One night, he and Ahmed traipsed down to the bus station in Skøyen. One of them would keep watch while the other tagged. They swapped places, got freezing cold and swapped again, keeping their arms moving to stay warm. In the middle of the Winter Olympics, at around two in the morning while Morg was on guard, they got caught.
The boys were arrested and taken to the police station. Their parents were called. Their misconduct was reported and registered, but since neither of them had been arrested before, and in view of their age, their punishment was to wash buses for a couple of weeks in the summer holidays. But they were warned to stop tagging and told they would not be let off so lightly next time.
At last they had something to brag about at Egertorget. They had kept their mouths shut.
Anders peppered his story with gestures and phrases he had picked up from the immigrant gangs. Sometimes he substituted Arabic words for Norwegian ones, like the toughs in the hard gangs did.
Fucking hell, it’s him again, thought Net, a tagger from the East End, in slight irritation. Unaware of each other, Morg and Net had both spent periods at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Net was a rebellious boy who bristled at the slightest thing. He went to the school at the centre and was under observation at the same time as Anders was attending the nursery there. Having grown up in Grünerløkka, which in the 1980s was a working-class district that Ris parents instructed their offspring to avoid, he had the credibility that Anders lacked. He started tagging when he was twelve and was among the most skilful, a graffiti artist with a style all of his own. In adult life, Net was to become part of the established art world.
‘Consept was after us and the law took us,’ Anders went on in his immigrant speak, his ‘Kebab Norwegian’. ‘It was, like, well sick!’
There was furtive laughter from the steps.
Not many West Enders came to Egertorget, so Net had noticed Anders, the nobody with a craving to be let in. But Net could also see that Anders wanted more than simply to hang out there. He was ambitious and determined, not just vaguely interested like so many of the others. Should they accept him?
It was a feeling that ran deep. You just couldn’t trust that lot from the other side of town. The West End might have the capital, but the East End boys owned the street: the walls were free.
And anyway, Morg was so ordinary, in Net’s opinion. Mediocre. Average. No particular asset to a crew.
Becoming part of a crew was the next step for Anders. Before he could be King. Put his name alongside the greats. But to be part of all that, you had to be invited to join. And the invitation was slow in coming.
As the hard layer of trampled snow turned to slush in March, Morg found himself arrested again. Again he kept his mouth shut. And again he walked free.
* * *
In the fifteen years of Anders’s lifetime, the number of non-Western immigrants in Norway had risen almost fivefold. In Oslo, the change was even more marked. By about the mid-1990s, a third of those living in the eastern areas of Oslo city centre were from immigrant backgrounds. The largest group was the Pakistani community, who had come to Norway for work in the 1970s. Their children had one foot in each culture; the girls were closely supervised and generally not allowed out after school, the boys had a freer rein.
In Anders’s eyes, the foreigners were the heroes. Their gangs were rougher round the edges and tougher than those of the Norwegian kids. The Labour-run city council had bought flats for refugees on the western side of town to counteract the ghetto effect in the east. The flats were in the blocks and terraces round where Anders lived, and were referred to as ‘the slum’ by the snobs who lived further up the hill in the same school catchment area.
There were sharp contrasts between the socially sheltered Norwegian middle class and the immigrants. Inherited codes of honour that were alien to Norwegians explained some of the conflicts that arose, but often it was just that people found it hard to get along. Wenche grew more and more vocal in her annoyance with the Somali children running round the blocks of flats and making a noise at all hours of day and night, while the foreign arrivals could be bitter about Norwegians who welcomed them by throwing firecrackers onto their balconies. One Somali father on an adjoining staircase armed himself with a bat so he could administer a good hiding to the boys who had sprayed water at his son. ‘Don’t water my son!’ he yelled out over Silkestrå.
It wasn’t worth picking fights with the gangs. One of Anders’s friends was beaten up by a foreign gang as a payback for something. A few days later, the gang leader was clubbed down by two Norwegians outside the Rimi supermarket and left bleeding in the street. Revenge had to be countered with yet more revenge. One evening, some of the gang members climbed over the wall of the Bygdøy mansion belonging to the shipping billionaire John Fredriksen, the richest man in Norway. His fourteen-year-old twin daughters had friends round at the time, and the boy who had carried out the revenge attack – the boyfriend of one of the daughters – was there. The gang got in through an open window. Their intended target hid in Mrs Fredriksen’s wardrobe. They found him, dragged him out, beat him until he was covered in blood, broke his fingers and threw him down a flight of stairs. Leaving the boy lying unconscious on the floor, the gang calmly left.
The gangs had their territories and defended them like young wolves. Where Anders lived, the boundary ran along the tram line. It was wisest to stay on the right side of it. Skøyen, Hoff, Majorstua, Marienlyst and Tåsen were all controlled by different gangs, most of them based on ethnicity, and if any of them needed help they would call in their relations from the East End.
A new term entered the Norwegian vocabulary in the 1990s: child robbery. Gangs would board the underground in the east, cross the city centre and emerge in the west. It was boys against boys, kids against kids. And the kids of Ris had lots of things the kids from the satellite towns wanted. The worst thing was when the gangs decided you were ‘indebted’. There was nothing for it but to pay up. A debt often arose out of thin air, or on spurious grounds like ‘You looked at me. Now you owe me.’ One of the gang might give you a shove and say you were in the way, and as a punishment you would have to pay.
Nobody squealed to the police. You didn’t dare.
It was best to cross to the other side of the street when you saw certain Pakistanis or Somalis in a bunch, or get off the underground at the next stop if they were patrolling through the carriages.
The Norwegians got called potatoes.
Fucking darkies, they shouted back.
Yogurtface!
Bloody Pakis!
Anders felt most at home with the brownies.
* * *
One day, Morg tagged the windows of the headmaster’s office at Ris with spaghetti stripes. Knut Egeland, who demanded almost military discipline of his pupils and often came to school in uniform, was determined to reprimand him. The headmaster came into the classroom where Anders was sitting at his desk before a lesson and punched him in the chest. It was a blow with some force to it. Anders got to his feet and asked if he shouldn’t return the punch.
‘Hit me if you dare,’ replied Egeland. It took a little while, as if Anders were thinking it over, and then he punched the headmaster in the chest, right on his pacemaker. Egeland rocked backwards while the teacher and the other pupils looked on in shock. The old man recovered and hissed, ‘An eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth,’ before walking out of the room.
Respect, that was what that punch gave Anders.
The little kids in Skøyen looked up to Morg; they knew that ‘last night Morg was here, and here, and there’. He had style, he had attitude. His letters were pointed at the top, rounded at the bottom and had forward-sloping shadows. Great shapes, the younger boys thought. Morg used loads of colour, often lots of different ones, at least three or four, and he favoured soft, pastel shades.
The colours varied, depending on the spray cans available. Among the taggers, the rule was that the paint had to be stolen. They sto
le it from petrol stations and building suppliers, especially from the big chains, not from the little shops – that was seen as uncool. The boys crept into the stores like thin, hooded shadows, prowled along the shelves and made sure a can or two fell into their rucksacks before coolly going to the counter to buy a cola, or they might simply grab a couple of aerosols and run. The spray cans were expensive, about a hundred kroner each. You needed at least three to four to create a decent piece, not even a particularly big one. Some walls took more paint than others: old stone walls soaked up the spray paint like mad, but for smoother surfaces like buses and trams you didn’t need as much.
Anders didn’t want to steal. He wanted to buy. Go to the checkout and pay.
In Denmark the spray cans were a quarter of the price. Morg, Spok and Wick made a plan to catch the ferry over to Copenhagen; they would only need to be away for two nights and they told their parents they were staying over at each other’s. Altogether they bought almost three hundred cans, lugging heavy bags home with them on the ferry. As the ship pulled out of the harbour, the fourteen-year-olds’ names were called over the loudspeaker system. There was nothing for it but to report to the captain. They spent the rest of the night sitting on the bridge, under arrest.
It was Spok’s parents who had suspected something was up, and it did not take many phone calls before they worked out what was going on. They rang the ferry company, which immediately found the boys on the passenger list.
What’s all the fuss about, Morg’s mother said when Spok’s father told her they had found the boys on the ferry from Denmark. He thought her irresponsible; she thought he was overreacting. Spok and Wick found their parents waiting on the quayside in Oslo the next morning. Nobody had come for Anders.
Spok’s parents did all they could to get their son out of what they saw as a negative environment. Spok started playing football as a cover, but continued to juggle the two worlds, the straight and the crooked, and went on tagging.
Anders was the one driving him on. He was running his own race and had systems for everything. His mother had now moved into a terrace of flats in Konventveien, where he stacked all the dearly acquired aerosol cans along by the wall under the veranda. He arranged them by number and colour codes in long, shining rows. He hoarded more of some colours and those cans protruded further out from the wall than the rest. Green. Orange. Yellow. Silver.
Inside the flat, beyond the spray cans, there was another war, sometimes cold and sometimes hot. The neighbours could hear the exchanges through the thin walls. Elisabeth’s teen rebellion had arrived with a vengeance. Doors slammed, glasses and saucepans went flying and hit the walls. The girl had years of anger to vent.
As a rule, Anders vanished into his room whenever his mother and sister were arguing, and only appeared in the kitchen for meals. Then it was Elisabeth’s turn to leave the room. She refused to eat with her mother and half-brother, and usually sat in her room on her own with a plate on her lap.
But outside the home, Elisabeth blossomed. She was attractive and popular, witty and amusing. And she wanted to get away. Away from her mother, away from Silkestrå, away from Norway. When she was eighteen, she went to America as an au pair. California was the place for her. Now she was saving up to go back; for good, she hoped.
While Anders was at secondary school, Wenche started going out with an army officer. Tore and Anders got on well with each other. He was a warm person and easy to be with. For a few years he was a sort of father figure for Anders, though he didn’t hide the fact that he thought Anders was a bit of a weakling, clumsy and awkward at men’s jobs like hammering in nails and mending bikes.
Once Anders was in his teens, he was able to go by himself on his bike to his father’s place in Fritzners gate when he was invited to dinner. They sometimes played Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit, and his father helped him with his homework. On one occasion his father invited him on a trip to Copenhagen. But theirs was never a close relationship. Jens was basically dissatisfied with his son and annoyed by his habits. He stayed in bed late and when he finally got up, he prepared himself about ten slices of bread to eat in front of the television, his father complained. He found him lazy and unenthusiastic, apathetic and taciturn. He wasn’t very curious or eager to learn, his father remarked. No, the boy liked the easy life and being waited on, Jens thought.
Anders’s father did notice, however, that he sometimes seemed vulnerable and sad, as if there were something troubling him. But Anders never shared any problems with him or said what the matter was.
The boy was craving love and attention, and it was as if he longed for something that was missing in his life, his father later admitted. But he was incapable of meeting the boy’s needs. He remained aloof and never made Anders feel loved.
The first time Anders was caught tagging, the police rang both his parents. His father was outraged that Anders had committed a criminal act. He threatened to cut off all contact with him.
The second time it happened he reacted coldly.
Anders promised not to do any more tagging. His father contented himself with that.
* * *
Anders was developing a steady hand. He didn’t mess anything up, the paint didn’t bubble, the lines came out even, without wobbling. He applied the silver spray paint without letting it drip onto or dust the black, while still keeping the colour even and filling in the whole picture.
But one day somebody openly mocked Morg on Egertorget. Mocked his inflated ambition. His boastfulness, his exaggerated hip-hop walk and the way he wore his trousers back to front to be cool. Trousers that were to be as outsized as those worn in music videos.
The taunts continued the next time he came along. And the next. Morg seemingly took no notice. Ahmed wasn’t there any more. He had been expelled from Ris for making trouble and now hung out with friends and relations in the East End. Spok and Wick found themselves caught in the middle. They didn’t play an active part in the bullying, but took an imperceptible step back whenever it started. They didn’t want to risk being dragged into anything. On the way home, Anders tried to make a joke of the whole thing.
It didn’t take long for the big taggers to show Morg that he was no longer welcome. They didn’t say it outright, just went from openly ridiculing him to totally ignoring him.
‘I didn’t have the balls to do anything,’ admitted Spok many years later. ‘I just stood there like a moron and hoped they wouldn’t start on me.’
Anders had committed a cardinal sin. He hadn’t known his place. He was a toy but had behaved like a king. In other words, like a wannabe.
Anders fought tooth and nail to keep his place in the community. But the bullying spread to his own little clique and his friends deserted him.
A pitiless panel composed of Wick and Spok delivered the coup de grâce.
Morg was thrown out of the gang.
At a much later date, when Wick was called in to be interviewed by the police about the friend with whom he had broken sixteen years before, he reverted to the value judgements of a teenage tagger: ‘He belonged to the cool gang for a while, even though he wasn’t cool. He was basically a fifth wheel. In the end we wouldn’t put up with him any longer.’
The logic was clear. ‘We soon realised we wouldn’t get anywhere with Anders in tow, so we had to make a choice. Either stand up for him or join one of the top taggers.’
With Anders gone from the Writers’ Bench, both Spok and Wick were recruited by good crews and went on tagging.
Cool or not cool, that was the question.
* * *
But Anders didn’t give up tagging. If he just carried on, if he just got better and better, they would have to acknowledge him and he could be a king after all.
He started tagging with boys younger than himself. Boys who hadn’t picked up on the fact that Anders wasn’t hip any more.
One of them was a skinny little kid from one of the biggest houses in the neighbourhood, whose parents were away a lot. He was in th
e year below Anders at Ris, did a bit of tagging and was dumbfounded by the sight of the arsenal of aerosol cans neatly stowed under the veranda. Anders used to spend a lot of time considering the colours he would use, weighing the cans in his hand before he covered up his palette along the wall so it couldn’t be seen from the path.
The top taggers were obsessive about having all their equipment in order, while the small fry went round aimlessly, without a plan.
One evening Anders pointed out a place he wanted to tag. He had his eye on a piece done by one of the big names. The younger tagger protested.
‘No way. You can’t write over that!’
‘I tag where I like,’ said Anders as he took the first paint can out of his bag.
In addition to the countless understandings about what was cool, the graffiti community had two absolute rules that should not be broken: don’t tell on anyone, and don’t tag over other writers’ pieces.
There were subtle, fluid exceptions. A king could write over the tag of a toy, but not the other way round. Someone good could write over someone bad. A big, coloured piece was permitted to cover a simple tag. A piece that was starting to fade could be written over, if you asked the permission of the person who had put it up. You could make the judgement yourself, but it had better be a good one.
‘Let’s find a bare wall instead.’
‘No, I want to tag here,’ insisted Anders in the darkness of the bus station.
‘You gotta ask first!’
Anders turned to the wall. He flicked the cap off the spray can and raised his hand.
He pressed the button.
The spray hit the wall, spreading over the other tagger’s name.
MORG it said, for the passengers to read the next morning.
MORG, it informed the tagger whose signature had been obliterated.