Beatles (43 page)

‘Revisionist,’ Gunnar whispered. ‘Worse than Finn Gustavsen.’

We were silent for a while yet. It had started raining.

I cleared my throat.

‘Paris was just the beginning,’ I said. ‘Now it’s beginning to happen!’

The others gave a nod. We played both sides again.

I thought about apples.

‘Don’t like Yoko Ono,’ Ola said. ‘Think she’s goin’ to mess things up.’

‘I’ve split with Sidsel,’ Gunnar said suddenly and gazed out of the window. ‘Happened in the summer. Couldn’t agree on anythin’. Didn’t seem any point.’

‘It’s over with Guri, too,’ Seb mumbled. ‘That slalom creep turned her head round three times.’

That seemed too much to take in at once. Russia and Czechoslovakia. Gunnar and Sidsel. Seb and Guri. John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The Beatles and
Revolution
. I thought about Cecilie, who had reduced me to a vacuum, and Nina, who had run down Svoldersgate as fast as her arms and legs could carry her that dreadful night in June.

‘How’s it goin’ with Kirsten then?’ I asked. ‘Was it good in Trondheim?’

Ola was one big smile.

‘Goin’ so well sparks are flying,’ he grinned and did a drum solo with the remaining Teddys.

At that very moment we realised that something had definitively changed, something was different now, as it had never been before.

We stared at Ola.

‘Ola,’ said Gunnar, inclining towards him. ‘You’re not stammering!’

He bowed his head in a cloud of red.

‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t stammer.’

‘But how did it happen?’ we shouted.

Ola took a deep breath.

‘Well, I was in Trondheim this summer,’ he said. ‘At Kirsten’s place. And I woke up one mornin’ and I didn’t stammer any more.’

‘You just woke up?’

‘Yes. Well, it was Kirsten who realised in fact. She was lyin’ beside me and…’

‘We understand!’ we yelled. ‘We’ve got the point!’

And then we crowded round Ola and were as one, almost like in the old days, like before the revolution.

Crown Prince Harald got Sonja. Bob Beamon jumped like a giraffe through the thin Mexico air and Black Power clenched coal-black fists against the light blue sky. Frigg was relegated to the second division and Uncle Hubert didn’t have anything accepted for the
Autumn Exhibition, following which he doubled his stake in the lottery. Rebellion was simmering at Manglerud school, the teachers were on the point of being chucked out and the FNL flag was hoisted in the school playground. Stig skulked up and down with leaflets under his arm and a suspicious expression, must have had his finger in every pie that autumn. And we all went to the Chinese embassy to receive our Mao badges from a rotund Chinese man in national dress. We didn’t pay any attention to John Lennon not attaching Chairman Mao to his lapel. We were given Mao’s red book as well, a handy little number, not much bigger than the Bible we received from Father MacKenzie for confirmation. There was a picture of Mao himself first, under a thin leaf of tissue paper. He had a wart on his chin, which irritated the hell out of me. And this time the dedication was easier to memorise by heart.
Workers of the world unite!
There was quite a bit of booing at school, but Cecilie couldn’t even be bothered to turn round. Peder and Slippery Leif dubbed me Kim Il Sung on the spot, it sounded quite good. But Cecilie was deaf and blind to my whole existence. She had begun to frequent Dolphin, and a number of folk singers had come into her life. They knew more than forty chords, had beards and bedsits and picked her up from school every Friday.

That was autumn that year, an invasion, an Olympics, a revolution, a long spell of rain that turned to snow and wrapped November in a white cover, like the Beatles new LP, a double album,
The Beatles,
white, bare, with four pictures of John, Paul, George and Ringo inside. We sat at Seb’s quietly listening to the four sides. His father was at sea again and the sitting room was quiet. We puffed on Peterson pipes and listened, looked at each other, unfolded the lyrics sheet and slowly nodded. ‘Yer Blues’ sounded suitably grim, fitted the mood. ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ made Ola blush, we skipped that one in silence. I hated ‘Obladi Oblada’, but I dug ‘Black Bird’ and thought about the black fists being raised in Mexico. Gunnar thought the words of ‘Back In The USSR’ were near the knuckle, you don’t make jokes about socialist imperialism.

We cleaned our pipes, opened the window, the snow was fluttering down in huge flakes, winter was early that year.

Sat in the cold for a bit without speaking.

Refilled our pipes.

Seb said, ‘It’s not like The Beatles. Doesn’t
sound
like The Beatles. I mean, they each seem to be doin’ their own thing.’

We chewed on that. Seb was right. It didn’t sound like The Beatles.

The photographs on the inside. One each. Touched up. They looked a bit old and lethargic.

Ola had to go, had private maths lessons, he was hanging on by the skin of his teeth. Gunnar went straight afterwards, had to help his father do up his grocery shop. He still believed he could be a match for the supermarket.

Seb and I were left and listened to a couple of tracks. ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, yes, had to give them that one, a belter. And the guitar solo on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, that one wept. They were the bright spots. Otherwise things looked pretty bleak.

Someone had come, there was talking in the sitting room. Seb’s face went black and he clenched his fists.

Then the door burst open and a fat face peeped in with a goldentoothed grin.

‘Hello, Sebastian. Just wanted to ask you to turn the music down a bit.’

Seb raised his head and sent him a hate-filled look:

‘Learn to knock first,’ he said.

The grin vanished.

‘What did you say?’

‘You heard.
Knock
first!’

The door closed again. Seb thumped his fists on his thighs.

‘The prick can go to hell,’ he snarled. ‘Comin’ here and playin’ boss.’

‘Is he often here?’ I asked cautiously.

‘When Dad’s away.’ He hesitated, gritted his teeth. ‘They’re goin’ to get divorced,’ he said at last. ‘Mum and Dad. They’re goin’ to separate.’

It sounded incredible. I thought of my mother and father at home. Divorce. The word didn’t exist.

‘I’m not goin’ to live here if that arsehole moves in and that’s definite,’ Seb said.

We lit the curved pipes and Seb took out a record I hadn’t seen
before. There was a big picture of a pretty tired-looking negro, reminded me of a country pancake, with a terrible scar between his eyes.

‘Little Walter,’ Seb whispered. ‘Dad sent it to me from the States.
Confessing The Blues
. Plays the harmonica like a guru. He can play with his
nose
!’

Seb put on the disc and set the volume to max. There were some nasty scratching sounds first. Then came some thunderous drumming, a bass pounded in and a harmonica turned the room upside down and sandblasted our brains. ‘It Ain’t Right’. And, shit, how it rocked and grooved. Seb took out his harp and added a few howls, I launched myself into it with a few throaty moans and we were no longer blowing a long march, we were blowing a long, dirty blues.

Couldn’t even puff on the pipe afterwards.

‘The guy’s name is actually Walter Jacobs,’ Seb enthused. ‘Died a year ago.’

An idea was beginning to form in my mind. It was a good idea. I would sing Cecilie back. And Seb would play.

I sat up.

‘You know,’ I said. ‘You know Cecilie’s runnin’ around with folk singers, don’t you. Perhaps we could perform at Dolphin, do a raspin’ blues, and blow the Young Norwegians off the stage.’

Seb gave me a long, hard look, curled a faint smile and sucked a wail from between his hands.

‘Alright. This is what blues is all about. Women. Women and cash.’

We practised intensively for a week and one day we went for it. Walter and Jacobsen. I knew the words off by heart and my throat was like a rusty saw after all the screaming. I had checked that Cecilie would be at Dolphin that night, I was on tenterhooks. But before we even got going Seb was suffering from serious nerves. His teeth were chattering, and he couldn’t play harmonica if his teeth were chattering, he said. He had a fifty-krone note on him, and next to the underground we hailed a psychedelic junkie who had ready-made joints going cheap. Seb said he didn’t think he could stay outside in the cold smoking – the feeling in his fingers and lips would go. So we dropped by Kaffistova in Rosenkrantzgate, ordered a glass of
milk and a bowl of stew to share and sat there. Seb lit up, inhaled, his eyes closed, I took a toke, swallowed, passed back the joint. We sat in Kaffistova until it was no longer Kaffistova but an evil-smelling den in Chicago or New Orleans. Seb told me about all his dreams. We stayed there until the music from the speakers in the ceiling no longer played Ole Ellefsæter but a stomping blues number that blew our diaphragms apart, until the ashen old men with rustling newspapers were sweaty black men knocking back beer and whisky after a day in the slaughter house or in the cotton fields. Then we, Walter and Jacobsen, left for Dolphin.

I spotted Cecilie straightaway. She was sitting in a corner, her face shiny and yellow in the light of the table candles. A bearded wonder was all over her like a rash. A girl with long, greasy hair and sandals was singing a folk song. All around her there was silence, and complete darkness. The place smelt of carrot juice and steaming bodies.

We squeezed onto two unoccupied chairs by the door. The song the girl was singing had a lot of verses. Seb’s nerves were beginning to fray again, he had forgotten that he was a black man, the colour was running off him like shoe cream. I was ice cold and raring to go. The girl finished, received generous applause, blushed, walked to a table and sat down. Then the boss folk singer guy stood up and announced that there would be a break before Hege Tunaal sang, but if anyone wanted to get something off their chests, they could come up on stage.

We had something on our chests.

I led Seb to the stage where the girl had stood.

I saw Cecilie watching us. Her mouth fell open with surprise and she looked a bit gormless.

I killed myself laughing inside.

The chatting subsided in the room and soon it was absolutely quiet. A few scattered claps rose into the air like birds from the snow.

Seb pulled out his harmonica, covered it with his hands and took several deep breaths. I started stomping the beat with my snow boot.

Seb wailed from between his trembling fingers and I began to howl:

Afterwards it was quiet for a long time. Then the crustaceans began to clap. But by then we had already started the next number. Seb was one big harmonica and I was a boot and a howl.

I looked at Cecilie. She stared at the candle melting over the cloth and solidifying in a red clump. I didn’t hear anyone clapping, but I saw palms hitting each other. Seb was already on his way out. I ran after him, someone tried to stop us, but we had done our bit. We fell down the steep steps and into the ice cold, ferocious, biting winter which froze us into submission.

Then I saw it. There were gravestones piled up right outside

‘It’s a cemetery, isn’t it!’ I smiled and burst into laughter.

Seb hadn’t caught his breath yet.

‘Stonemason’s, you moron,’ he panted.

And then I vomited, stew and milk, vomited over one of the monuments which had not yet had a name engraved, one waiting for a body and a grave.

That was the first and last performance by Walter and Jacobsen.

The next day Cecilie spoke to me. In the lunch break she came over to the shed where I stood swotting French, pale and sickly, freezing like a dog in my reefer jacket.

‘How did the English test go?’ she initiated.

Had almost forgotten what her voice sounded like.

‘C,’ I stuttered. ‘Forgot my crib.’

She looked me up and down, gave a cautious smile, her hand hovered.

‘Are you ill?’ she asked.

I didn’t answer. Wasn’t sure where this was leading. Best to stay on my guard.

‘Seb was great on the harmonica,’ she continued.

She held my eyes and giggled.

‘But your singing was vile!’

The nausea shot up from my stomach and hit my palate like a harpoon.

‘Was it?’ I said without blinking, swallowing all the crap.

She nodded. My ears were frozen stiff. She was wearing a hat. A brat was caught throwing snowballs by Skinke.

‘Grim,’ Cecilie said, suddenly snuggling up to me without a word. We stood like that until the bell rang.

I went straight home after the last lesson. Now I was going to ask Jensenius to teach me a few decent techniques, he would be given the chance to make a silver-tongued nightingale out of my howling ape. I think I had a temperature. Cecilie’s imprint was still on my body. I ran down Gabelsgate. I was freezing and had a temperature. But in Svoldergate there was a rumpus and a blue flashing light outside the front door. People were standing on tiptoe, peering and whispering. I walked over, dread in my heart. Then I heard it, not a howl, not a scream, but a long ululation, the way whales call in the
middle of the Atlantic as they send up a skyward column of air and water. It was coming from the stairs. Then it went quiet save for the sound of footsteps slowly descending.