‘Thank you,’ I mumbled, eased the record out of the sleeve and put it on the turntable. ‘Thanks,’ I mumbled again, blew the dust off the needle, prayed to Goose’s God that the batteries would hold out.
Think something changed at that point, in my room, the night before the maths exam with summer like a green, throbbing pulse outside the window. Nina beside me, and the music which, at first was unfamiliar, in the same way that Nina was unfamiliar when she first stood in the doorway. Then I got to know them, Nina and the music. And then I had to change, too, to let the music flow inside me like water, to open myself completely like a door that had been jammed shut for a long time, that is the only way I can express it. Like raising yourself or carrying each other. Our hands crept across the floor, groping their way forwards. ‘A Day In The Life’. A day like this, of which there is only one, and I could swear her mouth still tasted of apple.
I took her home. She would be in Norway until autumn. Everything was different, the streets, the trees, the windows, the people we met, they smiled, just smiled. And Nina walked barefoot on the tarmac, which was cool in the night air. We sat by the fountain, felt the spray on our necks.
‘Jesper’s nothing,’ Nina said.
Didn’t answer.
‘Don’t think any more about it,’ she said.
As if I had been thinking about it.
I gave a harsh laugh.
‘You must’ve met other girls, I suppose,’ she said, without looking at me.
‘Might’ve done,’ I said, lighting a cigarette.
Then we said nothing for a good while. The apple trees in the garden on the corner were lit up in white and all the dogs in the whole town gathered in Gyldenløvesgate, panting and wheezing, and, gently growling, they came over to sniff us, must have scented something.
Behind us, the column of water rose in the air.
The class followed me with their eyes as I smacked down the papers on the teacher’s desk in front of the cross-eyed invigilator and it was barely quarter past twelve. I raced out of the airless torture chamber, took the stairs in three bounds and ran straight into the arms of Nina, who had been waiting in the school playground.
‘Have you finished already?!’ she laughed.
‘Yup. Straight onto paper. From Gunnar’s draft. The invigilator couldn’t see further than a metre.’
We went back to my place to get our swimming togs and Sergeant Pepper. Nina carried the record player under her arm, and we cycled to Huk, Nina on the luggage carrier, the sun like needles in our faces.
Lay there all day, until the last bathers had gone home, until we were alone. Ate strawberries out of a green punnet and lay with our ears against the speaker and our faces close. Our stomachs and shoulders were burning. She rubbed in some Nivea for me. I did the same for her. She had brought along sunglasses, two pairs, one round, one square, with blue and green glass. We lay on our backs staring at the setting sun with open eyes.
Then we were all alone.
Yachts leaned against the horizon.
A sandal had been left at the water’s edge.
‘Wait here,’ I said to Nina, running onto a rock, breathing in and diving. The water was black to my eyes, a cold current pulled at me. For a moment I panicked, saw floating figures with undulating hair, bodies in slow, weary, almost beautiful movement, like astronauts. I was about to give up, my head was exploding, but I fought my way down and touched the bottom. I rummaged around in the sand, and between stones and seaweed felt something round and rough, got a foothold and launched myself upwards to the green sky.
Nina was sitting by the record player. I held my hands behind my back and dripped water over her.
‘Which hand do you want?’
She pondered and chose the right one.
I gave her the rusty Mercedes badge. She laughed and asked what it was.
‘A fallen star,’ I explained.
She lay in the grass and pulled me down to her. I switched on the record player. India. It was magical. It was unbelievable. I was caught, laughed at Paul’s ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, listened intensely to the groans on ‘Lovely Rita’ and was woken by the cocks crowing on ‘Good Morning, Good Morning’.
‘The batteries are flat,’ Nina said.
She was right. The music played in waves, getting deeper and deeper, it sounded terrible.
‘No problem,’ I said, using my finger, getting the right speed again, thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute.
‘What did you do to your finger?’ Nina asked.
I lay down beside her, the music jarred again, played in fits and starts.
‘Got it stuck in the lathe,’ I said.
‘The lathe!’ she laughed.
‘Yep. I was making a ring.’
She bent over me.
‘Who for?’
I pulled her down and whispered in her ear.
‘But it works fine now. My finger, that is!’
‘Prove it,’ Nina whispered.
So I started the music again, with my finger, until the rhythm throbbed inside us like the boats chugging across the fjord, harder and harder, higher and higher, my finger was on every revolution, until the final scream, almost inaudible, pushed her head back and ‘A Day In The Life’ came to an abrupt end and slipped into the silent grooves.
Afterwards we sat back to back listening to the silence, a few birds, a few waves, a wind, the boats that had gone.
‘We’ll have to go back soon,’ I said. ‘They’re waiting at Seb’s.’
‘Who are?’
Nina leant her head back over my shoulder and beamed.
‘The others of course! Gunnar and Sidsel! Seb and Guri! Ola and Kirsten!’
A warmish shower fell as we cycled home but we didn’t take off our sunglasses. Nina sat at the back talking about someone she knew in Copenhagen who had been to San Francisco and was going to India. Didn’t catch everything she said. Kept thinking, kept thinking that everything had taken such a long time and yet it had gone so damned fast.
PART 2
Hello Goodbye
Autumn ’67
I was in my seventeenth year, scrambling through an autumnal forest, tripping over twigs, branches whipping into my face, the compass needle quivering on the north-south axis, but Skinke’s hand-drawn map didn’t match the terrain, I was getting lost, now I think, now that the footsteps are closing in around me, the footprints around the house in the January and New Year’s wet snow, someone has been here again, they must have looked in, now I have to get out of this chaos, but the compass I received at my confirmation gives absurd readings, invisible birds scream above me, I plough my way through, time is getting short, I am beginning to panic, time is running away from me, I am the last man to return, I push the branches to the side and at last I see Cecilie, she is sitting on a rock beneath Ullevålseter, feeding a goat.
‘How many control points did you find?’ I asked.
‘None,’ she says.
‘I found the third down by Lake Sognsvann. That was all, then I lost the trail.’
‘Orienteering is the most stupid thing I know,’ Cecilie said, continuing to feed the goat with slices of bread.
I sat down on the rock an arm’s length from her, trying to think of something smart to say.
‘Thought I’d got lost,’ I said. ‘It’s an absolute jungle.’
‘I came straight here,’ she said.
‘Went fishing here a couple of years ago. With Seb. And Gunnar and Ola. They’re in the B stream. Sciences.’
Cecilie didn’t seem particularly interested. Cecilie didn’t seem particularly interested in anything. The goat was sucking her fingers and she was looking in any other direction but at me, just like in the classroom. Cecilie sat next to me in the second last row, I saw her profile against the window, I couldn’t get over her profile, erect and soft at the same time, and her eyes, brown I think they were, brown, but they never looked in my direction, they looked at the ceiling, out of the window, dow
n at the desk, across the dark green forest where the autumn sky let a cold, transparent light fall to earth.
‘Shall we have a beer at Setra then?’ I asked quickly, blowing a persistent ant off the back of my hand.
Cecilie just got to her feet and left, I followed her up to the house, where we found a window table. I ordered a beer, Cecilie wanted a blackcurrant toddy.
‘Think we’ve veered a bit off course,’ I said.
‘Why’s that?’
‘You seen any of the others from school?’
She shook her head. Her hair came undone, and I liked it when the knot in her hair loosened and strands pointed in all directions, wow, my stomach turned to lead.
I drank my beer.
Wondering what to say next.
I rolled a cigarette. Cecilie didn’t smoke.
‘How do you like the class?’ I asked stupidly.
She chuckled – I didn’t quite know why – and looked out of the window. An old man came plodding up with a rucksack and walking stick. The goat was standing with its head in the grass.
‘Don’t really know,’ Cecilie said.
‘Sphinx is a bit on the slow side,’ I said. ‘Could be one of the statues in Frogner Park. Hasn’t blinked since we started. Strange his eyes don’t dry up.’
‘I like French best,’ Cecilie said.
‘I know a girl in Paris,’ I boasted.
‘Do you?’ she said, warming her hands round the cup.
‘Not exactly,’ I crumbled. ‘It’s a woman. Colleague of my uncle’s. Paints pictures.’
Cecilie seemed bored out of her mind. I was getting desperate, drank some beer and it went up my nose. I coughed and spluttered until foam came out of my nostrils.
That was when Cecilie looked at me, right then, straight at me, and laughed.
‘Went down the wrong way,’ I said.
‘There’s a class party next Saturday,’ she said.
I cleared the beer from my sinuses and swallowed.
‘Wow! Terrific!’
Cecilie looked grumpy again.
‘It was my parents’ idea,’ she said.
Cecilie lived in Bygdøy and her father apparently sold watches, binoculars and jewellery, wowee, I was excited already, but that didn’t seem to be the case with Cecilie.
She pulled a long face.
‘They think you have to have a class party so that everyone can get to know each other,’ she said.
‘Will they be at home?’ I enquired anxiously, detecting a tiny fly in the ointment.
‘No, they’re going out.’
‘Next Saturday?’
Cecilie nodded and some strands of hair fell across her face. Something happened in my stomach and my fingertips went numb and goose pimples screamed down my back. Cecilie’s dark eyes brushed past me like a radio scanner, she picked up the signals and switched over to another frequency at once.
‘Dreading the maths test,’ was all she said, looking bored again, and so time passed.
I heard a loud noise behind me and there stood Seb, trousers soaked to the knees, hair like a haystack and the hood of his anorak filled with spruce needles and twigs.
‘So this is where you are,’ he panted. ‘Half the school is out searching for you.’
We looked at our watches. Getting on for five. We should’ve been at the finish by three at the latest.
Seb sat down.
‘Sphinx’s eyelid is twitchin’. Doesn’t bode well.’
‘We got lost,’ I said. ‘Couldn’t help gettin’ lost.’
‘I’ll say I found you in a bog,’ Seb said, and off we trudged.
‘Skinke’s flyin’ round with a walkie-talkie up by Skjennungen,’ Seb went on. ‘Sphinx is waitin’ at HQ.’
‘Who won?’ Cecilie asked.
‘I don’t know. We got lost by Lake Bånntjern and then Ola fell in.’
‘How did he manage that?’ I smiled.
‘He didn’t exactly fall. Dropped the last beer and jumped in after it. Came up with a bone.’
‘A bone?’
‘They used to dump children in the lake in olden times, you know. Ola got the shakes big time. We carried him to the station and then Hammer took him home. Gunnar is searchin’ for you in Gaustad.’
Sphinx was not best pleased when we arrived at the HQ by Svartkulp, but I suppose he must have been happy we were alive. It wasn’t easy to know where you were with Sphinx, our class teacher, he had big hands and a big head and he moved once every century. He moved now. Twice. I was given a real rollicking – tried to blame the compass, but to no avail. Cecilie wasn’t told off at all and Seb was awarded a medal for finding us.
Afterwards we caught the tram to Majorstuen, but Sphinx had to get out and look for Skinke because Skinke was the only person with a walkie-talkie and it wouldn’t make any difference how much he fiddled and shouted, he might be talking to a radio ham in Japan, in fact I felt a bit sorry for Skinke.
We sat in the smokers’ compartment, lit our roll-ups and grinned. I had never been so close to Cecilie before. I felt her thigh against mine. She wasn’t listening to what Seb and I were nattering about.
‘Didn’t think Ola would resurface,’ Seb said.
‘Didn’t he take off his boots?’
‘Yes. But that was all. Gunnar was on the point of jumpin’ in, too. But then he shot up like a rocket-borne sputnik with the bone in his hand. It was the biggest leap I’ve seen since the pike in Skillingen.’
So stupid that Gunnar and Ola were doing sciences, I thought. Now they wouldn’t be going to Cecilie’s party.
‘Cecilie’s havin’ a class party next Saturday,’ I said.
Seb snapped his fingers three times and leaned across me.
‘Great stuff!’ he said, patting her on the shoulder. ‘When shall we come?’
‘Seven,’ Cecilie said, sitting stiffly beside me and staring into the distance, and I cursed Cecilie for being such a hard nut to crack, but I would manage it, I would, perhaps I shouldn’t have had the beer in Ullevålseter.
Uncle Hubert was drawing aristocrats and medical consultants for weekly magazines. Didn’t see much of him that autumn. Henny was in Paris. Jensenius was singing less and less, must have already felt the winter in his bones. When I bought beer for him, he just stuck a limp hand through the door crack and retreated. Sometimes he went out for a walk too, the stairs made almighty creaking noises, he must have walked a long way because he always came home by taxi, once he had tried to break into the Concert Hall. There was something up with Jensenius. Everyone said Granddad could die at any moment, but he didn’t, he never died, just went on living, sitting in the chair by the window and laughing at something no one understood, stamping with his foot. Grandma’s budgerigar disappeared one day, flew out of the window, and she hung notices on all the trees in West Oslo. She put an advertisement in Aftenposten too, but the bird had flown. And Mum and Dad went a bit hysterical about the old jacket I had taken from Nesodden, Granddad’s drab, grey-white linen jacket, double-breasted and threadbare. Every morning there was grumbling and nagging. Why didn’t I wear the tweed jacket Mum had bought me for my birthday? She had obviously forgotten the dressing-up party we had had, that summer a long time ago. But otherwise they tiptoed around and thought it was brilliant to have a son at the gymnas. But once you were there, it wasn’t that difficult after all. You just changed building, a couple of the teachers and you were in a new class. Just like with the fork jab, we felt a bit cheated again. It was always like that. The waiting time was best, or worst, it all depended. Once it had happened, when you were there, it was already over and there was something harder or better or grimmer or worse beckoning in the distance. And so it was just a question of getting on with the waiting, the anticipating and the dreading again.
It was a hassle.
But now I didn’t know what was awaiting me.
Yes, I did.
Cecilie’s party.
And I have closed the shutter on the last window.
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It started off nicely enough with tweeds and mini-skirts and a thimble of sherry for everyone. We stood in the largest living room I had ever seen, a hangar with clocks everywhere, seven, all set at the same time, with Cecilie’s father holding a deadly embarrassing speech, wishing us luck and so on, quite what for, we didn’t know. Her mother stood three steps behind him in a full-length dress and pearl necklace and Cecilie waited with head bowed. Seb and I were dying to go to the toilet because we had knocked back a few beers beforehand to get a flying start, and we needed it because there were sixteen boys and six girls and it was going to be dog eat dog. I had a sneaking suspicion that Slippery Leif was hovering over Cecilie, but with his double chins and myopia I didn’t see him as the greatest threat. Peder was altogether another matter, the 400-metre runner, sailor and winner of the orienteering, still suntanned after the summer. He was not to be trusted. He had already found himself a seat perilously close to Cecilie while I stood with legs crossed, desperate for the clockmaker to tick to an end.
At long last he stopped, retreated with the diva and the herd began to stir. Seb and I made a dash for the toilet, there were three to choose from on the first floor, marble and gold taps and Greek statues in niches and inset clocks. Hell, we hardly dared piss. Seb swung out the last beer from his jacket sleeve, he was a specialist, I never quite worked out how he did it. We drank at a rate of knots.
‘We’ve come to the wrong place,’ Seb said. ‘This is Drammensveien 1.’
We raced down, afraid to miss the opening manouevres. There were a few scattered bottles on the tables, cigarette smoke was floating through the hall like blue cirrus clouds and some people were balancing plates on which there was a steaming mass of meat. We were sizing each other up, making fun of the teachers and keeping a headcount on the girls. They were all there and we sniffed out a group standing in the hall with a hipflask: Leif, Crutch and Ulf. We scrounged a drink and Leif looked at me through metre-thick glasses, blinked, as if wondering where Cecilie was, not to mention Peder, as though I knew. I dashed back into the hangar and surveyed the scene: five girls on the sofa with eleven bulls at their backs. I ambled into the kitchen and of course they were there. Peder was helping Cecilie with the pans.