‘Fun’s over now,’ the uniformed officer said.
‘Where do you live?’ the lifeguard said.
I reflected on that.
‘Bygdøy,’ I said.
And then I gave them Cecilie’s address.
They became a little gentler when they heard where I lived.
‘Prommer, are you?’ the driver asked.
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Got my grades today. Two As and two Bs.’
‘What a to-do,’ said the second officer, who was fully dressed now.
‘Couldn’t take my booze,’ I said. ‘But I’m fine now. Thank you for helping me.’
‘It doesn’t do to behave like that, you know.’
‘Of course not,’ I said.
‘What have you done with your clothes?’ the driver asked.
‘Left them at a girl’s,’ I said.
They chuckled to each other, then it was a hundred kph out to Bygdøy. The palace stood there with all the ground floor windows illuminated. At regular intervals a lawn sprinkler burst into life.
I walked down the long drive with a constable on each side. They rang the bell. I was as calm as a dead lemming. The door was opened.
The constables touched their caps.
‘Your son was detained after a bit of a disturbance of the peace, so we had to bring him home.’
Cecilie’s father stood in the doorway gaping in amazement.
‘A student with such good grades has to celebrate, but there are limits,’ the second officer said.
They saluted one more time, bowed and set off down the shingle.
That was when the fear came.
Cecilie’s father stood with his mouth agape.
The police car started up with a roar.
‘Are you out of your mind?’ he said.
I stood there in my trunks, freezing cold.
‘It’s a misunderstanding,’ I ventured.
‘You’ve got five seconds!’
‘I fell in a pool. I wanted to talk to Cecilie.’
No chance.
Cecilie’s father was counting. He had reached three.
At four I turned and ran.
The day after, Henny returned home from Paris.
I don’t know if I had been hoping for rain. Clouds hung like black boards over Nesodden and gulls formed white letters in the air. But it didn’t start to rain. With heavy strokes, I slowly swam ashore, dipped my face in the waves and through streaming eyes saw Henny sitting on the mound in a green military jacket with a big bandage round her head. She was pale, her face was hard.
I stumbled over the seaweed and sat beside her.
‘Put some clothes on or you’ll catch cold,’ she said.
‘No hurry.’
She dried my back with the towel and hung it over my shoulder.
‘Great that you came,’ I said. ‘Gets a bit boring after a while.’
She crouched down with her chin between her knees and looked across the dark water.
‘Think it’s going to rain?’ she asked.
‘Don’t know. Maybe.’
I put on my shirt, flipped out two cigarettes.
‘It gave me a helluva shock when I saw you on TV,’ I said. ‘It looked terrible.’
Henny gave a thin smile.
‘The reality was worse.’
‘Is it over now? I mean, there’s no more trouble in Paris now, is there?’
Henny looked at me.
‘It’s only just begun, Kim. This was just a rehearsal. To show our strength. The same thing’s happening all over Europe. And in the States.’
She scanned the water again, adjusted her bandage. I pointed towards Bygdøy.
‘Know a girl there, I do,’ I said. ‘But her parents don’t appear to like me. The father chucks me out every time I turn up.’
Henny laughed.
‘Does she like you?’
‘Not entirely sure.’
‘Don’t think your parents like me that much, either,’ she said.
I fidgeted with my cigarette, burnt my fingers.
‘Are you going back to Paris?’ I asked quickly.
‘Yes. After the holidays. Going to share an atelier with a French girl in Montparnasse.’
Wow. That sounded cool.
‘Will Hubert be joining you?’
She shook her head carefully: ‘Don’t think so.’
‘Unless he wins the lottery,’ she added with a smile.
Clouds leaned over us. Gulls screeched through their shiny yellow beaks. A shoal of mackerel made for the middle of the fjord.
‘What’s actually wrong with Hubert,’ I asked, ‘when he does all these crazy things?’
Henny said nothing for some time.
‘He gets nervous,’ she said at length. ‘He doesn’t fit in here. Just like me. The middle classes crush him. When he’s in Paris, he’s fine. Hubert was never meant to be here drawing all that flimflam for weeklies!’
Considered that for a while.
‘If he wins the lottery, will you get married then?’ I asked, immediately feeling an oaf.
Henny laughed.
‘No, we’re just friends. Good friends.’
She used the word in such a strange way. Friends. Not the way that Seb and Gunnar and Ola and I were friends. A sort of inbetween thing. Not lovers. Not pals. Something in the middle. Neither the one thing nor the other.
It struck me that Cecilie had used the same word.
‘Friends,’ I repeated.
‘I’m cold,’ Henny said, slowly rising to her feet.
We walked past the old shed and I was not quite sure if I hoped it would rain. It didn’t. We walked past the shed, the stinking ramshackle shed where names and hearts had been scratched into the paint and words were written that were more distinct than the gulls’ Japanese symbols in the sky.
And so I went home, leaving summer, another summer in my life. Now the heat has gone, cold rises from the images I draw. The diorama has been transformed into a room of mirrors, a chamber of horrors. It is not dried up, dead insects I see now, but mutilated, humiliated dying people. It is no longer a Charlie Chaplin walking backwards through my brain, but cold, clear images blown up on the walls around me. The Vietnamese girl, she is screaming without making a sound. The young boy with his heart cut out in a triangle. My Lai. An infant from Biafra with its stomach extended like a drum, an elderly man’s face with eyes covered in flies. Newborn, born dead. An arm covered with needle marks and a vein protruding from under the skin. I write and the luminescent stitches running across my hand ache, my head with the shorn-off hair that will not grow aches: the images. They have nothing to do with me. The words sparkle with lies, like my hand. I can’t lie that much. The images on the walls around me grow. And just like the time when I saw Henny being beaten up on TV, I am forced to get involved with the images. The images surge over me, just as a photographer in a war zone is forced to be involved in his motif. There are no more Beatles pictures on the walls. My hand can hardly control this writing.
Today I switched on the radio for the first time since I have been here. They talked about a volcano in Iceland and a town being reduced to ashes. They talked about 500 seabirds dying in an oil slick. They said the Workers’ Communist Party had been founded in Oslo. I switched off. I was frightened by the voices. Afterwards I stood at the window looking out through the crack between the shutters. Winter dazzled me. The snow lay even on the ground, no human tracks.
Mum must have been here. Mum.
I went back to the table and the papers, still blinded.
Things are restless inside here. The images move.
In three months’ time it will be spring.
I don’t have much time.
The fence had to break in the end. The crowd poured forward in an uncontrollable wave, a police horse went berserk, it stamped its iron hooves on the pavement and reared up with a foaming whinny over the terrified people trying to escape. At the same time a VW went amok, lurching backwards and f
orwards in the crowd, behind the wheel a sweaty gabardined figure with his forehead on the horn. Panic was total.
And in the overgrown garden the Russian embassy stood locked and blacked out.
We pushed as far as the house wall on the corner. This was the biggest battle in Skillebekk since the War of the Staple in 1962. But gradually tempers cooled. Those washed up against the fence got to their feet, the VW threaded its way down Drammensveien and the police horse stood shitting in Fredrik Stangs gate.
‘Look who’s here,’ Seb whispered.
Peder and Slippery Leif with Kåre and the editorial team in tow. A broad grin above their ties.
‘Hello, hello, hello,’ smiled Slippery Leif. ‘So this is where the lefties hang out.’
We kept our mouths shut, feeling that we were on the defensive. The wall behind us was cold and uneven.
Peder pulled some gum from his mouth, let it hang from his forefinger.
‘And you’ve been to the USSR this summer, have you? Looking a bit on the pale side.’
Guffaws spread through the ranks. Peder was taking cheap shots today. He could indulge himself. People would buy anything.
Slippery Leif took over.
‘You Hanoi, Vietcong and socialism sympathisers, bet you’d like to be living in Czechoslovakia now, wouldn’t you, eh?’
Gunnar stepped forward.
‘You misunderstand. You always have done, you and all the other bloody flunkeys. We condemn the invasion of Czechosklovakia just as much as you and all the others. Get that clear. Okay? We don’t support the USSR. What they have there now isn’t socialism. We support the 1917 revolution, we support Lenin’s teaching, but since Lenin the USSR has become a socialist-imperialist superpower!’
Wow. We were as dumbstruck as Slippery Leif. Peder stuck his forefinger in his gob.
‘You’ve got better at talking, haven’t you,’ he whispered between clenched teeth, and so they drifted off with their honour semi-intact and their grins at half mast.
‘Have you been to the USSR this summer?’ Ola smiled.
‘Did you see that?’ Gunnar hissed. ‘The flunkeys were as happy as pigs in shit. They’re happy the Russians have invaded Czechoslovakia. It was what they needed. This is their lucky day.’
Gunnar had surpassed himself. We could only take a back seat, everyone took out a cigarette and while we puffed the crowd dispersed, the tramlines in Drammensveien reappeared and in one of the windows in the Russian embassy a curtain was carefully drawn to the side and a sleepy face peered out.
‘Probably just a stand-in,’ Ola said. ‘Like that time at the Vikin’ with the Rollin’ Stones.’
We went back to Gunnar’s place. In the sitting room his father was walking in circles thinking up new moves to counteract the supermarket opening in Bygdøy Allé in three months’ time. The whole shop was plastered with posters displaying special offers. This week’s price for carrots was ten øre a kilo. He was giving potatoes away.
‘You really took them down a peg,’ Seb said.
‘Been readin’ a bit this summer,’ Gunnar mumbled.
‘The frogs were turned into tadpoles,’ Ola declared, lighting a cigarette on the windowsill.
There was a knock at the door and Stig poked his head in. He had undergone a major change over the summer. Cut his hair, grown a beard. And there was a host of badges on his cord jacket. We took a close look and Stig stuck out his chest. Front National de Liberté. Mao. Lenin.
‘The rabble are enjoyin’ it,’ he said. ‘Best thing that could have happened to them. But do not lose focus. We’re fightin’ against both superpowers. Don’t forget the dialectics!’
He threw a single into the room.
‘The Beatles are finished,’ he said. ‘Crap A side. Revisionist B side.’
The door slammed shut after him.
‘Stig’s been to Tromøya,’ Gunnar said, sending us an embarrassed glance. ‘Socialist Youth Front’s summer camp.’
In the middle of the floor lay the new Beatles 45. We gathered around the record player. Gunnar put it on the turntable. I had to have a closer look. Apple. There was an apple on the record. I had to go to the window to get some air. My stomach groaned. Would I never be able to play a Beatles record without having an apple thrown in my face?
Hadn’t heard a thing from Nina.
It was the longest single we had ever experienced. At least a quarter of an hour. ‘Hey Jude’. It hit the mark, built up to a fantastic scream. There was a huge howl and we waited for the innermost groove and then it was over. I liked it. It was one of their best.
No one said anything. Gunnar flipped it over. ‘Revolution’. John sang. Eight large ears flapped. Four pounding hearts. The stylus floated across the grooves. John Lennon sang calmly about the revolution. Gunnar’s forehead became as low and furrowed as an expanded accordion. Ola tapped the beat with a Teddy.
Afterwards it was quiet, all we could hear was Gunnar’s father’s footsteps in the sitting room.
‘Revisionist,’ Gunnar whispered. ‘Worse than Finn Gustavsen.’
We were silent for a while yet. It had started raining.
I cleared my throat.
‘Paris was just the beginning,’ I said. ‘Now it’s beginning to happen!’
The others gave a nod. We played both sides again.
I thought about apples.
‘Don’t like Yoko Ono,’ Ola said. ‘Think she’s goin’ to mess things up.’
‘I’ve split with Sidsel,’ Gunnar said suddenly and gazed out of the window. ‘Happened in the summer. Couldn’t agree on anythin’. Didn’t seem any point.’
‘It’s over with Guri, too,’ Seb mumbled. ‘That slalom creep turned her head round three times.’
That seemed too much to take in at once. Russia and Czechoslovakia. Gunnar and Sidsel. Seb and Guri. John Lennon and Yoko Ono. The Beatles and Revolution. I thought about Cecilie, who had reduced me to a vacuum, and Nina, who had run down Svoldersgate as fast as her arms and legs could carry her that dreadful night in June.
‘How’s it goin’ with Kirsten then?’ I asked. ‘Was it good in Trondheim?’
Ola was one big smile.
‘Goin’ so well sparks are flying,’ he grinned and did a drum solo with the remaining Teddys.
At that very moment we realised that something had definitively changed, something was different now, as it had never been before.
We stared at Ola.
‘Ola,’ said Gunnar, inclining towards him. ‘You’re not stammering!’
He bowed his head in a cloud of red.
‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t stammer.’
‘But how did it happen?’ we shouted.
Ola took a deep breath.
‘Well, I was in Trondheim this summer,’ he said. ‘At Kirsten’s place. And I woke up one mornin’ and I didn’t stammer any more.’
‘You just woke up?’
‘Yes. Well, it was Kirsten who realised in fact. She was lyin’ beside me and…’
‘We understand!’ we yelled. ‘We’ve got the point!’
And then we crowded round Ola and were as one, almost like in the old days, like before the revolution.
Crown Prince Harald got Sonja. Bob Beamon jumped like a giraffe through the thin Mexico air and Black Power clenched coal-black fists against the light blue sky. Frigg was relegated to the second division and Uncle Hubert didn’t have anything accepted for the Autumn Exhibition, following which he doubled his stake in the lottery. Rebellion was simmering at Manglerud school, the teachers were on the point of being chucked out and the FNL flag was hoisted in the school playground. Stig skulked up and down with leaflets under his arm and a suspicious expression, must have had his finger in every pie that autumn. And we all went to the Chinese embassy to receive our Mao badges from a rotund Chinese man in national dress. We didn’t pay any attention to John Lennon not attaching Chairman Mao to his lapel. We were given Mao’s red book as well, a handy little number, not much bigger than the Bibl
e we received from Father MacKenzie for confirmation. There was a picture of Mao himself first, under a thin leaf of tissue paper. He had a wart on his chin, which irritated the hell out of me. And this time the dedication was easier to memorise by heart. Workers of the world unite! There was quite a bit of booing at school, but Cecilie couldn’t even be bothered to turn round. Peder and Slippery Leif dubbed me Kim Il Sung on the spot, it sounded quite good. But Cecilie was deaf and blind to my whole existence. She had begun to frequent Dolphin, and a number of folk singers had come into her life. They knew more than forty chords, had beards and bedsits and picked her up from school every Friday.
That was autumn that year, an invasion, an Olympics, a revolution, a long spell of rain that turned to snow and wrapped November in a white cover, like the Beatles new LP, a double album, The Beatles, white, bare, with four pictures of John, Paul, George and Ringo inside. We sat at Seb’s quietly listening to the four sides. His father was at sea again and the sitting room was quiet. We puffed on Peterson pipes and listened, looked at each other, unfolded the lyrics sheet and slowly nodded. ‘Yer Blues’ sounded suitably grim, fitted the mood. ‘Don’t Pass Me By’ made Ola blush, we skipped that one in silence. I hated ‘Obladi Oblada’, but I dug ‘Black Bird’ and thought about the black fists being raised in Mexico. Gunnar thought the words of ‘Back In The USSR’ were near the knuckle, you don’t make jokes about socialist imperialism.
We cleaned our pipes, opened the window, the snow was fluttering down in huge flakes, winter was early that year.
Sat in the cold for a bit without speaking.
Refilled our pipes.
Seb said, ‘It’s not like The Beatles. Doesn’t sound like The Beatles. I mean, they each seem to be doin’ their own thing.’
We chewed on that. Seb was right. It didn’t sound like The Beatles.
The photographs on the inside. One each. Touched up. They looked a bit old and lethargic.
Ola had to go, had private maths lessons, he was hanging on by the skin of his teeth. Gunnar went straight afterwards, had to help his father do up his grocery shop. He still believed he could be a match for the supermarket.
Seb and I were left and listened to a couple of tracks. ‘Happiness Is A Warm Gun’, yes, had to give them that one, a belter. And the guitar solo on ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, that one wept. They were the bright spots. Otherwise things looked pretty bleak.