffee.

‘That’s a lot of money,’ he said quietly. ‘Aren’t you nervous about having so much money on site?’

Dad laughed.

‘You and Kim have seen too many crime programmes, that’s for sure!’

And then we drove back to town. There was a gang of long-haired youths playing guitar in Hvervenbukta. They had lit a bonfire on the smooth rock by the sea. Mosseveien was steaming after a hard day. The cranes on Akershus quay were still, like huge dead animals, and the sky over Holmenkollen was blood-red. Dad accelerated and we hurtled into the sunset with open windows and the wind blowing in our hair and bringing tears to our eyes as insects splattered on the windscreen and spread in all directions.

At first I thought I had caught a cold from the car ride, I woke in the night with a constricted throat, gummed-up eyes, and feeling feverish all over. But when I saw myself in the mirror next morning, I had quite a shock. I looked like a confused pelican, my chin bulged down under my face and I could barely speak. The fever had spread to my head, I shuffled back to my room, and when Mum saw me, she screamed.

I spent days on a white carousel. I lay in the desert with cold cloths over my forehead, juice in large glasses and the radio on. My nuts began to ache too, it was just like having toothache in your bollocks. That was when my mother went hysterical and sent for the doctor. He arrived with a stethoscope and did not look at all like the doctors Hubert drew for the weekly magazines. He poked
and pressed me from forehead downwards. Afterwards he and Mum talked in low, sinister voices, but I caught occasional words, I heard mumps, mumps and boys, Mum kept going on about boys.

Bit by bit I recovered, the carousel slowed down, the fever was sweated out into my bed, the bulges shrank. And in fact it was quite nice lying there like that, sluggish and listless, listening to old records, Cliff, Paul Anka, Pat Boone, rounding off with the old 45s. I played Robertino too and Jensenius stamped on the floor with approval. Gunnar, Seb and Ola visited me one day, no danger there, they had all had mumps a long time ago. They stood around my bed grinning and telling me about Skinke’s shoes, which someone had filled with water, and Kerr’s Pink, who had given the whole class seed potatoes. But then they went serious and got to the heart of the matter.

‘What about Frigg this year then, eh?’ Gunnar asked.

We had been skiving football training all autumn, it would be quite hard to play our way back into the team.

‘Don’t know,’ I said. ‘Think we should give it a miss.’

The others nodded.

‘There’ll be no time for football when we go to the
gymnas
,’ Gunnar said.

‘No,’ we said.

‘But we could pop over and say hello to Kåre,’ Seb said. ‘To tell him we’re droppin’ out.’

‘Of course,’ we said.

When they had left, the fever returned and wrung me like a sponge. Mum managed to steer me into the sitting room where I sat, half-dead, waiting for her to change the bedding and air the room. Afterwards it was like lying in the wind, a wind with sun and freshly mown grass and juicy apples. I slept, woken once by some sounds, the rumble of the train, the tram squealing, bombs falling. Then, all of a sudden, it was still again and the next time I woke I was as fit as a fiddle and five kilos lighter.

That was my last childhood illness.

We went to see Kåre in Theresesgate. He started looking for subscription cards, but Gunnar stopped him.

‘Won’t be any football for us this year,’ he said. ‘There’ll be no time for trainin’ when we start at the
gymnas
.’

Kåre leaned over the counter and studied us.

‘Big lads now,’ he said.

We shifted uncomfortably.

‘Just wanted to tell you,’ Gunnar went on. ‘It’s been great playin’ football for Frigg.’

Kåre gave a sad smile.

‘Far too many give up like you,’ he said. ‘How are we going to keep Frigg in the first division if players keep going?’

We shuffled our feet.

‘Don’t think we’d’ve got in the f-f-first team,’ Ola laughed with embarrassment.

Two juniors came in to pay their subs, in shorts with plasters on their knees and a key round their necks, only just able to reach the counter with their chins.

After they had left, Kåre said, ‘Might be a Petersen or a Solvang in those skinny legs. Who knows?’

No, you could never know, but for us the season was over.

We shook his hand.

Kåre smiled his crooked smile and breathed heavily through his flat nose.

‘Good luck, lads,’ he said. ‘All the best!’

We bought ten Craven A and trogged down to Bislett. Thinking about the team jersey, freshly washed, stiff, blue and white. Åge reading out the names of those in the team. The dressing rooms, the own goal in Slemmestad, the sending-off in Copenhagen. All
the pitches: Voldsløkka, Ekeberg, Dælenenga, Marienlyst, Grefsen. Grass, gravel and particularly football in the rain, heavy, sluggish games like in slow motion while the rain bucketed down, that was what I thought about most on the boiling hot day we trogged down Theresesgate leaving Kåre for the last time: football in the pouring rain.

It was all systems go at school. Kerr’s Pink was reading from Petter Dass, Hammer was bursting with German verbs and Skinke was a barrel of gunpowder in the sun. The only cool place was in woodwork. I sat filing a teak ring I had thought about giving someone, but one day I dropped it on the floor and it broke. No point trying to stick it together. Couldn’t even give it away now. Wondered for a while whether to make a birdhouse, but it was too late anyway, wouldn’t finish it before summer. That was, in fact, the day the woodwork teacher brought in a snake skin from Africa, as big as a carpet. His brother had shot the snake while it was lying in the shade of an orange tree disgesting a sheep. We could see the bullet hole, too. The woodwork teacher’s brother was a missionary in Africa. Goose stayed behind after the lesson. He had made a cross in woodwork, now he wanted to hear more about the missionary in Africa. Just before the bell rang for the next lesson he came over to us at the drinking fountain and told us that snakes sleep for a whole month after eating a sheep. And the snake was the Devil’s Beast. That was why the woodwork teacher’s brother had shot it. We could remember what had happened to Holst, the teacher, couldn’t we?

‘Yeah,’ Gunnar said, looking away.

Goose was beginning at the Christian
gymnas
in the autumn. His eyes sparkled. Gunnar flicked through the English course book. I drank water.

‘God be with you,’ Goose said, he said that and left us.

And he
was
with us, for a while anyway. Norwegian lessons were going well. I wrote about space travel and thought I made a good fist of it. I wrote about humans that are so tiny and space that is so immense and I got something in about a door that has to be opened to enter the blue space. I was in the groove. If there was not enough
room for us on earth, we could settle on other planets. When I had finished the rough copy and eaten my packed lunch, sweaty salami and wet goat’s cheese, I thought about Goose, he sat behind me and was scribbling away like a madman, I thought that out in space there was perhaps an old God, with a white gown and a middle parting, a bit like John Lennon, and he kept an eye on everything we wrote and knew exactly what we would write and what grade we would get. In that case there was not much point writing at all. Didn’t put that though.

Survived English as well. And German. Then came the wall. Maths. The evening before, I sat mugging up on equations and geometry sweating like mad while the summer simmered away and the gulls came in from the fjord with raucous screams and burning beaks and shat on my window. I read about x and y, twirled the
compasses
, drew triangles and angles and straight lines, while outside the gulls screamed. I thought about the snake skin, that the future was like a snake, a boa constrictor which dropped from the trees, and that we had already been swallowed, zero chance of escaping, we were already in the warm belly of the future and were being digested. Impossible to concentrate with the gull screams right outside the window. Then the doorbell rang. It couldn’t be Gunnar, Seb or Ola because they were at home swotting and at least as busy as me. I heard my mother open the door and then nothing because the gulls were screaming. Must have been a perspiring door-to-door salesman. But then there was a knock at my door and when it opened I forgot everything I had read, everything that had existed, everything that still existed.

Nina.

She stood in the doorway looking in at me.

Mum was in the background, she slunk away.

Hardly recognised her with hair down over her shoulders, a flower behind her ear, a long colourful skirt, narrow around the waist, almost like my arm, I gulped, gulped and clung to my mask.

Wished some girl had been with me in the same way that a boy had been with her that time in Denmark. All I had were my maths book and the compasses. Was everything supposed to be forgotten now, as though I had been sitting and waiting for her for a whole
year? I was angry, why hadn’t there been someone here too, what did she think she was doing, just coming, without batting an eyelid, standing at my door and looking at me with those same eyes, the same smile, which nevertheless seemed so unfamiliar, for she had changed, and yet she was the same, she was Nina.

I was angry. I was confused.

‘Hello,’ I said.

She came in.

She went straight to the point.

‘Did you get my letter?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

She closed the door.

‘Are you studying for an exam?’

‘Maths.’

‘Are you mad at me?’ she asked.

‘Mad? Why should I be?’

‘I could sit quietly,’ she said. ‘So that you can study.’

She had brought a parcel with her. Flat. Square. I didn’t want to ask, but couldn’t stop myself.

‘What’s that?’ I pointed to her hands.

‘For you,’ she smiled, putting the package on my maths book.

I felt her hair on my face. There would be thunder tonight.

‘For me?’

‘Yes.’

I unwrapped the paper, my hands were sticky with sweat.

Sergeant. Sergeant Pepper. Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.

‘The new Beatles LP,’ she whispered behind me.

Caught. Bound hand and foot. The new Beatles LP. Why weren’t the others here, Gunnar, Seb and Ola? Everything had gone
topsy-turvy
. And yet everything was as it should be.

I just stared. The faces stared back at me, a whole collection of heads, and at the front, in uniform between exotic plants they stood there expecting something from me, expecting me to do something, right now. The four faces when I opened the cover, close up, insistent, were forcing me to do something. On the back, with the lyrics in red, John, George and Ringo stared at me while Paul had his back
to me. I was sitting with my back to Nina, could sense her behind me, I turned.

‘Thank you,’ I mumbled, eased the record out of the sleeve and put it on the turntable. ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled again, blew the dust off the needle, prayed to Goose’s God that the batteries would hold out.

Think something changed at that point, in my room, the night before the maths exam with summer like a green, throbbing pulse outside the window. Nina beside me, and the music which, at first was unfamiliar, in the same way that Nina was unfamiliar when she first stood in the doorway. Then I got to know them, Nina and the music. And then I had to change, too, to let the music flow inside me like water, to open myself completely like a door that had been jammed shut for a long time, that is the only way I can express it. Like raising yourself or carrying each other. Our hands crept across the floor, groping their way forwards. ‘A Day In The Life’. A day like this, of which there is only one, and I could swear her mouth still tasted of apple.

I took her home. She would be in Norway until autumn. Everything was different, the streets, the trees, the windows, the people we met, they smiled, just smiled. And Nina walked barefoot on the tarmac, which was cool in the night air. We sat by the fountain, felt the spray on our necks.

‘Jesper’s nothing,’ Nina said.

Didn’t answer.

‘Don’t think any more about it,’ she said.

As if I had been thinking about it.

I gave a harsh laugh.

‘You must’ve met other girls, I suppose,’ she said, without looking at me.

‘Might’ve done,’ I said, lighting a cigarette.

Then we said nothing for a good while. The apple trees in the garden on the corner were lit up in white and all the dogs in the whole town gathered in Gyldenløvesgate, panting and wheezing, and, gently growling, they came over to sniff us, must have scented something.

Behind us, the column of water rose in the air.

The class followed me with their eyes as I smacked down the papers on the teacher’s desk in front of the cross-eyed invigilator and it was barely quarter past twelve. I raced out of the airless torture chamber, took the stairs in three bounds and ran straight into the arms of Nina, who had been waiting in the school playground.

‘Have you finished already?!’ she laughed.

‘Yup. Straight onto paper. From Gunnar’s draft. The invigilator couldn’t see further than a metre.’

We went back to my place to get our swimming togs and
Sergeant Pepper
. Nina carried the record player under her arm, and we cycled to Huk, Nina on the luggage carrier, the sun like needles in our faces.

Lay there all day, until the last bathers had gone home, until we were alone. Ate strawberries out of a green punnet and lay with our ears against the speaker and our faces close. Our stomachs and shoulders were burning. She rubbed in some Nivea for me. I did the same for her. She had brought along sunglasses, two pairs, one round, one square, with blue and green glass. We lay on our backs staring at the setting sun with open eyes.

Then we were all alone.

Yachts leaned against the horizon.

A sandal had been left at the water’s edge.

‘Wait here,’ I said to Nina, running onto a rock, breathing in and diving. The water was black to my eyes, a cold current pulled at me. For a moment I panicked, saw floating figures with undulating hair, bodies in slow, weary, almost beautiful movement, like astronauts. I was about to give up, my head was exploding, but I fought my way down and touched the bottom. I rummaged around in the sand, and between stones and seaweed felt something round and rough, got a foothold and launched myself upwards to the green sky.

Nina was sitting by the record player. I held my hands behind my back and dripped water over her.

‘Which hand do you want?’

She pondered and chose the right one.

I gave her the rusty Mercedes badge. She laughed and asked what it was.

‘A fallen star,’ I explained.

She lay in the grass and pulled me down to her. I switched on the record player. India. It was magical. It was unbelievable. I was caught, laughed at Paul’s ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, listened intensely to the groans on ‘Lovely Rita’ and was woken by the cocks crowing on ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’.

‘The batteries are flat,’ Nina said.

She was right. The music played in waves, getting deeper and deeper, it sounded terrible.

‘No problem,’ I said, using my finger, getting the right speed again, thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute.

‘What did you do to your finger?’ Nina asked.

I lay down beside her, the music jarred again, played in fits and starts.

‘Got it stuck in the lathe,’ I said.

‘The lathe!’ she laughed.

‘Yep. I was making a ring.’

She bent over me.

‘Who for?’

I pulled her down and whispered in her ear.

‘But it works fine now. My finger, that is!’

‘Prove it,’ Nina whispered.

So I started the music again, with my finger, until the rhythm throbbed inside us like the boats chugging across the fjord, harder and harder, higher and higher, my finger was on every revolution, until the final scream, almost inaudible, pushed her head back and ‘A Day In The Life’ came to an abrupt end and slipped into the silent grooves.

Afterwards we sat back to back listening to the silence, a few birds, a few waves, a wind, the boats that had gone.

‘We’ll have to go back soon,’ I said. ‘They’re waiting at Seb’s.’

‘Who are?’

Nina leant her head back over my shoulder and beamed.

‘The others of course! Gunnar and Sidsel! Seb and Guri! Ola and Kirsten!’

A warmish shower fell as we cycled home but we didn’t take off our sunglasses. Nina sat at the back talking about someone she knew in Copenhagen who had been to San Francisco and was going
to India. Didn’t catch everything she said. Kept thinking, kept thinking that everything had taken such a long time and yet it had gone so damned fast.