One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (10 page)

Anders’s father did notice, however, that he sometimes seemed vulnerable and sad, as if there were something troubling him. But Anders never shared any problems with him or said what the matter was.

The boy was craving love
and attention, and it was as if he longed for something that was missing in his life, his father later admitted. But he was incapable of meeting the boy’s needs. He remained aloof and never made Anders feel loved.

The first time Anders was caught tagging, the police rang both his parents. His father was outraged that Anders had committed a criminal act. He threatened to cut off all contact with
him.

The second time it happened he reacted coldly.

Anders promised not to do any more tagging. His father contented himself with that.

*   *   *

Anders was developing a steady hand. He didn’t mess anything up, the paint didn’t bubble, the lines came out even, without wobbling. He applied the silver spray paint without letting it drip onto or dust the black, while still keeping the colour
even and filling in the whole picture.

But one day somebody openly mocked Morg on Egertorget. Mocked his inflated ambition. His boastfulness, his exaggerated hip-hop walk and the way he wore his trousers back to front to be cool. Trousers that were to be as outsized as those worn in music videos.

The taunts continued the next time he came along. And the next. Morg seemingly took no notice. Ahmed
wasn’t there any more. He had been expelled from Ris for making trouble and now hung out with friends and relations in the East End. Spok and Wick found themselves caught in the middle. They didn’t play an active part in the bullying, but took an imperceptible step back whenever it started. They didn’t want to risk being dragged into anything. On the way home, Anders tried to make a joke of the
whole thing.

It didn’t take long for the big taggers to show Morg that he was no longer welcome. They didn’t say it outright, just went from openly ridiculing him to totally ignoring him.

‘I didn’t have the balls to do anything,’ admitted Spok many years later. ‘I just stood there like a moron and hoped they wouldn’t start on me.’

Anders had committed a cardinal sin. He hadn’t known his place.
He was a toy but had behaved like a king. In other words, like a wannabe.

Anders fought tooth and nail to keep his place in the community. But the bullying spread to his own little clique and his friends deserted him.

A pitiless panel composed of Wick and Spok delivered the
coup de grâce
.

Morg was thrown out of the gang.

At a much later date, when Wick was called in to be interviewed by the
police about the friend with whom he had broken sixteen years before, he reverted to the value judgements of a teenage tagger: ‘He belonged to the cool gang for a while, even though he wasn’t cool. He was basically a fifth wheel. In the end we wouldn’t put up with him any longer.’

The logic was clear. ‘We soon realised we wouldn’t get anywhere with Anders in tow, so we had to make a choice. Either
stand up for him or join one of the top taggers.’

With Anders gone from the Writers’ Bench, both Spok and Wick were recruited by good crews and went on tagging.

Cool or not cool, that was the question.

*   *   *

But Anders didn’t give up tagging. If he just carried on, if he just got better and better, they would have to acknowledge him and he could be a king after all.

He started tagging
with boys younger than himself. Boys who hadn’t picked up on the fact that Anders wasn’t hip any more.

One of them was a skinny little kid from one of the biggest houses in the neighbourhood, whose parents were away a lot. He was in the year below Anders at Ris, did a bit of tagging and was dumbfounded by the sight of the arsenal of aerosol cans neatly stowed under the veranda. Anders used to
spend a lot of time considering the colours he would use, weighing the cans in his hand before he covered up his palette along the wall so it couldn’t be seen from the path.

The top taggers were obsessive about having all their equipment in order, while the small fry went round aimlessly, without a plan.

One evening Anders pointed out a place he wanted to tag. He had his eye on a piece done
by one of the big names. The younger tagger protested.

‘No way. You can’t write over that!’

‘I tag where I like,’ said Anders as he took the first paint can out of his bag.

In addition to the countless understandings about what was cool, the graffiti community had two absolute rules that should not be broken: don’t tell on anyone, and don’t tag over other writers’ pieces.

There were subtle,
fluid exceptions. A king could write over the tag of a toy, but not the other way round. Someone good could write over someone bad. A big, coloured piece was permitted to cover a simple tag. A piece that was starting to fade could be written over, if you asked the permission of the person who had put it up. You could make the judgement yourself, but it had better be a good one.

‘Let’s find a
bare wall instead.’

‘No, I want to tag here,’ insisted Anders in the darkness of the bus station.

‘You gotta ask first!’

Anders turned to the wall. He flicked the cap off the spray can and raised his hand.

He pressed the button.

The spray hit the wall, spreading over the other tagger’s name.

MORG it said, for the passengers to read the next morning.

MORG, it informed the tagger whose signature
had been obliterated.

A king could do what he wanted.

Not a toy.

He had thrown down the gauntlet.

*   *   *

Just before Christmas when he was in Year 9, Anders went by himself to Copenhagen to replenish his stock of spray cans. He bought all the colours he needed, put them in his bag and caught the train home.On 23 December, when he got to Oslo Central, he was stopped by the police. They
confiscated the contents of his bag – forty-three cans of spray paint – and sent him to the child welfare duty officer, who informed his home. The officer wrote the following report: ‘Mother not aware he had been in Denmark. He went to Denmark once before without telling his mother. The records show the boy received two previous warnings for tagging and vandalism in February and March 1994.’

The child welfare office conducted interviews with Anders and his mother in the new year and logged that the latter was concerned her son might be turning to crime. There was ‘genuine concern about his involvement in the tagging community,’ wrote the child welfare officer. ‘Such communities are known for activities and behaviour bordering on the criminal. The boy himself claims he no longer spends
his time with any tagging community.’

Anders was certainly right about that. He no longer had a community.

The child welfare log ended as follows:

02.02.95: Letter from Anders that he no longer wishes to cooperate with the child welfare authorities, as a result of ‘disclosures’ at school.

07.02.95: Meeting scheduled with the boy at the office. Did not attend.

13.02.95: Meeting scheduled with
mother and son at the office. Neither attended.

Not turning up to a pre-arranged meeting was an effective tactic for avoiding the spotlight of the child welfare office. The case was not pursued because it was ‘not judged serious enough to warrant intervention and support on the part of child welfare officers’.

*   *   *

‘Morg’s squealed.’

At Egertorget, the boys sat talking. Net wasn’t surprised
when word spread. Nobody knew what he had said, who he had informed on, or whether anyone had been arrested as a result. It didn’t help. Once the rumour was out, you were marked.

Backs were all that Anders saw now. No one wanted anything to do with him.

School became an extension of the nightmare. As soon as Anders appeared, whether it was before lessons or in the evening, kids ganged up on
him. And these were people not remotely connected to the tagging community. He had turned into someone everybody could trample on. His favourite phrases were circulated and mocked, and his big nose was caricatured.

Anders started lifting weights, ideally twice a day. He developed quickly, from thin and weak to broad and strong. His classmates wondered if he was on steroids. At Ris, weight training
was seen as far from cool; it was only years later that it became trendy.

Anders was left sitting alone now. Well, not invariably. Sometimes he sat with a couple of others from the fourth group: the losers.

‘Outcasts stick together,’ laughed the cool kids.

The class yearbook had a damning verdict:

‘Anders used to be part of the “gang” but then he made enemies of everybody,’ was the book’s
summary for the leavers of spring 1995. ‘Anders has staked it all on getting a perfect body, but we have to say he’s still got quite a way to go. Apart from that, Anders spends a lot of time in Denmark getting materials for his “art”. In Year 7, Anders had something going with X, but now he’s got an admirer in Tåsen (with red hair and freckles). Anders often does stupid, unprovoked things, such as
hitting the headteacher.’

The piece finished by saying he now hung out with the losers in the class, who were mentioned by name. Nobody got off lightly.

Anders was desperate to find out who had written it, so he could beat him up.

The girl in the class with whom Anders was said to have had ‘something going’ was also furious with whoever had composed the entry. It amounted to bullying, because
being together with Anders was the last thing anybody would think of. They would be outcasts themselves, then.

It all came back, crystal clear, to Morg’s former friend Wick when the police put the yearbook in front of him sixteen years later.

‘Yes, that’s how it was,’ said Wick, the tall, dark one in the gang. Then he suggested a slight rewording: ‘Not enemies, it was just that he was pushed
out. Not wanted in the gang any more.’

As he sat in the sterile interview room trying to define why Anders was rejected, Wick recalled everything in minute detail. He remembered a pair of outsized hip-hop jeans, a make called Psycho Cowboy. The jeans were very popular, but disappeared overnight, after a few months of fashion hype.

Then they were ‘one of the worst things to be seen in’, recalled
Wick. ‘And Anders went on wearing his just a bit too long.’

*   *   *

Is there anything worse than being rejected by your friends?

Yes, perhaps there is.

Being disowned by your father.

After his third arrest, Jens Breivik made it clear to Anders that he wanted nothing more to do with him. His son had broken his promise to give up tagging.

The decision was final.

Anders was fifteen.

He
would never see his father again.

To Damascus

There is fighting in the streets of Erbil. Blood wets the sand that covers the cracked asphalt. Rubbish is mixed with desert dust and the stench of war fills the alleyways and squares. Life has gone underground, and flickers over a low flame.

It is 1996.

The Iraqi army has withdrawn, and the war being fought is no longer for freedom, but between the Kurds themselves, for power
and money. Erbil is a city where old rivalries are never forgotten, only intensified and mythologised by fresh killings leading to further years of blood feud and enmity. Kurdistan is ripping and hacking itself to pieces. The fighters occupying the city are choking it to death.

Every night families are torn apart. Children are killed by other children’s fathers, or by young men who might become
fathers one day.

In the cellars, people sit in darkness for days, weeks, months, while the militias battle it out above their heads. Children try to invent a game down there, in the cellars, because children will always want to play. Fathers are nervous and restless; should they be taking up arms as well? Should they be choosing sides? Should they?

*   *   *

Mustafa chooses life.

He is holding
a four-year-old in his arms. Bano, his firstborn. With bullets whizzing through the streets above them and rockets landing God knows where, he wonders how to cope with everyday existence, how to find food for his family, how to get water, fuel and all the rest of it.

‘Why must we stay in here?’ whines the little girl. ‘I want to go up!’

Not a single glimmer of light finds its way into the cold
room. It’s a relief that their neighbour built a proper cellar.

‘Let’s go up and play,’ begs Bano.

This little girl, conceived and born when snow was in the air, who wants to be part of everything, to have answers to everything – she is the apple of his eye. She learnt to walk at nine months, to put together long sentences when she was two; now she talks like a schoolgirl.

Bayan is sitting
with Bano’s little sister on her lap. Lara was born eighteen months after Bano. Bayan had wanted a boy. She comes from a traditional family, where a woman gains worth and status only once she has borne a son. Now she is pregnant for the third time, and the oppressive cellar atmosphere is making her queasiness worse. She groans. This isn’t how life was meant to be.

Suddenly there is a huge bang.
The house shakes, its framework creaks. Something shatters and makes a tinkling noise as it falls to the ground. The windows? The crockery?

The children wail, and terrified shouts can be heard. The parents sit there numbly, ready to evacuate the cellar if they have to. Two girls who share the darkness with them start to cry. The elders recite from the Qur’an, a stream of mumbling verse coming
from their barely open mouths. Sirens pierce the night.

But the house stays standing, the cellar does not collapse or get filled with falling earth or plaster, no beams come crashing down. Is it over?

Not for the children. Lara is too upset to settle. Bano is crying hysterically. She turns her head to her father in the darkness.

‘Why did you want children when you knew there was a war?’