The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness

by Catrina Davies

  “You could borrow one. Park outside my house and run an electric heater.”

  “It would be too cold to busk.”

  “I could take you skiing. It wouldn’t cost you anything. I’ve got plenty of gear.”

  Johan was oddly silent. I was dimly aware of him staring at Børge with a sort of shocked expression, like he had when Børge had given me the board and wetsuit.

  We said good-bye on the quay at Moskenes, the village where Johan lived, which was right down near the southern tip of the islands, near a place called Å.

  I gave Børge Hanna’s book.

  “I don’t need it anymore,” I said.

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yep. I’ve finished it.”

  I wasn’t sure at all. I wanted to hang on to everything Hanna had ever said or done or given to me for dear life, but Hanna had said you should pass books on when you finish them and Børge had given me a surfboard and wetsuit, so it seemed only right that I should give him something in exchange. He seemed really pleased, and actually kissed me, on the cheek, brushing my lips with stubble.

  “I’ll return it one day.”

  I didn’t see how. We hadn’t even exchanged emails.

  22

  I made it back to the mainland just in time. That night the tail end of Hurricane Katrina caught up with the tail end of the Norwegian summer, with disastrous results for busking.

  For the next three weeks my namesake trailed me like a stalker. She kept me awake at night, hammering on the fiberglass roof. She rocked my bed violently from side to side until I sat up terrified, certain the whole thing was about to tip over and bury me under three and a half tons of twisted metal. The van smelled like an old pair of sneakers. Washing was a distant memory. My shoes, my clothes, even my bed was wet. I got a stinking cold from sitting half under dripping doorways for hours on end, getting myself wet so that my cello would stay dry. If only I still had Henrik’s crisp five-hundred-kroner notes.

  The sky was so dark I had to have candles lit all the time. All I could do when I wasn’t busking was lie on the damp bed and stare at the mould on the fiberglass ceiling and try not to think about the deep hot baths Jack and I used to share at Broadsands. If it hadn’t been for the ribbons hanging from the rearview mirror and Børge’s surfboard tied to the tongue and groove with bungee cords and the wetsuit hanging from the back doors on an old coat hanger I would have seriously doubted that either Hanna or Unstad ever happened.

  It took weeks, that journey back to Bergen, and it left me drained and depressed. I finally got there on 30 September. I went straight to the ferry port to find out how much I’d have to save for a ticket back to England. Sweet, petite surfer or no sweet, petite surfer, I’d had enough.

  Only I was too late.

  The crossing had been canceled.

  Ferries didn’t go to England from Norway anymore.

  Part Three:

  Paths of Freedom

  23

  The rest of Europe loomed as strange and unforgiving as death. I had forgotten that when I arrived in Norway it also loomed as strange and unforgiving as death. Now, Norway seemed positively cosy. I gazed at the map in Europe on a Shoestring, at all the countries that suddenly stood between me and home. Sweden, Denmark, Germany, Holland, Belgium, France. The only one I’d ever been to was France. I counted the miles and worked out that the distance from Bergen to Calais was more than going to Nordkapp all over again. I threw Europe on a Shoestring on the floor and lay on the bed staring at the ceiling. If only I hadn’t given Hanna’s book to Børge. If only I was safe and warm in the bar at the hostel, drinking Rattler and impressing everyone, especially Jack, with tales of my brave adventures. If only the adventures were over.

  The trouble with Sweden was that their biggest coin was worth only ten kroner, half as much as Norway’s biggest coin, which was worth twenty kroner. This meant that as soon as I crossed the border my earnings went down by 50 percent. I had to play in every town I passed. I’ve forgotten most of their names. I remember that the rain stopped and that the nights were dark. I remember playing “Bruca Maniguá” until my fingers were cracked and sore. I remember swimming off the Skåne peninsula in freezing water and watching the stars come out one by one from the back step of the van. I remember the market in Varberg and I remember that I bought a cheap pair of slippers, because all I had were flip-flops and hiking boots with holes in them. It was almost October, and my feet were cold.

  I remember the long, white bridge from Malmö to Copenhagen, and the big, green police vans parked in a line outside Freetown Christiania. I remember trying to navigate the many lanes of traffic and spending the night in the grounds of a mental hospital on the outskirts of Roskilde. I remember playing “Autumn Leaves” on Roskilde high street and walking back to the van past replica Viking ships that made me think of Børge. On the surface, nothing much had changed. I still hated setting up in a new town and breaking the silence of a busy street. Even though I still couldn’t stand the thought of Jack and the sweet, petite surfer, I had still had enough. I was still going home.

  But something had changed. I was haunted by thoughts of Jack, but I was also haunted by other things, new things. I was haunted by the wide open spaces I had left behind, and I was haunted by the sea. I couldn’t stop thinking about Unstad, and instead of watching a film of Jack on the inside of my eyelids, I sent myself to sleep at night trying to catch imaginary waves.

  I first noticed this change when I left Roskilde, having managed to save a hundred euros. Instead of driving west, toward Germany and home, I began driving north, in order to do a lap of Jutland before I left the country. I told myself it was because Aarhus, a university town on the east side of Jutland, would be a good place to busk. It was quite good, but that wasn’t the reason I was there. I was there because Johan had mentioned that you could surf in Jutland. It didn’t matter that I’d barely learned to stand up. My life was already folding itself quietly around my need to find waves.

  After Aarhus I busked on the tiny main street in Skagen, which had almost certainly never seen a cello before, but which had spawned its own school of artists. I went to look at the place they had mostly painted, a long beach that directly faces Kristiansand, the town I fled to after failing to busk in Oslo. I spent the night in a big car park, empty apart from one other van. I woke early and walked along the sun-drenched beach to the place where two seas, the Kattegat and the Skagerrak, meet in a violent tidal race.

  The owners of the other van came and introduced themselves as I was eating breakfast on the back step. They had seen my surfboard. They had just come from a place called Klitmøller, on the west coast. They said the waves had been good.

  Klitmøller was an overgrown fishing village with several sandy car parks nestled in behind high dunes, the other side of which was a long beach. The sea was so flat that the two surf shops on the main street looked laughably out of place. I parked the van in the car park at the furthest end of the village. It was already home to a group of German surfers who were amusing themselves by playing competitive and complicated games involving tin cans and tennis balls. They invited me to join in, but I have never been much good at competitive and complicated games involving tennis balls, so I got my cello out of its cupboard instead, and hauled it up on to the top of one of several weird, graffiti-covered concrete bunkers that were half buried in the sand. They were left over from World War II and most of them were tilting drunkenly.

  The sea was flat for three days. I stuck around, waiting, hoping. In order to avoid playing competitive and complicated games with German surfers, I took to walking on the beach and in the forest that backed on to it. It was a deep, dark, creepy forest full of pine trees that were good to climb and secret paths and clearings and shooting ranges that were used by the army.

  One evening I clambered on to the flattest bunker with my cello and played “Vocalise” to a dramatic and beautiful sunset. That was how I met Karen.

  Karen lived with her t
iny daughter in a house on the edge of the forest. She had built the house herself, mixing the concrete for the foundations, wheeling it around in a wheelbarrow, building the walls, cutting down trees from the forest to make the roof, plumbing in her own toilet. She had learned these skills working on building sites to save money for extensive surf trips that she had made in a bright green Iveco Daily van with six tires and an old plywood offcut that served as a kitchen. Karen knew all about life on the road. She clapped when I finished “Vocalise” and then offered me a hot shower and the use of her washing machine.

  It was the first time my clothes had been washed in anything other than a river or seawater for four months. We drank beer in her garden. Karen told me about all the places she had been in her Iveco, which was just like mine, and I told her I was heading back to Calais in order to catch a ferry home. She insisted on giving me a tatty old Stormrider surf guide, which was like Europe on a Shoestring, only instead of telling you how campervans couldn’t overnight in lay-bys ever, or how much money was worth, it told you if a place had a wave and what kind of wave it was. Klitmøller was in there (rarely, not very good). Unstad was not in there.

  I went to my van and found the map Aase had given me, so I could show Karen where Unstad was.

  “You are lucky,” she said. “Doing something you love as your job.”

  I hadn’t thought about it like that.

  “I love playing the cello, but I hate busking.”

  “Don’t you like it when people give you money?”

  I thought about the elderly people who had gathered on the bench to listen to me when I played outside the Coop in Mo i Rana. I often thought about them. In fact, it wasn’t wholly true anymore that I hated busking. There were some things about it that I had grown to like. Mainly the feeling I had after a good session, the sense of achievement, dropping the coins into the biscuit tin and knowing that I earned them. I really earned them.

  “I suppose it has its moments.”

  Karen picked up the Stormrider surf guide and began circling places that would be good for me, easy places, places for learning, with a big red marker pen.

  “The Ile d’Oléron is perfect,” she said. “It is warm and has nice waves and nice people.”

  “It’s practically in Bordeaux!” I said. “I’m only going as far as Calais.”

  “Why don’t you busk your way down the coast to Spain? Then you could go to Portugal. You could go anywhere. You are free.”

  I shook my head. She sounded like Hanna. And Andrew.

  I stayed in Klitmøller long enough to spend a day trying to ride some small, crap waves that finally turned up and broke on the beach behind the car park. Afterward I went to a party at Karen’s house, held to mark the end of summer. All the other guests were either fishermen or surfers, and they all brought huge bags of shellfish they had caught that day in Klitmøller. After we had eaten, Karen asked me to play my cello. I didn’t let myself even think about it. I just went to the van, pulled it out of its cupboard, tuned up, found a chair and played “Bruca Maniguá.” Then I played “Autumn Leaves.” When I finished everybody clapped and carried on eating shellfish, and although I was shaking slightly I didn’t let it show. I went back to the van and put the cello away. I was glad that I had something to offer. The fishermen brought fish, I brought music. That was the way it worked.

  24

  Civilization closed in after Denmark, hoovering up the wide, open spaces and turning them into endless suburbs. I’ve lost count of the nameless streets and cities I tried to entertain with the music I had taught myself in Norway. The further south I traveled the harder it all became: busking, finding places to sleep, finding places to wash, finding water. The nights grew longer and darker. Forests were full of used condoms and missing persons posters. Lakes were man-made and there was NO SWIMMING. I dreamed of Jack and surfing in equal measure. Once I even dreamed of Børge. We were sitting on the doorstep at Rithmaku, the hut where Hanna wrapped me up in light, and he was actually smiling.

  I learned that some of the service stations had secret showers and I learned how to convince the person in charge to let me have the key. More often there was no key and it was a case of going dirty or risking a hairy truck driver walking in on me naked. Usually I went dirty. If somebody on the street expressed an interest in my music, which they did from time to time, I asked them if I could come to their house and take a shower. Usually they said yes. I started buying water in five-liter plastic bottles. Roads were complex and spaghetti-like, with endless opportunities for wasting copious amounts of diesel driving around industrial cul-de-sacs. The cities I ended up playing in were so big I often forgot where I’d left my van and had to spend hours searching for it, growing more and more certain it had been towed away and crushed.

  All the countries had different rules, which I had to learn quickly, on the hop, usually by breaking them and getting told off. In Germany you could play in the big shopping center in the middle of town, but only for twenty minutes, in a specially designated spot, on rotation with other buskers. There was strict timekeeping and I stood out like a sore thumb. All the other buskers in Germany, at least the ones I met, were proper music students and played proper music. Not made-up versions of “Bruca Maniguá.” On the positive side, the towns weren’t hundreds of miles apart and I could move on quickly, and at least in Germany it was easy to find places to sleep. This was the spiritual home of the motorhome, and there were special areas set aside where you could park for free. I stood out like a sore thumb in those, too.

  Holland was a different story. I’m sure it would seem normal now, but fetching up in Holland after months in Norway felt like fetching up on Mars. Not only were there no wide open spaces, there were no spaces at all. I felt like an ant, tunneling through an endless town on an endless motorway, surrounded on all sides by other ants. Fighting my way into a town was no easy feat, given the rivers of people flowing in all directions; finding a pitch was about being somewhere where my cello would have the most visual impact, and not getting trampled. There was absolutely no danger of being heard. There was plenty of competition, but it wasn’t like Germany. In Holland the buskers were ravers, sitting wan and exhausted on blankets, smoking and playing didgeridoos, and the problem was not to do with rules, or that anyone had a problem with buskers, the problem was that, half the time, instead of money I’d get little packages of weed thrown into my hat, which wasn’t going to get me home or feed me. Also, I had to spend some time taping it to the inside of the tongue and groove before I crossed the border into Belgium, just in case.

  I had discovered two things in Holland, neither of them particularly encouraging. One was that you needed a licence to busk in Belgium, and that if you were caught busking without one the fine was a hundred euros. The other was that there was no money whatsoever to be made in France.

  I’ll never know if the first was true. All I can say is that I tried very hard not to busk in Belgium, but in the end I had to, at a town near the French border called Tournai. I did see two policemen, but I closed my eyes and carried on playing, and I kept them closed for twenty minutes, and when I opened them again the policemen had gone and there were twenty people standing around, who clapped when I finished playing “Bruca Maniguá” for the fifth time.

  It was the end of October when I finally crossed the border into France, two full months since I left Unstad. It was only 60 miles from Tournai to Calais. The long drive south was over. Or at least, it should have been.

  I longed for Broadsands, for Ben’s grumpy humor, for the feeling of safety, for being able to wake up in the morning and not have to think about where I was going to busk that day, for not needing to worry about the van breaking down or being moved on by policemen in the dead of night. But now that I was so close to making it a reality, facing Jack and the sweet, petite surfer seemed more and more unbearable. When I arrived in Bergen, even after all the storms, I had been full of Knivskjellodden and Unstad and Hanna. Now, after two months of st
ruggling through countless cities and sleeping in motorway service stations, all that felt a million miles away. I was pale and spotty. I hadn’t been eating or sleeping properly. I lay on the bed and flicked through Karen’s Stormrider surf guide. I picked up Europe on a Shoestring.

  I didn’t exactly plan it. I just didn’t go to Calais. Instead I found myself in Dieppe. In Dieppe I discovered that the second part of the information I had been given in Holland was true. French people were not generous toward buskers. Which meant that I didn’t have enough for a ferry from Le Havre, and as it wasn’t a place I wanted to hang out, I carried on to Caen, and I still didn’t have enough in Caen, and the police moved me on, so I carried on to Rennes. And I made some money in Rennes, but it was a big place and I couldn’t find anywhere to park for the night, so I carried on to Saint-Brieuc, where I managed to save about a hundred euros over four days, and then I went to Roscoff, because you could get a ferry from Roscoff to Plymouth, only the ferry from Roscoff was two hundred euros, so I drove down the coast, ostensibly looking for somewhere to busk, but actually, if I’m honest, looking for waves that I could practice on—so I wouldn’t make a fool of myself in front of the sweet, petite surfer—and beaches where I could get a tan so I didn’t have to face her looking spotty and pale and exhausted.

  But there were no such waves or beaches in Brittany that week. Instead there were storms like I hadn’t seen since Katrina hit Norway. So I carried on south until the sun came out and my money ran out, by which time I was in La Rochelle. I busked in La Rochelle until I had another hundred euros, and then I looked at the Stormrider surf guide, and I saw that the Ile d’Oléron, which Karen had circled with her big red marker pen, was just around the corner.

  25

  The bridge to Oléron was free, and the first beach I found was long and sandy. It was called Vert Bois, presumably because of the tall pine trees that backed on to the dunes. I parked my van next to an old white Transit with a “Creatures of Leisure” sticker in the window and three distinctly un-pedigree dogs lying on the front seats, tongues hanging out. They stood up and wagged their tails at me. The wetsuit felt as uncomfortable as it had that first day at Unstad. I carried the board awkwardly to the end of the sandy road, down a couple of steps, and across the beach.