Beatles (45 page)

We scampered up the steps.

‘You found it,’ Cecilie said.

I shone the beam on her.

I could hardly breathe.

‘You bastard,’ I said.

Her eyes went strange in the light.

‘You bastard!’ I shouted.

She looked straight at me, she didn’t understand what I was saying.

I had blood in my throat, I was bringing it up, acidic and grey. My voice was slurred.

‘I’m not some plaything!’ I shrieked. ‘You can’t just get me to do whatever takes your whim! D’you understand?’

I walked down Gabelsgate. She followed. My ears were pounding, as though my forehead was too small, too tight. I stopped again and shone the beam on her.

‘I’m not your servant!’ I yelled.

Cecilie stood stock still. The torch shook. I hurt, right out to my extremities, right out to my mangled finger.

‘What did you do to it?’ she asked, touching me.

And before I could answer, I was surrounded by furious dogs. They came from all sides with evil, gleaming eyes and drooling jaws, they growled and groaned and gnashed their teeth, and their coats bristled. That was too much for me, I ran, but they came after me, an army of dogs, and in the end they were all over me, barking round my feet, biting at the leather, pulling and tugging. In the end I peeled off one of my boots and threw it over a fence. The dogs bounded after it, howling.

Cecilie was standing at the top of the street.

I limped home.

The next day, my boot was returned. Cecilie brought it with her to school. She had repaired and impregnated it.

‘Almost as good as new,’ she smiled.

It was not. It looked like a biscuit someone had chewed and spat out.

She gave me back the boot and I stood in the playground feeling like a mentally deficient shoemaker.

Cecilie just laughed.

‘I’m not angry at you,’ she said.

I looked at her in amazement.
She
wasn’t angry? At
me
? Didn’t understand.

She picked some strands of tobacco off my jacket. Peder and Slippery Leif were standing by the fountain scowling with incomprehension.

‘Don’t give it another thought,’ she said. ‘I’m not angry.’

A host of thoughts whirled around my head, but the foremost image in my mind was Carlsberg: the distance, the subservience, the loyalty, the manicured lawn, the black servant’s long fingers.

She had stunned me into silence.

‘Aren’t you going to try it on?’ she persisted.

I whipped off my slip-on and stuck my foot in the boot. Didn’t fit at all.

With a resigned laugh, she said, ‘Wrong foot!’

I forced my toes in, the big toe cracked.

‘Perfect,’ I said. ‘Perfect.’

After the badger, of course, nothing could be the same again. My boot lay at the back of the wardrobe, bitten to pieces and disfigured, unwearable, like some hidden shame lying there in the dark, and I had to wear slip-ons for the rest of the spring and felt very flat-footed. But Cecilie came to school with her thin legs in red high-heeled shoes as if she was keen to humiliate me even more, she strode around like a wading bird in the pond, all the frogs drooled in the reeds, and me, I splashed after her with webbed feet and a snorkel and a diving suit that was much too tight, I began to get low on oxygen, but I followed, it seemed almost to amuse her, I didn’t really understand everything that was going on that spring. My mother, nonplussed, wondered what had happened to my boots, I said I had tripped over a barbed wire fence when we were hunting the badger, it would have been impossible to retell the whole story, about the German hiding in the air-raid shelter in 1945, she would never have believed me. But I told the story to Granddad at the old
folks home one afternoon when I was alone with him and a bag of oranges. He chuckled for three quarters of an hour and told me badgers’ bristles were used to make shaving brushes in the old days. He stroked his rough chin and nodded for a long time. Didn’t get brushes like that any more. Badger was the best. But I had an electric razor and zero beard.

One day Cecilie wanted me to go with her to town after school to buy clothes. It was April, the snow was gone, there was the faint smell of spring in the air, patches of green.

Cecilie grabbed my arm.

‘What happened to the badgers?’ she asked, straight out, as though nothing had happened.

‘They were put in a zoo somewhere in Sørland,’ I answered, ruffled.

We walked past the American embassy. I spat on the pavement three times.

‘Pig,’ Cecilie said.

We stopped in Universitetsplass. Someone had erected a huge tent there and it wasn’t the scouts. We took a closer look. The square was packed with people. A horrible sound locked itself onto your ear, it was like an impaled heart, beating and throbbing without end. It was the counting mechanism by the entrance. For every heartbeat a number rose with a clock-like tick. In luminous letters the sign said:
The population of the earth has increased by 100,054 people since nine o’clock today
. While we read, there were forty-three more. We looked at each other. Wow. We went into the tent.

There were large photographs on all the walls showing pollution, the population explosion, cars, motorways, factories and coffee plantations. We walked in silence and took it all in, it was not very cheerful viewing. We were living on a time bomb. We were living in a sewer. We were shitting on our own food. We were digging our own graves. The earth we had inherited and for which we should be so grateful was just a dirty tennis ball smashed out of court in the first set. There were new images for my darkroom, for my cabinet of horrors. The photographs burned a stronger pessimism in my eyes than the optimistic messages the texts tried to convey. They said we could do something about the situation, about the crisis. The whole
thing was a political question, a question of economics, distribution, power, profit, solidarity. All the time I could hear the throb of the counting mechanism, another heartbeat every second, several times a second, adding to the global choir of screams.

Cecilie beckoned me over to another wall. It was an overview of contraceptive devices. It looked like cutlery for a big meal. Condoms, coils, pessaries, the pill. I discreetly felt my back pocket, my wallet, where I kept my Rubin Extra, pink, purchased some time at the beginning of the Stone Age, ordered in the name of Nordahl Rolfsen and never paid for. The pack of twelve was still complete.

48,246 people were born while we were there. The Band of the Royal Guards came down Karl Johan and drowned the heartbeats.

‘Would you like to have children at some point?’ Cecilie said.

‘No,’ I said, hearing my heart beat in my ear. ‘Never.’

It was a strange spring. It arrived without Jensenius. There was something missing that spring, it was like a spring without birds. May 1 was around the corner and Stig harangued every one of us, the meeting place for the Red Front procession was outside the electricity station at two thirty, the main slogans were
No to VAT, Oppose the TUC’s class co-operation policy, NATO out of Norway, Full support for the triumphant Vietnamese people!
Gunnar would be there, naturally, Ola had to study maths, Seb promised to come too, but it was never easy to know what Seb would get up to, life jumped the rails that spring for Seb after his parents got divorced. He put his harmonica on the shelf, it was The Doors now,
Waiting For The Sun,
did nothing but quote Jim Morrison, turned up zonked for a couple of lessons and was skiving school big-time. Seb couldn’t give a shit that spring. But he would try to come. Yep. If they let him in. Seb grinned from under his wispy moustache. Stig interrogated me. But it was difficult because I had received an invitation, I was pretty taken aback, an invitation from Cecilie to dine at her house on May 1. I told Stig that I would make every effort to turn up, but when May 1 came and the Internationale boomed out from Solli plass, I was making my way towards Bygdøy in freshly pressed cords and a tweed jacket wondering what the hell the purpose of this was.

Cecilie was standing at the door when I arrived. Her hair hung
in a loose knot behind her neck. That was enough for me. I forgot the slogans on the spot. I would eat grass if she asked me. I plodded towards her while keeping an eye open for Alexander the Great.

‘Hiya,’ said Cecilie, administering a hug.

‘Is it just us?’ I enquired.

‘Mummy and Daddy are waiting inside.’

‘Eh? Is this your idea?’

She just shrugged.

We ambled across the golf course, Cecilie holding my hand. I certainly needed it. Her mother appeared on the first floor balcony and waved down to us. The father made a surprise entrance from behind a sliding French door.

We walked towards him. He was standing with his hand at the ready. Cecilie let go of mine and I took his. He shook my hand warmly.

‘Nice that you could come, Kim Karlsen,’ he said.

I mumbled and stammered and then the mother came out too, wearing an elegant dress and jewellery on every patch of bare flesh, all that was missing was a regal coronet in her hair. She beamed a gleaming-white smile and took me away from her husband.

‘Here you are at last,’ she said.

I understood zilch. Sweat was flowing into my socks.

‘And now you young ones can go for a walk in the garden while Daddy gets changed,’ she said, nudging us onto the green expanse.

We strolled towards the apple trees. I lit a cigarette.

‘What the hell’s going on?’ I whispered.

Cecilie moved away. She didn’t answer.

I held her back.

‘Is there something wrong with their memories or what? Don’t they remember who I am?’

She just shook her head as if she understood just as little herself, and the knot behind her neck loosened and her hair cascaded over her shoulders like a river.

And at that precise moment I could have sworn I heard footsteps marching down Drammensveien and slogans being hurled in the air because it was half past three and time for the departure from Solli plass.

A bell rang at the palace. The meal was ready.

The table in the enormous dining room had been set. I was bewildered by all the glasses and knives and forks, and sent Cecilie a discreet glance to see where she would start. The father had put on a sailor’s blazer and a silk cravat. He clapped his hands and the double doors at the back of the room opened and two ladies in black entered with steaming dishes and green bottles of white wine. There was prawn cocktail and trout and bombe glacée. Were we getting married? Alexander the Great sat at the end of the table peering happily at his watch and when several clocks struck four, he raised his glass and said with a broad, sincere smile:

‘Well, now that one’s scuttled,
skål
!’

It was quite evident that he had gone mad. Cecilie’s father had gone mad.

A halting conversation spluttered into life. The mother wanted to hear a little about school and I gave laconic answers. Cecilie was not very helpful. My voice sounded hollow and resonated in the vast room. The serving lady stood behind me with another bottle at the ready. A fish bone got caught between two of my teeth, it stuck out at the corner of my mouth, I couldn’t loosen it, it was enormously annoying. I took a sip of wine and coughed into my napkin. Conversation across the table was extracted like teeth, the father shovelled down the trout and seemed almost bored by what was going on. The mother looked embarrassed and I praised the food and said the fish tasted better than the rainbow trout I had caught myself in Lille Åklungen a light year ago.

Cecilie’s father lit a big cigar and appeared to come to life.

‘Fly?’

I stared through the banks of fog rolling towards me.

‘Pardon?’

‘Fly?’ he repeated.

I had to be extremely cautious not to say anything that might irritate him. I deliberated, feverish, sweat bubbled on my scalp, my collar was wet around my neck.

‘Mosquito,’ I said. ‘There were loads of mosquitoes.’

He blew away the smoke hovering between us with one snort.

‘Fly!’ he roared with laughter. ‘Did you catch it with a fly?’

I flushed from my chest upwards. Cecilie giggled and received a kick from her mother under the table, I saw her, I hated all of them.

‘A spinner,’ I said.

The conversation over dessert died a death. The serving ladies went round as if they had been wound up mechanically and released onto the floor. I was frightened. I glimpsed Carlsberg through the double doors, his long, dark fingers. I was scared stiff.

‘What are you going to do after your final exams?’ the mother asked.

‘Not sure yet,’ I answered in a clear voice. ‘Maybe study languages.’

‘That’s what’s wrong with you young people,’ the father broke in, blowing out all the candles in one breath. ‘You can’t see
ahead
. You don’t have
perspectives
! I started off with two empty hands!’

He showed us them. The palms were sweaty and his life line stretched a long way down his forefinger. I was depressed.

‘Have you any hobbies?’ he continued, smacking his hands down on the table.

My head was like a swarm of bees. Answers flew in all directions. I caught the first to come to hand.

‘Stamps,’ I said.

He gave a nod of acknowledgement.

‘That’s good. That’s an
investment
!’

Then, suddenly, it was over. He rose to his feet. In a second we were on the terrace in the unusually cold evening wind blowing off the fjord. It was 1 May 1969. Cecilie and her mother had to go in and fetch more clothes. I remained with her father. He gave me a cigar and lit it. We each stood in our cloud of smoke without speaking. On the lawn Carlsberg was busy sticking hoops into the ground. He looked grouchy and offended.

And then we played croquet. I lost. Cecilie’s father saw to that. He pursued my ball and knocked me miles away every time he had the chance. I seemed to be stuck in a corner of the garden on my own smacking the ridiculous yellow ball with the idiotic mallet.

‘Conditions are the same for everyone!’ the father yelled to me as encouragement.