He believed all the hollows in the fields by the women’s prison were caused by bombing. He imagined that the world was once completely flat and the bombs that fell during THE WAR, in his mind like big heavy bumble bees, had formed the landscape the way it was now.
When Dad talked about THE WAR, and he often did, for he had been a part of it, Arvid could picture these hollows, and when they were playing in the little valley they called Dumpa it struck him that some of the bombs must have been really big.
When he found out that no bombs had fallen around where he lived, he couldn’t believe it, for the image of the rolling fields and the bumble-bee bombs had become part of the boy he was, and there was nothing to put in their place.
He thought the women’s prison was a church, and it looked like a church, but although he knew there were always people inside he never saw anyone coming out. It was so quiet in the courtyard behind the high wire fence, the gravel was red, like nowhere else in the district, and the tall doors were always locked. Sometimes there was a black car in the courtyard, but he had never seen it coming or going.
He knew there were always people inside for when he played in the fields he saw faces at the windows, and when the women inside waved he waved back, and when the wind was blowing from the right direction their voices fluttered like scraps of paper on the shining autumn air. But when they shouted to him, he ran, and after he was told it was not a church he only played there if he forgot he shouldn’t.
One time when he did forget, there was a woman standing at a window shouting:
‘Give my love to Joakim!’ And she started to laugh aloud when she saw him run. He covered his ears, for he didn’t want to hear, but it was too late and he realised he would always remember the name: Joakim.
A few days afterwards Dad read aloud from the newspaper about someone who had escaped from prison and Arvid knew at once who it must have been.
That night she came to him in his dreams and she shouted Joakim! Joakim! until he woke and sat up and he too called Joakim! Joakim! and Mum came bursting into his room and said, for God’s sake, what is going on here?
Between the high rises and the terraced houses there was a barn. It was red with large grey peeling patches and had stood there for ever, for as long as he had lived, and even though Dad said it was part of a farm that had been there before, Arvid couldn’t care less. The barn was there, and was the Barn.
‘Let’s go and play in the Barn,’ the children said to one another, because it was a good place to play, and the fact that they were not allowed made it even better. The grown-ups said it was because the place was falling down, but Arvid thought why would a barn that had stood for as long as he had lived suddenly decide to collapse right now?
The Barn had a traditional ramp and a big barn door that was shut with a bolt and a big padlock. Arvid and Jon Sand had tried to open it many times, Jon had even tried with a fire-cracker he had swapped with his big brother for a copy of Illustrated Classics, and had stuffed it into the lock. There had been a bang, but that was it. The lock was still intact and the door still closed.
They jumped from the barn ramp, and the trick was to jump from as high as possible. The higher, the tougher. It could be dangerous, but until now two broken legs were the worst that had happened and that wasn’t too bad.
Arvid was almost up by the door when he jumped, and there was such a wonderful rush in his belly when he leaped, and he rarely hurt himself because he was so light. The big boys called him Death Diver, and whenever they said that he smiled inside. But he didn’t smile with his lips, he just curled his top lip the way his mother had shown him that Elvis did when he was at his peak, and if there was something Mum knew about it was Elvis. When they played Elvis on the radio she sat at the kitchen table with a cigarette and sang and smoked and knew all the songs by heart, and every morning she sang ‘It’s Now or Never’ in the bathroom.
Arvid had practised in front of the mirror in the hall and after a while he was so good at curling his lip that many people thought he had been born like that.
But Jon was the one who could jump furthest. Arvid did the best he could and yet he was always half a metre behind.
‘Your legs are too short,’ Jon said. ‘See for yourself, your knees are almost in your shoes!’ But that couldn’t be right because the doctor at school had said he had a well-balanced body, and when he asked his mother what that meant, she said every part of his body was in its right place and that was a good thing.
In any case Arvid thought it was better to be the Death Diver than an ordinary long jumper. Jon probably thought so too, Arvid guessed, but he didn’t say that, because they were friends and shared whatever fame and glory came their way.
‘I wonder what’s inside,’ Arvid said. They stood there with leaves in their hair, sand in their shoes, staring at the shabby old barn, their knees giving way and their legs shaking after a long but happy stint of jumping.
‘Comics,’ Jon said. ‘Newspapers.’
‘Comics?’
‘Yes, Donald Duck, Texas, Wild West, Prairie, Arbeiderbladet, Jukan, Morgenposten. When they had a paper collection, they brought it all here to the Barn. My big brother said so, for he saw them.’
‘Texas comics?’
‘Yes, dammit.’
‘But then we have to get inside before it’s too late!’
‘Sure, but how?’
They looked at the big walls and felt helpless, the solid barn door and the foundations, and then they both saw it at the same time. The Barn didn’t have proper foundations like terraced houses, it was standing on a square of big boulders, and between the rocks there were gaps. How could they have missed them?
They ran round the Barn searching for the biggest gap and when they found it Jon almost threw himself in, he squirmed and kicked and shoved until he was stuck, and Arvid had to pull him out again.
‘It’s no good,’ Jon said, holding his hand to a graze on his cheek. ‘You try.’
Arvid peered into the black hole, and now he wasn’t so keen. Suppose there were someone inside, you couldn’t know that beforehand, suppose she was in there hiding while everyone was searching, and once he thought about her he could almost hear her and he was sure that was how it was: she was inside, in the dark, waiting for him.
But Jon was standing there, looking excited, and he had done his bit, he even had grazes on his cheek, and it was suddenly impossible for Arvid to say he didn’t dare.
He felt a chill inside as he stuck his head in and began to push himself between the rickety stones. It was so dark inside he didn’t know whether his eyes were open or shut, and after deciding he wouldn’t go any further he felt Jon grab his feet and push him all the way in. It was a tight squeeze, the sharp stones scraped against his stomach and one of his jacket buttons came off, and then he was on the ground inside and screamed:
‘Shit, what did you do that for?’ But then he shut up because it was so low under the floorboards above him that his voice bounced back and boomed in his ears and filled up the dark.
‘Because you’re so damned slow,’ Jon said from outside. ‘Do we want the comics or not?’
Arvid groped with his hands like a blind man at the movies, afraid of touching something strange or perhaps someone strange, and wasn’t that breathing he could hear? At any rate something was moving, there was a rustling of paper, and then he felt something brush against his thigh, something soft and living. He gasped for air, the hairs on his neck stood up, he went stiff and straightened up, but instead of hitting his head on the floor above he was suddenly able to stand upright. And then he realised he had his eyes closed, and when he opened them, it was no longer dark.
There was a hole in the floor. He had his head and shoulders up inside the Barn and streams of light came flowing between the wide cladding boards and, when he looked around him, he saw an ocean of newspapers and comics.
He seized the nearest bundle, tore at the string, and it snapped with a twang, and an avalanche of magazines came crashing towards him, sending swirls of dust up into the air. Arvid grabbed as many as he could hold, shrank back down through the floor and crawled fast towards the aperture of light, where Jon was standing unharmed outside, no ice in his stomach and only a graze to his cheek.
‘Wow!’ said Jon as magazines, newspapers and comics suddenly came flying from the crack in the wall, followed by Arvid with a look in his eyes that Jon had never seen in his friend before.
They sifted through them and it turned out that, apart from three copies of Alle Kvinner, four of Aftenposten and six of Reader’s Digest, there were two of Tarzan and five of Texas they had never ever seen. Arvid fingered the spot on his jacket where the button used to be and said:
‘Call me Ali Baba!’ And then he laughed.
Jon wasn’t the sort of boy to keep secrets, and soon the story about Arvid’s exploits was doing the rounds. At the same time the grown-ups had started to talk about the Barn being demolished, and about time too, Dad said, that dump is a danger to life and limb, you keep away from it, Arvid! I will, said Arvid, but out in the streets panic ran like a terrified squirrel between the houses, children exchanged looks and thought, so close to the riches and maybe their newly discovered way into the Barn would be lost and gone for ever!
One evening Jon knocked on the door to ask if Arvid could come out. His big brother wanted to talk to him, Jon said, and Arvid asked his dad if he could. Dad glanced at his watch and said:
‘Have you done your homework?’ even though he knew full well that he had, Arvid always did it the minute he came home from school.
‘Yes, I have,’ he said.
‘OK, half an hour,’ Dad said as he always did. Arvid could have asked at ten o’clock on a Sunday night and his dad would have replied, ‘OK, half an hour.’
Outside it was dark and wet, and although it was not raining, you felt the damp air settle on your skin at once and it was good to breathe. Arvid liked it when it was dark and wet, he felt tucked up in a woollen blanket and hidden away, yet able to walk wherever he wished.
Trond Sand was fifteen years old and waiting by Thomassen’s with a cigarette in his mouth that he smoked, and Arvid could see the glow bobbing up and down like the lanterns at sea when they took the ferry to visit Gran and Granddad in Denmark.
‘Hi, Death Diver,’ Trond said.
‘Hi,’ Arvid said with a slight curl of the lip.
‘I heard you got into the Barn. You’re the only one who made it. Pretty neat, if you ask me.’
‘Ah, it was nothing special.’
‘It was, trust me,’ Trond said, taking a drag from the cigarette, blowing smoke out again and it looked white and ghost-like against the black sky. Trond flicked the butt and it twirled round and landed with a hiss on the shiny, wet tarmac.
‘You know Bandini?’ he said.
Stupid question, Arvid thought, everyone knows Bandini. Bandini was the strangest man in Veitvet, and that was saying a lot, for in Veitvet there was no shortage of strange men. Bandini was Italian and an artist, the only one Arvid had ever seen close up. He had a walking stick and wore a green army jacket and his long hair was tied in a knot on top of his head. Mum thought that was charming. Bandini was also the politest man she knew, and in this block everyone and his brother could learn a little from that, she said, casting a meaningful glance at Dad, who might as well have his Sunday-school fees back, for it had been a complete waste of money.
On the lawn outside his house Bandini had placed a car engine painted blue, and when there were enough people in the street he would go out and pat the engine and say, this, my friends, is great art. But Dad said it was a Ford Anglia engine, and it was not great art at all, it was a load of crap. He said that because he once had an Anglia himself, but when he started working at Jordan he couldn’t afford a new car after the Anglia packed up.
Most of the time Bandini sat in his flat painting naked ladies. At the kiosk he was Knoff’s biggest customer for Cocktail, for it was not easy to get live models in Norway, Dad said, who liked Bandini well enough, for he had also been to THE WAR, in Italy, but had fled because a man called Mussolini wanted to cut off his head.
‘Of course I know Bandini,’ Arvid said.
‘He’s moving back to Italy,’ Trond said. ‘He can’t manage the hills up to Trondhjemsveien any longer, and Mussolini croaked fifteen years ago, so there’s no problem going back.’
Trond lit another cigarette and went on:
‘So he gave all his magazines to the paper collection, and I was thinking you might do me a favour. Get my drift?’
‘No,’ Arvid said.
‘You don’t wanna do me a favour?’
‘Yes, I do. I mean what favour?’
Trond rolled his eyes. ‘Bandini’s mags, they’re in the Barn, right?! And you’re the only one small enough to get in and big enough, intelligence-wise, to know what to look for! You can have my steam engine for ten mags. Get my drift now?’
The steam engine! Arvid had seen it many times in Jon’s house. It was on a shelf just inside the door to Trond’s room and was so shiny and beautiful to look at it almost hurt to think about it. And it worked. Arvid was allowed to have a go one time when Jon and he had been alone, and he had wanted one since he first saw it.
‘I haven’t used it for years,’ Trond said. ‘You can have it for ten mags.’
‘But which mags do you mean?’
‘For Chrissake, of course you know. The ones he uses to paint from. They’re in the Barn. Ten of them, you can manage that.’
Arvid knew what Trond meant because he had been to Bandini’s once for a glass of water and had seen what was hanging on the walls in there, but he didn’t say a word about it to anyone at home.
‘All right, I’ll see what I can find.’
‘Great, come on.’
‘No! Not now!’ Arvid remembered the dark inside, the place stuffed with darkness, no light from the timber cladding now, no light from the crack in the wall.
‘I have to get back in, Dad will be furious. I’ll do it after school tomorrow.’
Trond looked at him as he blew smoke from the corner of his mouth and said:
‘OK, Death Diver, it’s a deal. But don’t you mess me about!’
‘I won’t,’ Arvid said.
The day after, he almost ran home from school. On the way he passed the Barn, but he didn’t even give it a glance, for he had to hurry home with his bag first and didn’t want to think about anything until he had to.
He slung his bag in the hall and shouted to his mother, who was in the kitchen frying meatballs:
‘Be right back. Have to go to Jon’s to fetch something!’ And then he slammed the door before his mother had a chance to answer.
Fatso was sitting on the stoop reading Arbeiderbladet as he always did at this time of day. He had his woollen jacket on, it was mid-October and cold, but Fatso didn’t take his newspaper inside until the first snow had fallen.
‘Hello,’ Fatso said. ‘How’s it going, Arvid?’
Arvid didn’t answer, just walked straight by, and as he rounded the corner by Thomassen’s Fatso called after him, ‘You’re as damn polite as your father!’
Arvid walked up the hill to Grevlingveien and sneaked between two houses and down to the Barn from the top. That way not many could see him, for the crack in the wall was on that side, and he was lucky, for no one saw him at all.
He had the knack now, and it was easy to get in through the hole. Instead of wearing a jacket with buttons he had on a thick jumper and he slid in with ease and knelt groping his way forward to find the hole in the floor. And then he found it and pushed himself up with his shoulders hunched, and he was up looking around.
The place was stripped. Not a magazine, not a newspaper, not a comic, not so much as a lousy Popeye. Just loads of mess and rubbish and dust, dust and more dust. But beneath the roof sat two men with ropes around their waists and they were up to something, they had hammers and monkey wrenches and they were banging and unscrewing some huge bolts. Arvid stood up fully to see better and then he saw a strip of light widen and then he knew. It was the wall, they were tearing down the wall! Arvid threw himself into the hole like a frightened badger, but he didn’t look and halfway down got stuck. He heaved and pulled, but it was no use, his belt was snagged at the back, and he began to take it off as fast as he could. But his fingers were as stiff as dry twigs, and the men were pounding away at the wall making the whole Barn shake, and one shouted to the other:
‘All right, Joakim, let it go.’ And he gave the wall a savage blow with his hammer. Arvid gasped. Joakim! The wall swayed, he was going to die, he was going to be squashed, and then he screamed:
‘Joakim!’
‘What?’ The man turned. ‘Oh, shit me! Olav! There’s a kid in here!’
‘I was told to say hello!’ Arvid yelled.
‘What?’ The man was desperately banging the wall, striking it again and again, both of them were smashing at it for all they were worth.
‘I want to sleep,’ Arvid whimpered and buried his head in his armpit. ‘I want to sleep.’ And then the wall fell, as if in slow motion. Outwards.
‘Lord Jesus,’ the one called Joakim said as he climbed down. Once he was on the floor he ran over to Arvid, lifted his head off his arm and looked into his face.
‘Are you all right, boy?’
Arvid turned round and he could see daylight, and there was his house just across from the Barn. He looked up at Joakim and smiled.
‘I thought she was under the floor, but she wasn’t. She must have run off somewhere else.’
He struggled to his feet and set off towards the light streaming in where the wall had been, he could see the bright, blue autumn sky and the sun, and then he turned.
‘If I wish for a steam engine this Christmas, do you think I’ll get one, even if it’s expensive?’
‘Definitely,’ the men said, looking at each other. ‘No doubt about it.’
‘Great,’ Arvid said. ‘Bye.’ And he ran out of the Barn, his heels banging on the barn wall, that was lying there like a bridge out into the world.
‘Jesus,’ Joakim said. ‘What’s the matter with kids nowadays?’