‘My God, what shall I do?’ my mother whispers. I close my eyes and see my father’s hand raising the gun, there is a flash of light, for it is sunny outside, and I run back to the living room, the hall smelling of bonfire and forest and long-forgotten sunny Sundays, but when I look out the window, there is no one by the gate.
The next day my mother starts packing.
I look around for Samuel and catch sight of him half hidden behind the press where he is padding about with a broom, sweeping the ashes off the floor. As soon as the foreman’s through the door and gone, he drops the broom and goes into the soundproof room.
Trond comes whistling in where the foreman went out, he has a copy of Melody Maker tucked under his arm. He looks at me and grins.
‘Tell me something, Sletten,’ he says in a bossy voice. ‘Are you sure the printing trade is right for you? Have you considered the Oslo Fire Brigade? Hell, can’t I go to the shithouse for two minutes without you razing the whole place?’ I don’t answer. In a couple of months I might; for now, I just shrug.
‘Samuel!’ Trond shouts. ‘Come on, we have to thread the paper.’ To me he says, ‘The printers are in the storeroom playing poker, so we’ll have to do without them.’
We start the machine on slow, make a new cut in the paper and start threading it through the press, one man each side, round hundreds of cylinders and rollers. It takes ages, but everything runs smoothly, we could have done it with our eyes closed. When we’ve finished, we wash down the rubber blankets and have a smoke. We’re not allowed to start up without the printers, so we just have to wait for Goliath and Elk to show up. But they don’t, and Trond checks his watch.
‘Lunchtime,’ he says.
To get to the cloakroom, we have to go through the next concourse. I open the large door and walk straight into a wall of sound. The roar bounces off the walls and the compressed air valves make smacking sounds as the pressure is released, there is a loud whistle, the machines are coming in to land, everything moves, there is someone running, and the machines stop and go silent. A man I cannot see lets out a naked laugh, another man throws his lunch pack like a baseball, it fizzes in an arc through the air, and I can’t resist, I jump and catch it in mid-flight and toss it into the nearest waste bin.
I hear ‘Fuck you,’ and there is a tingle in my spine, but I just put my hands up and move on without looking back.
In the canteen we help ourselves to coffee from the counter, find a table by the wall, and Trond pulls a pack of cards from his pocket and starts to shuffle. We are the first ones here, it’s perfectly still, and we hear the clatter from the kitchen and the canteen lady humming. Trond deals with practised fingers, five cards each, and the door opens and all the others come streaming in wearing blue, ink-stained work clothes, and their hands are flushed from the white spirit and strong soap. They are shouting and laughing about something that has happened, but we don’t know what that is, and we don’t care. But when everyone has sat down, Jonny comes bursting in, five hours late today with his hair standing on end, and his face as red as his hands. He isn’t close enough for me to smell him, but I know he reeks of alcohol. He pours himself a large mug of coffee and chuckles at something only he knows about. On his way from the counter, he stops at the window facing the car park and looks out.
‘I’ll be damned,’ he says. ‘Did I come in the car today?’
Everyone cracks up laughing, they slap their thighs and roar with laughter, but I can see from Jonny’s face that he is not joking, he is staring in disbelief at the yellow Opel Kadett parked crosswise out there. His eyes are rimmed with white as he runs the gauntlet through the canteen and sits down at a table by himself. He lowers his head, and I pick up my cards, but I don’t look at them, I look at Jonny and think back to the first time I saw him, charging from the gallery of Number Three with a test print in his hand. Everything was wrong, no one was doing their job, and he was so furious the blue veins on his forehead stood out, and on his back there were big patches of sweat, and he scurried in between the machinery and started to dance along the ink regulators, twisting them like a lunatic, and then he was out again and off to the paper-folder for another test. Kneeling down, with a magnifying glass in his hand, pirouetting up, waving the print in the air he smacked it down on the table and said:
‘This is how it should look, this is pro work, damnit!’ And I guess he’s right, that’s what pro work looks like, but now he is empty, and I know he is finished. He’ll get the boot for certain, he’ll keep drinking until he ends up under the bridges along the Aker river or standing at the soup kitchen with his hand stretched out, his gaze turned in, saying:
‘Got any change, pal?’ And then he’ll die thirty years before his time.
There is a downward pull in the space around him, like at the edge of a cliff where half of you wants to jump and the rest of you holds back, and it makes me furious, makes me want to lash out. I can’t concentrate, and I chuck my cards on the table.
‘What’s up with you?’ Trond asks, impatient. ‘Why can’t you sit still like other people do?’ But I cannot and I get up, and there he is, the guy with the lunch pack. He started working here a month before me and is a veteran and doesn’t like me taking liberties.
‘Leaving, are you, tough guy?’ he says. I feel the heat rising. There’s no avoiding this, and he could not have chosen a better time. I round the table and face him and say:
‘No, I was going to come and see if you had any food left, I’m so goddamn hungry today.’ I haven’t said anything so stupid for years, but now he is forced to do something and shoves me hard in the chest. I would have toppled over without the table behind me. It’s a long time since I’ve been in a situation like this, but I made up my mind years ago that, if I ever were, I would be ready, and I lash out at once. The pain that shoots up my arm is so fierce that the first thing I think of is how much it must have hurt him, because I hit him right under the eye. He howls and crashes backwards, and I hold my arm, it hurts so much I could scream. I take two deep breaths, and then there is a racket in the canteen, and someone grabs me from behind and lifts me off my feet. I kick out and the someone hisses in my ear:
‘You fucking idiot, you’re not even through your probation period yet!’ It’s Goliath: he carries me through the canteen to the door and lobs me into the corridor without drawing an extra breath, I could have been his teddy bear, if he ever had such a thing. My knee smashes against the opposite wall. There is something expanding in my chest like a balloon, it’s swelling and pushing from the inside, it makes me dizzy, and I jump up and hurl myself at him and throw a left hook into his stomach. It’s a wonderful feeling, I have felt like doing it for weeks. A strange noise comes from his mouth, but then I feel a smack above my ear, and I am on the floor. There is a rushing sound and then a howl in my ear, and I can barely hear what he says:
‘If I were you, I would clear off and get down behind the machine until this blows over. You and I can settle up some other time. You goddamn squirt!’ He slams the door, and the bang bounces through my skull, and the corridor goes quiet. The only noise is in my ear. I limp to the stairs. My knee hurts, and I have to take the steps sideways, it is three floors down to the print shop, and I try not to think. I haven’t really seen this staircase before. It is painted yellow, and I cling to that. But of course, that’s not a whole lot.
On the ground floor I meet Maggi. She comes from the lift with her trolley on her way back from the shop. She stops.
‘Here’s your tobacco,’ she says. ‘That’s twenty-five kroner.’
‘What tobacco?’
‘You ordered a pack of tobacco. Have you gone senile?’
‘I’m not senile. It’s my head. It hurts.’ I try to put my hand in my pocket for money, but my arm is paralysed.
‘Let me,’ she says and thrusts her hand into my pocket, rummaging around and fiddling with all kinds of things, I gasp, and she winks, finds the money and counts off what I owe her and stuffs the rest back
with a broad beam. And then, in a friendly way, she pats me hard on the knee.
‘Ouch!’ I scream. She laughs, loud and husky, wags her finger and goes into the finishing shop.
In the cloakroom I sit on the bench in front of my cabinet, stick my bad hand under my shirt and rub my knee with the other. It’s strange when there’s no one here, very unfamiliar and quiet, just grey and a hideous yellow, wet patches under the sinks, and I try to remember why I quit school. I don’t remember anything, and I sit there for a long time, my mind a blank, until I hear sounds that might be laughter on the stairs. It gets louder, and I hear the steel-toed shoes on the floor, but still no one has opened the door. I get up and stare at the door and wait, thinking maybe Trond was right. Maybe the printing business is not the trade for me.
15
KJARTAN, CALLED ELK because of his size and his gait, approaches A press waving a spatula knife in his right hand. Elk is the deputy printer and fifty-three years old, he is recently and unhappily divorced and has a mass of grey hair above his heavy face. I stand by the stacker, handing out sixteen-page sheets on a vibration plate, working them and piling them 32 high on a pallet. Soon I will have been here for two months, and no one can complain about my skills, the printed sheets go on the pallet in razor-sharp stacks. There are 12,500 sheets on each pallet, that is 25 sheets per stack and this is the tenth pallet today. For once we haven’t had a single paper break, and I am exhausted by the everlasting thunder of the press. It gets into your bones and in the end turns them into jelly.
I follow Elk out of the corner of my eye. I have just reported a blemish on the print. For the moment it’s outside the cut, but it is growing and soon it will be on the printed page itself. It has to be a build-up of ink on the rubber blanket. I reported it only because I am dying for a fag and know we will have to stop the press to remove it. I stand there shifting my feet, my pack of Petterøe out and ready, and I am just waiting for Elk to give the stop signal to Goliath, who is the head printer.
The spatula is gleaming. I was the one who cleaned it, it’s part of the job. Assistants clean the printers’ tools. It’s ridiculous, they could do it for themselves. But they insist, they want to maintain the line of command.
Elk paces around the machine. He closes one eye as if taking aim, a strange sight that is, and then he goes down on one knee, holds the spatula at an angle to the whirling rubber blanket, supports his arm with his left hand, and I realise he is not going to stop the press. The cylinders are rotating at 18,000 revolutions per hour: all you see is the newsprint flashing by. Goliath is in the cage behind the console reading a tabloid. No one else in sight.
From the large windows up under the ceiling a ray of sun comes shining into the concourse, so powerful and tangible you could bang your head on it, if that’s what you wanted to do. All of a sudden there are sparks raining through the room making the sun seem like a torch with a flat battery. Something flies through the air, and I feel a smarting pain in my earlobe. Christ, I could have been killed. A chill runs down my spine. I go numb, completely rigid, my brain slams the brakes on and comes to a standstill. And then I see the jet of blood. I start to run, I throw myself at the red button, so far from my post at the stacker, and the sound of the machine coming to a halt is like a plane crashing. Suddenly I realise Elk is drunk, that he smelt of alcohol when I reported the blemish.
‘We’ll fix that,’ he said with a crooked grin, and that was the first time I’d ever seen him smile. Now the great Elk is standing with one hand bleeding, screaming:
‘MY FINGERS, OH FUCK, I GOTTA FIND MY FINGERS!’
There are three fingers missing from his left hand. Goliath comes running in, he tries to calm Elk down, he has a rag he wants to wrap round the injured hand. He gulps so hard you can really see it, and he holds Elk tight around the shoulder, but Elk, who is almost as tall and even stronger, tears himself away and starts running in circles.
‘FUCK FUCK OH FUCK I GOTTA FIND MY FINGERS!’
People rush in from all sides and crowd around the A press, and we look for Elk’s fingers, but they are nowhere to be found, and to be honest, I’d prefer not to find them.
Goliath tries to catch the eye of the man with the large face that is the same colour now as his hair, and his hand just bleeds and bleeds.
‘Hello Kjartan . . . Kjartan.’ For once Goliath speaks gently. ‘Hello, Kjartan, take it easy now. Let’s get out of here. I’ll drive you to casualty. Come on now, Kjartan!’
Elk stares at Goliath with a strange, distant look in his eyes and then he shouts: ‘BUT DON’T YOU GET IT I HAVE TO FIND MY FUCKING FINGERS THEY HAVE TO BE SEWN BACK ON!’
But we can’t find his fingers, and Goliath forces Elk to go with him. He has lost so much blood that his knees are giving way, and he doesn’t look so tall any more. On their way out, they pass the foreman, who looks around him. Goliath doesn’t even turn his head, and as I am the one standing closest to the foreman, he asks me:
‘What’s going on here?’
‘Kjartan’s lost three fingers.’
‘Oh. Jesus!’ The manager sees all the blood and says Jesus again. Then he looks at me.
‘What happened to you? Your ear is bleeding.’ I touch my earlobe, and there is blood on my fingers.
‘The spatula knife,’ I say.
‘The spatula?’ Then it dawns on him. ‘So where the hell were you standing?’
‘By the stacker.’ Everyone looks back at the belt. In the wall behind the half-filled pallet is Elk’s spatula knife, centimetres into the plaster.
‘Oh, Jesus,’ the foreman says. ‘You could have had your skull sliced in two!’ He runs his hand through the hair he has left and leaves the concourse smoking nervously and goes up to the office where he spends most of the day flicking through pornographic magazines.
We wash off the blood, remove the ripped rubber blanket and stretch a new one around the drum, and we can go home.
In the cloakroom, the ever-hip Trond says: ‘At least I’m no longer the only one here with a pierced ear.’
The next day Trond calls me over. He is behind the press cleaning up. We have finished the print run and have to wash everything down before we start afresh.
‘Just look there,’ he says.
In the water tank, Elk’s fingers are floating. They are swollen and look like big snails. I throw up straight into the tank. The foreman, who is doing his inspection tour has recovered well from yesterday’s ordeal and says:
‘You’ll have to clean that up yourself, Sletten!’ And I have to wash the tank and remove my vomit and Elk’s three fingers.
‘I don’t want to watch this,’ Trond says, making himself scarce. I don’t really know what to do with the fingers. In the end I wrap them in some waste paper and throw them in the rubbish container. And then I go to the toilet and throw up once more.
It’s dark on my way home from the late shift. No one lives in this area. Along the road down to the Metro station there are nothing but factories and warehouses, and in a few offices the lights are still on. The old street lamps are hanging on rotting posts and swing in the wind and creak in their rusting metal holders, and most of them are smashed anyway. I am walking alone. There is no one else going my way that I feel like talking to. Trond lives in Lørenskog, and he has a car and all, and besides, I have fallen out with plenty of people.
The early winter gloom devours everything. Litter blows down the gravel road, through the grey I can see the white of it rolling along the ditches, and it’s so quiet I can hear the rustle and the echo of my footsteps. Beneath the railway bridge it is totally dark, but then I see the lights from the Metro station, so I walk the last stretch a little faster. I pay at the barrier where a sleepy ticket collector sits reading the magazine I work on every day. He could have saved himself the trouble, it won’t make him any smarter. Down the steps I can hear my heart beating.
The train arrives on schedule. Inside the carriage I try to read, but I am tired, and before I am even
able to concentrate, I see Linderud station disappearing behind me, so I just have to put the book in my bag.
I am the only person to get off at Veitvet. There is a hollow echo between the concrete walls on my way down the stairs, and another sleepy ticket collector is sitting at the barrier reading the same magazine. Perhaps Oslo Transport Company buys up remaindered copies, hell, I don’t know, but I am about to drop a remark. I decide not to. It’s half-past eleven, and my whole body is aching. When I close my eyes, I can see the fingers in the tank.
I go out through the glass door by the Narvesen kiosk, and as I’m about to start down the steps to Veitvetveien, someone behind me shouts softly.
‘Hi, Audun!’ I turn. And there are Dole and Willy plus two others. Dole is smiling. I am a dead man. Quickly and quietly they spread out: they know how to do this, they have seen it in films, and there is no point trying to escape. I rest the bag against the railings. This is the moment I have to rise out of myself and become someone else: Martin Eden or Jean-Paul Belmondo or Albert Finney in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. I too have seen the films. It will be all right. Arvid and I used to talk about it, it’s the only way to keep your dignity. Or else they own you. I smile at Dole and splay my hands.
‘Out late?’ I say. He smiles back, There’s one thing we both know: I am finished. And then the film unravels. A man in dark clothes comes skulking along the walls from the shopping centre. Geir’s bar has just closed, and he is not too steady on his feet, but still he can probably make it wherever he wants to go. I don’t know if it’s him, his face is shrouded in the darkness by the station, and I am not used to seeing him here among the houses and streets and shopping centres, but it looks like his walk, and as he slips by, I say to Dole: