‘Listen to that baroque piano! Swings like crazy! And Norwegian wood does not mean forest or wood. It means tobacco, you know. The tobacco Indians smoke. Peace pipe, folks.’
He sat with us until ‘Michelle’ slowed and faded, then he snatched his beer and made for the door. We went on playing records, we kept playing until fireworks went off outside the window, big colourful explosions. It was twelve o’clock.
We went out onto the balcony. Gunnar’s parents were there, too. The air was cold and good and we felt very warm inside. Happy New Year! Yes. It was on its way. It was great. We were on schedule. Gunnar’s father wanted to take a photo of us. We folded up our collars, sucked in our cheeks, lowered our eyelids and crouched down over his brand new flash camera. He told us to smile and not to look so angry. He hardly recognised us.
That was how it should be.
On the last day of the holiday we waded up Thomas Heftyesgate humming ‘Norwegian Wood’ and pondering the future of The Snafus. It was a year to our confirmation, so we had to get hold of the equipment. It was no good practising with pencils, elastic bands off jam jars or badminton racquets. All of a sudden we heard a loud din in a garage just beyond the English embassy. It wasn’t a record player at full blast, it was a band. We stopped dead in the snowdrift, crept closer. A band. They began to sing, it sounded totally out of tune, but it was a band. We stood listening for a long time and while they were playing a guitar version of ‘Lappland’ someone came behind us and we jumped out of our skins.
‘Wanna join the fan club?’ bleated a fat tub with greasy hair and a blue double-breasted jacket.
‘W-w-we were just p-p-passin’,’ Ola stammered.
The music stopped and the garage door opened. We peeped in and there stood everything we had dreamt of, electric guitars, microphones, big drums, amplifiers and loads of cables criss-crossing the stone floor. The musicians had red jackets, hair covering their foreheads and ears and were at least twenty years old.
‘Found these fans,’ said the greaseball.
‘Shut the door before our bollocks get permafrost,’ the drummer shouted and we were shoved in and the garage door was slammed to.
‘Got a gig,’ the manager said, lighting a cigarette and blowing fifteen rings up to the ceiling. ‘Tutti frutti job with cream. Party night at Vestheim.’
He turned to us.
‘Which school do you go to, boys?’
‘Vestheim,’ I said.
He drew closer.
‘Goodo,’ he said. ‘Goodo with sugar on. You’ll be in the front row.’
‘Okay,’ I said. ‘If they let us in.’
‘Say Bobby said it was alright, then you’ll get in. Just say Bobby said it was alright.’
The band started another song: ‘Cadillac’. Bobby was snapping his fingers. The guitarist’s solo was very intense, but the singer’s voice snapped like a matchstick in the refrain.
‘Have to get shot of that catarrh,’ Bobby shouted afterwards. ‘Otherwise they got into the groove.’
‘What’s the name of the b-b-band?’ Ola asked.
‘The Snowflakes,’ Bobby said. ‘Remember the name.’
‘The Snowflakes,’ Ola repeated. ‘Do you only play in the w-w-winter?’
Now Ola would have to keep his mouth shut before we were pitched out on our noses. Seb was already giving him a poke in the back.
‘No, smart-arse. We’re called The Raindrops in the summer.’
The Snowflakes started up again, an instrumental: ‘Apache’. The solo guitarist moved the tremolo arm and the notes billowed out into the room in slow motion. Bobby trotted to and fro in front of them, crouching down and cupping his ears.
‘The sound’s good,’ he declared afterwards.
There was a hammering on the door. Bobby opened up and in charged three girls who threw themselves over Bobby and then kissed the band, but when they came to us, they stopped dead.
‘Fans,’ Bobby explained. ‘The Vestheim Fan Club committee. Playing there one evening.’
‘Cool,’ said one of the girls. ‘Can’t we go out and have a beer?’
‘T’rrific idea,’ Bobby said. ‘Come on, guys. Let’s cool it with a few beers.’
He looked down at us.
‘We’re agreed then, are we?’ Bobby said.
We nodded. Didn’t quite know what we had agreed to, though.
‘Perhaps we could have a bit of a jam?’ Seb asked.
Bobby eyed him and had a long think.
‘Jam?’
‘Just try a bit.’
‘That’s fine,’ the bass player said. ‘But take it easy. Sensitive equipment.’
‘That’s okay,’ Bobby said with a frown. ‘Take it easy. Expensive gear.’
So they wandered off, the girls had sweaters with ‘Snowflakes’ written on the back.
Ola pounced on the drums, Gunnar and Seb each grabbed a guitar and I stood by a microphone and we went for it. We screamed and shouted, I moaned and shrieked into the mike and my voice emerged from somewhere else and sounded quite different. Gunnar hammered away at the two chords he knew and Seb did his best to break a string. We kept this up for at least half an hour, it sounded quite awful and quite beautiful.
Then Gunnar shouted ‘Stop’.
There was an abrupt silence. We were exhausted. Ola hung over his stool like an old bedsheet.
‘We have to know what we’re playin’,’ Gunnar said. ‘So that we can play together.’
‘What shall we play then?’ Seb wondered.
We deliberated.
‘We’ll write our own songs,’ I said.
Seb agreed.
‘Of course! We’ll make our own music! Why the hell hadn’t we thought of that before?’
‘But we haven’t done anything yet, for Christ’s sake. We have to decide what we can play now!’
‘“Norwegian Wood”,’ said Seb.
‘Without a sitar?’
‘We can try.’
We tried, but we never found the melody. And then we were back at square one. Our stomachs vibrated, we should at least have been wearing a kidney belt, we jumped around, I lay on the floor, screaming wildly, Ola’s bass drum was kicking like crazy, Seb was plucking the strings so that it sounded like forty sitars and ten randy cats and Gunnar was striking firm chords to keep the whole thing more or less together.
‘Just like in the Cavern!’ Seb yelled. ‘Just like in the Cavern!’
We shifted into something vaguely like ‘Twist And Shout’, the sweat was steaming off us, girls in the crowd were tearing their hair and wanted to get near us on the stage, we gave everything we had, everything and the last drop, and a bit more, then the garage door burst open, I was lying on my back and silence fell over me like an avalanche. There stood the girls, squiffy, Bobby, with gaping eyes, and The Snowflakes, with broad grins.
I scrambled up, Gunnar and Seb crept out from under the guitars and Ola put down the drumsticks and appeared from behind the bass drum.
‘What the hell was that?’ Bobby said.
‘We were playin’,’ I whispered.
‘Playin’! Do you call that playin’?’
‘What’s your name?’ asked one of the girls, leaning towards me.
‘The Snafus,’ I said in an even softer voice.
Then they began to laugh. Everyone laughed. We skulked towards the door.
‘Just a sec,’ Bobby shouted. ‘You remember the gig?’
We nodded.
‘So tell everyone you know about The Snowflakes. Got that?’
We nodded.
‘Deal’s a deal, boys,’ he sibilated in Norwegian English.
We left the garage, tired and sweaty, the cold froze our clothes to our bodies.
‘Imagine havin’ a garage like that to practise in!’ Gunnar said after we had calmed down a bit. ‘Then we would definitely be better than The Snowflakes!’
‘We are better than The Snowflakes,’ Seb shouted. ‘They just play shit.’
I thre
w a snowball in the air and I could swear it never came down again.
‘They don’t even know what a s-s-sitar is!’Ola snorted.
School began, Christmas was over. Christmas trees stood in gateways and backyards, brown and bare like fish bones. Stars vanished from windows and re-appeared in the sky on cold, pitch-black nights. A new year. Everything had changed. Everything was the same. Except that Skinke, the gym teacher, had had a new idea. We should swim. On such cold days he announced that it was important and proper that we should swim. For then we would acquire another subcutaneous layer of fat on our bodies, which would protect us against the cold. Viz. the polar bear. And with that we tramped down to West Oslo Baths and jumped into the chlorine. Skinke patrolled the pool blowing his whistle and screaming orders.
‘Where’s Fred?’ gurgled Gunnar, spitting out green water.
I took a gander.
‘Here he comes,’ I said.
Here came Fred Hansen. His ribs jutted out like the steps of a staircase above the bony hips from which flapped his Tarzan bathing trunks. He hesitated for a few seconds, then strode onto the diving board and launched himself like a contorted seal, jackknifed and hit the water without a splash, without a sound. And there he stayed. Fred Hansen didn’t surface. Skinke waved his arms about and yelled. We could see Fred on the bottom like a grey shadow, a skinny deepwater fish. It seemed to last forever and Skinke was on the point of diving in when Fred shot up like a torpedo, almost erect in the water, he really did, Fred leapt like a trout, then he began to swim, front crawl, it was the most elegant crawl I had ever seen, he surged through the water like a transported log, hardly seeming to move, his thin arms driving him forward as though he had a propeller behind his feet.
‘That’s great!’ Skinke shouted. ‘That’s great, Fred! Keep it up!’
Fred kept it up, back and forth, back crawl, butterfly, front crawl, the rest of us wallowed there, splashing around like disabled hippos, but Fred was a seal, he was a seal!
In the shower afterwards we all stared at him. It was unbelievable.
‘You’re a bloody good swimmer,’ we said.
Fred blushed and vanished in the steam.
Then we sprinted back to school. Our hair was deep-frozen by the time we reached Skovveien and our fringes stood up like peaks on caps. After arriving in the classroom we slowly thawed out and water streamed down our faces, and the girls sitting in the window row laughed.
The day Gjermund Eggen won the gold in the fifty-kilometre cross country event we had the school party at Vestheim. We met at Seb’s two hours before the kick-off. His mother had joined his father in Marseille where his new boat was moored. In the meantime Seb’s grandmother had moved in and she sat at the back of the sitting room embroidering and didn’t hear the clinking in Gunnar’s bag as we tiptoed across the carpet.
‘Lager!’ Seb said after we had barricaded the door.
‘Only stuff I could find,’ Gunnar said.
‘If we do press ups afterwards, we’ll be p-p-pickled,’ Ola said. We looked at him.
‘To heat the b-b-blood. Then it goes to your h-h-head quicker.’
Seb levered open the bottles with his belt buckle and we each had a swig. It tasted of gym bag.
‘Pretty good,’ Gunnar said.
We nodded and Seb passed cigarettes around. Then we sat there puffing and quaffing lager in blazers with shiny buttons and grey drainpipe trousers. Paul was wailing ‘When I Saw Her Standing There’ on the record player. That was how life should be, no doubt about it.
At eight we stumbled through the streets, crashed into lamp posts, tripped and grinned and held onto each other, howled at the heavens and sprayed our names in yellow in the snow, as far as it went, it went as far as surname and address, wow, what a night this was going to be.
In the playground people were huddled together in dark clusters. We could hear music from a record player. In one corner a square bottle was doing the rounds. Red faces shone out. Suddenly we were not so mouthy any more, we descended the stairs as erect as flagpoles, hearts pounding behind our shirts and five kroner in our fists. We hung our duffle coats in the cloakroom, which didn’t smell of sweat and athlete’s foot but perfume, raisins and something else exciting. Skinke, his arms crossed, in a double-breasted silver suit and yellow tie, his hair Brylcreemed, stood guard at the entrance.
‘Great somersault,’ he said to me as we passed.
In the gymnasium there was no longer a smell of cowshed, it was a new room, with garlands hanging from the ceiling, large fishing nets extended across the walls, balloons, candles and a long counter where you could buy Coke, buns and sausages, and in the corner a big stage with all The Snowflakes’ equipment. We calmed ourselves down with a Coke and took a cautious look around. Girls in wide dresses, girls in tight dresses, tall girls with their hair up and black eyes and thin shoes, standing still. And the boys in shiny suits, the gymnas students, some wearing Beatle jackets, and we stood there in blazers, starched shirts and knitted ties, feeling pre-shrunk.
People were streaming in the whole time, the place was filling up, some were rowdy and lurched around like overjoyed elephants. Everywhere the talk was of Gjermund Eggen and his gold in the fifty-kilometre, and Bjørn Wirkola’s ski-jumping. Names were shouted, balloons burst, girls’ laughter. Then the lights were dimmed a fraction and all went quiet. The Snowflakes filed onto the stage wearing red jackets, green trousers and white shoes. Bobby was standing at the side adjusting some cables. They launched into ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, we shut our ears and moved back as far as we could, for this could not be allowed, they could not be permitted to play The Beatles like this.
‘Feeble version,’ Seb groaned, sticking corks into both ears.
The jungle was alive. Leopards stalked through the grass, scented the wind and moved step by step towards the antelopes. The pumas sat by the wall bars waiting for an unwitting hare to hop past. The zebras frolicked around and the elephants lay down to sleep. Outside in the darkness, hyenas and wolves howled, the ones who had not been admitted.
Some girls from Gunnar’s and my class stood close by, overdressed and heavily made-up. They were giggling and their eyes rolled around the room like marbles.
‘Aren’t you boys goin’ to ask them?’ Seb grinned.
‘Got a girl in Copenhagen,’ I answered.
The Snowflakes burst into a Swedish number, ‘Där björkorna susa’. Bobby was on the stage adjusting a few bits and pieces and putting on manager airs. Girls had lined the wall bars and the atmosphere was beginning to pick up. We went to the toilet, taking off our ties on the way, and the toilet was just as crowded. In the midst of the bodies was Roar from the B class, chief hooligan and troublemaker.
‘Psst!’ he hissed as we entered.
He was holding a fluted bottle, taking immense swigs and wiping the sweat off his forehead.
We stood by the urinal and unbuttoned.
‘That Guri,’ Roar erupted, his voice unusually high-pitched. ‘That Guri who’s in the C class, she’s as randy as a stoat. Spread her legs for five øre, she would.’
The gang gave a low chuckle. Seb looked down at the dark yellow piss in which brown dog-ends were floating.
‘That’s why she left. Bun in the oven. Fucks in the fields, she does. Biggest quim in town!’
Seb spun round and stood in front of him.
‘Shut your mouth!’ he snarled.
Roar looked up in astonishment.
‘Didn’t quite catch that.’
‘Button it, arsehole features,’ Seb said.
The toilet went quiet. A circle formed around Seb and Roar. The atmosphere was taut.
‘What did you say?’ Roar said, passing the bottle to a flunkey.
‘Arsehole,’ Seb enunciated.
Now everyone knew something had to happen and the circle widened. Ola stood gawping. Gunnar clenched his fists and sent me a look. I closed my eyes. Then a voice boomed out from behind us.
‘And what is going o
n here?’
Skinke. The circle crumbled away, Roar took his bottle and slipped into a cubicle. We sauntered back to the gymnasium.
The Snowflakes were in the groove. They were playing ‘Apache’, the tremolo arm quivering and shaking. Bobby had organised a chorus of banshees who were jumping up and down in front of the stage, the three girls from the garage. We sneaked past Bobby’s gaze and picked up a Coke.
‘Watch out for Roar,’ Gunnar whispered.
‘He can’t get away with talkin’ that kinda shit,’ Seb hissed, sinking his teeth into a currant bun.
‘He’s p-p-pissed,’ Ola said.
‘Doesn’t help.’
Skinke was back in position at the door, broad-shouldered, puckered brow. A few girls from the gymnasium were sticking close to him and trying to get him out on the floor, but Skinke was unshakable. Kerr’s Pink, wearing a blue suit and perforated shoes, replaced him and the girls were all over him and he was dragged onto the dance floor amid stamping and cheering.
All of a sudden Ola was gone. Clean gone.
‘Where’s Ola?’ Gunnar asked.
‘No idea,’ I said. ‘He just went to buy a bun.’
We asked Seb. His head was bowed and he was still seething.
‘Isn’t he here?’
‘Nope.’
‘There he is,’ Gunnar shouted, pointing.
There he was. Ola was on the dance floor. Ola was on the dance floor with the tallest girl in the school, Klara, from the B class, the goalkeeper in the handball team. We stared, stared so much our eyebrows were perpendicular. Ola almost melted into all of Klara. She swung him round and round to The Snowflakes playing ‘Dancing Shoes’ and from time to time we saw Ola throw back his head and gasp for air.
We didn’t say a word, not a single word. There was nothing left to say.
The music came to an end and Ola wriggled out of her clutches. Klara was holding his head like a handball, but Ola slipped away, good thing he had put on hair lotion before we left, he darted in and out between the couples and came over to us with a look of horror on his face.
‘Help,’ he said.
‘There’s nothin’ we can do,’ Gunnar said with a grave mien.
‘Here she comes,’ I said.