It's Fine By Me (7 page)

‘I’ll never forget it,’ Kari says. ‘I thought my head would explode.’ We have been to the Grorud Cemetery and are walking along Trondhjemsveien on our way home. My mother is a few steps behind us, she’s crying and wants to be left alone. It’s Egil’s sixteenth birthday. It’s a Friday in October. I have taken the day off from school, and when we get home,
Jussi Björling will be on the turntable. She always plays opera when something is wrong, she plays opera when nothing is wrong, she always plays opera no matter what. Sometimes she locks the door, turns the volume up and stands on a chair conducting with her eyes closed. I have seen her through the window on my way from friends’ houses at Linderud, I have looked across the little hollow with the stream and into our apartment on the third floor and seen how my mother is standing on a chair conducting the music I cannot hear, and wondered how many other people have seen her.

And almost always it is Jussi Björling. There is a signed photograph of him on the living-room wall. How she got hold of that, no one knows, but it has always seemed impressive, has given her records some extra meaning, and it was on the wall of our house in the country. My father couldn’t stand it, he did not like opera, he liked tango and anything else was for people with thin blood. On his own accordion he could play the tango, and people said he was pretty good.

‘Jussi Björling? Hell, he looks like a pen pusher!’ he used to say, and once, when he was in a drunken haze, he smashed some of her records.

‘We were lucky the neighbours called the police,’ Kari says. ‘Things could have got out of hand. You were only two years old, for Christ’s sake. He was so drunk. He was always so goddamn drunk. Was I happy when we moved at last.’

We talk about him as though he, too, were dead, we do that every time we talk about him. It’s not often. But he isn’t dead.

We walk down Trondhjemsveien. Flaen and Kaldbakken are on the lower side where many from my class live. Among them is Venke. I know exactly which window is hers. I have been there with her, kissing on her bed with my hand up her skirt and her hand down my pants, and with her mouth against my neck she whispered: ‘I think maybe I love you, you’re so strong.’ That really scared me, so I took off.

These houses seemed so important before, but now they look like something from a cartoon, compared with the high-rises at Ammerud. Rødtvet is on the upper side, and behind it is forest and more forest, for hours and days if that’s what you want. You can go in there and keep wandering and come out again far into the countryside.

‘It took him five years to get here,’ I say. ‘He must have fallen asleep on the way.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘He’s here now. I saw him just over a week ago, at the end of my paper round.’

‘Who’s here now?’

‘The person we’re talking about. Dad.’

What a word! Dad. But there is no other.

‘He was standing there, at the top of that hill.’ I point to where the footpath slopes down from Trondhjemsveien, by the Metro bridge. ‘The man in the black suit. The man with the shiny pistol. I wonder if he still has it. Perhaps it’s in his rucksack. And it was definitely his rucksack.’

‘You must be kidding! Are you sure?’ Kari grabs my arm and walks a bit faster to leave our mother further behind.

‘Of course I’m sure. Do you think I have forgotten what he looks like?’

‘Have you told her?’ Kari tries not to turn round, but doesn’t quite succeed.

‘What would be the point of that? I don’t want to move again. Not now, at least. I’m not scared of him.’

‘Oh no?’ She looks at me, and I know as well as her that I am scared to death. He is the only person who really scares me. Everything else is child’s play.

‘I’ll kill him,’ I say.

‘Shh, don’t talk like that. But what does he want? What do you think he wants? We’ll have to work out something. It’s too bad I have to go home on the bus tonight.’

‘To your car spray hotshot?’

She blushes. ‘You mind your own business!’

‘There’s nothing to work out. We’ll just have to wait and see what happens.’

We stop until my mother has caught up with us so we can walk together down Grevlingveien. She is not crying any more, and Kari slips her arm under hers, and she smiles at us.

My mother is small and fair-haired, quite slim, and if you are not standing too close and can’t see the lines around her eyes and mouth, thirty-six is not the first age that springs to mind. I suppose you could say she is attractive, I don’t know, it’s hard for me to say. Once, around where we used to live, I saw her turn a man’s head on the road, but maybe she had smudged her lipstick or had a black eye that day. She had one from time to time. So did I. When my father was home for long enough, we all did.

She has always wanted curly hair, but it is straight as a waterfall, just like mine, and it seems to me that fair-haired people are not as curly as dark-haired people. Anyway, she has tried curlers and tongs and once she saved up to have a perm. When she came home she stood crying in front of the mirror because the curls were compact and tight and not what she had pictured and dreamt about, and, to be frank, she did look terrible. For almost an hour she stood over the basin trying to smooth her hair out again, and she stayed indoors for several days. So much money down the drain. What she does now is fill the kettle, put it on the stove, and when the water boils she hangs her hair over the gushing steam, and then the tips curl and give her what she calls a natural wave.

Since we moved, she has really had only one good friend. His name is Robert, but he calls himself Roberto, and he rented our spare bedroom the first difficult year in Veitvet. Now he lives in a smart one-room flat in Majorstua on the west side. He drives a white MGB, digs opera and is a homo. That doesn’t seem to bother him much, and it doesn’t bother me either. Sometimes he pinches my bum, but that’s
just teasing, to show he knows that I know that he isn’t
actually
pinching my bum. Or something like that.

Every Wednesday afternoon Roberto drives to Veitvet from Majorstua to listen to opera with my mother. The white car floats down Beverveien with the roof rolled back, round the curve, and Roberto waves his hand to the boys standing along the road and the boys wave back, and it doesn’t seem to bother anyone that he is a homo. But I may be wrong there.

As we go up the steps in the tower and along the Sing-Sing gallery he is standing outside our door with a bouquet of flowers and a plastic bag in his hand, even though it’s only two days since he was last here, and I think that maybe homos have a feel for that kind of thing, like girls do. Anyway, my mother smiles and pulls herself together and is happy. Now there is someone to share the opera with, and I’m happy too, because I don’t have to stay at home and be a comfort. Some days it makes me feel claustrophobic and today is one of them.

I go up to my room and change into normal clothes, hold up my checked trousers before I go for the Wranglers instead. Before I leave, I play Bob Dylan’s ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ to cleanse my mind. It’s unbeatable. It is so full of hatred it makes me want to lie down on the bench and pump iron, but it will take too long. I can’t be indoors now, not with Kirsten Flagstad and Maria Callas howling in the next room.

On my way out, I hit my foot against something sticking out from under the bed. It’s the accordion. I sneaked it indoors and up to my room when my mother wasn’t there and have hidden it. I have a
KEEP OUT
sign on my door to
make her stay away. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone, only Arvid knows, and sometimes I feel an urge to take it out, hold it in my arms and play a few notes. But I am afraid it will make me remember too much. I push it back underneath with my foot.

I walk through the living room. Roberto is standing by the old record cabinet waving a new recording of Tosca, and he winks at me, and I pat my bum, and my mother says, ‘Well, put it on, then.’

The first notes come thundering down the stairs as I leave the building. She plays music louder than I do, and yet I am the one who gets a hard time. I guess I appreciate Jussi Björling more than she does Jimi Hendrix. The only singer for her after 1945 is Elvis. I couldn’t give a shit about him. But maybe Elvis reminds her of the days when the future was still open and she sat around in old American cars necking with my father, dreaming behind the dashboard with Kari in the back seat wrapped in nappies, and was about to marry this man that she wanted. What a kick in the teeth.

It’s raining outside. Heavy, gusting rain, and the concrete walls of the houses turn sticky and dark. It makes me feel so out of place, and suddenly I long for thatched houses and log walls and attics and birch trees right outside your window and meadowland where the wind and the rain sweep across the tall grass in one long, surging swell and make you think of films you have seen and of walking barefoot, and then it painfully passes and is squeezed into a funnel with only one narrow way out.

There is nothing to work out. We just have to wait and see what happens. But nothing happens. Soon two weeks have gone, and had I not been the person I am, I would have thought it was a ghost I had seen. I remember a time out in the country when almost everyone believed in ghosts. Someone had planted stories that spread all over the district like a nervous disease, and in the end Kari was so scared she joined something called Kløfta Parapsychological Association. Its members went off in droves to old abandoned farms and lay on the living room floors with tape recorders, keeping each other awake, rigid with fear, waiting for white ladies in lace frocks. But girls are girls, and what I believe is what I see when I see it. I have never seen any ghosts. The ones that haunt me do not glide around at night wearing lace frocks, howling with grief.

Perhaps I had got it wrong. But I had
not
, and then there is the accordion and what Leif said, although I don’t understand just why he went to Leif. Anyway, it
was
him. But what does he want? What is he waiting for?

I walk along Beverveien in the rain, turn up the collar of my reefer jacket and feel the rain running off my hair down my neck, and the sun breaks through, and even though it’s very low, it feels like spring, only colder. I could go into the woods now, take the paths from the top of Slettaløkka into the forest and on to Lake Alunsjøen and down around Lake Breisjøen to Ammerud. I often do that, it’s a fine route if you walk fast. I like walking fast. But that road is closed to me now.

Arvid is standing outside the Narvesen kiosk by the Metro station buying cigarettes. He has just got off the train after school and is still carrying his schoolbag. I lean against one of the columns under the bridge and wait until he has finished. After the long drive into the country, I have only seen him at school. We have barely spoken, which is quite unusual, and he smiles in a shy way as he turns and sees me standing there.

‘Hi,’ he says. ‘You weren’t at school today. Have you stopped coming?’

‘We were at the cemetery.’

He nods, and then I ask:

‘How did it go with the car door?’

‘Dad got all worked up, of course. But now it’s all sprayed and done.’

‘How much was it?’

‘A hundred kroner. But don’t worry. I said it was my fault, so Dad paid.’

‘No way. It was my fault.’ I pull my wallet out and take a hundred-kroner note. I’ve just been paid for the paper round. My mother will have to wait for her share. ‘Here,’ I say.

‘Bloody hell, Audun, you know you don’t have to pay.’

‘What’s right is right, or else everything would just be crap. Take the money, I’ll be all right, no problem.’ He takes the note folds it and puts it in his pocket.

‘So, you’re not quitting school then?’

‘That’s a whole other thing. Coming?’

‘Where to?’

‘Well, not the woods, that’s for sure. To town maybe, or Geir’s?’

‘Geir’s? I thought you hated the place.’

‘It’s early. None of the jokers are there yet. I feel like a beer. It has been one shitty day.’

Arvid giggles. ‘Why not?’ he says. ‘It is Friday and all.’

We walk into the shopping centre from the top level along the square towards the door to Geir’s. Arvid carries his rucksack in his hand. On his back, it would make him look like a schoolboy, and we open the door, walk in and sit down at a table right at the back.

‘I hate to tell you, I’m skint,’ he says, ‘but if I dig around I may have enough for one.’

‘Hell, it’s on me.’ I order two beers. There are some things with alcohol you must never do. You must never drink alone, never drink on Sundays, never drink before seven o’clock and if you do, it has to be on a Saturday. If you’re hung-over, you go for a walk in the forest, and you must never drink the hair of the dog. Do that, and you are an alcoholic, it’s common knowledge. If you are an alcoholic you’re out of control. If you have no control, you are finished. Then you spend the rest of your days walking through the valley of the shadow of death. You are the problem no one wants to solve. They give you a wide berth in the street, scurry behind the canned food when you’re in the shop to buy beer. The woman at the cash desk is in a hurry. And then you die and no one gives a shit.

It’s not Saturday, and it’s well before seven o’clock, but apart from that, we’re in the clear, and after the first sip I feel good. Arvid smiles and wipes the froth off his top lip.

‘That was good,’ he says. ‘We ought to do this more often.
It’s a shame we don’t have money, then we could have a few more.’

‘You’ve got the hundred kroner,’ I say.

‘But of course I do,’ he says and grins.

7

I WAKE UP.
I have been dreaming about Egil for the first time since the accident. In the dream we are standing on a log by the bank of the river Glomma, fishing with our new spinning rods. We got them for Christmas and haven’t tried them out yet. It’s Easter, perhaps. The silver reels glisten in the sun, and Egil looks the way he did last year. I know he is dead, but it doesn’t matter. It is absolutely still by the river. Straight ahead the water’s swirling and further up are the rapids, and yet we do not hear a sound. It is wonderful. Egil smiles and casts a long line, he is happy, and I smile back at him. I can’t remember ever seeing him so calm, his face so soft and smooth. He’s relaxed because he knows he is no longer alive, and there will be no more trouble. That calms me, too.