Gunnar was the first to arrive.
‘Ola’s greater than Gordon Banks!’ he shouted.
He studied me close up.
‘Come on, you’re not annoyed because you were sent off, are you!’
I finished the Solo.
‘Bloody hell, you earned us respect. One sendin’ off and the puddin’ started to wobble.’
The others carried Ola in. Kåre pulled out a crate of lemonade and everyone collapsed on the benches with exhaustion.
Ola sat beside me.
‘Neat save,’ I said. ‘Class act.’
Ola gave a weary smile.
‘I l-l-looked him in the eye,’ he said. ‘Then he didn’t have a h-h-hope!’
In the evening songs and games and food were on the menu at the school. The Danes joined us. The Danes were good losers. I wasn’t. At eight I put my boots on the shelf and told Åge I felt poorly, must have been a temperature. He placed two fingers on my forehead and nodded. I went downstairs and lay down. I’ve got a temperature, I thought. So I lay there, alone in the massive gymnasium with the smell of bodies and sweat and socks hanging from the ceiling like a heavy curtain. Alone in the light blue sleeping bag stuck to my skin. I felt so old and drained. Punished. I couldn’t get my mind off Nina and Jesper. I hated him. I hated them both. I had been given the brush-off, made fun of and trampled on. Then I must have fallen asleep, at any rate I woke up to someone shaking me. It was Gunnar. It was darker, I could just see all the sleeping bags scattered across the floor like huge larvae in the night.
‘Hi,’ Gunnar whispered. ‘Are you asleep?’
‘I was,’ I said.
He rolled closer.
‘Are you ill?’
‘Temperature,’ I said. ‘Probably a draught on the boat.’
He came even closer.
‘Wasn’t Nina at home?’
‘Nope.’
‘But you’d written, hadn’t you?’
‘Yep. She was at home. Yet she wasn’t.’
Gunnar didn’t understand that.
‘Cut out the riddles!’
‘She was with someone else,’ my mouth said.
I woke in a boiling hot swimming pool. I was under water. The surface danced and flickered above me and a crowd of people were standing around the edge peering down at me. I swam up to them and banged my head against the sun.
It was the day after. Don’t remember much about it. Didn’t even feel like a hot dog. I sat on a bench feeding the pigeons while the others ran up Copenhagen Round Tower. I sat on a bench feeding the pigeons while the others were in the zoo. They managed to get me to board the boat home, but I was not bloody going down to the bottom, not bloody likely. I sat in a deckchair on the sun deck and went to sleep. When I woke it was quite dark and someone had covered me with two thick rugs. Carefully, I felt around. My head was as clear as a mountain stream. I stood up. I saw a knot of people and lights some distance away. Above me, the stars flickered. The boat left a white trail in its wake. A ship passed on the port side. I could hear music and voices.
‘He’s woken up!’ someone said behind me. ‘The roughneck’s woken up.’
It was Gunnar. He came with Seb and Ola.
‘Are you better?’ Seb asked.
‘Fine,’ I said.
‘Thought it was best with the rugs,’ Ola mumbled. ‘So the g-g-gulls wouldn’t shit on you!’
‘Thanks,’ I said. ‘They saved me.’
Seb had something in those large pockets of his. Beer cans. They grinned and took a swig each. I didn’t want any.
‘Åge’s in the bar,’ Seb said. ‘Pretty pissed.’
‘With a w-w-woman!’ Ola panted. ‘Danish b-b-blonde. With knockers a metre long!’
‘Looks like Marilyn Monroe,’ Gunnar daydreamed, drinking from the can.
Ola tipped backwards, caught himself and leaned forwards.
‘Do you know what my dad does?’ he grinned. ‘Eh? He washes his h-h-hair in beer!’
Ola split his sides and threw his beer can in the air.
‘What does he do, did you say?’ Gunnar yelled.
‘W-w-washes his hair in beer! Promotes g-g-growth!’
He laughed soundlessly with an open mouth, then poured the rest of the beer down his neck and looked totally deranged.
We carried him to the railings where he treated the gulls to some half-digested chunks of red sausage. The waves roared beneath us.
‘Bloody hell,’ Ola groaned, bringing up some more chunks.
‘Best if we stay here a while,’ Seb said with a grin and took out another can. He had cans everywhere.
I could feel the fever at the back of my head again, like cold terror now. There was a glass partition between us. I could not reach them. I had been sent off again. Didn’t want to lose them too.
‘Bet you don’t think I dare stand on the railing,’ I said.
They looked at me and laughed. Ola raised his head and guffawed, too.
‘Don’t fart about,’ was all Gunnar said.
It was fairly broad, but curved. And slippery, probably. I was wearing plimsolls.
‘Shall we join the others downstairs,’ Seb suggested, finishing his beer.
I jumped up onto the railing, supporting myself with my hands. There were no lights to be seen on the horizon now, only blackness. The waves beat against my ear drums. Then I found my balance, straightened up with my arms outstretched. I started walking. Gunnar, Seb and Ola recoiled, their eyes white balls. I walked along the railing. My heart was caught between two beats. Time took a break. The waves stood up and froze. The wind fell and died. Then Gunnar ran forward in the dark, grabbed me and pulled me down. We rolled over each other on the deck with Gunnar holding me in an iron grip. Then he slapped me. He slapped me across the middle of the face.
‘You silly bastard!’ he shouted.
Seb and Ola stared at us, unable to believe what they were seeing.
‘Sorry,’ Gunnar whispered all of a sudden.
I hugged him. His face was wet.
‘Doesn’t matter,’ I said, feeling the blood flow into my mouth.
I sat in my room swotting. Outside my window, evenings rolled past. I wanted to throw away the dry flower I had kept in the drawer. Poisonous. In the drawer there were a dozen Rubin Extra. Jensenius was singing above me, not so loud now for the spring had been a false alarm. It hailed on May 17. But we saw Wenche Myhre in a prommers’ truck roaring up Gyldenløvesgate. My temperature had gone. Spring didn’t truly arrive until June. The trees became green machine guns. One such evening Gunnar dropped round. He had a long face. Slumped down on the sofabed.
‘It’s the end,’ he said.
‘What of?’ I asked.
He produced a letter from his pocket. Not perfumed this time, just a standard sheet of paper ripped out of an exercise book.
‘She’s found a Young Farmer from Vågå,’ Gunnar said, crumpling the letter into a tight ball and throwing it out of the window.
I closed my maths book and sat next to him.
‘You can’t trust girls,’ I said.
Gunnar folded his hands and wrapped them round his knee.
‘Best it finished as it did,’ he said. ‘Can’t trust a turnip like that.’
I rested my arm on his shoulder. Bitterness coursed through us.
‘They’re not worth the shoes they walk in,’ I said.
‘Wouldn’t touch her with a hayfork,’ Gunnar said.
‘Those Young Farmers probably stink of shit,’ I said.
‘You can’t trust girls,’ Gunnar said.
We sat in silence for a while. The street noise tormented us. I closed the window.
‘I’ll never go to Heidalen again,’ Gunnar said. ‘Never.’
‘Let’s nip over to Seb’s,’ I suggested.
Ola was sitting there with his head between his knees.
‘We were just on our way to see you,’ Seb said.
We sat down. Ola ratcheted himself up and stared vacantly into t
he universe.
‘Finished with Klara,’ he said. ‘She’s g-g-goin’ with Njård’s top scorer.’
What a day. What a spring.
‘Shit,’ Gunnar said and told the others about Unni and the Young Farmer.
‘Girls are a bunch of p-p-pricks,’ Ola said, punching his fist in the air.
‘Not worth the stockin’s they walk in,’ I said.
‘First you and Nina,’ Gunnar started counting. ‘And then Unni. And then Klara.’
‘And Guri,’ I added.
Seb averted his eyes.
‘And Guri,’ he whispered.
We sat without speaking for what must have been over an hour. Outside, the grey gloom settled between the houses and enshrouded the streets. Seb suddenly perked up and rummaged through his pile of records.
‘Got this from Dad today,’ he gasped.
‘Got what?’ we asked of one voice.
‘The latest Beatles record!’
We threw ourselves at him and put the record on the turntable. ‘Paperback Writer’. We played it ten times in a row. It had beat. The B-side was ‘Rain’. That was very appropriate.
‘What does “Paperback Writer” mean?’ Ola asked.
I explained to Ola.
Ola thought this over.
‘Could definitely have written a book about us, couldn’t they,’ he said. ‘A b-b-big book!’
Yellow Submarine
Summer ’66
One day at the end of June we finally had a book in our hands, green and published by Cappelen, written by Kerr’s Pink. But it was not really about us. I was given a C for behaviour and a D for woodwork. Seb got an A for singing and music. Gunnar had a B for behaviour while Ola had an E in German and maths. We couldn’t care less now, all we were thinking about was bait. We had to find some earthworms for the big fishing trip in Nordmarka.
We rushed out of the playground but were hooked by Goose standing in the middle of the road, obviously with something on his mind.
‘Hello,’ he muttered.
‘How many As did you get, Goose?’ Seb asked.
‘Why do you call me Goose?’
‘Eh?’
‘Why do you call me Goose?’ he repeated.
Tricky question to answer that was. Goose had been called Goose all the years I had known him.
‘That’s the way it is. Like Dragon’s called Dragon.’
‘The girls tease me,’ Goose said.
‘Stuff the g-g-girls,’ Ola said.
‘Couldn’t you call me Christian?’ he mumbled.
‘Sure, yes, of course we can,’ Gunnar said. ‘But we’ve got to run. Goin’ to dig up worms in Nesodden.’
We charged past him.
‘Have a nice summer, Christian!’ we yelled down the street.
He beamed all over his face and yelled back, ‘You have a nice summer!’
‘Funny,’ said Ola. ‘F-funny.’
‘You sure we’ll find earthworms here?’ Gunnar asked as we plodded up to the House.
‘You bet. Behind the outside loo.’
Gunnar stopped.
‘Outside loo, did you say?’
‘Correct.’
I fetched the spade from the shed and we walked over to the wonky loo with a heart on the door. A strong smell came from the fertile earth. At the top it was quite dry, but a spade’s depth down it was soft and moist. I turned a spit over and a worm poked its head out, wriggling and squirming.
‘What’s that?’ Gunnar asked, pointing.
‘A worm, you clod.’
‘Not that but that,’ Gunnar said.
I looked where he was pointing.
‘That. That’s just a bit of toilet paper.’
Gunnar went and sat down on a rock by the apple trees. Ola wasn’t exactly ecstatic, either.
‘So the fish is s’posed to eat the w-w-worm, is it, and then we eat the fish. Not b-b-bloody likely!’
‘You’ll have to use a net then, you wimp,’ Seb snorted and we were left to dig up the bait. We scooped some soil into the coffee tins and between us we found about a thousand worms. Then we made holes in the lids so that they wouldn’t die from suffocation. It was a pretty tight squeeze already.
‘Let’s go for a swim before goin’ home!’ I shouted.
I walked round the House to make sure everything was okay. There was a line of ants crossing the kitchen steps. I found an arrow I had lost last year. Then I looked in one of the windows and saw myself sitting inside, I recoiled, frightened by the distorted image in the pane, and ran after the others.
The beach was deserted. We undressed and the sun burned our pale grey bodies. Embarrassed, we scrutinised one other, threw ourselves off the springboard, dived in and emerged with a rock each. Afterwards we lay on the bare boulders and our stomachs went red, and as we walked past the old shed with its protruding boards, peeling white paint and smell of rotting seaweed, I was reminded of Henny in Paris and I knew that what happened last year, last summer, would never happen again, would never happen again.
‘What’s the tent like?’ Seb asked on the ferry going back.
‘Stig says it’s great,’ Gunnar said.
‘Don’t need a tent if it’s good weather,’ I said. ‘We can lie outside in sleepin’ bags.’
Then we traipsed through the town each with a tin containing at least three hundred worms. Reaching the American embassy, we stopped and looked at the flag hanging from the pole.
‘My brother says there’s a huge trout inside,’ Gunnar said.
‘Trout? No kiddin’!’
‘It’s true. In the pool.’
We walked past the guard. He couldn’t be bothered to stop us, but then he didn’t know what we had in our tins. We entered a large hallway and in the middle of the floor there was a pool with a fountain and lights and so on. We peered down and could only see round pebbles on the bottom. The water was no more than twenty centimetres deep.
‘Ain’t no trout here,’ said Seb. ‘There might be an anchovy.’
We strolled round the edge. Then Ola shouted and almost dropped his tin.
‘L-l-look there, boys!’
A huge trout was swimming only a metre away from us. It was so big that its back was sticking out of the water. It swam slowly as if it was very old or bored. We followed it, crept after it as quietly as we could, but it was impossible not to make a noise in this tiled hall. The trout approached the edge and lay against it as if its shoulder itched. I bent down and touched it. It let me do that. It was cold and tough, motionless. Then it glided away beneath my fingers, to the slender fountain that perhaps reminded it of some waterfall or other, if it had ever swum towards a waterfall.
‘I feel sorry for it,’ Seb said.
‘Terrible to keep a big fish in such a crappy pool,’ Gunnar said.
I flipped off the tin lid and pulled out a nice fat earthworm and threw it to the trout. It couldn’t even be bothered to turn, it just swam in the opposite direction. But the guard woke up. He walked over with a gun in his belt and ejected us into Drammensveien.
‘Cruelty to animals,’ Ola said.
‘We should’ve taken it with us to Skillingen and let it out there,’ Gunnar said.
‘And c-c-caught it afterwards,’ Ola laughed.
In the evening we gathered at Seb’s and went through our equipment. Gunnar’s father saw to provisions: a whole cardboard box full of wholegrain bread, biscuits, caviar, dried milk, tea, coffee, fruit, cans and ‘Dead Man in a Tin’ that he had left over from an army exercise in 1956. Ola had a gas stove and a frying pan. We borrowed a tent and compass from Stig. Then we made the final adjustments to the fishing reels. I had been given a rod by Mum and Dad for passing my exams. Gunnar had bought 400 metres of 0.30mm fishing line. Seb had three spinners, two floats and six corks. My mother had got hold of four fine-mesh bags we could put over our heads and use as mosquito nets.
But Seb had something better. He produced a pipe. A corn cob pipe.
‘Midges and mos
quitoes can’t stand tobacco,’ he explained. ‘Just puff away and they’ll be off.’
We laughed at that for a bit, then we unfolded the map and traced the route with a finger and submerged ourselves into the countryside, lost ourselves in dreams.
‘We’re not takin’ watches,’ Seb exclaimed.
‘Eh?’
‘We’re not takin’ watches. Like Indians.’
We deliberated. We knew the sun rose in the east and set in the west.
‘W-w-what about if it’s cloudy?’ Ola said.
‘We’ll know when it’s dark,’ Seb said. ‘Stuff watches.’
‘Moss grows towards the west,’ Gunnar said.
‘And anthills to the east,’ I added.
‘What about an alarm c-c-clock?’ Ola ventured.
The doorbell rang. Seb went to answer the door and returned with Fred. He had cut his fringe and sandpapered his ears. And he was wearing new trousers, no doubt about it, new jeans, with turnups reaching his knees and a large belt with a luminous buckle. Zorro.
‘Take a pew!’ we shouted.
He sat down and looked around. Seb fetched a Coke and cigarettes.
‘Are you goin’ fishin’?’ Fred asked.
We showed him our route on the map. He studied our gear, tried the reels and weighed the spinners in his hand.
‘They’re light,’ he said.
‘Eight grams,’ Gunnar elaborated. ‘Almost a fly.’
Seb opened the window and the summer evening flooded into the room. Some girls were laughing up the street, we stuck our heads out but said nothing.
‘What are you doin’ this summer?’ I asked.
Fred’s eyes went vacant.
‘Holiday camp,’ he said. ‘Hudøy.’
‘Want to listen to some records?’ Seb asked quickly.
And so we played Beatles music for the rest of the evening, right up to ‘Paperback Writer’ and ‘Rain’. Fred didn’t utter a word, just sat listening with his ears on stalks, his ears were large red flowers and from time to time he looked at us, smiled, almost laughed.