So we became friends and from then on we were almost inseparable, in fact there were long spells when you spent more time with my family than with Berit and Arvid. If I’d been allowed to come home with you we would probably have spent some time there too, although when I think about it I’m not so sure about that, because you didn’t get on too well with your mother and your stepfather, and that’s putting it mildly. Arvid was a real slimeball and you couldn’t stand him. Erik used to describe him as a “tolerant tyrant” and he couldn’t have put it any bloody better. You see, Arvid was the sort of person who would always ask your advice and want to hear what you thought, even though he had already decided what he was going to do, and he would go right ahead and put his plans into action with a sanctimonious smile on his face no matter how much you objected. He never tired of discussing Christianity with you, for example, but even though you told him quite clearly that you didn’t believe in God he refused to give you pocket money until you agreed to say grace before meals and clasp your hands and bow your head during prayers at the vicarage. And: “What would you like to do today, David?” he might ask, but there was no point in saying you’d like to go to the cinema or to the swimming baths, because he would already have arranged with members of the congregation to meet out at Framnes to grill sausages, play volleyball and rehearse with the children’s choir he had set up.
But back then you were even more mad at your mother than you were at Arvid, if that was possible, because it was, after all, her who had decided to leave Erik and move in with the vicar from hell. And this, together with the fact that she never protested and never spoke up for you when Arvid treated you the way he did, made you feel that she had let you down, isn’t that right? Although she meant well, I’m sure. Grandma said one of the reasons why Berit went to live with Arvid was so that you could get on and go up in the world. What this getting on and going up actually involved I’m not quite sure, but according to Grandma she certainly felt it was very bloody important to get you away from hick country before you really took root there and turned into a scruffy, wily mini version of Erik with no ambition except to hang around the barn, smoking roll-ups and making moonshine.
Your mother was ashamed of being a hick from Otterøya and she did everything she could, from the minute you moved to Namsos, to hide who she was and where she came from. She put away the home-made dresses and jeans so short she looked like she was expecting a flood and took to wearing what she personally thought were very smart outfits, all colour-coordinated. She ironed out every trace of her Otterøyan dialect and put on a kind of phony posh Namsos accent. But what was worse, according to what Erik said when he was at our place, was that she wanted less and less to do with him as well. And if he absolutely had to pay you a visit he was requested please to park his vehicle where the neighbours couldn’t see it, especially if he was in the camouflaged Jeep or one of the huge American cars, because they attracted so much damn attention. She took this denial of her own background so far that she wouldn’t admit to any knowledge of things that had been a perfectly natural part of your everyday life on the island, or so Grandpa said. When the Norwegian Farmers’ and Smallholders’ Association arranged a “farmers’ day” at the Namsos Fair one year, for example, she acted like a dumb townie female, asking one of the farmers whether the pigs were dangerous. And nothing would persuade her to taste fresh milk straight from the cow, a treat that she and you and Erik had once fought over, competing to see who could drink the most. Oh, no, that couldn’t possibly be fit for human consumption.
Naturally she expected you to consider this new life of yours as big a change for the better as she did and she couldn’t understand what you were so damned unhappy about. Didn’t you have your own room? Didn’t you have a stepfather who could help you with your homework and answer all the odd questions you were always asking? And weren’t you living within walking distance of the town, and in a neighbourhood where there were at least twenty or thirty kids of your own age? That’s the sort of thing she would ask you and then she would sniff and toss her long, red hair, as if to say she thought you were spoiled and ungrateful and absolutely impossible to please.
But all her snobbishness only pushed you further and further away from her and the vicar, of course. Having grown up without a father you had become unusually attached to Erik, and this made it bloody hard for you to see your mother suddenly turning her back on him and the life you had led on the island. And since you identified so strongly with Erik and all he stood for I can see how you must have felt that Berit was turning her back on you as much as on him when she wanted nothing more to do with her former life. Not only did such a rejection fill you with even more shame and anger than you had already been feeling, it also made it even more important for you to show who you were and where you came from. And this you did, of course, by acting even more like Erik and distancing yourself even more from everything that the new Berit stood for, particularly anything to do with her new Christian faith and lifestyle, since this was where the conflict between the new and the old life was greatest.
And once you know that, it’s not so hard to understand why you gravitated towards me and Bendik, since the sort of scrapes we got into must have been about as far from a Christian lifestyle as you could get.
Anyway. The anger you felt towards Berit and Arvid just grew and grew. Not only did you spend more and more time at our house, after a while you even stopped speaking to your mother and Arvid when you were at home. You simply chose not to say a word. They begged and pleaded with you to speak, but as you said to me if they weren’t interested in what you said or thought then you were going to show them that you weren’t interested in what they said or thought either, and no fucking way were you opening your mouth again until they realized that. And they could get as angry as they liked.
Bendik and I were really impressed by this and even though we didn’t actually plan it I remember we used this same strategy with the teacher we had at that time. Her name was Frida Iversen, but she had an enormous backside, a bulging stomach and stubby little hands that flapped back and forth as she waddled along the corridor, so we just called her the Duck. Christ, how we hated that woman. Or at least, although we didn’t understand it at the time it probably wasn’t her we hated, but the school that we associated her with. Because not only did the school try to fill our heads with knowledge we knew we’d never have any use for, and not only were we tricked into believing that we were stupid and lazy for not learning what the teacher said we had to learn, but we were even denied the fucking chance to develop the talents that we did actually have. None of the things we knew or that we could do were considered to be worth anything. Take me, for example: by the eighth grade I could have taken apart and reassembled the engine of Duck’s ancient Datsun (which was always misfiring) in just about the same time it took her to get it started, and yet she talked and acted as if, of the two of us, I was the stupid one. Or take Bendik. He was so bloody clever with his hands, but at school he was fobbed off with one woodwork period a week and then he had to sit there like a retard, finishing off a breadboard that the woodwork teacher had even gone so far as to cut out for him, because of course he couldn’t be allowed anywhere near the saw. I mean, that could be dangerous, right?
The point is that school was a nine-year-long insult. It was a nine-fucking-year-long humiliation of those of us who were more practically than academically inclined, and it was probably this, more than anything, that we were protesting against one day when we suddenly decided to adopt your strategy and refused to speak to the Duck. I don’t remember what it was she had asked us, but whatever it was we couldn’t be bothered answering and holy shit was she mad.
“Bendik! Tom Roger!” she shouted, slamming her hand down on her desk so hard that the pile of exercise books jumped. “For the last time! I’m talking to you, and when I talk to you, you will be so good as to answer.”
But me and Bendik, we didn’t say a word. We had both resorted to your strategy quite spontaneously and quite independently of one another, but once we realized what we had started it became a game to ignore her for as long as possible.
“Please yourselves,” the Duck said. She pointed to the door. “Headmaster’s office, now! Quick march!”
But we didn’t budge. We just sat there, looking indifferent. I chewed my gum and blinked lazily and Bendik let out a long yawn, not so much sitting as sprawled in his seat.
“Bendik and Tom Roger, did you hear what I said?”
There was silence for two or three seconds and then I turned slowly to you.
“Oh, by the way, I found out why your Puch stopped running when you were out on it yesterday,” I said. “The spark plug had sooted up again. It was totally black.”
“Oh, right,” you said, nodding slowly and trying to look every bit as laid-back and worldly-wise as we were all trying to seem back then.
“Tom Roger,” the Duck shouted, angry and shocked.
But I didn’t take my eyes off you.
“I don’t really think there’s any point in changing the plug, though,” I said. “We’ll probably have to adjust the carburettor to get it running smoothly again.”
You nodded slowly and pursed your lips, as if to say, “Hmm, interesting.”
“Tom Roger!” the Duck shouted even louder.
“The fuel mix is too rich,” I said.
After a couple of moments I heard the scrape of a chair being pushed back sharply. The Duck planted her hands on the desk and jumped up. She wound up her hips and did a quick little duckwalk out of the room. There was total silence for a few seconds and then the class erupted. Kids screamed with laughter as they mimicked the Duck’s voice and described to each other how furious she had been, and how crazy Bendik and I were for daring to do something like that, because there was going to be a helluva row now, they were sure.
“Huh,” Bendik said with a little shrug, to show how little he cared about that.
Not long afterwards the door opened again.
The babble of voices immediately died away. The headmaster had a round, almost constantly smiling face that made him look like the man in the moon and this, along with a squeaky voice that we never tired of imitating, meant that he didn’t exactly command respect. But he wasn’t smiling now. He positioned himself in front of the blackboard. He said nothing for a few moments, just stood there looking at the floor, drumming his fingertips together and looking as if he was thinking. Then suddenly he raised his eyes and glared at me.
“What exactly is going on here?” he said.
I gazed blankly out of the window. It had been raining, the wind was ruffling all the glittering puddles dotted around the playground and a white plastic bag drifted slowly across the football pitch where the sixth-graders hung out during break.
“Tom Roger,” the headmaster said.
I turned my head slowly. He carried on drumming his fingers as he paced steadily up to where we sat.
“What is going on here?” he asked again.
I shut my eyes and shrugged, opened my eyes again.
“Bendik?” he said.
“Nothing special,” Bendik said.
“Nothing special?” he said. “That’s not what I heard. I heard you and Tom Roger are refusing to answer when you’re spoken to.”
“Maybe you should get your ears checked,” Bendik said. He looked up at the headmaster and smiled. “Well, I mean, I just answered your question.”
The headmaster stopped in his tracks and stood for a moment with his mouth open, then he narrowed his eyes and looked at Bendik as if he couldn’t believe his ears.
“What did you say?” he asked.
Bendik turned slowly to me and nodded.
“Yeah, he definitely needs to get his ears checked,” he said.
We looked at one another and grinned and just in front of us I could see you shaking with suppressed laughter. The headmaster walked right up to Bendik, placed both hands on his desk and looked him straight in the eye. His moon face was scarlet with rage and he was obviously trying hard not to lose his temper and say or do something he would live to regret.
“Bendik,” he said. “I’ve told you before, but this time I really mean it. I’m losing patience with you and Tom Roger.”
“What have I done now?” Bendik cried. “You asked me what was going on and I answered you. Nothing special, I said. It’s hardly surprising that I’m starting to wonder whether you’re a bit deaf if you didn’t hear that?”
“You answered me, yes,” the headmaster shouted sticking his face a fraction of an inch closer to Bendik’s. “But you didn’t answer Frida.”
“Who?” Bendik said.
“Frida,” the headmaster shouted.
“I don’t know anybody called Frida,” Bendik said.
“Right, that does it,” the headmaster roared, slamming the desk with his hand. “Pack your bags and get off home, the pair of you. I’m going to phone your parents straight away and call them in for a meeting.”
“Okay,” Bendik said brightly, giving the headmaster a look that said this was good news and hardly what you’d call punishment. And then he turned to me. “Shall we go round to your house?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
So in other words we said stuff school.
Ma and Bendik’s mother weren’t exactly happy about this, but they didn’t get too upset either. Sometimes Ma did say things like “You have to finish school so you won’t end up like me,” or: “These days you need an education to get a job,” but only when the situation called for it, like when she and I went to parent–teacher meetings and she wanted to give the impression that it certainly wouldn’t be her fault if I didn’t finish lower secondary. Because in actual fact she thought that most of what we learned in school was as much of a waste of time as I did, and she simply couldn’t understand how anybody would take up a student loan and spend years studying to get a job that paid them half what they would have earned if they’d got a job as a car mechanic straight after ninth grade.
You worked harder and did much better at school than Bendik and me for the simple reason that you liked that sort of work and it came easily to you. It wasn’t as though skipping classes and saying stuff school posed some threat to the great ambitions your mother had for you and that you therefore felt obliged to swot and do well at school. Far from it. In actual fact you tried to convince both your mother and Arvid that you cared even less about school than you actually did. You refused to give them the satisfaction of seeing you do well in an area in which they really wanted you to do well, so you didn’t tell them when you got good marks, you often said that you’d skipped school even when you hadn’t and you made it crystal clear to them that you wouldn’t dream of going on to upper secondary.
Mind you, you were exactly the same with Bendik and me, I remember, but for a very different reason – not because you wanted to distance yourself from us but because you wanted to show that you were just like us. It was almost as though you felt you were letting me and Bendik down when you understood more and did better than us in school. I often noticed that you tried to act as though you knew less and could do less than you actually could. I never saw you put up your hand in class, for example, even if you knew the answer to whatever the teacher had asked. And if the teacher asked you a direct question, you always said, “I’ve no idea, ask Brainy there,” then you’d nod at Audun and grin.
But back then the fact that you were good at school and Bendik and I were not didn’t matter much as far as our friendship was concerned. None of that mattered until we left lower secondary. At the time I’m talking about here, when we were in our early teens, the bonds between us were greater than our differences. If you didn’t come home with me straight after school you’d come knocking at the door sometime later in the afternoon. Then we’d go and pick up Bendik and cruise around on our mopeds till late in the evening. We weren’t old enough to drive mopeds but hardly anyone cared about that sort of thing in those days, which was just as well, because riding our mopeds made us feel every bit as free as anybody wants to feel during adolescence. The thing is, you see, if you grow up in a city you can take the tram or the train or the bus into the centre of town and lose yourself in the mass of streets and buildings and people, but for kids like us, growing up in a small town like Namsos, that just wasn’t possible. For us to feel anything like that as teenagers a moped was the thing. A moped expanded our horizons and our possibilities, a moped meant freedom, escape and independence, and from that point of view it was also a symbol of how we wanted to see ourselves and how we wanted others to see us. Which was probably why we spent so much time and energy on washing them and working on them. Because Christ knows we did: hour after hour, evening after evening in the garage or the yard at our place, unscrewing this, tightening that; you working on a ’72 Puch with custom handlebars and aluminium wheels, Bendik on a ’73 Tempo Panther with flames painted on the petrol tank and me on a Corvette 380 from 1974.
Even in those days these were, in fact, real old-guy mopeds, but since we liked fixing up bikes and since you didn’t just go taking apart a brand-new moped for no reason, they were just the thing for us. And anyway, it was so bloody satisfying to see the looks on the faces of trust-fund brats on gleaming new FZs when we opened up the throttle and zoomed past them on our old, battered scooters, because our bikes were of course wolves in sheep’s clothing – and how. Take my Corvette, for instance: it had a fairing and windshield, a cowl and original panniers that brought tears to the eyes of every man over seventy when they saw it coming, right? But what people didn’t know was that I had bored out the exhaust, put in a Comet cylinder and 17 mm Comet carburettor and mounted new drive mechanisms on the front and rear gear wheels. Together, all of this gave the moped a top speed of around seventy miles an hour on the flat (we had a car drive behind it to measure the speed) and that was more than enough to allow it to zoom past the trust-fund brats and get away from the cops if that should be necessary.
So in this way too our mopeds reflected the way we wanted to be, right? People thought they were just useless heaps of junk, but when the shit hit the fan, when it really counted, they could leave just about anybody standing.
The fact that I knew how to use a spanner and was a better mechanic than most, came in pretty damn handy when our business really got going in the mid-80s. Like I said, before you came to town we were already doing the odd little job, but it didn’t amount to much more than breaking into the occasional holiday cottage, stealing the little we could find in the way of valuables and selling them to Grandpa, who then sold them in his junk shop. But back then holiday cottages were a bit more plainly furnished than they are now, to put it mildly, so there was never much for us to lug back to Grandpa except fishing tackle, transistor radios and old propane gas stoves, and we weren’t exactly going to make our fortunes out of that.
Then one day something happened that marked the start of a new phase in our life of crime.
It was the 16th of May, the night before Constitution Day, and as always we had gone down to the beach at Gullholmstrand in the evening. But unlike other years when we drank beer and pretended to be drunk or made a bit of money by running around collecting empty bottles for the deposit and gathering firewood for the older kids, this time we were among the teenagers sitting round the bonfire drinking home-brewed hooch. There were some girls there from Høknes Lower Secondary that we were keen to meet, as they were supposed to be easy and willing to go all the way, so we stuck as close to them as we could. We were shy and unsure of ourselves and like most kids of that age we tried to hide this by acting tough. Both you and I added less water to our liquor than we knew we should, our accents got thicker, we cursed and swore and were even louder and brasher than usual. If one of us made some crack aimed at the other, he was liable to get a hard but friendly clout on the back of the head, and every now and again we would get up and chase one another along the beach or wrestle each other to the ground, making terrible threats that nobody took seriously. Bendik was exactly the same, of course, but because he was so fucking shy, especially where girls were concerned, he had to go even further than us to make himself feel tough and sure of himself, and on this particular night, as so often before, things got a little bit out of control. The first to suffer was Janne. She had attached herself to us as usual and was sitting by the fire, trying to unhook the coffee pot from its stick so she could mix herself a karsk.
“Phew, it’s so bloody hot,” she said. “I think I’m gonna melt.”
“Yeah, well it’d do no harm for you to melt off some of that lard anyway,” Bendik said. He pulled a tin of General snus out of the pocket of his denim jacket, opened it and slipped a sachet under his lip. “You’re starting to look like a fucking weather balloon.”
Everybody sniggered.
“Sorry?” Janne said. She obviously hadn’t caught what he said because she was smiling cheerfully at Bendik.
“I said you’re looking very nice this evening,” Bendik said.
Janne stuck out her tongue and made a noise meant to sound like “blah”, then she turned away and carried on struggling with the coffee pot. We looked at Bendik, you and me, and grinned, and there were sounds of giggling and snickering round the fire.
“Would you look at her,” Bendik said, nodding at Janne, grinning and shaking his head. “She’s so fucking ugly a harelip would look good on her.”
Everybody burst out laughing at this, great big belly laughs. A few of the girls nudged the boys and asked them to stop it, but even they couldn’t help giggling a bit.
Janne sat there staring into the fire. Her eyes were swimming and she had to swallow once or twice, but she managed to hold back the tears. Only once the laughter had died down did she turn to Bendik.
“I know how I look, Bendik,” she said.
There was silence.
Janne never took her eyes off Bendik.
“I do the best I can to … I try to make myself look nice, I do,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter how much time I spend on it … I know I’ll never look good. But it hurts to have you always reminding me of it.”
Silence, broken only by the crackle of the fire.
Suddenly it didn’t seem so funny any more. Even you and I were a bit taken aback by this brutally honest answer and a few of the girls whom Bendik had probably been hoping to impress by acting tough and clowning about looked even sadder than Janne herself. But Bendik being Bendik he couldn’t leave it at that. Even though you put your head on one side and sent him a look that said enough was enough the snide grin stayed on his face.
“Yeah well, you can doll up a toad, but it’ll still be a toad. And you’re right, you’re never gonna look particularly good,” he said. “But you might not look quite such a fright if you didn’t slap on so much make-up. When we went on that school trip to Langvassmoen it looked like you’d left your fucking face behind in your sleeping bag when you got out of it in the morning.”
Nobody was laughing now.
“Cut it out, for Christ’s sake,” one of the girls said.
“Can’t you see she’s crying,” another one asked.
“Aw, shut your face,” Bendik retorted. He snorted and sneered as he took a sip of his karsk.
“How would you feel, Bendik, if the only people who liked you were your mum and dad,” Janne sobbed.
“Yeah, yeah,” Bendik muttered.
After a moment or two Janne put her hands up to her face.
“I’m gonna kill myself,” she said. She must have been feeling very hurt, but it was obvious that she also thought it was nice to have the other girls sympathizing with her and was trying to gain still more sympathy by acting even more heartbroken than she actually was. And it worked, because two of the girls got up and went over to her, put their arms round her shoulders and tried to comfort her.
“I’ll kill myself,” Janne said again. “I will, I’ll kill myself.”
“Is that a promise?” Bendik asked.
“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” one of the girls said. She eyed Bendik furiously for a moment, then she turned to you and me. “Hey, is that beast your mate?” she asked, nodding towards Bendik.
Obviously we had to stand by Bendik so we laughed in her face.
“Yeah, of course,” I said.
“Deep down he’s a really nice guy, you know,” you said. She shot us a look of disgust before turning away and going back to comforting Janne, who was now sobbing harder than ever, of course. Bendik sat there grinning so broadly that we could see his snus sachet glistening at us, but he knew he’d made a fool of himself, I could tell, because he had that wide-eyed, very focused look that he got when he was slipping into the darkness that he sometimes slipped into. And when he was in that mood you had to watch your step because there was no telling what he might do
“Cheers, Bendik,” I said, raising my mug.
“Cheers,” Bendik said, doing the same. But his mug was obviously empty because he immediately put it down and picked up the bottle of beer belonging to the guy sitting next to him, cool as you like.
“Oy, that’s my bottle,” the guy shouted.
“So?” Bendik said. He put the bottle to his lips, drained it and chucked it down onto the shingle where it promptly shattered. For a moment the other guy just sat there open-mouthed, staring at Bendik, but then he clenched his left fist and punched Bendik in the face, hitting him so hard that he toppled off the rock he was sitting on and fell straight into the fire. He didn’t lie there for long, of course, he kind of rolled over it, but it was long enough to singe his hockey hair and his eyebrows and so on, and when he got to his feet he looked like something out of the loony bin, he was so mad. The guy who had punched him must have been some sort of athlete because he had taken off like a shot and was already way down the road. Bendik charged after him but before he had rounded the bend in the road leading up to the housing estate the distance between them had doubled and he was left standing, gasping for breath. But he wasn’t about to be put off, not Bendik. He was blind with rage and the need for revenge and although the place was swarming with people he marched down to the car park, climbed onto a Suzuki 250 that was sitting there, started it and rode off after his assailant. Bendik never did catch the guy. He had either run off into the forest or he was holed up somewhere on the housing estate. In any case, what I started to say before I got lost in all those bloody detours was that this “borrowing” of a scooter marked the start of what I referred to earlier as a new phase in our life of crime. What happened was that Bendik did a few rounds of the two blocks up on the moor, then he gave up and drove back down to the beach, but to save being caught red-handed by the motorbike’s owner he left it in a grove of trees and walked the last couple of hundred yards to where we were sitting, right? And there the bike stayed, and not just for one day or a couple of days. Two weeks later when you happened to be in the neighbourhood, it was still bloody well sitting there, so we seized the chance and drove it back to Grandpa’s shed, right? Then we sprayed it black and sold it to a moron from Nærøy for eight thousand kroner. Eight thousand! That was a bloody fortune in those days, so obviously we were tempted to do it again.
And that is exactly what we did.
In the evenings we would ride around Namsos and the surrounding area, looking for mopeds and small motorbikes that would be easy to steal, and a few nights later two of us would ride back out there on my moped and drive two bikes back to Grandpa’s shed, where we’d make the stolen one unrecognizable by stripping it down, replacing parts, respraying it and doing it up a bit. As usual Grandpa never questioned what we were doing. Not at all, he was keen to make a little money out of it himself, and as well as charging us a small amount for the use of his shed he started hinting that maybe we should expand our activities a bit more and bring him in on it. Not that he ever said so in so many words, but he kept giving us little tips, all of which were meant to get us to see things his way while still leaving it up to us to suggest that we team up.
“Looking bloody good,” he remarked one day as he stood with a cigarette butt in the corner of his mouth, eyeing up a Zundapp we’d just got ready for selling. Smoke coiled up from his lean face and he narrowed his eyes as he hunkered down and ran a finger over the freshly sprayed petrol tank.
“Is it yours?” he asked, looking up at you with a grin that said he knew exactly what we were up to.
You stood there with your thumbs hooked into the loops of your belt, looked at him and grinned back.
“Yeah,” you said. “I just bought it, but I’m gonna sell it again.
Grandpa nodded and stood up, still grinning. “Bloody good,” he said again, blowing smoke out of his nostrils. “I could sell five like that in a day if I wanted to. No bother.” He stuck his hands in his pockets and stood leaning back slightly, inspecting the moped.
“Yeah, well, not here in the shop, of course,” he went on, and then he looked at me and raised his eyebrows. “But around and about. I’ve had my own junk shop for thirty years, you know. I’ve travelled all over the country, doing house clearances and the like and I’ve made a lot of contacts,” he said.
We looked at one another, not saying anything.
He swung his leg over the moped and gripped the handlebars.
“Right then, how much do you want for it, David?” he asked.
You slid your thumbs out of your belt loops, turned your palms up and gave a little shrug. “A thousand kroner, maybe,” you said.
“Is that all?” Grandpa said, looking at you and nodding. “I’m sure I could get fifteen hundred for it if I spoke to the right people. As much as two thousand, maybe.”
That’s the way he went on and we were smart enough to take the hint, of course, so the next day we wandered over to his place and suggested the very deal he had been priming us to suggest and after scratching his chin and looking doubtful for a minute he pretended to let himself be talked into it. And then we really were in business. We rode around the Namdal area, stealing mopeds that we fixed up and resprayed, then Grandpa sold them on to various friends and friends of friends. I don’t know how much money we made at that time, but it was a fair bit and if you think we frittered it all away you’re wrong, because even though we did spend more on beer and cigarettes and stuff than we would normally have done, you, Bendik and I all saved up for driving lessons and our own cars. And it has to be said that Ma and Bendik’s mother got their share too. I treated Ma to a new TV and video, for example, and since Bendik’s ma didn’t have a freezer, just one of those fridges with a little freezer compartment inside it, he bought her a brand-new chest freezer. And as if that weren’t enough, he filled the freezer with venison and elk meat that he’d got cheap from Erik and Albert, who – in addition to hawking illicit liquor – ran a large-scale poaching operation.
Both my ma and Bendik’s knew of course that there was something fiddly going on as Janne so aptly put it. But being poor but proud and flatly refusing great presents just because they’d been stolen or bought with dirty money was a luxury neither of them could afford, so not only did they accept our gifts and not only were they only too fucking pleased to do so, after a while they also began to treat us like grown men. So, while Arvid and Berit still expected you to tidy your room once a week and made you blow in their faces so they could smell your breath when you came home late and Christ knows what else, Bendik and I were suddenly promoted to being the heads of our households, or not far off it at any rate. We came and went exactly as we pleased, we never asked permission to do anything. We began to have a say in things and make the sort of decisions about domestic matters that the man of the house usually makes, like when Bendik’s ma came home one day and found him panelling the living room walls. “That old wallpaper was looking so sad, I thought I’d freshen the place up a bit,” he said. Or when Ma had been out to the postbox one day and came back in with two electricity bills. “It was so bloody big I called and asked them to split it in two,” I told her.
But in the autumn of 1985 something happened that turned me back into a little boy overnight, so to speak, and not only that, it threatened to overturn our whole business. What happened was that Ma got herself a new man, and not just any man either, let me tell you because while Ma may have sneered at Berit for being ashamed of her poor hick roots and marrying for money and prestige when you got right down to it she was no better herself. You see, this guy she had hooked was a little, bald thirty-five-year-old with short legs and a lot of Sunday dinners sloshing about under his chin. Ma was only thirty-two back then, she had big brown eyes, long raven-black hair and looked like a Colombian fashion model, but she still felt had made a real catch because fatso had his own plumbing firm with branches in several towns in Norway so he was rolling in money, drove a white Mercedes and talked, acted and dressed as if he owned the world.
It was actually quite incredible to see how my family behaved once Peder Raade, as he was called, came into our lives. Grandma raised her eyebrows and tried to look as if every word that dropped from his lips was pure gold and Grandpa bowed and scraped and couldn’t have agreed more with whatever this guy Raade said. Mind you, that was Grandpa all over. Whenever he met anyone higher up the social ladder with money in the bank he would play up to them and go along with everything they said. The difference in this case was, though, that while he usually sneered at and made fun of those same people the minute they were out of sight, with this guy he would still be going on and on about how right Peder was about this or that long after Peder was gone. “Aye, I’m with Peder on that – Social Democrat or Communist, they’re all the bloody same,” said the man who had voted Labour all his days, and: “No, it’s true what Peder says, it’s a shame that plane tickets are so dear in this country” – this from a man who was terrified of flying and would not set foot in an aeroplane, not even if you put a gun to his head.
But Ma herself was the worst of the lot. She was so desperately keen to fit in with Peder and become a part of his world. She ditched the big red plastic roses she usually wore in her hair and the bracelets and rings and all the other trinkets Uncle Willy had bought for her on his holidays abroad. She suddenly lost the taste for moonshine. It had to be gin and tonic for her now, preferably Bombay Sapphire, or at the very least Golden Cock, and as if that weren’t enough she started talking about “funds” instead of money. Funds! It was so ridiculous you couldn’t help laughing and fuck knows I did. And I wasn’t alone either, you did too, because when you saw how Ma was behaving it reminded you of your own mother.
But the worst of it was, as I say, that she started treating me like a kid again. “Have you done your homework, Tom Roger?” she asked me when she and Peder walked into the living room one day and found you and I sprawled on the sofa watching a video. And one night when I was on my way to bed she actually asked me if I’d taken my cod liver oil. As if she had ever cared whether I did my homework or not, and as if I had ever been in the habit of taking cod liver oil. It was ludicrous. I realized, of course, that she said these things because she was hoping that she and Peder would eventually have kids, so she wanted to sound like a good mother when he was around, but even so, the difference between the way she had treated me right up until she met Peder and the way she was treating me now was so huge it was comical.
Peder himself scarcely seemed to notice how hard my family struggled to behave the way they thought he would want them to behave and if he had noticed he would probably have told them to relax, because I think he found it exciting, exotic even, to be a part of our family. He thought it was really funny, for example, when Ma forgot about acting posh and slipped back into her old rough way of talking, and he never tired of saying how relaxed he felt when he was with us, we were so easy to be with, as he said, so straightforward and so honest.
But there were two things he didn’t like.
For one thing he wanted Ma to stop working as a clairvoyant and medium, because although he didn’t say it straight out he made it plain that by putting the sort of ad in the paper that she did, she was as good as making herself the laughing stock of the whole town. What Ma thought about this I don’t know, but her regular ad stopped appearing in the paper soon afterwards and her consultations with clients, on the phone or at home, came to a sudden end.
The other thing that Peder wasn’t too happy about was, of course, our business. At first we lied in his face and told him we got paid for repairing and doing up mopeds, but the guy was no fool and when he noticed that every bike was given a respray and fitted with new parts that were little more than decoration he soon figured out what we were up to, right? I don’t know what he said to Ma, but one day when you and I were in the shed, fitting chopper handlebars on an old Honda 50 and listening to W.A.S.P.’s “Animal (Fuck Like a Beast)” on my old mono cassette player, she came in and asked us what exactly we were doing. She stood there with her head on one side, eyeing us up and fiddling with the catch on one of the earrings Peder had bought for her on his last business trip. They were blue and round like grapes, I remember, but they had cost a fortune, so she had got into the habit of fiddling with them. It was a way of drawing attention to what she was wearing in her ears, or at least that’s what I thought at the time and it’s what I still think.
I felt anger begin to smoulder inside me.
“As if you didn’t know what we’re doing here,” I said. “As if you haven’t known all along.”
“What?”
I got up slowly, picked up a rag from the black synthetic leather seat and looked at her as I wiped some oil off my fingers.
“Don’t play dumb,” I said.
She stared stonily at me, just stood there for a moment.
“I can see I’ve been too trusting where you three were concerned. I’ve been too naive, so I have.”
I let out an angry little laugh, reached out a hand and turned the music down a bit.
“That’s quite a performance, do you expect us to believe it?”
She didn’t say anything for a moment, didn’t take her eyes off me, but I could tell that she knew we were onto her and there was no point in keeping up the act, because suddenly she dropped her sad, disappointed expression. She jutted her head forward another inch or so and growled at us.
“I don’t give a flying fuck what you believe, but if I see you bringing so much as one more moped here I’ll call the cops,” she said, and then she turned on her heel and stalked off.
Ma’s threat to call the cops if we didn’t pull the plug on our business didn’t really bother you or Bendik or me, but from then on Grandpa became so cautious it bordered on paranoia. Not that there was ever any mention of him pulling out, he was too fond of making easy money for that. But he would no longer allow us to fix up the bikes in his shed and every time we had to talk to him about something to do with the business he would turn up the sound on the cassette player and spend a minute or two racing around like a bloody ferret to check that Ma wasn’t eavesdropping on us. As far as I can remember, at that point neither Ma nor Peder knew that Grandpa was in on our scheme, but Grandpa was so dead set on making sure they wouldn’t suspect him that that in itself eventually began to look suspicious. Not only was he always jumpy and on his guard, but in the hope of making it seem utterly unthinkable that he could be involved in our activities he actually started acting as though he was worried about us. “I’m sure that whatever they’re up to it’s no more than boyish pranks, Laila,” I heard him tell Ma one day, “but I am a bit worried that it won’t stop there.” And: “I wonder if those lads aren’t a bad influence on one another. Maybe we should try to split them up.” That’s how he went on, and it sounded so phoney and so out of character that I was sure it was only a matter of time before Ma would rumble him.
But I was wrong, obviously.
I was still living on the ground floor of Grandpa’s and Grandma’s house, but Ma had moved into Peder Raade’s house up on the hill at Høknes and even though she still had a key and was always popping in to see us, obviously she couldn’t keep tabs on you, me and Bendik like before. We’d got our freedom back, and we made good use of it I can tell you. Within just a few weeks we had expanded our activities to include stealing boat engines. It was an amazingly easy way to make money, we didn’t know why we hadn’t thought of it before. Today such engines cost about a thousand kroner per unit of horsepower. Obviously it wasn’t as much as that back then, but still, if we stole one fifty horsepower engine and one thirty horsepower engine in a weekend, for example, it goes without saying that we made a packet. What we did was we borrowed Erik’s boat and took it out to one of the many holiday cottage sites scattered along the shores of Namsos fjord. We would hide in some bay or inlet for a little while, then we’d row quietly over to the marina or floating jetty or wherever the boats were tied up, untie the moorings of the boat with the biggest engine and tow it to some place where we wouldn’t be disturbed. Then we’d get out the blowtorch and remove the engine from the hull. As soon as that was done we’d load the engine onto our boat and head for some out-of-the-way spot where Grandpa would be waiting with the pickup truck. And then, after we’d manoeuvred the engine onto some polystyrene sheets that we’d spread out on the bed of the truck, we’d pull a tarpaulin over the whole lot and set off to pick up another engine from somewhere else entirely. Grandpa was very particular about this last part. We weren’t ever to take more than one engine from the same marina or floating jetty, and if we were going to pinch several engines on the same night, we had to take them from different spots, all far apart from one another. If we didn’t, it would no longer look like a scattering of one-off thefts, but more like a large-scale, well-organized criminal operation.
“And what do you think would happen then, Bendik?” Grandpa asked once when Bendik was insisting that we should take two engines from the same holiday cottage site in Flatanger. “Well, I’ll tell you. If the cops didn’t start investigating the matter off their own bat they’d be forced to look into it once the press got wind of it, and they would, you bet your life they would. So it’s important not to get too greedy. Because if we get too greedy, sooner or later we’ll get caught, that’s for sure.”