Dear David,
When I think back on the 80s, it sometimes strikes me that it’s not my 80s I’m looking back on, but the image of the 80s that’s presented on the internet and in films, on TV and radio and in the newspapers now, in 2006. When I sat down to write this letter, for example, what I thought about was Sky Channel and Pat Sharp on MTV. I thought about BALL sweatshirts and puffa jackets with leather patches on the shoulders, about Toto and Alphaville and Dire Straits and Frankie Goes to Hollywood. I thought about pastel colours and mullets and fountain ponytails and marathon dances in the gym at Namsos Lower Secondary. Even though none of this was any part of my life or Bendick’s in the 80s I sat down at the computer and thought of all this and a lot else that I knew little or nothing about back then and that I wouldn’t have known anything about today either if it weren’t for the fact that I once went out with a woman who tried to deaden her fear of getting old by refusing to let go of the 80s and still dressed in much the same way and listened to much the same music at the age of thirty-five as she had when she was a teenager.
This fact, that I remember somebody else’s 80s better than my own, reminds me of the time when we celebrated the fifteenth anniversary of us finishing lower secondary. I hadn’t been planning to go to this party and I don’t think anyone else expected to see me there either, but the very fact that they didn’t, well, that brought out the devil in me and after a few drinks to give me Dutch courage I took a taxi to the Namsos Athenæum where the party was being held. And before too long I was sitting next to you, sipping a red-coloured welcome drink, smiling happily at speeches full of references to Lacoste shirts, Levi 501s and red leather ties worn to confirmations. And shortly after that I was dancing to “White Wedding”, joining in the chorus of “Buffalo Soldiers”, and laughing my head off at a sketch performed by a bunch from the A class, all about Pac-Man, Donkey Kong and the old Commodore computers.
But the uneasy feeling that this wasn’t my 80s grew stronger and stronger. As if my ma could afford to buy me Levi’s or Lacoste shirts or gear from Busnel or Matinique when those brands were all the rage. Never mind video games or a computer or cable TV or one of those electronic games that you saw kids playing with in the playground. As if I ever listened to the Top Ten or got asked to parties where they played “Forever Young”, “Wake Me Up Before You GoGo” and other hits from those days. That wasn’t my 80s. That was the 80s of all the well-off, clever, popular middle-class kids who came home to tables set for dinner every day and whose parents promised to pay for driving lessons if they stayed away from cigarettes. And yet there I was nodding and laughing and having fun, and this gradually began to make me feel that I was betraying the kid I had actually been in the 80s. Not only did I not object when our successful former classmates presented this garish version of the 80s, I actually almost fooled myself into believing that that had also been my 80s. I was in the process of erasing the boy I’d been back then.
And if you ask me, that’s exactly what’s happening now, all over Norway. The popular, well-off, clever teachers’ pets that you and I went to school with are all grown up now, and just as Audun and Marianne took over the planning committee and turned that evening into a carefree, innocent, safe, candy-coloured version of the 1980s, so all the pampered, successful thirty-somethings in the country have taken over all the influential posts and appointments. In TV programme after TV programme, radio programme after radio programme, newspaper article after newspaper article they talk about how they represent you, me and everyone else. And eventually we start to believe them. Eventually we start to believe that their version of both the past and the present applies to us as well.
And exactly the same thing happened to our parents’ generation, you know. Think of being young in the late 60s and early 70s and you immediately picture grim-faced Marxist-Leninists demonstrating against the war in Vietnam or long-haired, hash-smoking hippies sitting in a park listening to Jimi Hendrix and saying, “Far out, man.” Everybody does it. Even my ma, although she probably doesn’t even know who Jimi Hendrix was. She doesn’t picture her own 60s and 70s, she pictures the 60s and 70s of the kids who were popular and good at school and well off when she was young, the kids who were born with a silver spoon in their mouths and sailed through their childhoods without a scratch and went on to become student radicals and academics. For decade after decade they have occupied their positions of power and presented their versions of the 60s and 70s and that is what Ma pictures. Even though she grew up in the small northern town of Namsos and has probably never seen a hippie in her life, even though she never went on a protest march and the closest she ever got to further education was sleeping with an arsehole of a supply teacher we had at Namsos Lower Secondary in the early 80s.
So I promise you one thing: this letter’s not just going to be a fucking rehash of the version of the 80s we were presented with at that class reunion. Now that I’ve sat myself down here to help you “find out who you are”, as it said in the paper, there’s no fucking way I’m going to be tricked into writing Audun’s and Marianne’s story. I’m going to write about me and you and Bendik. I’m going to write about my tinker family and your family of hick farmers – and that story, our story, begins on the day that you and your mother moved in with your stepfather, a real sleazeball if ever there was one, notorious in the town for using his position as the local vicar to take advantage of single women.
I don’t remember exactly when this was, but it was long before they pulled down the old fence separating the detached bungalows of the middle class from the council flats where Bendik and I grew up, so it was before I turned fourteen, at any rate. I was about eleven maybe, maybe twelve, maybe thirteen, I can’t say for sure, but it really doesn’t matter that fucking much. In any case, one summer’s day in the early 80s a blue and white removal van was parked outside the vicarage, and me and Bendik were hiding up on the mound of grass where your stepfather used to empty the wheelbarrow after he’d mowed the lawn. The plan was for us to dash out and grab some stuff from the van every time the removal men carried something into the house. Guerrilla tactics, Bendik called it, obsessed as he was with soldiers and war. Dart out, dart back, quick as lightning, dashing back and forth until we ran out of room in the old bike trailer we had left on the path behind us. We used to do little raids like that now and again because my grandad had a scrapyard and a junk shop and he bought just about everything we brought him, no questions asked, so it was an easy way to make some money.
But when we looked down from the top of the mound of grass and saw that the men carrying in your belongings were Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre Hindmo we immediately ditched our plan, because there was always the chance that they would get the blame for pinching the stuff and we didn’t want that, obviously. So instead we lay there spying on them. They were puffing and panting, their faces shiny and running with sweat. Uncle Willy had taken off his shirt and was working stripped to the waist. He had a tattoo of an anchor on his forearm and a hairy belly that bulged and strained over the waistband of his trousers and jiggled when he walked.
“Fuckin’ hell!” he wheezed, taking off his gloves, picking up a bottle of beer that was sitting on the rubbish bin next to the wooden fence and knocking back the last of it in one big gulp. “Don’t you think it’s hot?” he asked, looking up at Odd Kåre in the body of the van. Odd Kåre didn’t answer. He looked deadbeat; big, dark, heart-shaped patches of sweat had formed on the front and back of his white T-shirt. He stopped what he was doing, took hold of the hem of his T-shirt, pulled it away from his body and flapped it, airing himself. “The sun’s nearly down and it’s still hot as hell,” Uncle Willy gasped. Odd Kåre just turned round, grasped the arm of a sofa and dragged it right out to the front, then he tramped off to the back again. “It’s nigh on unbearable,” Uncle Willy mumbled, then he set the empty beer bottle down on a little table that was standing in the driveway. Odd Kåre lifted a rolled-up carpet off a pile of boxes. “Christ Almighty, you’d think it was the middle of the fuckin’ day, it’s that hot,” Uncle Willy said.
“Yeah, yeah,” Odd Kåre growled.
Odd Kåre heaved the carpet onto the sofa, took a fresh bottle of beer from the crate and handed it to Uncle Willy.
“You don’t have to make excuses,” he said.
“Fuck’s that supposed to mean?” Uncle Willy said, sounding mad now.
“Aw, gimme a break,” Odd Kåre sighed. “Yesterday it was because you’d eaten salt herring. What’ll it be tomorrow, I wonder.”
“What the fuck are you insinuating?”
“Cut it out, I said! Open your bottle, drink up and then get on wi’ your work. I’m knackered and I’d like to get this done and out of the way.”
Uncle Willy eyed Odd Kåre for a second.
“Who the hell d’you think you are?” Uncle Willy shouted.
Odd Kåre sighed and shook his head.
“Eh?” Uncle Willy shouted again. “Who the bloody hell d’you think you are?”
“Aw, please. I don’t feel like arguing with you. You can drink as much as you like just so long as you do your work.”
“So long as I do my work?” Uncle Willy stared at Odd Kåre, his mouth hanging open. “So long as I do my work? Are you saying I don’t do my work now? First you insinuate that I drink too much, then you tell me I’m not doing my work. You’ve hardly been working here a fucking year and now you’re talking to me like I’m a damn fucking errand boy.”
“Save it!” Odd Kåre snapped.
Uncle Willy gave a bark of angry laughter.
“You’ve got a fucking nerve!” he cried.
Odd Kåre put his hands on his hips, looked down at the floor of the van and shook his head.
“I never said you weren’t doing –”
“I’ll tell you one thing, you great turnip!” Uncle Will bawled, cutting him short. He slammed the unopened bottle of beer down on the table next to the empty one and took a step closer to the van. “I’ll tell you one thing,” he said again, pointing up at Odd Kåre. “I tell you, you and those stringy bloody arms o’ yours don’t lift half as fuckin’ much in a day as I do. Do you realize that? Eh?”
Odd Kåre took a deep breath, about to say something, but then he flapped his hand at Uncle Willy and sighed. Uncle Willy licked his lips, looking madder and madder.
“Not even half,” he said.
“Yeah, yeah, that’s right,” Odd Kåre said. “I’m weak and bone idle.”
“Yeah, you bet your fucking life you are.”
“Hmm,” Odd Kåre said, opening his eyes wide and smiling sarcastically at Uncle Willy. “But d’you think we could get back to work now?”
Uncle Willy just stood there gawping at Odd Kåre for a moment or two, then he snorted, picked up a box of ornaments and set off up to the house. Then he suddenly stopped, turned and came back to the van.
“Oh, by the way, how was that daughter of Arthur’s?” he asked with a snide grin.
Odd Kåre looked a bit taken aback.
“Oh aye,” Uncle Willy said, nodding triumphantly. “I saw you the pair of you.”
Odd Kåre didn’t say anything.
“For fuck’s sake!” Uncle Willy crowed. “As if shaggin’ minors wasn’t enough, now you’re havin’ it off wi’ your own mate’s daughter. It’s like I said, you’ve got a fucking nerve.”
Odd Kåre’s face was like stone, his eyes bored into Uncle Willy’s.
“Oh, dear, what’s the matter?” Uncle Willy sneered. “Did you eat something that didn’t agree with you?”
“You’d better watch yourself,” Odd Kåre said coldly and softly.
“I should watch myself?” Uncle Willy said. He stared at Odd Kåre for a second, then he put down the box he was holding and jabbed his chest with his finger. “I’m to watch myself. Me? Well, I’ll tell you this much, you’re gonna be in bi-ig fuckin’ trouble if Arthur gets to hear about it, because you’ll wind up right back in the slammer. You do realize that, don’t you?”
Odd Kåre kept his eyes fixed on Uncle Willy’s, saying nothing.
“And you’re telling me to watch myself,” Uncle Willy said again.
“Aye,” Odd Kåre said, then he paused. “Well, I don’t know if you remember anything about Friday night, but would it ring any bells if I said that there’s an Audi lying at the bottom of the fjord and that both the police and the insurance company are wrong if they think it was stolen?”
Silence for a few moments.
“A-ha… now who’s worried?” Odd Kåre grinned, leaning forward slightly and staring at Uncle Willy. “It’s like I say, you drink way too much and you’d better watch out. It’s easy to give too much away when you’re drunk, you know. There’s plenty of folk have got their fingers burned that way!”
They glowered at each other for a couple of seconds, then Odd Kåre turned away and started dragging furniture towards the front. Uncle Willy picked up the unopened bottle, pulled a tin of snus from his back pocket and flicked the cap off the bottle with a little pop. White foam gushed out of the neck and a little beer ran down the sides of the bottle and over his big fist. “Fuck,” he mumbled, slurping up most of the foam and shaking his hand, sending drops of beer flying.
Suddenly a voice called from the veranda: “Excuse me!”
It was your mother, Berit.
She was standing with her arms crossed, looking down at Uncle Willy with a faint smile on her face.
“I was wondering if you’d mind not drinking beer while you’re working here. There’s a child in the house, you see,” she said and she raised her hand and pointed to an open window on the first floor. And there was a tall, skinny boy of my own age. He was standing perfectly still with his arms by his sides, gazing down solemnly at the drive.
That was you.
There was silence for a couple of seconds.
Uncle Willy took the bottle away from his lips and stood there holding it out stiffly in front of him. He shot a surprised look at Odd Kåre and Odd Kåre looked back at him in equal surprise. Then they both turned and looked up at your mother. No one said anything for a moment or two, then Odd Kåre and Uncle Willy looked at one another again. Odd gave a little snort of laughter, Uncle Willy sniggered and shook his head, then he put the bottle to his lips, tipped his head back and took a long swig on it while you and your mother looked on. “Aaahh,” he sighed, then he set the bottle on the ground, drew the back of his hand across his mouth, sauntered over to the van and began to lift off some of the stuff that had collected at the front. Your mother stood and watched him for a moment or two then she just turned and went back inside.
“There’s a child in the house, you see,” Odd Kåre said, mimicking her and making a face.
Uncle Willy grinned. “Who the fuck does she think she is?” Odd Kåre went on. He pulled his T-shirt over his head and tossed it onto the grass. “Eh?” he said. “And who the hell does she think we are? Does she think we’re gonna talk or act any different just because there’s a bloody vicar in the house?”
“People like her, they’ve never broken sweat in their lives, I’m tellin’ you,” said Uncle Willy. “They’ve never lifted anythin’ heavier than their wallets and however heavy they may be it’s not quite the same thing. They don’t understand that it’s thirsty work lifting and carrying.”
“Gimme half an hour wi her an I’d make her sweat,” Odd Kåre grunted, clutching his balls.
Uncle Willy gave a dirty laugh.
“Aye, I bet that’s just what she needs,” Odd Kåre went on.
“Yeah, you could be right,” Uncle Willy laughed.
“Fuck yeah! You think I don’t know the type? Eh? Women married to shrimps like him – men that feel guilty every time they get a hard-on – you think I haven’t met their type before? What they need is a right good fucking from a man with more to him than a fancy CV, only they’re not allowed to admit it, to themselves or anybody else. They’re programmed to say that what they want are soft, gentle men who’re always giving them hugs, who say gosh instead of fuck and who think it’s so important to talk things over. No wonder they become frustrated and mean, no wonder they become bitter and miserable, no wonder they start to hate anybody that bears any resemblance to a real man.”
Uncle Willy stood there with his hands on his hips, shaking with laughter, rolls of fat jiggling.
“They’re all the same, vicars’ wives and other churchgoin’ women. The same goes for them women’s-libbers and feminists. They’re all the same, there’s nothin’ they’d like better than a real man, but there’s no way they can let themselves or anybody else have that, so they start to hate men and sex and all that. Homespun psychology, maybe, but it’s true!”
Uncle Willy’s laughter turned into a long coughing fit.
“Well,” he said, as soon as he was finished coughing, “why don’t you tell her what she’s missin’, man?” He cleared his throat and wiped away the tears of laughter.
“Yeah, maybe I should,” Odd Kåre said. “I’m not much of a knight in shining armour, but I suppose I could make an exception in her case and offer to come to her rescue.”
Uncle Willy burst out laughing again.
“Actually, that’s not such a bad idea,” Odd Kåre said, turning his eyes upward, frowning and appearing to consider the matter. Uncle Willy laughed and shook his head. Odd Kåre eyed Uncle Willy, then he cupped his balls and squeezed, making them bulge between his fingers. “I’ve got a long load here inside my Levi’s, you see, and now that I think about it, I wouldn’t mind runnin’ it through the vicar’s wife’s tunnel,” he said.
Uncle Willy’s roars of laughter lapsed into another hacking coughing fit.
“Hey!” Odd Kåre suddenly shouted. “Mrs Forberg!”
“No, man … don’t,” Uncle Willy gasped. He looked at Odd Kåre and shook his head, but the wicked grin on his beefy face was quite clearly telling Odd Kåre to go right ahead.
“Mrs Forberg!” he shouted again, eyes fixed on the open veranda door.
“Hey! For Christ’s sake,” Uncle Willy said, grinning. “Leave the woman alone, you! We’re working here.”
But Odd Kåre was not to be put off.
“Mrs Forberg!” he shouted for the third time.
And then your mother appeared. She stood in the doorway studying Odd Kåre for a moment, then she came down the short flight of steps and onto the veranda.
“Yes,” she said.
“I was just wondering if it was going to be a while before the vicar gets home?”
She waited a second before answering.
“Well…” Odd Kåre said with a shrug. “You know … a lot of men don’t like their wives being left alone when there are workmen in the house, so we were just saying that maybe we should put our shirts back on till he comes home. For your sake, I mean. So there won’t be any ructions in the boudoir later.”
A hiccup of laughter escaped Uncle Willy, he put a hand to his mouth and kept his eyes fixed on the gravel, shaking with laughter.
“Yeah, well, we talk from experience, you see,” Odd Kåre went on. “There’s a lot of jealous husbands around. And we can kind of see why. I mean, there’s plenty of women that sit at home alone feeling frustrated, and naturally, if you’ve got a workman or two in the house, well… things can happen.” Odd Kåre held your mother’s eye and smiled, all innocent-like.
“Just get on with your work, would you please?” your mother said.
“Right you are,” Odd Kåre said brightly. “Actually, we were just thinking it might be time to bring in the bed.”
At this Uncle Willy doubled up, slapped his knees and howled with laughter.
“If that’s okay with you, that is,” Odd Kåre said, looking up at your mother with that same innocent look in his eyes. She said nothing, simply stood for a moment looking at him, then she turned and went back into the house. You were still standing like a ghost at the dark window upstairs. Rigid and staring with your arms hanging by your sides. Me and Bendik lay where we were for a little while longer, then we slid down off the warm, smelly mound of grass.
Had Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre Hindmo known that your mother was Erik’s daughter they would obviously never have behaved the way they did when you moved in, and had me and Bendik known we would never have carried on where Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre left off, but because we looked up to them and thought they were great, that, of course, is exactly what we did, right? We pestered the life out of you and your mother from day one and we went on pestering you until we found out that you were Erik’s grandson.
So who was Erik? Yeah, he was your grandfather. But who was he to us?
Erik wasn’t just a close friend of our family, he was also our grandad’s “business partner”, as they called it. He worked on some of the fishing boats and shrimp boats when they needed extra men and at the sawmill when they were short-handed, but all of that and the little bit he made from selling firewood and Christmas trees from the little copse your family had on Otterøya was just a cover, because what your family actually made its living from back then was the “distillery” that Erik had built in the barn and that he ran with his brother Albert and the rest of the hicks on Otterøya. He was careful as hell, and even though he’d been making illicit liquor ever since he stopped working for the Highways Department in the late 60s or early 70s not many people knew what he did. Everybody in my family knew, though, because Grandad was one of several middlemen Erik used to sell on his liquor.
Once or twice a month Erik would roll up in a battered old army truck with a tarpaulin over the back or a white Hiace with a number plate so caked in dirt and muck that the number was unreadable. Once Grandad had opened the doors of the big, yellow-washed shed behind our house Erik would back the vehicle up until the rear end was inside the shed, and then all they had to do was unload the jerry cans and stack them behind a whole wall of old banana crates that were only there to screen the booze from prying eyes. None of the neighbours suspected a thing: everybody simply assumed that Grandad was taking delivery of more stuff for his junk shop, but me and Bendik (and later you too) usually kept a lookout anyway, just in case some busybody should come by, the plan being that if we stuck our fingers in our mouths and whistled loudly Erik and Grandad would haul some scrap out of the van that Erik always had with him just in case, then they would pull down the tarpaulin or slam the car door shut and say: “Right then, that’s the lot for now.”
Erik had been delivering moonshine to us for as long as I could remember and was a regular visitor at other times too so I’d got to know him pretty well, not just directly, but also through the countless and outrageously far-fetched stories he and Grandad were forever telling about themselves. He had a big, pear-shaped face with eyes set close up against his nose; he was well over six feet tall, so broad that your mother had to sew a panel into the backs of his jackets and shirts so they’d fit, and if you took his hand it was like sticking your fist into a boxing glove. “The only thing that man bows his head for is the top of the door,” Grandma used to say and it was true, because just like Grandad he had a remarkably powerful need to be his own man and a fierce hatred of being ordered about, managed or controlled. As far as Grandad was concerned I think this had something to do with him being a tinker, because if there’s one thing about a tinker it’s that he likes to be his own master and to go where he wants when he wants. Erik was a bit like that too, because as the son of a fisherman and farmer on Otterøya who personally provided just about everything his family needed, he had been taught to take care of himself and not rely on anyone else. And any man who learns to live like that is obviously also going to learn to love freedom as much as he learns to hate everything and anybody that tries to limit that same freedom.
“We’re soon gonna have to ask the fucking authorities for permission to wipe our own arses,” he used to say. “There’s no way I’m asking leave to put out a coupla salmon nets, and no way I’m asking leave to bury asbestos panels on my own land. It’s a flaming dictatorship, that’s what it is.
“Aye, and when some poor sod up at Lierne shoots a bear that’s attacking his sheep, fuck me if he doesn’t get a stiffer sentence than if he’d shot his bloody neighbour,” Grandad says.
“Aye, and they call that progress,” Erik says.
That’s how they went on when they were sitting having a wee dram. It was always the same: at some point they would start to get hot under the collar about something they weren’t allowed to do, or that they’d been criticized for doing, and they would get more and more steamed up until they were sitting there fizzing and fuming at the council and the government and politicians and toffs and everybody else that poked their noses into things that were none of their business and that they knew next to nothing about. This need to be one’s own master, to be a free agent, was also, I think, one of the main reasons why they made and sold illicit liquor. The money was definitely the chief incentive, obviously, but producing and selling moonshine was the same as breaking the law and breaking the law was the same as refusing to do what the authorities and power-mad politicians told them to do, and since this in turn satisfied their great need to see themselves as free men I think they would have done what they did whether they made money from it nor not. It’s a bit like me taking a trip across the Swedish border to buy drink and cigarettes. I don’t save a lot of money on it, but by Christ it feels good to do the greedy, toll-mad, duty-happy Norwegian state out of a few kroner.
I once visited the farm where you and your mother and Erik lived and where he had his still. Like I said, Grandad had a scrapyard and a junk shop, and one autumn day when I had gone with him to pick up stuff from a house clearance out on Otterøya he decided to call in on Erik and Albert and the rest of the hicks for a wee dram. After driving for a good ten to fifteen miles, stopping every hundred yards to shoo sheep and cattle off the road, we turned onto a narrow dirt road so rutted and potholed that Grandad’s false teeth broke with a loud crack as we bounced over the last hump.
“You’ll have to do something about the suspension on that pickup of yours,” Erik remarked, grinning, once Grandad and I had climbed out of the truck and Grandad was standing there in the muck, glumly inspecting the damage to his dentures. “Ain’t that right, Albert?” he said, glancing at his brother.
“Aye, must be somethin’ wrong wi’ the suspension,” Albert agreed, leering and baring a row of rotten stumps that glinted in the sun.
“The suspension?” Grandad growled. “The lad and I switched places I don’t know how many fuckin’ times just over that last few hundred yards.”
“Yeah, yeah, now come away in and sample the last batch,” Erik said, laughing as he laid his great bear paw on Grandad’s skinny shoulders and pushed him up the ramp and into the barn where the still was kept.
I’d seen plenty of illicit stills before this, of course, because back then most of the fathers in our neighbourhood had their own still gurgling away in the basement, ensuring them of their weekend tipple and a bit more besides, but the sight that met my eyes when I walked into the baking – hot, yeasty-smelling barn was something else again, and that’s putting it mildly. The must was stored in three green septic tanks, each of which had to have held 5,000 litres; the three gleaming condensers at the very back of the barn were enormous and could probably have distilled hundreds of litres of must at one time, and in front of a whole wall of ten-litre cans containing the finished product hung row upon row of charcoal filters. I’ve no idea how much liquor Erik and his team produced in an average year, but we’re talking thousands of litres, certainly. Thinking about it now, though, what really puzzles me is: what on earth did they do with the money? The profits must have been huge, but going by their homes and their clothes and their habits, anybody would have thought they were dirt-poor, every one of them. The house where you and Erik and your mother lived was small, crooked and lopsided and according to Grandad it was so draughty that there didn’t have to be any more than a fresh breeze outside to give you a centre parting as you sat in their living room watching the evening news. And as if that weren’t enough, they went on using the outside privy in the barn until well into the 70s. Erik normally wore old, washed-out flannel shirts with leather patches on the elbows and when he paid us a visit I used to charge my chums fifty øre for a peek at his massive shoes parked in the hall, so I clearly remember how worn the soles were on one side and so thin that he must have felt every pebble or bit of grit under his feet when he walked. The only thing that Erik quite evidently spent money on was motors: he was a member of the local Amcar club and sitting in the yard alongside the Hiace and the army truck that he used for delivering liquor were a 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air and a 1960 Oldsmobile F-88 Convertible – cars that cost a fortune even back then.
But however shabbily dressed Erik was and however dilapidated the house where you lived might have been, it was nothing compared to the state of his brother Albert’s place fifty yards further up the hill. Albert lived all alone in a tumbledown wooden shack with the once red paint peeling off its walls and two broken windows that he could never be bothered to change, but patched up instead with black plastic and bits of cardboard boxes. He never washed and rarely changed his clothes, and Grandma said the inside of his shack was a sight to behold, because he stoked his stove with tree trunks he found lying around in the forest and saw no point in chopping them up when he could simply stick one end in the stove and keep stuffing the trunk further in as it burned down. This meant, though, that the stove door had to be kept open while the fire was on, so the walls were pitch-black with soot and a heavy, acrid stench hung in the air, the sort of smell you get in old, burned-out buildings. Not only that but he couldn’t be bothered throwing rubbish in the bin or taking it down to the shore and burning it. He simply lifted the trapdoor in the floor and dropped it all into the cellar, where it lay and reeked and brewed and stewed, and the unbearable stink of the midden seeped through the cracks in the floorboards and mingled with the stench of smoke and soot. Albert himself was totally unaffected by it, he was used to it, Grandma said, and anyway he didn’t smell any better himself, because not only didn’t he wash himself or his clothes, he didn’t bother to brush the few teeth he had left in his mouth either, so you had to stand well back when you spoke to him – word had it that the fetid odour of stale coley and sour roll-ups could kill flies at ten yards.
“I wash the kitchen from top to bottom every time he’s been to see us,” Grandma used to say.
Grandad believed there was only one explanation for Erik’s and Albert’s pauper-like existence and that was greed. Albert survived mainly on fish he caught himself and food that he got for free from the staff at the Co-op because it was past its sell-by date and they were going to have to throw it out anyway. His evenings were usually spent tucked up inside the foul-smelling shack drinking moonshine and cold water in the glow of a twenty-watt bulb, and the farthest he was prepared to go in terms of extravagance and generosity was to invite his only grandchild to the new Chinese restaurant in Namsos, because she was anorexic so she was never hungry anyway. Erik probably wasn’t quite as mean, Grandad said, but he nicked loo rolls and sachets of salt and pepper from the Community Centre Café on Saturdays and if stewed prunes were fifty øre cheaper at the ABC supermarket than at Thor’s Cut-Price, then you could bet your boots he’d put the pack back on the shelf and amble on down to the ABC. So yes, he was fond of money, too.
But we had no idea, when you and your mother came to town, that you were closely related to our good friends Erik and Albert and that you had grown up in deepest, darkest hick country out on Otterøya. Since you had moved in with the vicar we just took it for granted that you were a simple country boy who went to church every Sunday and never swore, and as far as me and Bendik were concerned I think this was an even better reason to give you a really warm welcome than our admiration for Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre Hindmo and our desire to imitate them.
It was one thing that Grandad was a tinker and that the Church’s persecution of tinkers in Norway had left him with a hatred of churches and churchmen that had rubbed off on me and everybody else in our family, but quite another, and much worse, that your stepfather was a disgusting slimeball who was always making passes at my ma and other single mothers in the neighbourhood. Before he got together with your mother he was actually known all over Namsos for using his position as vicar as a way of getting to meet single women – as he probably had to do if he was ever to get lucky, because to be perfectly honest Arvid wasn’t the most attractive of men. He had no eyebrows, and he suffered very badly from psoriasis so his face was often covered in red, running sores. He wore freshly ironed shirts that he buttoned right up to the neck and their backs were always covered in a white dusting of scurf and dead skin. Not only that, but he was a creepy, snakelike character who reeked of scheming and ulterior motives and put everybody with any sense on their guard when they saw him slithering towards them. According to Grandad he always wore that smarmy vicar’s smile no matter how angry or annoyed he might be feeling, and whether there was any reason for it or not he would shower people with compliments, flattering and soft-soaping the women in particular, as I know only too well because when he was after Ma he was always clapping his hands and going into ecstasies over things that other visitors scarcely noticed, far less remarked on. “Oh, Laila, what a beautiful tablecloth,” he’d cry. “Did you embroider it yourself?” Or: “I must say, Laila, these are the best doughnuts I’ve ever tasted.” He chattered like a woman and the only reason Ma didn’t tell him to go fuck himself was, of course, that she and Grandad and Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre were planning to milk him for a few kroner – and that they did, very successfully. One day when the vicar from hell was sitting on our sofa, trying to come up with more fine words, Ma resorted to the good old ruse of ripping her blouse and screaming rape. Me and Bendik were helping Grandad to fix his ancient Corvette that evening and I had gone in to get some soldering wire to mend a hole in the exhaust when I heard her scream. The next second Uncle Willy and Odd Kåre burst into the room through two different doors. They pretended to be outraged, shouting and bawling that they were going to kill Arvid and send him to the bottom of Namsos Fjord, and then Grandad walked in and played the good guy, urging everybody to calm down and trying to prevent things from turning violent. They were prepared to let Arvid go, that was no problem. They could even be persuaded not to report the incident to the police, but Arvid would just have to make it up to them in some other way, Grandad said – the message obviously being that the vicar from hell had better get out his wallet or else. And that he did, terrified and confused as he was.
But by paying up to avoid being reported for an alleged rape Arvid was as good as admitting to having committed said rape, and since he was terrified that Berit would get to hear of it, and of how he’d been going around slavering over every unattached woman in Namsos, he wouldn’t allow me to set foot inside your house after we became chums. He told you and Berit it was because I was a thieving rascal who would make off with the silver first chance I got. But if that really was the reason then how the fuck was Bendik allowed in? Because everybody knew he was an even bigger rogue than me. But more about that later because, like I said, it would be some time yet before we became chums.