by Mikael Niemi
One weekend night, when Mum and Dad had gone off to play car bingo at the local football ground, we marched into Sis’s room without knocking. The girls screamed. There was a crate of beer in the middle of the floor. We backed out, but Sis dragged us in and locked the door. Then she threatened to thump us so hard if we squealed on her that our milk teeth would puncture what little brain we had, and she’d pull out so much of our hair that we’d go bald before we had a full mane, and then she’d scratch out our guts with her red-painted nails and slowly roast us with Dad’s blowlamp that he used to wax our skis, and a lot more on the same theme.
I played the idiot in order to save my life—a good tactic in the Torne Valley context—and muttered something about how they were free to drink as much Tizer as they liked. Then the girls all burst out laughing and one of them said we had to taste a drop as well so that we were just as guilty as they were, that was the only way to seal our lips. She opened a bottle and came up close, and I felt her permanent wave on my cheek and her hair spray in my nostrils and her warm breath all over my face. She took hold of me by the cheeks, quite firmly, while another girl held the bottle over my mouth, and I opened it wide. She came so close that I could feel the softness of her tits, I leaned over backward like a suckling child waiting for its bottle, and I sucked and I drank and I sucked again, like at a woman’s breast.
The beer tasted of straw. It stung my throat, bubbled and foamed. I lay back and gazed up into the girl’s beautifully painted eyes: they were as blue as the river. She must have been at least fourteen, and she looked down at me so warmly, so tenderly. I wanted to stay there for the rest of my life, fall asleep in her embrace. Tears welled up in my eyes. She noticed, and took away the bottle. I’d drunk at least half of it. She zoomed in on me with her lipstick lips, and then she kissed me.
The girls all cheered. Sis smiled, her benevolence was unprecedented. I felt dizzy, and propped myself up against the wall. Niila was forced to drink the rest of the bottle. He did his best and was rewarded with applause. Panting for breath, he struggled for ages to unbutton his shirt, then produced the record. Then he sat down next to me, and Sis started the gramophone.
The girls went mad.
We must have played it at least twenty times.
I leaned against Niila and felt so happy, I thought I’d burst.
* * *
Afterward we found ourselves standing in the yard, shivering. The chill came tumbling down from the clear sky, it would be a bitterly cold night. Niila hung around, wanted to ask something, but didn’t really dare. In the end he dragged me into the garage. Closed the door as quietly as he could, and then crept up close to my ear.
“What did she do?” he whispered.
I grabbed him by the shoulders.
“Stick out your tongue,” I said. “No, not as much as that.”
He pulled it back in so that just the tip was sticking out, round and wet and pink. I stuck mine out as well. We stood there without moving for a while. Then I leaned forward and kissed his salty, boyish mouth.
CHAPTER 8
In which a piece of hardboard is carved, a mouth is opened, and the stage is trodden for the first time
The sixties were coming to an end, and in the big, wide world pop music was coming into its own. The Beatles went to India and learned to play the sitar, California was overwhelmed by Flower Power and psychedelic rock, and England bubbled over with bands like the Kinks, Procol Harum, The Who, Small Faces, and The Hollies.
Very little of all that reached as far out as Pajala. Sis did her best to keep up: she hung up a copper wire between a pair of pine trees in the garden as an antenna, and tuned in to Radio Luxembourg on our ancient steam radio. We occasionally went to Kiruna to see The Shanes from Tuolluvaara, who had appeared with the Beatles in 1966, or the Hep Stars when they happened to be passing through—but only after long, cautionary conversations with Mum behind closed doors.
It was a long way from Pajala to the rest of the world. And when Swedish Television eventually got around to broadcasting one of its rare pop concerts, it was a recording of an event several years earlier with Elvis Presley. You simply had to take whatever was on offer.
I sat down with great expectations. Sis opened the wood veneer doors shielding the screen from view, and switched it on quickly, in order to give the tube plenty of time to warm up. It matured like a loaf in the oven, and eventually produced a picture. The electrical signals were routed via the Kaknäs Tower in Stockholm and set off on their long, meandering journey over Sweden. The relay stations received the signals, and passed them on to the next, and the next, and eventually, just like one of those gigantic trains with neverending wagons laden with iron ore, they staggered as far as the Pajala TV mast on the top of Mount Jupukka, were duly transformed, and tumbled down like shelled peas into our black-and-white box.
And there he was. Elvis. Before he’d been sent to Germany as a GI, at the height of his career, a slim, virile young man with a wry smile, greasy hair, and legs as pliable as pipe-cleaners. Dad groaned and made a point of marching out to the garage. Mum pretended to knit, but she couldn’t take her eyes off this sweaty stud in his black leather jacket. Sis bit her nails down to the quick, and wept into her pillow all night long. I wanted a guitar.
The next day, when school was over, I went down to the woodwork shop in the basement and made something looking like a guitar from a piece of hardboard. Nailed on a bit of wood to make a bridge. Stretched a few elastic bands to make strings. Attached a piece of string so that I could hang the thing over my shoulder.
The only place where I could count on having a bit of peace was the garage. I sneaked in when nobody was looking, spread my legs wide apart on the concrete floor, and looked out over the packed audience. I could hear the shrieks, and imagined the thousands and thousands of teenyboppers surging forward toward the stage. Then I launched into Jailhouse Rock, which I knew by heart, thanks to Sis’s record. I tried wiggling my bottom. Felt the music pulsing through me, powerful and spicy. Then I grasped the toilet roll I was using as a microphone and opened my mouth. And started singing. But it was a song without words—I was only moving my lips, just as in the music lessons at school. I was miming to the music from deep down in my soul, wiggling my hips, bouncing about and belting out chords until the lump of hardboard trembled.
There was a sudden noise, and I froze in terror. Just for a moment I was convinced the roar of approval could be heard as far away as the church. But I was alone in the garage, and soon I was back into the make-believe. Absorbed by the acclaim, surrounded by lights and clamor. My hips were quivering, the stage was quaking, my body arched backward.
Then Niila materialized. He’d crept in as quietly as a lynx, and been studying me in silence, for God only knows how long. I stiffened in shame. Waited for the scornful smile, the splatter as I was squashed against the wall with a flyswatter.
Only once afterward have I ever felt as naked. That was on the train from Boden to Älvsbyn, in the toilet. I’d just had a crap, stood up, and was wiping my bottom with my trousers around my ankles when the door opened and the female conductor asked to see my ticket. She claimed she’d knocked first, but the hell she had.
Niila sat down on an upturned enamel bucket and scratched away thoughtfully at a scab. Eventually he asked me in a low voice what I was doing.
“Playing,” I muttered, deeply embarrassed.
He sat in silence for what seemed an age, staring at my badly carved lump of hardboard.
“Can I have a go?” he asked at length.
At first I thought he was teasing me. But then I realized to my surprise that he was serious. Feeling increasingly relieved, I hung the board over his shoulder and showed him how to hold it. He started copying me, who’d in turn been copying Elvis. He swayed tentatively from side to side.
“You’ve got to get your legs working as well,” I told him.
“Why?”
“For the girls, of course.”
He sudden
ly looked shy.
“In that case you’ll have to sing.”
I nonchalantly raised the toilet roll to my lips and mimed silently, tossing my head from side to side. Niila looked disapprovingly at me.
“You must sing properly!”
“Bugger that!”
“Yes, you must.”
“No, I can’t.”
“Yes, for the girls!” said Niila in Finnish. I burst out laughing, and a wave of warmth flowed between us.
That was how it all began, at home in the garage surrounded by skis and snow shovels and winter tyres. Niila played, and I opened my mouth and let my voice do its thing. Hoarse and shrill and bellowing. I crowed, I whined, it sounded worse than the dog, but for the first time in my life I dared to sing.
* * *
A few weeks later I happened to mention during recess that Niila and I had started a pop band. That’s certainly how it felt. After all, we’d stood in the garage every day after school, and blown up each other’s dream world into enormous, brightly colored balloons. And as I’ve always had far too low a sense of self-preservation, not to mention a tongue loose at both ends, it just slipped out.
The sensation spread like wildfire. This was Pajala in the sixties, remember: an earth-shattering piece of world news wasn’t necessary. Niila and I were surrounded, it was the lunch break, and we were subjected to scorn and accusations of lying. The ring closed in on us, and in the end there was only one way out. We were forced to perform at the next Happy Hour.
Unfortunately our teacher agreed. She got the caretaker to dig out an old record player, and I borrowed Sis’s record of Jailhouse Rock when she wasn’t looking. We were going to mime, and I borrowed a girl’s skipping rope to use as a microphone. I was going to sing into the handle.
As early as the rehearsal at break, it was obvious it would be a disaster. The gramophone wouldn’t work at 45 revs, it would only play at 33 or 78. The record sounded like either funeral bassoons in Tibet, or Donald Duck at the circus. We chose the latter.
The bell rang, and the class sat down at their desks. Niila was holding on to the hardboard guitar with a grip of iron, looking panic-stricken. The boys started throwing erasers at us even before we’d started. I picked up the skipping rope and thought about imminent death. Teacher was just about to introduce us, but I reckoned we might just as well get it over with, and slammed down the needle.
The music started off with a clatter. By God, but we jumped around! The floor sagged and the heavy needle pattered at the defenseless vinyl like a woodpecker’s bill. Niila’s nervousness made him so stiff-legged that he kept losing his balance, crashing into the teacher’s desk, bumping against me, then staggering back into the blackboard and bending the chalk shelf. I threw myself wholeheartedly into the catastrophe, stopped miming, as the record sounded like a box of nails being shaken, and instead started yelling out in home-made English. I was bawling so frenetically that even the eraser-throwers lost the plot. I was trying simultaneously to prevent Niila jumping about so much he smashed the record player. As the needle was jumping back and forth, there was no sign of the song ever coming to an end. Niila tossed his head so violently that his shoulder strap came loose and the guitar flew into the wall map, making a deep dent close to Jyväskylä, and despite my bellowing I finally managed to hear Teacher shrieking. Niila got tangled up in the skipping rope and tumbled stiff-legged into me like a moose. We collapsed into the record player, the pickup arm fell off, and at last silence fell.
We lay there in a heap. Niila was winded and could only breathe in, not out, he was hiccuping and gasping as his lungs filled up to bursting point. My lip tasted of blood and salt. It was so quiet, you could have heard a mouse sneeze.
Then the girls started clapping. Hesitantly but approvingly. The boys were muttering enviously, and a big lump of eraser bounced off my head.
And it dawned on me that it hadn’t been a complete disaster after all.
* * *
The next few days were hectic. Niila was given a good hiding at home when it became known what he’d done, but he said bravely that it had been worth it. I was also threatened with a fate worse than death by my big sister when she saw her ruined record. I escaped by the skin of my teeth after agreeing to a Draconian installment plan by which she would take all my pocket money for the foreseeable future.
The reaction of the girls at school was more thought-provoking. Like most lads of my age I considered myself to be ugly and shy, with straggly hair and a potato of a nose and skinny forearms. But now, Niila and I started getting looks. Shy, fleeting glances in the lunchtime cafeteria line, quick smiles from clusters of girls outside the home ec room. We were invited to join their skipping games, and shyly agreed to do so. We were called ladykillers by the envious boys. It was all most bewildering and a bit frightening.
All the time we kept on practicing in the garage, tunes I’d heard on the radio then reproduced from memory. Niila jumped around with the piece of hardboard, and I sang. It sounded less awful than before as I’d learned not to strain my throat, but to sing from deeper down in my chest. My voice became steadier, and occasionally sounded a little bit like music. Niila started smiling inwardly and giving me friendly digs. We sometimes paused in between numbers, discussed the relationship between girls and rock music, drank lemonade, and felt nervous.
Things came to a head a few weeks later when a girl who lived in Strandvägen arranged a party. After sodas and popcorn, we played Consequences. Before Niila and I could get away, we’d been kissed to death, and I got together with a girl for four days before I put an end to it and gave her back the necklace and brass ring and the photograph of her in her lace blouse and her Mum’s lipstick.
Not long after that, it was all over. The girls found more exciting things to do, and got together with boys from the big school. Niila and I suddenly found ourselves in a backwater, and although we tried for ages to fix a follow-up to our Happy Hour performance, our teacher would have none of it. I had another go at the girl I’d turned down, but didn’t get anywhere. Life was a mystery.
CHAPTER 9
In which our heroes start at the big school and, with considerable difficulty, learn fingering techniques
After three years at the Old School, most of us little brats could read and count, and it was time to proceed to the juniors at Pajala Central School, a yellow brick building looking as if it were made of Lego. The new school year started with a campaign to make us start brushing our teeth. There was a clear need for it, you might say: at my latest checkup I had ten cavities, and Niila had nine. The rest of the class fared just as badly, and the local authority had been forced to order a truckload of extra amalgam from Linköping. Now we all had to go in groups to the clinic and swallow a coloring tablet that turned the plaque an angry red, then look in a mirror and do some tooth-brushing gymnastics under the supervision of a stern-looking lady. Brush, brush, brush, at least ten times up and down in each place. I don’t know if that’s why, or if it was due to the fluoride rinse, but I didn’t have any more cavities at all for the rest of my time at school.
Needless to say, the dentists soon noticed that they were doing fewer and fewer fillings, and started looking around for alternative sources of income. The answer was braces. Every week some poor soul was sent to the clinic and came back with a mouth full of plastic and steel wire. As soon as a tooth was the slightest little bit klinkku, it had to be corrected. For me it was a canine tooth that wasn’t quite standing to attention, and by God, I was sent to the National Dental Service like greased lightning. The woman dentist had a permanent furrow in her brow, reached for the pliers, and tightened the steel wire in the brace until the whole of my skull ached. As soon as I got outside I loosened the wire with the key for my bicycle lock, bringing relief until the next visit. Sometimes the specialist traveled up, a bald fellow from Luleå. The only difference was that he tightened the wires even harder, and that his fingers tasted of cigarillo when he poked around inside my mouth.
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Going to the junior school meant that puberty was getting closer. You could see what was in store every break. Various couples from class six wandering around holding hands and kissing. Girls having a smoke behind the bike sheds. Makeup getting bolder and brasher, the higher the class. It felt terrifying, we couldn’t really understand it. Would I change like that as well? Oh yes, it was there inside us all, we could feel it, a seed. It was swelling already, and before long we’d lose control.
As it was considered useful to be able to speak several languages, we started learning English, and our local Finnish dialect was heard less frequently in the schoolyard. I started writing down English pop songs by listening to Top Ten on the radio. We didn’t have a tape recorder at home then, so I had to write as quickly as I could while the program was being broadcast. I still didn’t understand the words, and had to write phonetically, learn them by heart, and then sing for Niila in the garage songs such as Ollyu nidis lav and Owatter shayd ovpail.
Niila was extremely impressed. Who had taught me English?
“I taught my self,” I said, nonchalantly.
Niila thought about that for a while. Then he made his own bold decision: He was going to learn to play the guitar.