Beatles (34 page)

I was in my seventeenth year, scrambling through an autumnal forest, tripping over twigs, branches whipping into my face, the compass needle quivering on the north-south axis, but Skinke’s hand-drawn map didn’t match the terrain, I was getting lost, now I think, now that the footsteps are closing in around me, the
footprints
around the house in the January and New Year’s wet snow, someone has been here again, they must have looked in, now I have to get out of this chaos, but the compass I received at my
confirmation
gives absurd readings, invisible birds scream above me, I plough my way through, time is getting short, I am beginning to panic, time is running away from me, I am the last man to return, I push the branches to the side and at last I see Cecilie, she is sitting on a rock beneath Ullevålseter, feeding a goat.

‘How many control points did you find?’ I asked.

‘None,’ she says.

‘I found the third down by Lake Sognsvann. That was all, then I lost the trail.’

‘Orienteering is the most stupid thing I know,’ Cecilie said, continuing to feed the goat with slices of bread.

I sat down on the rock an arm’s length from her, trying to think of something smart to say.

‘Thought I’d got lost,’ I said. ‘It’s an absolute jungle.’

‘I came straight here,’ she said.

‘Went fishing here a couple of years ago. With Seb. And Gunnar and Ola. They’re in the B stream. Sciences.’

Cecilie didn’t seem particularly interested. Cecilie didn’t seem particularly interested in anything. The goat was sucking her fingers and she was looking in any other direction but at me, just like in the classroom. Cecilie sat next to me in the second last row, I saw her
profile against the window, I couldn’t get over her profile, erect and soft at the same time, and her eyes, brown I think they were, brown, but they never looked in my direction, they looked at the ceiling, out of the window, down at the desk, across the dark green forest where the autumn sky let a cold, transparent light fall to earth.

‘Shall we have a beer at Setra then?’ I asked quickly, blowing a persistent ant off the back of my hand.

Cecilie just got to her feet and left, I followed her up to the house, where we found a window table. I ordered a beer, Cecilie wanted a blackcurrant toddy.

‘Think we’ve veered a bit off course,’ I said.

‘Why’s that?’

‘You seen any of the others from school?’

She shook her head. Her hair came undone, and I liked it when the knot in her hair loosened and strands pointed in all directions, wow, my stomach turned to lead.

I drank my beer.

Wondering what to say next.

I rolled a cigarette. Cecilie didn’t smoke.

‘How do you like the class?’ I asked stupidly.

She chuckled – I didn’t quite know why – and looked out of the window. An old man came plodding up with a rucksack and walking stick. The goat was standing with its head in the grass.

‘Don’t really know,’ Cecilie said.

‘Sphinx is a bit on the slow side,’ I said. ‘Could be one of the statues in Frogner Park. Hasn’t blinked since we started. Strange his eyes don’t dry up.’

‘I like French best,’ Cecilie said.

‘I know a girl in Paris,’ I boasted.

‘Do you?’ she said, warming her hands round the cup.

‘Not exactly,’ I crumbled. ‘It’s a woman. Colleague of my uncle’s. Paints pictures.’

Cecilie seemed bored out of her mind. I was getting desperate, drank some beer and it went up my nose. I coughed and spluttered until foam came out of my nostrils.

That was when Cecilie looked at me, right then, straight at me, and laughed.

‘Went down the wrong way,’ I said.

‘There’s a class party next Saturday,’ she said.

I cleared the beer from my sinuses and swallowed.

‘Wow! Terrific!’

Cecilie looked grumpy again.

‘It was my parents’ idea,’ she said.

Cecilie lived in Bygdøy and her father apparently sold watches, binoculars and jewellery, wowee, I was excited already, but that didn’t seem to be the case with Cecilie.

She pulled a long face.

‘They think you
have
to have a class party so that everyone can get to know each other,’ she said.

‘Will they be at home?’ I enquired anxiously, detecting a tiny fly in the ointment.

‘No, they’re going out.’

‘Next Saturday?’

Cecilie nodded and some strands of hair fell across her face. Something happened in my stomach and my fingertips went numb and goose pimples screamed down my back. Cecilie’s dark eyes brushed past me like a radio scanner, she picked up the signals and switched over to another frequency at once.

‘Dreading the maths test,’ was all she said, looking bored again, and so time passed.

I heard a loud noise behind me and there stood Seb, trousers soaked to the knees, hair like a haystack and the hood of his anorak filled with spruce needles and twigs.

‘So this is where you are,’ he panted. ‘Half the school is out searching for you.’

We looked at our watches. Getting on for five. We should’ve been at the finish by three at the latest.

Seb sat down.

‘Sphinx’s eyelid is twitchin’. Doesn’t bode well.’

‘We got lost,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t help gettin’ lost.’

‘I’ll say I found you in a bog,’ Seb said, and off we trudged.

‘Skinke’s flyin’ round with a walkie-talkie up by Skjennungen,’ Seb went on. ‘Sphinx is waitin’ at HQ.’

‘Who won?’ Cecilie asked.

‘I don’t know. We got lost by Lake Bånntjern and then Ola fell in.’

‘How did he manage that?’ I smiled.

‘He didn’t exactly fall. Dropped the last beer and jumped in after it. Came up with a bone.’

‘A bone?’

‘They used to dump children in the lake in olden times, you know. Ola got the shakes big time. We carried him to the station and then Hammer took him home. Gunnar is searchin’ for you in Gaustad.’

Sphinx was not best pleased when we arrived at the HQ by Svartkulp, but I suppose he must have been happy we were alive. It wasn’t easy to know where you were with Sphinx, our class teacher, he had big hands and a big head and he moved once every century. He moved now. Twice. I was given a real rollicking – tried to blame the compass, but to no avail. Cecilie wasn’t told off at all and Seb was awarded a medal for finding us.

Afterwards we caught the tram to Majorstuen, but Sphinx had to get out and look for Skinke because Skinke was the only person with a walkie-talkie and it wouldn’t make any difference how much he fiddled and shouted, he might be talking to a radio ham in Japan, in fact I felt a bit sorry for Skinke.

We sat in the smokers’ compartment, lit our roll-ups and grinned. I had never been so close to Cecilie before. I felt her thigh against mine. She wasn’t listening to what Seb and I were nattering about.

‘Didn’t think Ola would resurface,’ Seb said.

‘Didn’t he take off his boots?’

‘Yes. But that was all. Gunnar was on the point of jumpin’ in, too. But then he shot up like a rocket-borne sputnik with the bone in his hand. It was the biggest leap I’ve seen since the pike in Skillingen.’

So stupid that Gunnar and Ola were doing sciences, I thought. Now they wouldn’t be going to Cecilie’s party.

‘Cecilie’s havin’ a class party next Saturday,’ I said.

Seb snapped his fingers three times and leaned across me.

‘Great stuff!’ he said, patting her on the shoulder. ‘When shall we come?’

‘Seven,’ Cecilie said, sitting stiffly beside me and staring into the distance, and I cursed Cecilie for being such a hard nut to crack, but
I would manage it, I would, perhaps I shouldn’t have had the beer in Ullevålseter.

Uncle Hubert was drawing aristocrats and medical consultants for weekly magazines. Didn’t see much of him that autumn. Henny was in Paris. Jensenius was singing less and less, must have already felt the winter in his bones. When I bought beer for him, he just stuck a limp hand through the door crack and retreated. Sometimes he went out for a walk too, the stairs made almighty creaking noises, he must have walked a long way because he always came home by taxi, once he had tried to break into the Concert Hall. There was something up with Jensenius. Everyone said Granddad could die at any moment, but he didn’t, he never died, just went on living, sitting in the chair by the window and laughing at something no one understood, stamping with his foot. Grandma’s budgerigar disappeared one day, flew out of the window, and she hung notices on all the trees in West Oslo. She put an advertisement in
Aftenposten
too, but the bird had flown. And Mum and Dad went a bit hysterical about the old jacket I had taken from Nesodden, Granddad’s drab, grey-white linen jacket, double-breasted and threadbare. Every morning there was grumbling and nagging. Why didn’t I wear the tweed jacket Mum had bought me for my birthday? She had obviously forgotten the dressing-up party we had had, that summer a long time ago. But otherwise they tiptoed around and thought it was brilliant to have a son at the
gymnas
. But once you were there, it wasn’t that difficult after all. You just changed building, a couple of the teachers and you were in a new class. Just like with the fork jab, we felt a bit cheated again. It was always like that. The waiting time was best, or worst, it all depended. Once it had happened, when you were there, it was already over and there was something harder or better or grimmer or worse beckoning in the distance. And so it was just a question of getting on with the waiting, the anticipating and the dreading again.

It was a hassle.

But now I didn’t know what was awaiting me.

Yes, I did.

Cecilie’s party.

And I have closed the shutter on the last window.

It started off nicely enough with tweeds and mini-skirts and a thimble of sherry for everyone. We stood in the largest living room I had ever seen, a hangar with clocks everywhere, seven, all set at the same time, with Cecilie’s father holding a deadly embarrassing speech, wishing us luck and so on, quite what for, we didn’t know. Her mother stood three steps behind him in a full-length dress and pearl necklace and Cecilie waited with head bowed. Seb and I were dying to go to the toilet because we had knocked back a few beers beforehand to get a flying start, and we needed it because there were sixteen boys and six girls and it was going to be dog eat dog. I had a sneaking suspicion that Slippery Leif was hovering over Cecilie, but with his double chins and myopia I didn’t see him as the greatest threat. Peder was altogether another matter, the 400-metre runner, sailor and winner of the orienteering, still suntanned after the summer. He was not to be trusted. He had already found himself a seat perilously close to Cecilie while I stood with legs crossed, desperate for the clockmaker to tick to an end.

At long last he stopped, retreated with the diva and the herd began to stir. Seb and I made a dash for the toilet, there were three to choose from on the first floor, marble and gold taps and Greek statues in niches and inset clocks. Hell, we hardly dared piss. Seb swung out the last beer from his jacket sleeve, he was a specialist, I never quite worked out how he did it. We drank at a rate of knots.

‘We’ve come to the wrong place,’ Seb said. ‘This is Drammensveien 1.’

We raced down, afraid to miss the opening manouevres. There were a few scattered bottles on the tables, cigarette smoke was floating through the hall like blue cirrus clouds and some people were balancing plates on which there was a steaming mass of meat. We were sizing each other up, making fun of the teachers and keeping a headcount on the girls. They were all there and we sniffed out a group standing in the hall with a hipflask: Leif, Crutch and Ulf. We scrounged a drink and Leif looked at me through metre-thick glasses, blinked, as if wondering where Cecilie was, not to mention Peder, as though I knew. I dashed back into the hangar and surveyed
the scene: five girls on the sofa with eleven bulls at their backs. I ambled into the kitchen and of course they were there. Peder was helping Cecilie with the pans.

A boiling hot plate was shoved into my hands.

‘You were unplaced in the orienteering,’ Peder said, grinning to both sides.

‘Right,’ I said. ‘Slipped on Ullevålseter.’

‘Got to have your navigation in order, you know. And your speed.’

Couldn’t be bothered to listen to the sailor, cleared off again and now there was a bit more life in the place. The sound system was on full peg, some old-time jazz thing, three couples slipped across the parquet and a few others were negotiating. Seb lay on the floor rummaging through the record stand, shaking his head in desperation. I couldn’t get Peder and Cecilie out of my system and in my annoyance I made a grab in the air and caught Vera on the hoof. She was so shocked she clung to me and her breath was hot and her eyes were framed by black eyeliner. A damned tango wailed from the speakers, I held her tighter, bent her backwards and stuff, and people were cheering. Then Peder and Cecilie came in with more food, Cecilie stopped and met my eyes, not for more than a second, but it was the first time, the first time we had
looked
at each other. I let go of Vera, sat down on a chair and lit up. Vera was left on the floor, alone, like a little child, abandoned in a large crowd.

Peder brought me some food.

‘Close your eyes and point west,’ he said.

‘Not hungry,’ I said, blowing smoke past his parting.

He sat on the edge of the table.

‘Nice jacket you’re wearing today,’ he said, feeling the tweed between his fingers. ‘Brand new?’

Ears pricked up in the room.

‘Inherited it from Jesus’s uncle,’ I said.

Peder continued to rub the lapel. His blue jacket was blinding me.

‘That’s what I thought,’ he said. ‘Because you buy your clothes from the Sally Army, don’t you.’

I hadn’t thought about Fred for a long time. Now he stood in front of me as clear as day, in his wide trousers, and the rat, I saw the rat in the torch light.

It all happened very fast. I punched him on the nose. He fell back with blood spurting like a fountain over his mouth and chin.