Exposed at the Back

by Arild Stavrum

  Steinar took note of one person in particular in the background of one of the photos. A man whose name the journalists hadn’t found out, described only as Golden’s business partner, but who Steinar recognised well. Business partner? Steinar had no idea that Golden had anything to do with that bastard. He got back on his bike and gripped the handlebars. They creaked.

  Steinar took a long sip of his special blend of coffee, Red Bull and cranberry juice. It washed away the last remaining taste of blood and acid. He put the bottle back in its holder, turned the bike round, started his stopwatch and began rolling downhill. He sped up as the view vanished, then he turned the bike into the woods, down along the steep gravel track.

  His cycling computer showed 55 km per hour. With little shifts of his weight he managed to avoid the biggest stones, but he hit a large bump and the bike took off, so high and far that he had time to think in mid-air. He made a perfect landing then threw himself into a sharp bend. As he rounded the corner a man was standing 10 metres in front of him with his back turned, waiting for his dog to do its business.

  ‘Out of the way!’ Steinar shouted.

  The man turned his head, eyes wide open, but stood stock still. Steinar swung onto the high bank above the ditch, cycling along it almost horizontally.

  His muscles couldn’t take the strain for more than another few tenths of a second. He used all his strength to force the bike back onto the track, scraping against a withered tree trunk. It would hurt tomorrow, when there was no more adrenaline to relieve the pain. He heard the man behind him shouting four-letter words.

  The track flattened out. Steinar kept on pedalling until he came to a small car park in the woods at Akebakkeskogen. He stopped the clock.

  His arm was bleeding from the scrape with the tree, but the cut looked clean. In the old days, Steinar had lost pieces of flesh on bone-dry astroturf and slid on muddy grass pitches with open wounds. This was nothing.

  A couple of minutes later his heart rate was back to normal. He checked his watch. Four seconds off his personal record. So close it was irritating. Lance Armstrong’s mantra came back to him as it always did in such situations: ‘Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever.’

  Steinar had quit too soon once before. He got into the saddle and started back up the hill.

  30 minutes later he was back in Akebakkeskogen. The same course, the same route, a new personal record. A feeling of calm descended. He drank his lukewarm cocktail and wiped his hand over his drenched forehead. The blood on his arm had dried now, but it was probably best to wash it before going home.

  He wheeled his bike between the houses until he came to the junction of Lofthusveien and Kjelsåsveien. A couple of pensioners were sitting on the terrace outside the little red newsagent’s shop. One of them was holding up a lottery ticket. Ahead of Steinar was a low building with the big yellow and black sign of Skeid sports club. He walked towards the changing rooms. A man was sitting on the steps that led into the kit room. The man was in his fifties, wearing only a pair of blue Adidas shorts. Everything about him was sagging, the bags under his eyes, his flabby pecs, his arms and the length of ash from his cigarette almost touching the ground. It seemed highly unlikely that he would manage to lift it back up to his mouth.

  ‘I’m just going to use your loo,’ said Steinar.

  The man didn’t answer. He’d given in to the heat.

  The changing rooms were decorated with the odd patch of faded red paint, and the benches had been given a bit of blue; otherwise the space was dominated by black mould, which made it look as if flames had licked up the once-white walls. Steinar went into the showers.

  He cleaned his cuts and patted them with toilet paper. Then he went back out of the changing rooms, ready to walk up the gravel track and out of the area.

  At the top of the climb he looked down at the gravel pitch, and at the red shelters over the substitutes’ benches. Grass was growing through the gravel in a few places. Nothing in the world could match the beauty of an old gravel pitch. Then Steinar heard a whistle from the astroturf behind him, the referee blowing for a foul. A voice cut through the air: ‘No!’

  Steinar had dropped football altogether, but he recognised the sounds instinctively. And the smells. Of newly baked waffles, coffee and sweat. He had to watch, at least for a while.

  10 years had passed, and Steinar thought he’d got over it, but the picture in the paper had reawakened the ghosts of the past.

  How could the man who destroyed Steinar’s life and career be Arild Golden’s partner?

  The Talent Factory

  ‘No!’

  Like the rest of the people in Nordre Åsen, Benedikte jumped when she heard the scream, which echoed halfway up the Grorud Valley. An over-excited supporter of the Oppsal Gutter 95 boys’ team had seen enough of Stanley’s dribbling skills.

  And it was Stanley, Skeid’s child prodigy, who Benedikte had come to see. Stanley was considered Norway’s foremost footballing talent, and he would soon be 15, the age when agents could secure the rights to represent young players. According to a tip-off received by TV2, Arild Golden had reached a verbal agreement with the family, so the other agents in Norway had given up. But now that he was dead, Stanley was fair game. There would be a real fight to sign the Skeid player.

  Every time Stanley got the ball it was as if the whole world stopped. For a brief moment, Benedikte was able to sympathise with the Oppsal defender who had his eyes nervously fixed on Stanley’s red Nike boots. Then Stanley shimmied to the right. A hundred small pieces of black rubber were sent flying up from the artificial turf. The defender had sunk down on both heels, glued to the playing surface, his hands out to the sides, palms facing forward, his mouth wide open. He was like a cartoon character who had run straight into a pane of glass, trying to get his body to do as it was told, to follow the red shoes, but it was too late.

  Benedikte looked over towards the chain-link fence next to the corner flag. Per Diesen had arrived. Diesen was wearing a plain, white V-neck T-shirt and blue tartan shorts partially held up by a gold-coloured belt. His hair was bleached white and stood on end here and there in a kind of organised chaos. A pair of scintillating blue eyes were hidden behind his black sunglasses. He bent one knee and leant against the fence, resting most of his weight on his elbows.

  Stanley was unknown to most football fans but Per Diesen was a superstar. Diesen was 22, a playmaker with Oslo club Vålerenga and on the Norwegian national squad. For several months now he’d been linked to a number of major European clubs. But he’d started at Skeid. Like many other top Norwegian players, he played at youth level here in Oslo’s East End talent factory.

  His transfer to the team’s big brother Vålerenga had been controversial. There was a media storm, like so many times before when a major talent had been ‘stolen’ from a smaller club. Skeid claimed it was swindled out of both his transfer fee and a percentage of any possible future transfers but, luckily for Diesen, all their anger was directed at his agent, Arild Golden. Here, on his home ground, everyone seemed genuinely pleased to see him.

  Per Diesen’s talent was unquestioned. His looks led to a host of sponsorship deals and he was usually chosen as the players’ media spokesman, not to mention securing various modelling contracts. Arild Golden had promoted Diesen as a Norwegian David Beckham, his potential earnings much higher than his basic player’s income of 2.5 million kroner.

  Diesen was the first Norwegian football player from the top league, Tippeligaen, to live-tweet from the changing rooms at half-time. Arild Golden launched an online reality show, in co-operation with the tabloid paper VG, based on Diesen’s life. The title was Per Diesen TV, or PDTV for short.

  The series went through a tough start. Like most famous footballers who made money out of their appearance, Diesen was rumoured to be gay, which turned off large segments of the football audience. At away matches in Bergen or Lillestrøm he was bombarded by chants about how much he liked ‘back passes’ and ‘banana shots�
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  ‘Peeeeep!’

  The referee, in his luminous yellow strip, had to blow his whistle especially hard since he had no desire whatsoever to move outside the centre circle. When he awarded a free kick, the whole neighbourhood knew about it. Benedikte looked over at Diesen again, who ran his left hand through his hair.

  PDTV was intended to be a kind of football-meets-Entourage concept, with a handsome, young player working his way through Oslo’s most attractive women. The only problem was that Diesen didn’t have any of these female liaisons. If a single footballer went for more than a few weeks without pulling a girl, he had to be gay. Surely a man in his position had plenty of opportunities? But he hadn’t been linked to any minor Pop Idol contestants or even to an extra from that interminable soap opera Hotel Cæsar.

  Everything changed, though, when Golden introduced Diesen to the glamour model Sabrina. They fell in love and moved in together. The homophobic chants died down, and his playing became even better. Diesen was leading the fantasy football statistics in the papers, his self-confidence was back, and his web series had become Norway’s most watched online programme. Per Diesen had a lot to thank Arild Golden for.

  PDTV was also where Diesen’s pop career was launched. Together with his best pal and teammate at Vålerenga, macho centre-back Marius Bjartmann, he’d recently released the single ‘Bleed for the Team’, which was currently at number one in the charts. It was true: a footballer could be more than just a footballer.

  A ripple of expectation went through the crowd. Skeid had been given a throw-in and Stanley was getting ready. Throw-ins weren’t usually exciting, but Stanley did somersault throw-ins. Benedikte had seen them before, but not from such a young boy. Stanley ran towards the touch-line, dropped the ball to the ground and spun in the air. He made a perfect landing on the touch-line and let the ball go just as it passed his head, but he threw it too far. The ball flew over all the players who’d gathered in front of the goal, and there would be a throw-in from the other side. Still, the boy’s not even 15, thought Benedikte, before turning back to look at Diesen.

  Diesen looked uncomfortable as Skeid supporters crowded around him. He signed autograph after autograph but also checked his watch several times. Eventually, he patted a young lad on the back, said something and walked towards the exit. The lads sang the well-known chorus from his song: ‘Yeaaaah! Bleed for the teaaaam!’

  The Small World of Football

  ‘Kick him, for fuck’s sake!’

  Steinar turned towards the shouting. A man in his forties, wearing glasses and light-blue clothes, was gesturing at the pitch. He carried on screaming abuse at the Skeid players in their red strips, and at the referee, with the occasional bit of praise mixed in for the right-back on the team in white.

  A few yards behind him stood two African men, over 6 feet tall and broad shouldered. One of them had to grab onto the other several times to hold him back.

  The right-back miskicked a pass straight out of play. Undeterred, the man in glasses shouted, ‘come on Oppsal!’, his voice annoyingly high-pitched.

  Skeid took a quick throw in, the ball ending up at Stanley’s feet. The players on both teams were shouting his name continuously. Either, ‘pass to Stanley’ or, from the other side, ‘mark Stanley’ and then more and more often, ‘get Stanley!’

  Stanley was right in front of the man in glasses, showing off. He put his foot on top of the ball purposefully. Two players from Oppsal were blocking his way. He performed the slightest of feints, a minimal shift of weight from right to left. Steinar felt the same movement in his own legs, how many times had he done the same? Stanley took off and sprinted down the touchline.

  Steinar didn’t read the sports pages any more, but it was impossible not to pick up on the biggest stories. He knew that Spain had won the World Cup, Lionel Messi was a fantastic footballer, and Liverpool had gone from three goals down to victory against AC Milan, but he hadn’t seen it himself. Still, it was so easy to recognise a dummy on the pitch.

  ‘Shit,’ said the man in glasses.

  One player had reacted and was now approaching at full speed from the side. He was clearly fed up of Stanley laying waste to them. He closed his eyes and flung himself with both legs stretched out, one along the ground and the other high in case Stanley jumped. This tackle had to hit its target. Either the ball or the player, preferably both.

  Stanley stopped and the Oppsal player went past him, onto the tarmac surrounding the astroturf, crashing into a large rubbish bin. By the time he opened his eyes Stanley was long gone.

  In between the artificial grass pitch and the gravel pitch there was a small, grassy knoll, a natural grandstand usually reserved for the players’ parents and friends. Today it seemed as if there were an unusually large number of people watching this match between two of Oslo’s boys’ teams.

  Steinar looked along the crowd. A couple of them nodded at him, a few others trying unsuccessfully to put a name to his face. He moved, scanning for a free spot away from the others, then he saw her sitting there on the grass.

  Above her light summer trousers she was wearing a blue sleeveless shirt, holding one slender hand over her sunglasses. The evening sun rippled down over the apartment blocks below the pitch. The lenses on her Ray Bans were darker nearer the top, and her blonde hair also went through different shades.

  Steinar was afraid he’d been studying her too closely, so he looked over at a small step where he could stretch out his legs, which were stiff after the bike ride. Just as he started walking towards it he heard her shout: ‘Steinar Brunsvik!’

  You might hate hearing about rally speed tests, the national crosscountry skiing championship and the Gundersen method in the Nordic combined; you might think Swix was a kind of chocolate bar, not ski wax, or that Offside was the name of some distant country, but you would still know who Benedikte Blystad was.

  His legs steered him towards her, but he didn’t answer. The ball was out of play, Benedikte was looking at him, and the whole neighbourhood had fallen silent. He had to say something.

  ‘You know me?’

  ‘Do you know me?’

  ‘You work for TV2.’

  ‘Why are you so surprised that I recognise you?’

  ‘It’s a long time since I was last in the sports news.’

  ‘You’re still a frequent discussion topic over lunch at TV2. A quiz question. “Name a man who made a legendary exit.”’

  Steinar felt his body itch. The blood was streaming from his lower legs, through his hips, up through his chest, on its way further up. He rubbed his hand on his forehead and tried to push the blood down through his face, down to his neck and away. He didn’t want to blush now, couldn’t blush now. He was 35, for Christ’s sake.

  ‘You talk about me at TV2?’

  ‘Why so surprised?’

  ‘No, I just didn’t think, I thought, I don’t know…’

  ‘Straight from the Norwegian First Division to Ajax Amsterdam. Everyone was sure you’d come home with your tail between your legs but you ended up in the Dutch Team of the Season. You’re one of the few footballers who’ve played on the Norwegian national side without having played in top-flight Norwegian football. But that’s not the most interesting part of the Steinar Brunsvik puzzle.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Steinar.

  ‘Why did you stop playing? You were a standard fixture at Ajax, a regular on the national team, only 25 years old, just approaching the best age for footballers. Then, during half-time in an international match at Ullevaal, where you were the best player on the pitch, you just vanished. Never to be seen on a football field again. Why?’

  Steinar was out of practice. All the sports journalists in the country had tried to solve the puzzle back then, but it had been a long time since anybody had shown interest, not least such a beautiful girl.

  Steinar didn’t generally watch sports programmes, but he’d seen Benedikte at least twice on TV2’s Friday late-night talk show. There it
had seemed as if she were playing some kind of role, although they probably all did. Her voice, in particular, was different now in real life. Softer, perhaps. And she appeared genuinely interested as she looked at him, asking why he’d stopped.

  Luckily, they were interrupted by a plump young man in a suit. The man cocked his head and gave a crooked smile. He pulled a business card out of his pocket and gave it to Benedikte.

  ‘My name’s Ola Bugge, football agent. If you need a strong new voice on TV2, an expert commentator with charm, just give me a call.’

  Bugge winked at Benedikte, holding his eye closed for several seconds before bowing his head, then lifting it back up and opening his eye again. He turned, carried on walking along the crowd, handing out cards to everyone whose eyes met his. Benedikte looked at him, then at Steinar, and puffed out her cheeks.

  The interruption had given Steinar time to regain his composure.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ he asked.

  Benedikte looked at Steinar through the darker part of her sunglasses.

  ‘I’m a journalist. I want to find out who killed Arild Golden. This is my chance for a scoop, and the clues are to be found here, in the world of football.’

  She nodded at the astroturf, where Stanley was performing a double step-over feint.

  Part 2

  24 July

  Arild Golden stood at the busy junction of Oxford Street and Tottenham Court Road. Outside the Dominion Theatre was a gold-painted statue of Freddie Mercury with the promise: ‘We will rock you.’

  He walked a short distance up Tottenham Court Road and took a side road to the left. It was narrow and dark. At the end of the blind alley stood a tall, heavy-set man, dressed in black, who opened the unobtrusive door. Golden walked downstairs, and a smiling woman in a raspberry-red dress showed him the rest of the way.

  The bar was at least 15 metres long. Shadows danced on the grey brick wall behind the eight barmen, and music by Massive Attack was playing. Golden loosened his tie just a little, undid the top button on his shirt and sat down on a bar stool. He didn’t look at the cocktail list, ordered a drink he knew wasn’t on it.