He nodded twice. His eyes were huge. He looked really worried – not for his sake but for mine. It didn’t exactly increase my confidence.
I swung my hips like a sailor. It made me feel a little braver. As if this were nothing to a big strong man who’d been brushing his teeth all by himself for years now.
A woman walked by me. She was in her late thirties. Her face was as spare as the leftovers from a dried-fish dinner. To give herself some individuality, she’d pulled her hair into a ponytail. She looked almost like an Indian even though she was blonde. But that wasn’t a knocked-down teepee she was pulling – it was a shopping bag on wheels. She was very pale. She looked anxiously at me, but she had no reason to be afraid. I tried not to smile at her.
I walked between the trees. I’ve always liked pines. They’re phallic. Plump, round, voluptuous, and they stretch toward heaven. Not like pious spruces with their drooping branches and their sad, undertaker’s expressions.
The smell of pines has always meant summer to me. Late summer and you’re on the way up and through a mountain valley or a pass, up towards the heathery plateaus and the big open stretches and the arched pure late-summer sky with its dark blue strength, there where a long summer season has stored its vitamins against winter.
But it wasn’t late summer now. It was February and there was no reason to think of mountain plateaus or pines, or anything at all.
Suddenly I saw the hut, twenty metres further up the slope. It wasn’t a hut you could brag about. Somebody had dabbed green paint over pieces of lath, tar-paper and insulating scraps of sacks. High on the wall facing me was a little window covered with chicken wire. A shiny blue bicycle stood against the wail. I spotted a white face behind the chicken wire.
I came closer and heard voices inside the hut. And then they came tumbling out through one of the side walls and down to the front of the hut. They lined up in front of the bicycle. They were like a wall.
The Welcome Committee was in session.
4
They looked more nervous than tough. Six average, overgrown, teenage boys with the same old pimples, the same old downy chins, the same old fatuous sneers. A tall lanky kid at one end of the line tried rolling a cigarette, but he dropped half the tobacco on the ground, and when he finally got the cigarette in his mouth he just missed jamming it in his eye.
The kid in the middle was different. He was short and fat. Ruddy face, yellow-blond hair. The hangdog look in his eyes told me he was the gang’s court jester. All gangs have their fool, and God help anybody in another gang who tries anything with him. Consciously or not, the fool keeps the gang together. They’ve got to defend him. This must be the one Roar called Tasse.
You could see differences in hair colour, expression and size among the other four. Even so, they were amazingly alike. They all wore jeans. Some wore leather jackets, other ski jackets.
When the last one came out of the hut the picture changed abruptly. The others had rushed out like sheep. This one sauntered – as if he’d happened to pass by accidentally. Something deliberate and stagey about him warned me. Psycho.
I could see how they fawned on him. What thirty seconds earlier had been confirmation candidates who’d have meekly recited the Lord’s Prayer for me suddenly became a gang. Tight lips replaced the uneasy smiles. The anxious eyes hardened into pebbles. The tall one’s cigarette settled down in the corner of his mouth. Tasse displayed his stomach, rested his plump little hands on his hips.
He didn’t introduce himself. Wasn’t necessary. He seemed totally uninterested in the proceedings. There was something almost drowsy about him. But the narrow squinting eyes weren’t sleepy. They were bright and alert. A predator’s.
His dark hair was brushed back from a high white forehead. It gave him a priestly look. His nose was unusually narrow and thin, almost like a knife, and you had the feeling he could use it as a weapon. His mouth was a little like Elvis Presley’s. The upper lip curled, but the teeth were too decayed to smile on a record jacket.
He wore tight almost white jeans and a black leather jacket with a lot of shiny zippers. A spare taut body – not especially powerful. But I assumed he’d be very good with a knife. His type is.
I knew how his voice would sound: as tense as a steel wire and as gentle as a used razor blade. As soon as he opened his mouth, a ray of afternoon-yellow sun strayed under the pines and shone right in his face. The paper-pale skin turned as gold as an angel’s. The full lips were transformed – pouting, Raphaelite. Just an illusion. Like most things the sun shines on. ‘What do you want, old man?’ he said.
He didn’t have to hustle for his applause. They gave him a standing ovation. Ugly teenagers’ ugly laughter shattered the silence of the forest.
‘I’m looking for the kindergarten. Heard it was here.’ I lacked his charm. No one laughed.
His tongue explored the decaying stubs. ‘The old folks’ home’s down the hill. Maybe we should send for a wheelchair?’
More guffaws. That was the funniest thing they’d ever heard.
‘Why? Do you need one?’ I said. And added while I still had a little headway, ‘I came to pick up my bike.’
‘Your bike?’ He looked around as if he’d just discovered the others. ‘Any of you guys seen a bike?’
The clowns looked around, shook their heads. Tasse looked as if he’d explode with suppressed laughter. Joker said, ‘Send your auntie instead, grandad. Or one of the nurses. Then we’ll see.’
I thought they were really going to split their guts this time, and then I realised that I was going to make a speech. Whenever I’m scared I have to make a speech. I’m going to stand at death’s door and make a speech. I’m going to stand at the Pearly Gates and talk St Peter into a coma before he has a chance to send me to the Complaints Department on the first floor.
I began with the lanky kid. Looked him in the eye with what I hoped would remind him of all his childhood bogeyman experiences. We’ve all had them. The cigarette began wobbling in the corner of his mouth.
I said, ‘Maybe I don’t look so dangerous at first. Not when there are seven of you and you’re fifteen or twenty years younger. But a lion who’s spent years in the zoo doesn’t look dangerous either to an idiot who’s about to step into its cage.’
I moved to the next. He was nearly my height. He had a sweaty upper lip and a large inflamed pimple by his left nostril. ‘The Norwegian Alps looking poetic at sundown don’t impress me,’ I said. He blushed. I moved on.
This one already had a beautiful grey-black stubble. Thick black eyebrows. Clearly myopic. I waved my hand in front of his eyes and he didn’t know where to look.
‘Hello. Anybody home? Here I am. No. Here. Go home and get your glasses, pal. You look like a bug-eyed refugee from outer space.’
Joker was next. I skipped him. He didn’t like that. Tasse was on his right.
‘Hello, Porky Pig,’ I said. ‘You look as if you could use a bike.’ I waited a minute. ‘Exercise, Fatso. You’ll find “exercise” in the dictionary. If you can read.’
I took the last two together. ‘And who have we here? Abbott and Costello?’
I went back to the centre of the line and checked them over one by one. ‘You lot know who I am? I’m Veum. Heard of me? I’m in the phone book under M for Monster. I make the papers. Every time I beat somebody up. So I wouldn’t advise climbing into my cage. Or look at it this way. I play for the national team and you squirts are backwoods Little Leaguers. You’ve only got one thing going for you. I’m not crazy about creaming anything smaller than I am. But I’ve never been religious about it, so you’re welcome to try.’ I continued while I had a head start: ‘I came to get my bike. Any objections?’
I locked glances with Joker. You handle psychos the way you do bears. The best way to tame them is to look them right in the eye. ‘When we real men play poker, we never waste time with the Joker,’ I said.
And I walked by him, took the bicycle by the handlebars and swung it around.
>
Turning your back on a wrought-up psycho is one of the stupidest things you can do, but I had a spellbound public and not many choices. As I passed Joker on my way out of that charmed circle, I turned and held him with my gaze. ‘Better bring your boss a clean nappy, boys.’
I kept my head as still as if I had lumbago. Kept my eyes on Joker’s until I was too far away for him to jam a switchblade between my shoulders.
Not a sound behind me. Nobody laughed. Nobody ever laughs when he’s a witness to high treason. At any rate, not before the king’s left the throne room. I was conceited enough to think my performance would become myth. Some day when somebody recited the gang’s history beside a shining blue camp-fire in the future’s lonely desert.
On the way down I got on the bike. The Lone Ranger riding into the sunset. Trouble was, the real Lone Ranger was constantly busy rescuing people. And this Lone Ranger was me.
5
Roar was waiting where I’d left him. He gazed at me. Open admiration. I jumped off his bike and we wheeled it between us back to his building.
He said, ‘What did you do?’
I said, ‘I just went up there and took it.’ As if there’d been nothing to it.
She didn’t have to introduce herself. I knew. She came fluttering towards us like a terrified bird, her dark hair a cloud around her face. She wore blue corduroy trousers, a light white turtleneck, and a red and blue ski jacket she hadn’t had time to fasten.
‘Roar!’ she called from fifty metres away. ‘Where have you been?’
She grabbed her son’s shoulders, staring at him. Her hair curled wildly. It was cut very short at the neck. She had one of those thin white necks that make you cry inside and remember the thousands of swans you used to see in Nygård Park when you were a kid. That make you regret deeply and sincerely that you’ve never found such a neck to cry against, ever loved another’s more – if you ever have.
‘Mum,’ Roar said. ‘This is … It was Joker and they – they took my bike and so I went …’
She looked at me. Frost in her eyes. Said in a voice you’d welcome on a beach when it’s thirty degrees in the shade, ‘Who are you?’ And to Roar, ‘Has this man done anything to you?’
‘Done anything to me?’ He looked at her. Baffled.
She shook him. ‘Answer me, boy! Answer me!’ She turned to me again and burst into tears. ‘Who are you? If you’ve so much as touched him, I’ll kill you!’
Her face was blotchy, her little nose shone, and the dark blue eyes sparked like gas flames.
‘My name’s Veum, Fru,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t –’
Roar interrupted. Now he had tears in his eyes. ‘He hasn’t, he’s helped me – he’s the one who got my bike back. He got my bike from Joker’s hut so you wouldn’t …’
He began crying and she looked at him helplessly. Then she hugged him and murmured something in his ear.
It was almost completely dark now and lights shone in most of the windows. Cars went by. Tired, stooped men left them and walked to their doors and to their lifts. Then it was up to their wives and their dinner tables twenty metres above earth, twenty metres closer to outer space and a new workday closer to eternity. A little drama played itself out on the pavement in front of the building they lived in, but not one looked up, not one noticed that a young woman, a little boy, a not-so-young man and a new bicycle stood there. We could just as well have been alone in an out-of-the-way spot in the Sahara.
The face looking over Roar’s shoulder was at least twenty years too young. The mouth had the injured pout of a little girl who’s been denied her lollipop, but it was a full, sensuous mouth. It told you she’d get what she wanted when she grew up. Just you wait. The dark blue eyes were calm now. They looked like flowers you didn’t pick and then regretted not picking for the rest of your life.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I was so frightened. He’s never been gone so long before. I … Well…’
‘I understand,’ I said.
She stood up and held out a hand while she brushed the hair back from her forehead with the other. ‘I’m … My name’s Wenche Andresen.’
I held her hand a few seconds. ‘Veum. Varg Veum.’
She looked surprised, and I realised she’d either misunderstood my first name or thought she’d heard it wrong.
‘My father’s sense of humour,’ I said. ‘He named me.’
‘Named you?’
‘Named me. Varg.’
‘Oh. So your name really is Outlaw?’ Her sulky mouth widened in a brilliant smile, and her whole face turned beautiful and young and happy. Until she stopped laughing and became ten years older and twenty younger at the same time. A little girl’s mouth and middle-aged eyes. I ought to see about getting home.
‘But what are you really?’ she said. ‘How did he get hold of you?’
‘I’m a private investigator. A kind of detective. He found me in the phone book.’
‘A detective?’ She didn’t look as if she quite believed me.
‘It’s true, Mum,’ Roar said. ‘He’s got an office in the city, but he doesn’t have a gun.’
She smiled weakly. ‘That’s nice.’ She looked around. ‘I don’t know – maybe I could give you a cup of coffee?’ Nodded toward the high-rise.
I looked at my watch. I ought to be getting home. ‘Thanks. Maybe you could,’ I said.
So Roar, his mother and I walked past my car and into one of the entrances to that twelve-storey building. We locked his bike in the cellar and got into one of the two lifts. She pressed the ‘9’ button. It was a small lift with steel walls painted grey. Here and there the paint had already begun to peel.
Wenche Andresen looked at me with her big blue eyes. ‘If we’re lucky, we’ll go all the way.’
‘What do you mean?’ I said.
‘There’s a bunch of kids constantly messing with the lifts. They all press the buttons on their own floors at the same time, and then there’s a short or something. Whatever they do, the lift stops between floors and you stay there until the caretaker starts it up again.’
‘I can see this isn’t a good place for kids. Aren’t there any other sports beside stealing bikes and jamming lifts?’
‘They’ve hired someone to work with them, but I don’t think it’s been especially successful. He’s started a youth club. His name’s Våge.’
The lift stopped. We’d made it. Two doors led from the lift out on to a balcony which, except for where it was blocked by the lift, ran the length of the building. All the flats faced the balcony. We passed two doors. There was a hand-painted sign on Wenche Andresen’s: Wenche, Roar and Jonas Andresen live here. She silently let us in.
She took off her jacket in the foyer and then took mine. I stood in the middle of the green mat. Confused. The way you always feel in strange hallways. Roar took my hand. ‘Come on, I’ll show you my room.’
‘I’ll make coffee,’ she said.
Roar led me to his room. The green and white curtains turned out to be white trucks on a green background. A double-decker white bed stood in one corner. Posters of comic strip characters and animals hung on the walls. There was a large poster of a clown in a circus ring, and a small calendar photograph of the Bergen Boys’ Drill Corps marching through a narrow street lined with low white houses. Toys were scattered all over the floor.
Wooden railway tracks, small model cars, stuffed animals, war-weary cowboys and Indians.
Sketch pads, drawings and old comics were stacked on a little green table. A child loved this room.
Roar looked at me. Formal now. ‘What should I call you? Veum?’
I ruffled his hair. ‘Just Varg.’
He nodded and beamed. His new front teeth were too big. ‘Want to see what I’ve drawn?’
So I saw what he’d drawn. Blue suns and yellow trees. Red mountains. Boats with wheels, horses with rabbits on their backs. Crooked little houses with skewed windows and flowers rioting in their gardens.
I walked to the
window. People, cars – so small. The five-storey buildings looked like crushed matchboxes from here, and the road between them like a track for toy cars.
Then I looked at the Lyderhorn’s steep sides, at that grey-black outline you can easily lose in the evening sky. As if the Lyderhorn were the sky. It was as if that dark mountain were the threatening clouds now lying like a snowdrift over the city – like a warning of Doomsday. Or of death.
6
We drank our coffee in the kitchen. The TV quacked in the living room. Roar was watching a children’s programme.
The kitchen was yellow with orange cupboard doors. She’d hung white curtains printed with oranges. A yellow and orange dotted circular cloth sat in the centre of the grey-white plastic table top. There was coffee in a green pot with red dots and a selection of biscuits in a raffia basket. ‘It’s not much, but …’ She shrugged.
‘The coffee was delicious,’ I said.
‘Drink up. There’s more.’
Then she said, ‘Was it Joker – as they call him – and his gang who took Roar’s bike?’
‘It was,’ I said. ‘I’ve heard there was another incident here – the mother of one of Roar’s friends.’
‘That’s right. I know about it. I’ve talked to her. She …’ She bit her lip. ‘It’s incredible. She … They took her boy’s bicycle, and she went up there to the hut to get it back. They … They actually took her prisoner as if she were a mere girl and not – not a grown woman.’
‘Was she …?’
She banged the cup down. Hard. ‘They couldn’t care less. If anything like that had happened when we were kids … If we’d when we were kids … I can’t even begin to imagine it. But that’s how it is.’ She looked woodenly at me. ‘That’s how it is when you’re a single woman with children. We’re hunted by everything that calls itself male – from runny-nosed boys to ageing Don Juans. It makes me sick.’
Yours Until Death Page 2