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 damn 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 gotten 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 gas 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. “Damn 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 traveled all over the country, clearing out houses 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, 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 paneling 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 mailbox one day and came back in with two electricity bills. “It was so damn 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 fucking same,” said the man who had voted Labor all his days, and: “No, it’s true what Peder says, it’s a shame that plane tickets are so expensive in this country”—this from a man who was terrified of flying and would not set foot in an airplane, not even if you put a gun to his head.
But Ma herself was the worst of the lot. She was so desperate 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 trips 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 m
e 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 laughingstock 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 tape 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 smolder 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 tape player and spend a minute or two racing around like a fucking 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 boys 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 phony 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 bunch. What we did was we borrowed Erik’s boat and took it out to one of the many vacation 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 maneuvered the engine onto some Styrofoam sheets that we’d spread out on the bed of the truck, we’d pull a tarpaulin over it all 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 steal 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 vacation 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.”
Namsos, July 4th–5th, 2006. A cold worm in the belly
… REALLY SHOULDN’T HAVE ANY MORE TO DRINK, had way too much aquavit at Ma’s and Grandpa’s. But I reach for the vodka. Lukewarm vodka, neat. Knock it back and set the glass down on the coffee table. Put my hands behind my head and lie back on the sofa. Look at Mona and grin. At her slim, white body. Her tiny belly button, pierced belly button. I like that piercing, little ring in her belly button. And her pointy little breasts, lovely breasts. She bends down and sets her beer bottle on the floor, just next to the rat’s cage, and there’s a faint rustling from the cage as she does it. It’s that fucking rat of hers moving around, never liked that fucking rat. I gaze at Mona and she gazes back at me, comes over and stands in front of me. Stands between my legs, perfectly still. And I sit perfectly still. Sit with my hands behind my head and my fingers laced together. Flex my biceps slightly. Big, bulging biceps. Send little ripples through my biceps. I know how much she likes a bit of muscle. Big muscles corded with veins. I know how hot it makes her. I look at her and grin, fla
sh my broken front tooth at her. I know she likes that too, don’t know why, but she does, says it makes me look more manly. My eyes travel down to her cunt and I swallow. Smooth, shaved cunt. Right in front of me. And then she puts her hands on my shoulders. Looks down at me as she does it. Her horny eyes, playful eyes and half-open mouth. I look at her and grin, place my hands on her hips, my big hands. Draw her a bit closer. Just keeping my eyes fixed on hers now, her eyes are glowing.
“Sit on me!” I tell her.
My voice low, husky. And she does as I say. Sits astride me, one knee on either side of my thighs. Grips my cock, big cock, grips it with her left hand and slides down onto it, slowly. I look down at her as she does it, watch her wet cunt sliding down onto my cock, swallowing more and more of my cock. Stiff cock. Been drinking all evening and all night, but my cock’s hard as a rock. I’m so horny. And then she starts to ride me. Rides me nice and easy. Moving gently. Feels so fucking good. I cup my hands around her buttocks. Big hands, broad. Dig the tips of my fingers into her buttocks, lightly. Massage them, knead them. And she moans softly. Tips her head back and shuts her eyes. Runs her tongue over her lips. Moistening her red lips. It’s so fucking good. And I’m seething with desire. I gaze at her breasts. Little pointy breasts with stiff nipples. Stiff nipples. Just like it says on her T-shirt. And I’m seething inside. I feel my mouth fall open, feel my lips drawing back and curling slightly. It crosses my mind that I must look even hornier when I do that, look savage, like a wild beast almost. I picture it, that look, and I squeeze her buttocks a bit harder. Picture the marks on her white buttocks, it usually leaves red fingermarks on her ass when I do that. It’s so fucking good. Savage. Run my fingertips down to her crack. Part her buttocks and feel her slide even further down onto me. I thought I was as far inside her as I could go, but now I slide even further in. Her cunt wrapping itself round my cock. Tight, warm cunt. And I let out a great groan. From way down deep in my belly. A kind of grunt. And Mona moans. A short, high-pitched moan. Keeps on riding me, riding gently, steadily. And I gaze at her hungrily. Gaze at her with glowing eyes. And she shuts her eyes. Sticks out her tongue and licks her lips. Red lips, glistening lips. I shut my eyes.
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