It's Fine By Me (11 page)

‘Right, shall we go in then?’ I say a bit roughly, but he just looks at me and has no idea what I am talking about.

‘What’s up with him?’ Rita asks. ‘Did you have a fight?’

‘He’s upset about his dad. Don’t come with me now.’

I walk towards the bar door. As I’m about to go in, it’s pushed open from the inside, and one of the local drunks comes staggering out. I stand back, and Dole looks up and sees me through the window. He knows who I am, but not what I want. I push the drunk aside and clear the way, and inside I head straight for the table where Dole is sitting. He is pretty hammered, he grins and says:

‘Hello, Audun, old boy,’ but I don’t answer, I just go up to him, lean down and grab his leg and pull. He hits the floor with a bang, the chair tips forward and hits him on the back of the head, the glass is knocked over and all the beer splashes down on his crew cut. He lashes out with the other leg but I skip to the side, and with his ankle in a firm grip, I drag him to the door.

‘Fuck you, Audun! Have you flipped or what!’ he yells, and I say nothing, for there is nothing to say, I just drag him along the floor. He flails out on all sides, crashes into chairs and tables, holds on to someone’s foot and shouts:

‘For fuck’s sake, help me!’ But no one lifts a finger. I bang open the door with my back, and outside in the square I let go of his leg. He gets to his feet with a groan. Once he has straightened up, I punch him hard in the stomach. I know what I’m doing. I have seen it before. He jack-knifes, and all the beer spurts from his mouth, and it floods out on to the ground between us, and I step away. I stand at the ready. But he coughs and splutters and stares at the tarmac.

‘You know what, Audun?’ he mumbles. ‘You’re a dead man.’ And then he opens the bar door and walks in bent double.

I turn back to the square. Rita is there alone, watching me with a look in her eyes I could have done without.

‘Where’s Arvid?’ I say.

‘He took off. The wrong way, I think.’

Right. I don’t know why I did what I did, but I don’t think it was for his sake.

‘Right,’ I say, running my fingers through my hair. I look at her. ‘How’s Tommy doing?’

‘Fine. He’s much better now. He really is.’

‘Good,’ I say, and start towards the stairs.

‘Audun?’ she says behind me. I turn round. She is wearing a brown leather jacket that must have been passed down from her father, that’s how it looks, and she seems older now than I’d thought before.

‘Nothing. It’s nothing.’

‘OK, that’s fine then.’

I walk down the spiral staircase and down the slope by the post office and the music school and along the terraced houses in Grevlingveien. It’s so quiet. I am breathing calmly. I just feel a little warm in the pit of my stomach. I cross Veitvetveien without looking left or right. A car brakes suddenly, but my eyes are fixed ahead, and I walk the footpath between the houses until I come out on Beverveien and down to the block where I live.

My mother’s in the living room. She is watching TV. On the table there is half a bottle of Upper Ten whisky, and she has her fingers round a glass while she watches Fred Astaire dancing solo across the screen. I have never seen her drunk, but I know she drinks. There are empty bottles stacked behind her winter boots at the back of the cupboard in the hall.

‘Hi,’ she says without taking her eyes from the TV. ‘You’re home early. I thought you were going to the youth club?’

‘It was boring.’

I’m about to go to my room, but I change my mind and plump down on the sofa. Fred Astaire is sitting in a
telephone booth now, talking to Ginger Rogers. He has turned on the French accent, and she doesn’t know it’s him she is talking to. He gives her some good advice with heavy French ‘r’s. He pouts. I don’t see the point. I get up from the sofa and go over to the cabinet beside the TV and fetch a glass. On the wall above the cabinet is the signed photograph of Jussi Björling.

‘Don’t mind if I do,’ I say in a straight voice. Now she looks up.

‘Don’t you think we’ve had enough of that?’

‘You’re drinking.’

‘It’s Friday. I’ve earned it. Well, you’re eighteen. You have to find out things for yourself. But be careful. Have some water in it. Here,’ she says, pushing over a jug of water. I pour myself a fair amount of Upper Ten and add some water.

‘That’s Fred Astaire,’ she says. ‘He could dance with the phone book, and I would watch.’ She smiles. She likes having me there. When I am not out, I usually sit in my room listening to records or reading, and she watches TV or listens to an opera in the living room. If she has her music on loud, I turn up the volume as well. I lean back and take a sip. I have never tried whisky before. It doesn’t taste good, but it does warm you right down to your feet. I shiver a little. I could get used to this, I think, and then I watch the film. It’s completely without meaning, but Ginger Rogers is attractive. She looks intelligent, much more intelligent than the stupid part she is playing. The glass is empty. I am fine now, the shivering has gone. I carefully reach for the bottle and pour myself another one, and she just watches the film. I may as well tell her now.

‘I’m quitting school,’ I say.

‘What?’ She tears her eyes from the screen.

‘I’m stopping school.’

‘Over my dead body.’

‘There’s nothing to discuss. I have made up my mind.’ I take a large swig from the glass, there is not a lot of water in it this time, I swallow and it flows all through my body. I like it, I could sleep now, and Fred Astaire is singing. Ginger Rogers is looking at him, she is smiling, they will find each other in the end. That’s good.

I pull myself together.

‘We don’t have a lot of money, do we,’ I say, ‘but I can’t do both the paper round
and
school any more. If I start working full time, we’ll be a lot better off.’

‘You don’t understand. I get money so you can go to school.’

‘What sort of money?’

‘It’s a state allowance. It’s for helping bright children from disadvantaged homes. Or something like that. I don’t remember exactly what it’s called.’ She blushes.

‘What! And you’ve never told me! Why didn’t you?’

‘That’s my business,’ she says, glancing at the TV where the credits are rolling. She missed the end of the film.

‘I don’t care what it’s called,’ I say, ‘I’m going to stop anyway. What’s there for me at school? I’m not like the others.’

‘Rubbish! What others? Your best friend, Arvid, he’s in your class, isn’t he? Is he suddenly different from you?’

‘Hell, of course he is. Do you want to know what I’m like? Do you want to know what I’m really like?’ I get up
from the sofa, the room is swaying, I hold on to the table and close my eyes.

‘But Audun, are you drunk? How much have you had?’ She takes the bottle and checks the contents. The whiskies I took must have been pretty stiff, because there is not much left.

‘Forget it,’ I say, and let go of the table and head for my room. I trip over the door sill and land on my knees, but that’s fine, I was going down there anyway. I pull the accordion out from under my bed and open the case and there it is: black and white with red stripes on the bellows. A Paolo Soprani. I hold it up, put my arms under the straps, loosen the catches on both sides and go back into the living room.

‘Goddamnit, now you’re going to hear what I’m like,’ I say and pull out the bellows and squeeze the keys and the buttons hard at the same time. The accordion sends out a howl that fills the room. I pull and squeeze again, and my mother covers her ears and shouts:

‘Audun, what is this? Where did you get that? Answer me!’

‘I have thick blood!’ I shout and laugh. ‘Do you want to hear a tango? Ho, ho! Here’s a tango!’ I pull and squeeze and stamp my foot, making the whole room shake, the glasses on the table and the glasses in the cupboard clink, and suddenly the picture of Jussi Björling falls off the wall and crashes to the floor. I stop playing and my mother hurries over to pick it up, and then I can see there is a baking recipe on the back and a photo of a loaf. The picture’s from a magazine, and the signature is printed on it. I laugh so much I can hardly stand.

III

11

THE SPRING AND
the summer of the year I was thirteen were sunk in yellow haze. I was sweating all over my body for weeks and weeks and it was hard for me to see clearly. I walked up the gravel path to the house like a drunk, the air about me thick and quivering with a light that could explode at any moment it seemed, and sometimes I would aim for the door and miss. I sat hunched over my school books rubbing my eyes, but the yellow haze would not go away, and I kept going to the kitchen for something to drink. My throat felt so dry, I was constantly thirsty, and in the end I turned away from the school books. When I came home, I took them out of my satchel and the next morning I put them back, but I didn’t open them. And I didn’t read anything else. The Davy Crockett books were on the shelves, but there was an emptiness surrounding them that made me restless, an emptiness everywhere that made me gasp for air, and I felt sick. I lay in bed for a week gazing at the curtains. They were as sun-yellow as everything else that was on my mind, and outside my head the sticky silence hung thick and hot, and my temperature rose to thirty-nine degrees.

‘I have yellow fever,’ I said.

‘Yellow fever makes your skin go yellow,’ my mother said. ‘You’re poorly, no doubt about it, but if you ask me you look pretty pale.’

‘I’ve definitely got yellow fever,’ I said.

‘You may have, of course,’ she said and went to look it up in the family encyclopaedia, and the symptoms listed there were quite different, but if ever there was something called yellow fever, that’s what I had, and no one could tell me different.

After a week I was fed up lying in bed. I got up and put on a baseball cap and sunglasses.

The morning before the last day of school, I woke early, but stayed in bed, gazing at the ceiling, thinking about things. And when my thinking was done, I jumped out of bed and went down to the kitchen where my mother was standing with her forehead against the window looking out at the road.

‘Tomorrow I’m going off for a while,’ I said.

‘Fine,’ she said, and was relieved, for she didn’t really know what to do with me in the two months that lay ahead of us. She had to work all summer in the cafeteria at Gardermoen airport, and no one had seen my father for months. Kari would work at the newspaper kiosk, and my mother had enough on her plate looking after Egil.

‘Where are you going, then?’

‘Frank and I are going to the woods, we’ll set up camp by Lake Aurtjern. I’ll be away for about two weeks.’

‘You’ll need quite a bit of food then.’

‘Not
that
much. We’ll do some fishing. Have you got any money?’

‘You can have some. I haven’t got a lot,’ she said, turning her apron pockets inside out, so I could see for myself.

‘I’ll take whatever you can spare,’ I said and tossed the schoolbag over my shoulder, put my sunglasses on and set off for school. She didn’t ask which tent we were going to use. We had never owned one; neither had Frank. Besides, I hadn’t even spoken to him. We hadn’t been friends for a year.

It was quite a trek to school. But that was not where I went. By the chapel, where the roads meet, I turned right towards the railway station. Even that was not a short walk. We lived on the outskirts of the village, and the school and the railway station were at opposite ends.

It was so hot. Not a single leaf stirred on the trees, and sweat ran from my eyebrows over my face, and whenever I moved my arms, my armpits felt raw. Although my schoolbag was half empty, it was painful to carry, so I jumped into a ditch and hid it under a bush. I could pick it up on my way home, or it could just stay there. I really didn’t care.

As I walked, my body eased up and gradually the stiffness disappeared, and by the time I reached the station building, I could have run the sixty metres in under nine dead. Perhaps there was something in the air that had changed, I don’t know, but still I kept my sunglasses on. I decided to wear them at all times, at least during the day. I liked the distance they created.

For a couple of weeks I had been pestering the manager of the Co-op for his biggest cardboard boxes. Now I had three, and they were really big, I could almost stand upright
inside one of them. I had kept them hidden behind a shed, and now I pulled them out and along the railway lines up to some big bushes. There I placed them one against the other, the largest in the middle and cut openings so I could move between all three. I had a hall, a lounge and a bedroom. There was not much space, but it felt right. Then I cut down some twigs from a nearby tree and laid them over the roof as camouflage. On this side of the railway lines there were just fields, so the chances of anyone stumbling upon me were small, and when I crossed the line to the road on the other side, my shack looked just like part of the scrub. I changed a few details and was home at the usual time. There was a large clock on the station building I could see from where I was camping.

I went home empty-handed; my bag was still where I left it, but my mother didn’t notice, or if she did, she didn’t mention it.

The next day, I packed my rucksack, sleeping bag, blanket for a groundsheet, torch, some extra clothes, fishing rod and the money my mother had given me. Egil stood in the doorway: he wanted to go with me, but she held him by the shoulders so he wouldn’t run off, and when I reached the gate I turned, and she looked so small and worn out, and I guessed it wasn’t such a bad idea to stay away for a while.

Everything went fine for a few days. The weather held, and that was a good thing, as I wasn’t sure at all how the house would cope with the rain. I slept and woke and felt the walls
all around me. I could stretch my arms out and touch both ends of the box with my fingers and feel the smooth inside of the cardboard. The sleeping bag was snug and dry, and at night I heard noises that were new to me. There were cars coming and going on the road and the clunk of wheels from passing trains and the screech when a train braked and stopped at the station. I could hear voices, but I was never afraid; all these sounds belonged there, and I could go on sleeping, knowing that this was something I had chosen myself.