The first time I met you face to face was down on the beach at Gullholmstrand. Me and Bendik were there and so were Janne and her dog, a fat old Labrador with a gammy hip. It was half-blind, this mutt, and would have been put down long ago if Janne hadn’t loved him more than anything else in the whole world and if her parents hadn’t been convinced that she’d be even more sad and lonely if she were to lose him. Janne wasn’t someone we chose to be friends with or invited to hang out with us, but she sometimes tagged along with Bendik and me because she didn’t have anybody else, and even though we weren’t always as nice to her as we might have been, we kind of accepted her and she was happy about that and grateful.
When the grown-ups talked about Janne they said things like “She was at the back of the queue when good looks were being handed out” and “She’s a nice, well-behaved lass, but maybe a bit more backward than other kids her age”, but they only talked like that because they all wanted to be seen as nice people, when in fact what they actually thought was what me and Bendik said straight out: that Janne was ugly and stupid.
Because Christ knows she was. She had the kind of big, heavy glasses that left sore spots behind her jug ears and on her pug nose. She had a length of white elastic attached to her glasses that was supposed to keep them in place, but it was so tight that it made her hair stick up at the back, making her look like a peewee or a crested grebe or whatever it’s called, the bird I’m thinking of. She also had a double chin that wobbled when she walked and an arse so big it hung over the sides of the chair when she sat down. Her face was broad and flat and perfectly round with a big mouth that she never closed, not even when she ate, something that came in handy when you and me and Bendik wanted to upset the stuck-up, oh-so-prim-and-proper girls in our class, I remember. All we had to do was give Janne one of the bars of chocolate we’d pinched from the corner shop and ask her to sit down beside them at break and eat it while they were having their packed lunches. That put them right off their food, I can tell you, and sent them running out of the classroom to throw up into the drinking fountain in the corridor. It was just as hilarious every time, or so we thought.
But enough of that.
Anyway, me and Bendik and Janne were down on the beach. I remember Bendik was cursing Janne because she had laughed when her dog climbed onto his foot and started humping it. They were both too taken up with this to notice you coming down the path with your swimming things in a Co-op carrier bag. You sat down on the sand just a few yards away from us.
“You should’ve been an abortion, so you should,” Bendik said to Janne.
Janne opened her big mouth wide and hooted with laughter, her eyes flicking between Bendik and me.
“D’you even know what an abortion is?” I asked her.
“Yeah,” Janne said. “I’m not a complete idiot, you know.”
“Now, now, don’t exaggerate,” Bendik said.
“Huh?”
Me and Bendik looked at each other and grinned.
“Okay, Janne, so what’s an abortion then?” I asked.
“It’s one of them black guys, in Australia, innit?” she said.
Me and Bendik doubled up, howling with laughter. I shot a glance at you while I was laughing, but you weren’t laughing. You weren’t even smiling, you looked very serious, grim almost, and you scowled at us as you stuck your hand into the Co-op bag and pulled out a beach towel.
“She’s thinkin’ of aborigine,” Bendik gasped. “She’s thinkin’ of aborigine.”
Janne said nothing. She was still sitting there smiling with her mouth wide open.
“Holy shit,” Bendik sighed, grinning. He wiped away the tears of laughter and shook his head. “You’re unreal, so you are. How many chromosomes do you actually have?”
“More than you anyway,” Janne said.
And that set us off again.
But Janne was laughing as well. That was the great thing about her. She seldom seemed to know when she had made a fool of herself or was being made fun of, so she was usually pretty happy and contented when she was with us. But you still didn’t laugh. You sat there looking all pursey-mouthed, probably trying to show how morally superior you were to us and how much sympathy you had for those less fortunate than yourself, what do I know. But I must have been thinking something like that as I sat there, because it was really starting to piss me off that you wouldn’t laugh at something as funny as this.
“I don’t think the vicar’s brat finds us very funny,” I said, nodding to where you were sitting. Bendik turned to look at you.
“Oh yeah?” Bendik said, not taking his eyes off you.
“Don’t call me vicar’s brat,” you said without looking at us. You wrapped your towel round your waist, stuck one hand underneath and started to take off your shorts.
“Well, well, hark at him,” I said. I looked at Bendik and gave a laugh that said no way could he tell me what to do.
“Who the fuck do you think you are?” Bendik asked. “Do you think you can come here and order us about just ’cos you’re the vicar’s brat?”
You didn’t say anything.
“Hey,” Bendik said, a little louder. “Hey you, vicar’s brat. We’re talkin’ to you!”
You still didn’t say anything. You pulled your shorts down to your ankles, slipped them off, put them in the Co-op bag and took out a pair of bathing trunks. Me and Bendik were just about to get up and come over to you, but we stayed where we were for a moment longer because suddenly Janne’s dog waddled up to you and started sniffing under your towel. You tried to push him away, but that wasn’t so easy to do because you had to hang onto your towel with one hand to stop it falling down and revealing all your equipment. In any case, the old dog had caught a whiff of your balls so he wasn’t to be put off that easily, if you know what I mean. Normally he was so arthritic and stiff that you could almost hear him creak when he walked but now, suddenly, he was as frisky as a ferret. He scampered about, darting here, there and everywhere so that for a while it looked like you were surrounded by black Labradors. Bendik and Janne and I just sat there slapping our thighs and roaring with laughter, but when you fell on your arse in the sand and the dog grabbed the chance to start humping your leg, Bendik and I leaped to our feet. Neither of us needed to say a word, we were both thinking exactly the same thing: that we should hold you down and let the dog finish what it had started. It was disgusting, I know, and I’ve apologized to you lots of times since then, but we did what we did, so I’m writing it down here. At any rate, Bendik held your arms and I sat on your legs and then the dog could get on with what he wanted to do.
“Look at ’im go, look how horny he is,” Bendik yelled, laughing and nodding again and again at the pointy, pink dog dick rubbing up against your leg.
“I think he fucking likes you,” I cried, grinning at you.
“He thinks you’re a real sweetie,” Janne piped up. Neither of us had known that she could be deliberately funny, but apparently she could and Bendik and I laughed so hard we nearly wet ourselves, and that in turn made Janne happier and more animated than I’d ever seen her before. She hung over you, laughing and laughing with that great, gaping Mongol mouth of hers. “Sweetie, sweetie!” she cried and she went on like that until the panting dog finally came, sending spurts of greyish-yellow spunk onto your knee and your calf. Then we let go of you and ran off sniggering, all three of us.
It was pretty rotten what we did to you there, of course, and I’ve no decent excuse for it. Except that that’s just how we were and our background was what it was. And since this was the background that you eventually fell into and became a part of, I think I should tell you a little more about it.
To take Bendik first:
He had holes in most of his teeth, a mop of ginger hair and a tiny upturned nose covered in freckles. I’ve always felt that all of this, together with his skin, which was a sickly bluish-white, like skimmed milk, fitted really bloody well with the uncontrollable rages and wild behaviour that would lead, a decade later, to robbery with violence, double murder and ten years in prison. Honesty and common decency were airs and graces that he had no time for, and whether he was faced with other kids or adults he didn’t know, he was always just as pushy, cheeky and totally fearless. He fought and lied and stole, not just when he felt he had to, but just as often because he thought it was exciting and fun. If he was spotted and caught he would put on a brilliant act, sobbing his heart out, begging and pleading to be let go and swearing by all that was holy that he’d never do it again. But as soon as his victim took pity on him and Bendik got beyond arm’s reach he would scoff and sneer and fire the most hurtful insults at the person concerned, and before too long he’d be off on yet another raid.
But behind the bandit‘s mask there was another Bendik, and even though it sounds so stupid that I almost balk at writing it down, this Bendik was an insecure boy with hardly any bloody self-confidence, partly because of the mother he had. Ingun Pettersen was well up in years when she had Bendik and by the time you moved to Namsos she was a wrinkled, bent old woman with mournful, doggy eyes set slightly too close together in a face that was yellowish-brown from way too much Petterøes No. 3 tobacco. We just called her “the Chimney” and if you kidded her and told her that she ought to shut her kitchen window because she could be fined thousands of kroner if the fire brigade was called out to a false alarm, she would squeeze her doggy eyes shut and croak that hoarse, hacking laugh of hers. That’s a sight that’s stuck in my memory because it was pretty bloody rare for Bendik’s ma to laugh or be cheerful at all. She was obsessed with sickness and death and disasters of one sort and another. She seldom talked about anything else and when people got fed up and remarked on her gloomy view of things she always responded by saying that they weren’t strong enough to cope with the harsh realities of life. But if there was anyone who wasn’t equipped to cope with the harsh realities of life, it was her. Because the fact was that she suffered from anxiety and hardly ever left her council flat. She was fretful and frightened of just about everything and no matter what Bendik might do or was supposed to do or felt like doing she was always sure it would end in disaster. “Well, don’t blame me when you’re sitting there in a wheelchair, paralyzed from the waist down,” she said when Bendik was a little boy and wanted to jump from the big ski-jump hill along with the rest of us kids. “You’ll know what I’m talking about when you’re looking at your fingers lying on the ground,” she said, when wee Bendik wanted to take his sheath knife out with him to whittle something. She also made sure that Bendik knew the emergency number for police, ambulance and fire brigade by heart and as if that weren’t enough he was never allowed to go anywhere without a card in his pocket on which she’d written his blood type – just in case he had an accident and needed to have a transfusion.
Obviously a lot of her fretfulness and anxiety and pessimism rubbed off on Bendik and, knowing as I do how much he hated that side of himself, it was hard not to see his rough, tough manner as a kind of compensation for this. Sometimes, for instance, if we burgled a place where there was a particularly big risk of getting caught, he would be running with sweat and white with fear, but the minute he realized he was afraid and, even worse, that he looked afraid, he would do a complete turnaround and be so intent on seeming brave that he could become reckless and take unnecessary risks. He was the same in other situations too. In discussions or disagreements he’d do anything rather than say what he thought, and if he was unfairly treated in any way he would simply swallow it, go all quiet and look almost sad. But this never lasted long, because suddenly it would seem to dawn on him that he was acting like the spineless wimp he hated to be and he’d instantly switch back to being the tough, aggressive lout whom even grown men were loath to cross.
Me, I grew up in an old yellow-washed, two-family house further down the same street as Bendik. Ma and I had the ground floor and Grandpa and Grandma lived on the first floor, but I spent almost more time upstairs than down, certainly during those spells when Ma was seeing the most hopeless of the men she took up with. As to my Da, he fell off a crane and was killed when I was only three years old, so I don’t remember anything about him. According to Ma I didn’t miss much, though, because he was an even bigger bum and drunkard than the guy she was with when you moved to Namsos and that’s saying something, since he drank aftershave and ate shoe polish when he was hung-over and couldn’t get hold of anything else to stop the shakes. I know it’s not normal to call a man a bum when his son can hear it, but that was Ma for you, she couldn’t be bothered hiding anything from me, or certainly none of the things she should have hidden. She made no effort to put away the dildo that lay on her bedside table, even though she knew I’d be in and out of her bedroom. She’d come crying to me to tell me the latest on her love life. And when she had her gabby, chain-smoking women friends round the air in the living room would be blue with talk dirtier than I’ve heard in any of the construction-site camps I’ve ever lived in. I remember, for example, one of the first times you came home with me, because Heidi Olufsen was there, the woman I would lose my virginity to at an after-party a year later and who then took it upon herself to teach me what Grandpa used to call the fine art of rumpy-pumpy. Oh, my God, what a glorious time that was. Anyway. You and I had come into the living room to fetch something and Heidi and Ma started asking us about our gym teacher.
“Do you take showers with him?” Heidi asked.
You were surprised and a bit thrown at being asked such a question. You didn’t say anything right away, but then you saw me grinning and that reassured you.
“Sometimes,” you said.
“Lucky sods,” Ma said pertly. She and Heidi looked at one another and cackled suggestively. They both bent over the coffee table, knocked the ash of their cigarettes, then sat back on the sofa.
“So, has he got a big dick?” Heidi asked. She took a quick puff on her cigarette and grinned at you, blowing smoke out of the corner of her mouth. You didn’t say anything. I think you were wondering whether this was some kind of a joke or whether they really did want to know.
“Does he, Tom Roger?” Heidi asked, turning to me.
“Not as big as mine,” I said, grinning. “But yeah, it’s big.”
Ma and Heidi looked at each other and cackled again.
“Ooh, hark at him!” Ma cried.
“Big-head,” Heidi said.
“No, but seriously,” Ma said, stubbing her cigarette out in the ashtray and holding her hands out in front of her, a bit like an angler describing the size of a fish he has caught. “This big?” she asked.
“Bigger,” I said.
“This big, then?” Ma said, holding her hands farther apart.
“Bigger,” I said.
“Oh, my God,” Heidi gasped. “Go into the bathroom, somebody, and get me a cloth. This sofa’s getting wet.”
So, as you can see, in our house there was no clear line between the children’s world and the adult world. Ma spoke and acted around me pretty much the same way as she did with her women friends, even though the people from Child Welfare had advised against it and tried to persuade her to shield me from that sort of thing. “I’ve got nothing to hide and there’s no fucking way those bitches from the social work department are going to make me pretend I’m better than I am when I’m with my kid. I’d rather he learned to have respect for himself and be proud of who he is and where he comes from.”
That, more or less, was what she said, and she usually made a point of adding that those social workers didn’t really want to help. What they wanted was to see people like her struggle in vain to be like them, because that acted as a sort of reminder to them that they’d done well for themselves and were better than ordinary folk. Not to labour the point, but if you ask me she was right in a lot of what she said. Specially when it comes to what kids are supposed to be shielded from, it seems to me that things have gone way over the score. These days you can’t even say the word “nigger” without the authorities moving heaven and earth to whisk the kids off to safety. I’m telling you, I’ve seen it happen more than once at parents’ meetings at nursery or school.
There was one thing about Ma though that really fascinated you, I remember – and I’m not thinking about her tits, which were always bulging out of a bra several sizes too small and which you used to gaze at longingly when she was sunbathing in the garden. No, I’m talking about her work as a medium and clairvoyant. I was used to it, of course, and I couldn’t really see the fun in hiding in the wardrobe behind the red velvet curtain to spy on her when she held her consultations, but I did it for your sake and I can still remember how mesmerized you were by the sight of Ma sitting there solemn-faced and straight-backed with her eyes closed, letting the dead speak through her or seeing into someone’s future. A future which, as it happens, was usually either very bright or very bleak and seldom anything in-between. “I can taste blood. Promise me you’ll see a doctor as soon as you leave here,” she told the plumber who lived further down the street. Or: “Oh, I feel a pressure in my pelvis, you’re going to have many children, at least three,” as she said to Jenny Lund.
Once in the mid-80s, after you’d been going on at her for ages, she finally gave in and agreed to help you find your father. I haven’t mentioned this before, but not only did you grow up without a father, you didn’t even know who he was, because for some reason Berit refused to talk about the guy. So it was no wonder you were so tense and serious-looking as you sat there in the deep, red-plush armchair, watching Ma light the obligatory incense stick, closing her eyes and preparing to search. There was a long silence, then she suddenly began to speak in the flat, monotonous voice she always used when she travelled out of her own body.
“I smell baking, cakes … I’m in a cake shop … or a café … the walls are pink … and I hear voices, many voices … but I don’t understand what they’re saying … they’re speaking another language … I don’t know what language it is, some East European … no, wait … wait … there’s one voice that’s … that’s rising out of the babble of voices, a deep male voice …”
She fell silent for a moment or two and then something happened that was unlike anything I’ve ever seen before or since. And it seemed to come as as big a shock to Ma as it did to us because even though she couldn’t speak any language but Norwegian she suddenly started speaking very fast in what we at first thought must be Russian or Polish but which turned out to be Slovakian. Or at least the only sentence we could remember afterwards was “Stalo sa prvého septembra” and this was apparently Slovakian for “It happened on the first of September.” Don’t ask me what happened on the first of September that was so special, or whether this meant that your father was living in what was then Czechoslovakia and is now Slovakia, but that’s certainly what we thought when Ma was finished and you got up from the armchair, pale and dumbstruck by what you had just witnessed.
While Ma was a medium and fortune teller, Grandpa ran, as I’ve said, a scrapyard and junk shop, so the garden, the yard and the garage were all overflowing with every sort of old rubbish. The neighbours were really pissed off with us about this, especially all those middle-class buggers living in the big villas on the other side of the fence. They saw red every time Grandpa rolled up with a new load in his blue pickup, because junk in the garden was one of countless things that didn’t fit with the chocolate-box style of life they were trying to build for themselves. Not only did they write to the council to complain, they also started a petition which stated that Grandpa was “polluting the local environment” and “putting the lives and health of children at risk by allowing them to play freely in unsafe surroundings strewn with dangerous objects”. But Grandpa was a tinker and used to being hassled so that sort of thing cut no ice with him, and he usually got his own back anyway. Not long afterwards, when the guy who had started the petition put his house up for sale, Grandpa made a point of inviting Erik and all his other drinking cronies over for a thumping great karsk binge in the garden at the exact time when the house was being viewed. Not only that, but he got Erik to bring an old toilet up from the basement and dump it right where it would be the first thing prospective buyers would see from this guy’s veranda. Oh, God Almighty how Grandpa crowed when he heard some time later that the house had sold for way under the asking price. Best of all, though, was the time when the guy who lived right next door to us wrote a letter to the Namdal Workers’ Weekly that everybody knew was aimed at Grandpa and all his junk. Grandpa smiled and was as sweet as sugar and grovellingly polite when he ran into the guy in the street one day, but that very same evening he summoned you and me and Bendik and Uncle Willy to the yard. We left the junk exactly where it was, but we moved the fence several yards further over into our ground so most of the mess now seemed to be in our neighbour’s garden, making it look as if he, and not Grandpa, was the neighbourhood scrappie. A brilliant act of revenge, if you ask me.
Being looked down on by those middle-class buggers was one thing, but it was quite another matter, and much worse, to be looked down on by many of our own. Oh yes, because that we fucking were. Ma believed it was because we weren’t as well off as a lot of other working-class people and because we couldn’t join in the so-called consumer boom of the 80s, but I don’t really think that had so much to do with it – there were plenty of folk around us who couldn’t afford to run out and buy all the things the admen said they should buy, but no one thought any less of them for that. The difference between them and us was that they spent their time and energy on mending and fixing up, painting over and touching up things that were old and battered to make them look decent. We, on the other hand, didn’t really give a fuck about all that. In other words, we didn’t give a fuck about the ideals, the expectations and tastes they had picked up from the middle classes and which the middle classes must have picked up from the upper classes. That’s why they looked down on us. Or at least that’s how I see it today. We weren’t to be intimidated. This could be seen even more clearly in our attitude to work, I remember, because, as with Erik, nobody in my family could be bothered pretending that the whole point of life was to slog your guts out from the age of sixteen to sixty-six. And it wasn’t that some members of the family hadn’t tried that either. Under pressure from Grandma, Grandpa did take a job in the quality control department of the Van Severen sawmill, for example, but he only stuck it out for two or three months because, as he growled on the day when he had finally had enough, “No fucking way was I put here on this earth to sit on a chair for eight hours a day, looking at wooden planks.”
And Ma was exactly the same. She had tried a lot of jobs before setting herself up as a fortune teller and medium, but on those occasions when she didn’t quit off her own bat she was given the boot and if anybody suggested that she only had herself to blame, for being such a slacker and a sloppy worker, she told them in no uncertain terms that she wasn’t going to break her fucking back for fifty kroner an hour. She used pretty much the same argument in court when she was convicted of embezzling money from the newsagent’s out at the Prairie, I remember, because when the prosecutor asked how much she had taken she replied: “Only as much as I felt I was entitled to.”
But this sort of protest, if I can call it that, didn’t mean that we were ashamed of being who we were, and when I think about it I don’t actually believe that any of us felt as much shame as Grandpa, who was a full-blooded tinker. Norwegians have never had any time for tinkers, you see, because the sight of a free and footloose tinker reminds the Norwegian of how tied he is to the clock and his employer and all the things he owns that he feels he has to guard. To save being reminded of how unfree he is, the Norwegian has done his best to wipe out the tinker society and this he has done in ways that are as bad as anything the Nazis did during the war. Grandpa’s mother was forcibly sterilized after giving birth to his little sister, his uncle was shot full of LSD then given a lobotomy at Gaustad Asylum in 1946, and as far as Grandpa himself was concerned there was hardly a town in Trøndelag that he hadn’t been beaten up in and run out of. It goes without saying that if you’re treated like this then you will, unconsciously, seek the reasons for this. You’ll start to wonder what’s wrong with you. Well, as the good book says, “seek and ye shall find”, and before you know it you find you hate yourself.
And if you ask me it was this sense of shame and self-loathing that also led Grandpa to beat up Grandma every now and again. I’m not making excuses for him, but because Grandma wasn’t a tinker herself I think he sometimes saw her as a sort of representative of society at large and of his persecutors. She was the one who tried to get Grandpa to work and earn money instead of sitting on the porch playing guitar or lying in the hammock behind the shed reading pulp Westerns. She was the one who insisted that it was worthwhile clearing the snow, even though Grandpa was quite right when he said that it would eventually melt anyway. She was the one who got mad at him when he came home from the shop with expensive steaks for dinner instead of the makings of four economical meals that she had sent him to buy. And she was the one who worked from the minute she got up until she went to bed, thus making Grandpa look like an even bigger layabout than he actually was. No matter how discreet and soft-spoken Grandma was she was still a constant reminder to him of what a failure and a misfit he was, so she was the one who had to pay the price when his self-loathing became too much to bear and his lust for revenge too great.
And speaking of revenge.
That incident with the dog on the beach wasn’t exactly the best way to make friends with someone, and that’s putting it mildly. It was a rotten thing to do and you had every reason to want to pay us back. And pay us back you did. One day Janne’s dog’s mouth started to bleed. The next day his nose was bleeding too and on the third day when Janne went to take him for a walk he couldn’t make it any farther than the lamppost on the other side of the street. He had peed on that lamppost practically every day of his life and he had no doubt been planning to do so again, but that wasn’t to be. The poor mutt was so weak that he couldn’t lift his back leg, so he had to pee straight down onto the ground like a bitch. And not only was his pee pink with blood, as soon as he had done his business he flopped onto his belly and lay there flat out with his tongue lolling, dead as a doornail.
What you had done was to stuff as much rat poison as you could into three lung sausages and then you had thrown these to the dog, one a day, when he was chained to his kennel. Bendik and I honestly hadn’t expected you to do anything at all. We thought you were a spoiled, mollycoddled vicar’s kid, a middle-class bugger who would be far too much of a wimp and a coward to take revenge, and who would try to disguise his lack of courage and spirit by going on about how it takes much more strength to turn the other cheek. But we couldn’t have been more wrong, because you didn’t stop at killing Janne’s dog with rat poison. A few days later when I was walking home from school you jumped out at me from behind the phone box next to the Favør Cut-Price Store armed with a chain. The last thing I remember, before I came to on the pavement with terrible pains in my head, my cheek and my left ear, was the dull clink as you wound the chain round your hand, preparing to strike. This could very quickly have developed into a vicious circle of tit for tat, but it didn’t, because when I staggered home and Grandpa asked who had done this to me and I told him it was the new kid at the vicarage, he realized I was talking about Erik’s grandson. So a little meeting was arranged in the permanently dust-laden back room of the junk shop. There Grandpa and Erik told us in no uncertain terms that we had to make peace on the spot. We glared at each other and weren’t at all keen to shake hands, I remember, but we knew they meant what they said and that we had no option, because even though they didn’t say it in so many words, it was easy to see that they were scared we’d become so blinded by rage and vindictiveness that we would end up dragging our families into it, and that would have had serious consequences for both parties, particularly if one of us was stupid enough to tip off the cops about certain breaches of the law committed by the other lot. Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this more or less enforced reconciliation paved the way for what was to be a long and happy friendship between you, me and Bendik.
To be continued.