Encircling 2

by Carl Frode Tiller

  “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 carburetor 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 immediately 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 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 grind 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 right 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 center 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 aluminum 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 fucking 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 carburetor 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 damn 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 mom 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 friend?” 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 rocks 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 development 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 parking lot, 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 development. In any case, what I started to say before I got lost in all those fucking 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 neighborhood, it was still fucking 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 goddamn fortune in those days, so obviously we were tempted to do it again.