‘Just wait a moment!’ and take a few steps after the man and shout: ‘Hey, you! Stop,’ although I am not really sure I want him to stop. But anyway, he doesn’t stop. I am about to run after him, and his back melts into the shadows up towards Trondhjemsveien and the woods on the other side, and Dole leaps out and blocks my way.
‘That was a new one,’ he says, ‘but it won’t fuckin’ work, Audun, you’re goin’ nowhere.’ And then he lashes out. I am not prepared for it, my guard isn’t up yet, and he hits me in the mouth. I am about to shout ‘Wait!’ but it hurts so much the word doesn’t reach my lips, and they are all over me, the four of them, punching and kicking, and I get my beating, with no dignity, Martin Eden and Albert Finney are over the hills and long gone. Finally, I am on the asphalt and all I can do is protect my face. Dole gives me a last kick and says:
‘Goodnight, Audun,’ and clatters down the stairs with the others. I hear Willy’s laughter, and then they are gone.
I am not sure I’m able to stand up. There is a smell of dust and beer and tarmac. I lick my lips. I can’t feel my mouth, but it tastes of blood. It hurts to breathe, I cough and the pain shoots across my ribcage. Dole’s last kick was vicious. I lift myself up, I can just about do it, my arms stiff and sore, and finally I get on my feet. Straight ahead is the sign for the bowling alley. It’s dark inside, but the sign is luminous. I look towards the stairs. There is my bag. I walk slowly over and pick it up. It’s painful. I can hardly bend down. I look around. Everything is quiet by the Metro. If anyone saw what happened, they have legged it. I look in through the station windows. The ticket collector is hunched over a crossword. He is deaf and blind. How he can even see that crossword is beyond me. He can go to hell.
I can’t go home like this. My mother will be hysterical and start fussing and ask me all kinds of questions. I don’t think I can face it. I hold the bag close to my chest and spit. There is a red spot on the asphalt. I put my hand to my mouth, and I can feel how my upper lip is split. I need help for this. Very slowly I walk round the shopping centre, past the rear entrance to Geir’s bar and down past the youth club and the post office. If I keep my back straight, my chest doesn’t hurt so much.
‘Anything comes up, you know where I live,’ old Abrahamsen said. He lives at the far end of Veitvetsvingen in a three-room terraced house. I take him at his word. I don’t know where else to go. I could go to Arvid’s, but I have hardly seen him the last month, and I would feel awkward.
I come to the bend in the road. There are cars parked the whole way down. People have more cars than they used to. I cough as gently as I can and ring the bell of the last house. When the bell stops ringing, it is dead quiet. I turn to see if anyone is standing there gawping, but there is no one about. I have two holes in my trousers, one on each knee, and there’s only one button left on my jacket. A noise comes from behind the door, and then it opens and old Abrahamsen peers out. He’s in his underwear. Of course he is, it’s late. I check my watch, but it’s broken and stopped at ten to twelve.
‘I’ll be damned, it’s that boy.’ He smiles. I try to smile back, but I cannot: moving my lips hurts too much. He opens the door and the light streams out from the hall. I close my eyes.
‘For fuck’s sake, Audun, what’s this you look like? Get yourself in here.’ I squint and try, but I can’t move my left leg up his steps. It has gone all stiff. He comes outside and supports my arm, and I limp indoors. I have never been to his place before. I had pictured an old man’s flat with an oilcloth on the table, elks in the sunset, discoloured wall lamps and unwashed, brown coffee mugs. But the walls are freshly painted and covered with framed pictures and photographs and the kitchen is spotless. In the living room there are several paintings and two bookshelves, and there is a zebra skin hanging on the longest wall. There is not one picture of anything in Norway. He sees what I am looking at and says:
‘I was a seaman. You didn’t know, did you? Can you manage to take your clothes off?’ I nod. I can if I have to.
‘You need to take a shower to see what’s what.’ I nod again and start to undress. The jacket and the shirt I can do, but I can’t do the trousers, it feels like my ribs crack when I bend down. I look at him and shrug and shake my head.
‘If it’s fine with you, I can do it,’ he says, and I nod. It’s fine with me. And old Abrahamsen kneels down and pulls off my jeans and boots. His hair has gone grey, but it’s all there, the sinewy arms in the vest work at my laces, he is quick and his muscles ripple, it looks good, and I think: to look like that when you’re past sixty.
He pushes me gently towards the bathroom. I stop him, I want to tell him something, but it’s too difficult, it turns to mush in my mouth, and I make a sign with my hand. He goes to fetch paper and a pencil. I write: ‘Could you please call my mother and tell her not to worry?’ And I add the telephone number.
‘I’ll sort that out, Audun. You take that shower.’
I do. The water is lukewarm and pleasant. It runs red down my stomach and on to the white, painted cement floor, like a rusty snake coiling, and then tapers down the drain. Carefully I dry myself and look into the mirror. Jesus Christ.
He knocks on the door and comes in with plasters and iodine in a little bottle. He stands watching me, shaking his head.
‘How do you feel?’ he says.
‘It hurts.’
‘A lot?’
I nod. He opens the bottle, cleans the wounds with some cotton wool and puts on the plasters. I stand quite still with my eyes closed. Once, by mistake, his elbow touches my ribs. I groan. He presses his finger softly in a few places. I groan again.
‘A couple of broken ribs would be my guess,’ he says, ‘it hurts, but it’s no disaster. Well, this is as much as I can do. I’m not sure about your lip, though. You’ll need to go to casualty with that.’ He tilts his head and smiles.
‘I remember one time I looked a bit like you do now. I was about your age too. It was in Hull, that was, a few years after the First World War. I had signed on a freight vessel. A Dane beat me up, I didn’t stand a chance. He was two metres of muscle from Hirtshals. We became friends later on. We’d had a pint too many, that’s all. You know, I could tell you some things about Hull. It was a great place. Not many people liked it, but I did. And here’s me telling stories. You need some clothes.’
He goes out and rummages around in a wardrobe and returns with a worn, grey suit, measures me up with one eye pinched and helps me on with the trousers. The suit fits and feels good. It’s clean.
‘That’s it, you have to look presentable in casualty, otherwise they won’t treat you properly.’ He rings for a taxi and puts on a jumper, jacket and shoes. He is going with me.
In the taxi down Trondhjemsveien, I huddle in the corner of the back seat. I feel better now, the engine hums and ticks over like a taxi should. I could have gone to sleep had it not been for my aching mouth and chest. I close my eyes and then old Abrahamsen says:
‘I don’t have to tell you, Audun, you know for yourself. You’re eighteen years old. It’s a tricky time. There’s so much going on, and later some say it was the best time they ever had, and some say it was the worst, and they’re both right. People live different lives. People are different. Some get the cream, always, oh, I’ve seen them. But one thing is certain: at some point everything changes. You’re not eighteen all your life. That may not be much of a consolation, but take a hint from someone who’s on the outside looking in: you’ll get through this. I’m dead sure.’
The doctor is tired and irritable. The first thing he says:
‘Is this your doing?’ looking old Abrahamsen in the eye.
‘Thanks for the compliment. Could I have done all that to such a strong fellow without a single scratch in return? Thank you very much!’ He bows, and the doctor is even more irritable. He tells me to get on the table, where I lie flat and he shines a lamp in my face and leans over me. There are black rings under his eyes and he needs a shave.
‘Right
,’ he says, ‘you have a choice. I can either stitch you up without an anaesthetic and it will heal just fine, or you can have an injection, and you’ll look into the mirror three weeks from now wondering where you got the hare lip.’ He talks like James Cagney, if Cagney had spoken Norwegian, there is a touch of American movie about the room, and it isn’t much of a choice.
‘No anaethedic,’ I say.
When he has finished he puts a big plaster over the cut, giving me a snub nose, he winds a bandage round my chest, and to his back I say ‘Thank you very much’.
‘OK, next,’ he shouts through the door, and we go down the corridor, past reception and on through the double doors to the square in front and look for a taxi. I am dizzy with fatigue and pain, and in the car I say the only right thing.
‘Tell me bou Hull.’
Old Abrahamsen smiles and tells me about Hull. About sailing down the Humber past fishing boats bow to stern all the way from Grimsby, and the old paddle steamer carrying passengers to and fro across the Humber and the old wooden wharves that must be long gone by now, but they smelt of fish and tar, reeking of a hundred years of sweat and toil when the sun was out, and quiet Sundays in Pearson Park where old men in white shirts and braces played bowls in the shade under the trees, the measured strides of men past seventy and the far-off clicks when the wooden bowls collided. It was so quiet you could hear your watch tick and your heart beat. And old Abrahamsen was young and lay on the grass kissing Mona O’Finley from Dublin. Her father had fled Ireland after 1916 and settled in 14 Pendrill Street, a grey house in a row of grey houses, off Beverley Road heading east. Oh, he liked Hull all right, there was not much of an upper class there, and on some days all you could hear around the harbour was Danish and Norwegian. And if talking to your neighbours was not what you fancied, you could go and have a pint at the Polar Bear, the finest pub in the world, where men in faded blue clothes were discussing trade union politics and poetry.
‘Oetry?’
‘Yes, for sure, poetry, and if you ask me, that was the best time of my life. You know, Audun, there are so many things in this world. It’s not just here and now.’ I nod, and we pass through the Sinsen intersection and up the hills past Aker Hospital to Bjerke trotting stadium at the top, and I really wished we would never get to Veitvet.
16
I AM OFF sick for the rest of the week and the whole of the next. My mother’s got a cleaning job at the Park Hotel, so she is away for most of the day, and I drift around the flat on my own, curtains drawn, drinking soup through a straw and lying in bed, reading and taking painkillers whenever I have to. At six she comes home and tells me the latest news about celebrities and pop groups staying at the hotel, about their drinking and the state of the rooms and toilets after they’ve left. She is ruthless. I miss talking with Arvid, but he doesn’t ring me, so I don’t ring him.
The Sunday before I return to work, I go for a walk in Østmarka. I take the Metro from Veitvet to Tøyen and change there and go to Bogerud and walk into the woods from Rustadsaga. It’s cold, the air is crisp and clear and dead leaves lie in golden heaps along the hiking trail. My body still feels sore, but it’s working again, and I push the pace until the muscles tell me it’s enough. It is good to breathe after many days indoors. I have changed the large plaster for a smaller one, so I don’t have a snub nose any more. The swelling has gone down, and apart from a few yellowish-blue marks and the plaster, my face looks almost normal. I have a cigarette in my pocket. I am going to smoke it when I’m halfway. I don’t meet anyone that I know. People from Veitvet trek in Lillomarka.
And I don’t see any animals, but long Lake Elvåga is glittering in the sunshine. About halfway, I stop and slide down and sit on the slope by the bank. It is fine and open here, and the trees are naked. I take out the roll-up and a little notebook I like to think is similar to the one that Hemingway used in the Twenties in his Paris book A Moveable Feast. I light the cigarette and try to do what he did: write one true sentence. I try several, but they don’t amount to any more than what Arvid calls purple prose. I give it another go, and try to get down on paper the expression on Dole’s face when I dragged him by the leg across the floor of Geir’s bar. It’s better, but not very good. I leave it for the day and put the notebook back in my jacket pocket and clamber up to the path. I go north along the lake to Elvågaseter restaurant. I order a coffee and sit by the window. I let the coffee cool for a few minutes. I speak to no one. Then it’s the last stretch, up past Vallerud to Gamleveien. There is a bus stop there. I have to wait for half an hour, but that’s fine with me.
The bus is nearly empty, just an elderly man with a rucksack sitting at the very front talking to the driver. I sit at the back as I always do, thinking that for one and a half weeks I haven’t spoken to anyone except my mother.
The next day, I’m back on late shift. I sleep in for as long as I can, and when I catch the Metro, I am wearing Abrahamsen’s grey suit. It attracts attention. People stare in the Underground, and in the cloakroom at work there is whistling and polite bowing between the cabinets. Trond waves his arm and says I look like something straight out of a black and white film from the 1930s, and others say, hand on heart, that the tapered trousers are what make the greatest impact. The suit causes so much of a stir that no one mentions my face. Which was pretty much the idea.
Jan is off sick again. He has been sent to hospital. No one talks about what may be wrong with him. He is the paper roll man, and I have been trained as his substitute. Trond winks and says promotion is just round the corner. Trond is supposed to step in on the paper-folder, but the man there is never ill. A change is welcome, and I must work alone, which I like, but it’s a lot more hectic.
The rolls of paper are stored on a large platform, row upon row in the next room. Each of them weighs a ton, and they are transported on a little trolley that runs on rails from the platform to the middle of the press where the roll star is. There is room for three rolls in the star. My job is to keep it filled and not ever lag behind, and the art of it is to make the splice. The paper is spliced when the press is going full blast, and so I need a length that matches the speed. I calculate the angle and make a V-shaped tear along a steel ruler and fix the tip back against the roll and cover it with a precise pattern of strong double-sided tape. When the old roll is almost finished, I swing the star 120 degrees round until the new roll is straight under the web and start up the motor until it’s running at the same speed as the rest of the press. And so I stand waiting, waiting, my finger on the button, and then I have to push it, and a brush pastes the join to the paper web and a knife cuts off the old roll with a bang. The sport is to get as close to the cardboard core as possible. If all goes well the splice is removed at the folder, and if it doesn’t, there is a howl and the paper comes streaming out of its web, or it concertinas, and we have to stop the press and re-thread the whole web. That takes an hour at worst, with test runs and washing down, and I am no one’s favourite. It doesn’t always go well, but I am not stupid, and Jan has been a good teacher.
Today all goes well. I toil and sweat and enjoy my work, I kick-start the trolley and stand on it as I shoot along the rails into the next hall, cut off the wrapping, and manoeuvre the paper rolls to the edge of the platform and rock them gently on to the trolley. There’s a trick to it: if I push too hard the roll topples over, and that’s why I wear my steel-toed shoes. They are supposed to take a ton’s weight, but I don’t feel like testing the claim. I keep the star full and two rolls in reserve, and by lunchtime not one splice has gone awry.
In the canteen we play cards, printers and assistants at their separate tables; this is lunchtime apartheid, but I couldn’t care less. Everything’s gone better than expected. When Trond suddenly looks at my face and asks what I was really up to last week, I just answer with a shrug.
Goliath and the other printers are sitting at the next table. Midway through lunch, Jonny goes to their table from his corner and takes a seat. They deal him in, but
he makes so much noise and laughs so hysterically that they send him off with a flea in his ear, and he has to go and sit down on his own again. I keep a watchful eye on him.
‘How’s Jonny doing?’ I say. Trond peers over his cards towards the corner.
‘Much worse. Every day he picks a quarrel with the foreman and turns up late every other. He’s on the edge. I’ve got a tenner on him to blow his stack this week. I don’t think I’ll lose.’
Neither do I. Jonny sits chewing on his sandwich and stares out the window, but outside there is nothing to see, it’s pitch black. I have an urge to go up and talk to him, but then I don’t. He is not in my league.
After the break, he runs around Number Three yelling at everybody and getting more and more desperate, and then he is off to the cloakroom. This keeps happening, and each time he returns with his body in a knot and throws himself at the ink regulators, but now he is the one making mistakes. His team is at their wits’ end, they have to stop the press every half an hour to re-set.
There’s a web break on ours. It’s not my fault, but Harald, who is Elk’s deputy, is running around giving orders and has fingered me as the sinner. He is sweating. I’m not afraid of him, I know what I am doing, and I do it my way, so I just turn my back on him. Goliath stands watching with a wry grin. I have no idea whose side he is on. We never talk. We prise out all the fragments that got stuck, and Goliath starts the machine on slow, and we thread a new web and wash down the blankets. It’s no problem, we are ahead of schedule. Harald can do his job, and I can do mine. When the press is running, I stock up with rolls, make the splices on the two already in the star and take out my pack of Petterøe and roll a cigarette. If all goes as it should do, I have twenty minutes.