Lena’s dad is in prison. He helped the North Korean embassy with a big alcohol smuggling job. I’ve been there and helped to carry boxes down into a secret room in their cellar. She wants to know if you can be called a child of divorce when you’re nearly grown up. She’s asked me. But I don’t think my answers were good enough.
I confess that I drink alcohol, even in the mornings, and about the hash and pills. For my thirteenth birthday I wanted two things. One was hash. The other was a yellow and black tracksuit. I went and bought that myself and my parents paid for it. It was harder to get the hash. I didn’t know anyone who smokes hash. Who could I ask to give it to me? I just knew that I wanted to try. It was something to do with God. A longing for something else. I gave the task to an older boy, and he was successful.
Arild listens. I wonder if I’m talking too much, but carry on. ‘Everyone at home is like a solid wall. You can’t talk to them. They never ask anything.’ They hold up daily life like a roof. Because the rain mustn’t get in. Fall to pieces.
‘And Granddad’s moved in permanently now. He can’t cope on his own and we can’t cope with him. We’re not used to having a main person in the house. He’s constantly asking what the time is. Just about every five minutes. I’m the only one who contradicts him when he says it’s his son Bo on the TV. The others tell me to shush and just say yes. “Nod and agree.”’ It makes me uneasy that it’s not true. Nervous about lying.
Arild gives us tea. We’re not used to drinking tea. Not used to sitting and talking about everything. ‘I’m scared that I won’t be a proper grown-up,’ I say. Arild looks very earnest. He quotes some Bible passage and prays for us. Put his hand first on Lena’s knee then on mine. He says our names out loud and calls on the Lord to see us. When he’s finished he says amen and closes his eyes.
We sit in silence and almost get a fit of the giggles even though we don’t want to. It’s serious in a way we’re not used to. It’s the first time that we’ve told an adult any of this. I look at Lena. I can see that she’s still a child too, with her round cheeks, bleached hair and heavily made-up eyes.
Then Arild says that the only way is to accept God. And suddenly I want to do just that, even though I’ve always been so against Him before. I just don’t know how. In this almost empty flat. With this stupid man I don’t know. I really don’t understand the first thing about how to find God. Even though I’ve been going to the Junior Club for years now and have been to countless prayer meetings. I’ve sat and thought about other things, thought that soon the prayers and sermons would be over and the activities would begin.
I take a sip of tea. It does down the wrong way. I cough and start to cry. My head splits. It’s Espen inside me who’s crying. Arild starts to talk in tongues. All foreign words. They pour out of his mouth. He folds his hands, hard, and I do the same. Bow my head. Espen says: ‘No, no, no.’ In a language I understand. I open my fingers so that God can see that my hands are properly in prayer.
I don’t need to tell anyone at home where I’m going. I’m just not there. Peter and I go into the woods. We smoke hash. It’s a home made bong. An empty toilet roll with a hole in it and we put hash in a tinfoil holder.
At first we don’t feel anything. Draw the smoke down as far as we can. Cough. Then I lie down on the ground and start to float. Out of my body, away and up into a new world where the details take on a new dimension. The soughing in the treetops. You could easily think you were lying up there in the sky looking down at the ground.
Peter starts to laugh. There’s nothing to laugh about. I lie in my bubble and hear nothing. I look at my fingers. I fold my hands. I believe that God has seen me. My body spreads. My arms come loose and move on their own. A dog appears and sniffs around, I jump up. My nerves on the outside of my body.
I have to smoke more. Peter has to pee. He doesn’t just open his flies. He lets his pants and trousers fall to his ankles. He stands there naked from the waist down and pisses. Then he comes towards me with his with trousers down and his hand on his cock. I’ve lit the bong and ask what he wants. ‘I want to smoke with this,’ he says and waves his willy around. ‘Do you like it?’ I don’t answer. I don’t want to see his willy. ‘Do you wish you had one?’ ‘No way.’ He pulls up his trousers. We smoke, cough. We lie down on some pine needles and fall asleep. It’s chilly, but we don’t get cold.
When I get home I can’t find the key and have to ring the doorbell. It’s Dad who opens in his pyjamas. I’m wearing my new tracksuit. ‘Have you been out running?’ Dad asks. I nod and totter into my room.
I stand at the fountain in the square by school. I’ve just walked down the hill from school and across the square for the last time. I’m never going back to my school again.
This autumn I’ll start at the secondary school that’s on the other side of the town. Something new is waiting for me. I don’t want to get old. Don’t want to grow, don’t want to cry. What is it that’s waiting? I don’t think I’m finished with childhood yet. I want to be looked after. It’s too late now.
It’s better to be the biggest amongst the small, than the smallest amongst the big. I watch the water spouting out in great arcs. Listen to the noise. Then I hear someone crying. Espen is here. Children know things they can’t express.
I’m afraid that Jonathan is losing hope. We’re sitting by the kitchen table. I want to get out our file but he says it’s not necessary. That we’re not going to write lists today.
I’ve had a relapse and been in hospital again. It wasn’t supposed to happen, not now when things were going so well. ‘What am I doing here, when you just stay with the voices?’ he asks, disheartened. I want him to be here. I have to be with the voices. But I still want him to be here. He normally says that he’s always here. That he’s at the end of a telephone. That I’m not alone.
Now I’m alone. It feels like he’s lost hope. He puts some old snus back in the tin and pops in a new pouch. ‘Would you like some coffee?’ I ask. He hasn’t taken off his hat. The yellow one with the Arsenal emblem on it. He sinks down into the low kitchen sofa.
He is the first therapist I’ve had who’s shown his emotions so clearly. He’s been let down. ‘What shall we do today then?’ he asks. ‘I don’t know. Yes, yes, yes.’ ‘What do they want?’ he asks.
I don’t answer. I get up and stand in the corner and make repetitive movements with my arms. He lets me do it. We’ve written lists of what I should do, hour by hour. Which even includes spending time with the voices. No list is going to help me today. They’re not enough. They can’t save me. Don’t lose faith, Jonathan. Don’t lose faith. We just have to keep fighting.
Peter and I are standing in the toilets just by the Christian Junior Club. There’s only one youth club and it’s run by the church. We’re necking spirits. Then we go in again and the sermon has just begun. Ascension Day is coming up. Filip and Terje, two of the youth workers, are nineteen. They volunteer here and are very kind, good-looking and devoted Christians. And naive. They see it as their mission to save us. I wonder if they’ve noticed that they’re not managing. They have run the club for years. We were children to begin with, now we’re teenagers.
It’s a mixture of prayer, songs and activities. After the sermon, we watch a film by a revival movement in the USA and after the film Peter and I go back out to the toilet and take a few more swigs of vodka. But instead of going back in, Peter wants us to lie down on the sofa in the cloakroom. We lie very close together on the narrow sofa. Gospel singing can be heard from the club room.
Peter opens his flies and strokes my cheek. ‘What do you want?’ I ask. ‘To see if you’re a girl or a boy,’ he says. ‘You’re so beautiful. You’re so cool. You dress like a boy. I think you’re a girl. But how can I know for sure? Maybe you’re some strange mixture. Let me have a look.’
‘You can’t,’ I say. I’m drunk and have no will. ‘Let me see, just once,’ Peter says.
A strange mixture. Is that what people think about me? Som
ewhere deep down I know that it’s right, but I still feel insulted. Don’t know myself what I want them to think either. Peter pulls down my trousers with force. The button pops off. But he’s not particularly interested in looking that closely. He quickly pulls down his own trousers. He pushes his penis into my vagina. ‘Don’t,’ I say. It hurts. He pushes even harder. ‘It won’t work,’ I say. ‘I’m too tight.’
Peter thrusts and I scream. The gospel singing stops and the door bursts open. Terje the Christian worker, Terje the innocent, just stands there and stares.
I think that I’m tied down. I’m lying with my arms out to the side. A waking nightmare that I’ve conjured up many times. I’m lying in bed. I try, but I can’t move. I try to talk, but can only stutter. I want to say that there’s been a misunderstanding. That I’m well and healthy. That I’m not going to harm myself or anyone else. I throw myself from side to side. I stammer: ‘Help, help.’
It’s the staff in a psychiatric clinic who have tied me down. People I trusted and confided in. Someone pulls out a knife. They circle the bed in silence. Then someone slices the knife through the air and the blade catches the light. It slashes over my face. Close, but doesn’t touch. I scream. Then they make a cut on my forehead and the blood pours down over my eyes. They tear off the blanket and cut up along my inner thigh towards my genitals. I piss myself. I shout: ‘No, no, no.’
I write and write, full of mistakes, but I know what it says. I know my texts off by heart. It’s easier to write your own book than to read one. I am the one telling the story. I force my sister Hild to write the texts on the typewriter, while I dictate. Marit is not here and I miss her. She was the one who used to type for me. Now we get postcards where she describes her wild life with her new boyfriend. I write letters back. Try to say something grown up, and she notices and replies: You’re getting so big now, my little princess.
It’s quiet at home without Marit. She used to shout and make a noise and say what she thought. Hild says nothing. Isn’t seeing anyone, just sits in her room and smokes. The trouble with Hild is that she’s dyslexic too. Of all us children, Marit is the only one who isn’t.
But Hild types as well as she can. Mum corrects it and Hild has to redo it. Mum laughs out loud at the spelling mistakes. She’s not laughing at us. She just thinks that spelling mistakes are really funny. She’s the sort of person who likes to get books of spelling mistakes from the papers for Christmas. My book, The Stone of Finn-Jon, is ready. We send it off to the TV. I never hear a peep in reply and have sent them the original. But I continue to write.
I start to write about old people. Every morning, Mrs Vangen slowly pulls a cart up the road. She has done the paper round. Her back is stooped. I compare her bent back with the old apple trees in her garden. In my story I call Mrs Vangen Mrs Evensen. This gives me the freedom to write down all the thoughts I have about her life and my own. I write an entire short story about Mrs Evensen. I send it in to the radio. I even write a poem called ‘Letter Box’. Which is also about an old woman. She goes to the letter box every day to see what’s in the post. She looks into the letter box, full of hope. She lives in hope. ‘But the spark of life in her eye quickly fades, when day after day, month after month, she gets nothing.’ The poem finishes like this: ‘The letter box is green, small and not particularly nice. It stands on a frame and could have brought joy to an old woman’s life.’
Both manuscripts are accepted by the radio. But not by the youth programme that I sent them to. They end up in a programme for the elderly and are going to be read by a real actor. I’m to go to the studio and be interviewed.
I’ve been looking forward to it all week. The day arrives when I go on my own into town and up to the radio station to give my first ever interview. Imagine being on the radio. Now everyone will know who I am.
I have to wait in reception. Then a woman comes to get me. We walk down endless corridors.
I get a microphone and headphones. ‘The people interviewing you are sitting elsewhere,’ the woman explains, ‘so you’ll hear their voices in the headphones and then you can answer, once we’ve got the microphone sorted out. Would you like a glass of water?’ ‘No thank you. I’m going to speak to someone somewhere else? Won’t I see them?’ ‘No, the programme is made in Bergen. Could you just say what you’re called?’ I say my name over and over again. Then they say that they’re happy with the microphone check. The green light goes on and a voice starts talking in my headphones.
‘The short story we have just heard was written by Eli Larsen, who has just turned thirteen. And we are lucky enough to have her here with us today. Welcome, Eli.’ ‘Thank you,’ I say, quietly. ‘So, here we have a young person who writes about old people.’ ‘Mmhmm,’ I reply. ‘To think that there are young people in this country who really care about old people.’ ‘Mmhmm.’ ‘Where do you get your ideas from?’ ‘The kitchen window,’ I reply. ‘It really is heart-warming and gives hope that such a young person actually thinks about the elderly in society.’ ‘Yes,’ I say, still quiet. I haven’t really got started yet. ‘More young people should do the same, don’t you think?’ ‘Mmhmm.’ ‘You describe these people with such insight, you must know a lot of old people.’ ‘Yes,’ I lie. ‘Well, we’d like to thank you for your lovely pieces and for coming to talk to us today. We hope that you continue writing.’ ‘Yes,’ I squeak.
The light shines red and I take off the headphones. They lead me back through the endless corridors. I sit on the tram home, devastated. I had thought that I would finally be able to say what I think and feel. All I managed to say was yes. I could only agree.
At home, the whole family has listened to the radio. ‘You were so good,’ Mum says. I don’t answer. ‘Chin up,’ Dad says, ‘you’ve been on the radio. That’s more than I’ve ever been.’ ‘It wasn’t me,’ I say. Then my brother, Torvald, who has been leaning over the table with his head in his hands, wakes up. ‘If you’re going to be a writer or a politician or anyone else who gives interviews in the future, can I give you a tip?’ he asks. ‘Don’t answer the questions. Just say what you want to say.’
I’m on tour in Germany with my latest book. Travel from town to town with an interpreter and sleep in a different hotel every night. I manage to say what I want to say. I talk and read from the book and the interpreter interprets. I mix seriousness and humour. It’s a kick to stand on stage. To enthral. To concentrate. To believe that the texts are good and that what I’m saying is touching. I enjoy it. Almost as intoxicating as writing.
In one place, a man comes forward to where I’m sitting signing books after the reading. He says that he’s staying at a hotel nearby. He’s a travelling salesman for jewellery. He normally sits on his own in a pub or his hotel room in the evenings, but then he saw a poster about a reading by a Norwegian woman he’d never heard of. ‘Could you wait here for seven minutes until I get back?’ he asks. He comes back with a silver ring with a green stone in it. ‘You have given me something special this evening,’ he says and gives me the ring.
In Kiel, there is a man who wants to come up on stage and ask me a question. ‘You said that you played football.’ ‘That’s right,’ I say, feeling cocky. ‘Can you juggle?’ ‘Yes, I can.’ ‘Then I challenge you to a game of keepie uppie.’ He doesn’t produce a ball. He takes out a keyring and says that I should put it on my foot. Kick it up in the air, lean forwards and catch it on my back. I try. The keyring flies out into the audience. I try again. Get it up in the air, catch it on my back but then it crashes to the floor. Then it’s the man’s turn. He flicks the keyring into the air, leans forwards and catches it and the keys stay lying on his back. The audience applauds and he does it again.
I’m fourteen. I’m a child and I’m grown up. I start doing a paper round in the morning to get money for alcohol and cigarettes. I get up at half past four every morning.
Sometimes Dad comes with me. He’s out of work again and proud that I’m working. We take the car then. Otherwise I cycle. Colle
ct the papers down at the tram stop when it’s still dark. I deliver the papers to the blocks down by the playing fields. When you get to the top of one stairwell in one building, you can go across the roof and down the stairs in the next.
I always meet an old man drinking up there on the roof. They say he was in the war and never got over the shock. But that was forever ago. He says hello and asks for a cigarette and a paper. Which I give him. He calls me ‘sonny’. ‘Hey, sonny,’ he says, and I like it.
One Friday when I’m delivering the weekend supplement as well as the normal paper, something special happens. When I get home, I open the paper and the weekend supplement falls out. I found, I found something. The whole front page is one big painting. I recognise it. I painted it.
My picture has won a competition and is going to be a stamp. It’s a four-leafed clover with four children’s faces, one on each leaf. One yellow, one red, one black and one white. They’re laughing. They’re supposed to represent children from each corner of the world. I personally wasn’t particularly happy with the picture, thin stripes of watercolour had run from the faces. I thought it had been ruined. But the jury obviously though it was charming or artistic. My prize is that the painting will be on a stamp for letters abroad. I’m very proud of that.
At the Junior Club, we go round to all the pensioners living on their own in the neighbourhood and give them Christmas decorations. It’s a candlestick with moss and gnomies. Then we share all the sweets we get and have a nice evening. I choose to go to the old lady who lives farthest away. I’ve talked to her in the mornings when I deliver newspapers to the blocks of flats. Her front door is usually wide open when I get there around six and she’s already been up for hours and baked and made enough food to feed an army. ‘This will make them happy,’ she chuckles to herself. Freshly baked bread, buns, soup simmering on the stove. She must have looked after a big family.
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