‘What are you thinking about?’ she asked.
‘Who won the cup final,’ I let slip, and the hand was retracted.
‘Really,’ she said, looking away. ‘It’s that important, is it.’
‘Not exactly,’ I started to reassure her, ‘… but it would’ve been nice to know, I mean, erm, who won.’
‘Boys only think about one thing,’ she sniffed, her mouth a thin line.
There was nothing to say and the silence was becoming quite oppressive. Nina sat like a locked door and I couldn’t find the key.
‘I’ll have to go now,’ she said abruptly, rising to her feet. ‘I have to go and see Guri.’
I had forgotten to take the flower box off the carrier, it towered up and looked ridiculous. But she didn’t want to sit there anyway. The hug I received was quite cold. I pedalled down the bumpy street and it was strange to think that Guri was going to have a baby. But who had won the cup final?
I didn’t get any further than Frognerveien. Three villains were standing on the corner and when they saw me they raced across the cobblestones and forced me onto the pavement. They clapped their big eyes on me and the bike.
Ola pointed to the box.
‘Been givin’ N-Nina rides in the box then?’
‘Who won?’ I shouted.
‘Are you a flower boy now?’ Seb grinned.
‘Perhaps he’s started up a removal business,’ Gunnar said.
‘Who won?’ I shrieked.
Gunnar shoved his hands in his pockets and scuffed the tarmac with his boot.
‘3–3 after extra time.’
‘A draw!’ I roared.
‘Yep.’
How lucky I’d been. I’d had my cake and eaten it. Would I be joining them for the replay next Sunday? That went without saying!
At home I met Jensenius on the stairs. He was dragging himself up step by step, and each one creaked beneath his weight, sweat was pouring off his fat skull.
Wheezing like a bagpipe, he stopped when I arrived.
‘Don’t you sing any more, boy?’ he asked.
‘I practise,’ I said.
‘I haven’t heard anything!’
‘I practise in my head,’ I explained.
‘You’ve got to let it out, boy!’ Jensenius thumped his chest raw.
And then he launched into an ear-splitting bellow, his face went crimson, the note soared and soared, plaster fell off the ceiling and all the doors were thrust wide open. But Jensenius sang until there was no longer a murmur and the whole stairwell reeked of beer and sweat and minced beef.
‘You have to let it out,’ he whispered afterwards. ‘Mark my words!’
Dad said it was because The Beatles had reduced the English trade deficit that they were awarded MBEs. And Mum thought that ‘Yesterday’ was very pretty and Queen Elizabeth must have known what she was doing. We went into my room angry and confused and slammed the door behind us.
‘There’s somethin’ not right here,’ Ola mumbled. ‘Don’t l-l-like it when our parents like what we l-l-like.’
We gave the matter some thought and nodded. We agreed. Ola had put his finger on it. There was something fiendish going on.
‘They don’t mean it,’ Seb said. ‘They’re just sayin’ it. They never mean what they say. They just say it.’
We gave the matter some more thought and we agreed. That was how it worked. We had seen right through them. They couldn’t pull the wool over our eyes.
First of all, the medals had to be presented. We stuck out our chests and pinned our awards on each other. Ringo got a silver medal in the Holmenkollen relay, which Gunnar’s father had won in 1952 with Ready. Seb got the swimming proficiency badge, which I had swum home in Nesodden the year before. Gunnar got a gold medal for prize cows that Granddad had won in Toten two years running, just before the war. I ended up with a Red Cross badge that Seb’s mother had received at the local group’s annual meeting in 1961. We stood erect in a line, august medals gleaming and rattling, and then we proffered a hand, gave a deep bow and the English queen passed through the room like a spirit.
After the ceremony it was gig time. Gunnar, Seb and Ola had brought along all their records. In total, we had ten singles, four EPs and five LPs. We had to get weaving if we wanted to hear the whole repertoire. I had bought new batteries for the Philips.
We started with ‘Love Me Do’ and glued our ears to the speaker.
‘How’s the drummin’?’ we asked Ola in the interval.
‘Practisin’ with pencils. Left hand is worse.’
‘Asked for an electric guitar for Christmas,’ Gunnar said. ‘With a tremolo.’
We turned the record over. ‘P.S. I Love You’. Dad groaned from the sitting room. That was more like it. We cranked up the volume.
In the middle of ‘Do You Want To Know A Secret’ there was a bang on the door. Mum stood there with Nina behind her.
‘Hiya,’ I said gruffly. Nina came in and Mum closed the door with less sound than Dragon saying Our Father.
She sat beside me on the floor. She looked around.
‘Are you playing records?’ Nina asked.
‘No, we’re playin’ cards,’ Seb grinned. Nina pouted at him, my stomach was leaden.
‘We’re celebratin’ The Beatles bein’ given MBEs,’ I added quickly.
‘Why are they the only ones to get them?’ Nina said.
We blinked our baby blues.
‘Who else should have got ’em, eh?’
‘The Byrds,’ Nina said, unperturbed.
‘They’re American!’ Seb bellowed.
‘The Rolling Stones then. Or The Yardbirds! Or Manfred Mann!’ Nina wasn’t giving in. This was a fight to the death.
‘Only The B-B-Beatles have reduced the English trade d-d-deficit,’ Ola squeezed out and the discussion was over.
We played the rest of the singles and I put on the EP with ‘Long Tall Sally’ to prove to Nina once and for all that The Beatles could play. Wow, what a guitar solo. Gunnar was wriggling all over the floor like an earthworm and Ola was drumming his fingers on everything within reach.
In the ensuing silence Seb had something he wanted to get off his chest.
‘Why’s Guri finishin’ school?’ he asked.
Nina squinted over at me. I looked out of the window. I had not blabbed.
‘She’s starting a new school,’ Nina said.
‘Doesn’t she like our class?’
Nina turned the conversation to another incident.
‘Do you boys know that Dragon tried to kill Lue?’
We jumped.
‘My mother told me – she knows the school nurse.’
We were on tenterhooks. Dragon. Murder.
‘Lue’s got a bad heart, hasn’t he. And that’s why he needs the medicine he has to take several times a day. He keeps the pills in his jacket pocket, in the right hand pocket, because when his heart is shaky his left arm is almost completely lame.’
‘Was that why he used to run into the corridor so often?’ Gunnar whispered.
‘Yes. Dragon put the medicine in the left hand pocket in one of the breaks.’
‘How’d he do that?’ Seb could only just articulate the words.
‘Lue was found unconscious in the corridor, but they brought him round in the school surgery.’
‘How did they find out it was Dragon?’
‘He said so himself. He was boasting to everyone.’
‘Will he go to p-p-prison now?’ Ola stammered.
‘He’s being sent to Berg,’ Nina said.
Things were going downhill for Dragon, Dragon without a face. Our insides froze, Ola putting on ‘Help’ wasn’t much help.
‘Would never’ve thought that Dragon had the intelligence,’ Seb whispered.
I accompanied Nina home. We took tiny steps up Løvenskioldsgate. The pavement was steep and slippery.
‘Is Guri going to leave the class?’ I asked.
‘Yes, she’s going to have an aborti
on.’
We walked on a bit. A soaking wet leaf blew right in my face.
‘That mod,’ I mumbled. ‘Isn’t it illegal?’
‘She won’t say who the father is.’
We had reached the fountain. It was closed off now, with solid boards across the pool. We sat on the edge. It was cold to the backside.
We didn’t move. Nina seemed so strange, somehow distant, that I could hardly reach her.
‘There’s something I haven’t told you,’ she began.
Now it was coming. I tried to find somewhere to put my hands. They wouldn’t keep still.
Nina’s eyes were white in the dark.
‘We’re moving,’ she said.
‘Moving? Where to?’
‘To Denmark.’
‘To Denmark,’ I repeated, without losing composure.
‘Yes. Copenhagen. Dad has a job at the embassy.’
‘When?’
‘In three weeks.’
It was autumn. The fountain was boarded up. And my hands were so bloody cold. I put them up Nina’s sweater.
‘I might visit you in spring,’ I said. ‘You see, we’re going to play football in Copenhagen.’
My hands were so warm and I had her hair all over me.
Things happened thick and fast. I was with Nina every evening, either drifting round the streets, I had never walked so much before, or sitting in her room and playing records and looking at the map of Denmark. It wasn’t that far away. If you went through Sweden you would hardly get your feet wet. I knew a kid from Ruseløkka who had sneaked onto the ferry to Denmark, but they found him before they reached Dyna lighthouse and he was given the heave-ho in Horten. But I would go in spring. That was a cast-iron certainty. With number 2 on my back. Oslo’s best defender. And after some reflection I wondered whether it was such a bad thing after all. Of course it was hard, but having a girl in Copenhagen wasn’t such a bad thing. That was what I told myself as I walked home. I’ve got a girl in Copenhagen. It sounded pretty cool. A girlfriend in Copenhagen.
Gunnar, Seb and Ola were beginning to send me scowls, wondering whether I had completely gone off the rails. But we went to the cup final the following Sunday equipped with Frigg pennants and chestnuts to throw at the Skeid shites. But the game was another draw after extra time and Seb said that if it went on like that they would soon be playing in snowshoes. The next Sunday we turned up with pennants and chestnuts again, there was frost on the ground and the Ullevål pitch looked like a farmer’s meadow, and it was obvious Skeid would win on a ground like that and with such an idiot of a referee, he disallowed a dream Frigg goal in the last minute, obstructing the goalkeeper, Kasper reckoned his toes had been trodden on, for Christ’s sake. We shuffled home in dejected mood, looking at the sky and thinking about snow.
‘How long till Nina moves?’ Gunnar asked.
‘Week.’
‘You goin’ to m-m-move, too?’
‘Shut up.’
We squeezed onto the Sognsvann tram and had a bit of banter with some Torshov tossers who had seen the Frigg pennants under our jackets.
‘Per Pettersen shoots like a dung beetle,’ one freckled face said.
Ola stuck his head forward, his lips aquiver.
‘Per Pettersen shoots like a p-p-puma. And K-K-Kasper’s a wanker.’
‘Piss off!’
‘Piss off yourself! No one can play football on a p-p-pitch like that!’
‘Conditions were the same for both teams,’ Freckles snorted.
‘Skeid are better at orient-t-teering! And someone must’ve g-g-greased the ref ’s p-p-palm!’
There was a bit of pushing and shoving, but we managed to get Ola off at Valkyrie plass intact and trudged aimlessly through the cold streets with frying smells wafting on the air.
I stopped off at Seb’s to borrow an essay on Traffic Safety. It was quite mad. Seb was suggesting that all cars should drive backwards. Then they couldn’t go so fast. But they would require bigger mirrors. He would have got an E from me, but after I had got rid of the worst howlers a C should be within my reach.
‘Dad’s comin’ back at Christmas,’ Seb said with eyes agleam.
He led me to the hall and stood rocking his thin frame back and forth.
‘Give it you back tomorrow,’ I said.
‘No hurry. You…’
He didn’t say any more. I paused and looked up at him.
‘Yes?’
‘Is it serious? Between you and Nina?’
I didn’t answer and sprang down the steps.
‘Just jokin’!’ Seb shouted, hanging over the banister.
Then he came running after me and held me back. His eyes were suddenly so very sad.
‘D’you know… did you know that Guri was havin’… a child?’
‘Heard rumours,’ I said.
‘Everyone’s talkin’ about it. That’s why she left the class.’
Seb’s face was white.
‘It’s terrible for her,’ he said and started walking slowly upstairs. ‘By the way, I asked her out to the cinema once,’ Seb said with his back to me.
Nina was due to leave on the second Sunday of November.
But on Saturday there was the premiere of Help and I queued for three hours at the Eldorado to get two tickets at the end of row fourteen. And so there we sat, Nina and I, the auditorium was a cauldron of excitement, I was wondering whether Gunnar, Seb and Ola had managed to buy tickets, but I hadn’t seen them in the queue. I was all in, too much was going on at once. I wanted to be with them and I wanted to be with Nina, so there I sat, Nina’s hand in my lap, a sticky bar of chocolate in my pocket and a bewildered brain in my head, amid a bedlam of screaming, arm-waving, perfume and boot stamping, sitting there, not taking in one iota of what was happening on the screen.
And then we were on our way home. We didn’t say much, we didn’t say anything. Last evening. It was freezing, the cold bit into our faces. We approached Tidemandsgate. The house was empty now, the removal men had already taken two big loads. And as we got closer, we squeezed hands harder and harder, until Nina said ‘Ow’ and pulled her arm away.
‘That hurt,’ she said.
‘I didn’t mean it.’
‘I know!’
She poked me in the ribs and produced a big apple from her pocket, it gleamed and shone like a red moon. She sank her teeth in it and the aroma was released into the darkness. Then I took a bite, and we ate the apple, each from our own side, laughing and dribbling, right through to the pips, then we were mouth to mouth, the core fell to the ground, it was beautifully staged, and then we kissed for a long time, an apple kiss, it went on and on, eventually we let go, Nina’s face was very wet, and I didn’t know quite whether it was tears or apple or maybe just me.
‘I’ll write to you,’ she said.
‘Good.’
‘Will you promise to write?’
I nodded, fidgeted and cleared my throat.
‘Do you remember the flower?’ I said.
Nina peered up.
‘You gave it to me that time Holst was almost gobbled up by a snake.’
‘Yes.’
I kicked a stone down the pavement. It hit a hub cap and made a terrible noise.
‘Still got it,’ I said.
We kissed again, then she tore herself away and hurried down the gravel path, and in the large empty house the windows shone like electric voids in the night.
As I ran home it began to snow.
Rubber Soul
Winter ’65/’66
Mum woke me up to tell me the weather forecast. Forty centimetres of fresh snow in Tryvann. The blind went up with a bang and winter streamed in through the window. I lay in bed with my senses alert, sensed and sensed nothing. Then I leapt out of bed to go to the telephone and call Gunnar, but Gunnar was out, skiing with Seb and Ola. His brother answered.
‘I think they were goin’ to Kobberhaugen. The Americans are comin’.’
‘Eh?’
�
��The Americans are comin’!’
I understood zilch.
‘Nordmarka is their first stop,’ Stig said.
‘Kobberhaug cabin,’ I said.
‘Exactly.’
I shot down to the cellar and collected my Bonna skis. The poles were a bit on the short side now. Then I went up to Frognerseteren and set off into the forest, stabbed and clambered my way up, steamed downhill without blinking, took Slaktern standing up, Kandahar bindings squeaking, raced across Lake Blankvann without a thought of whether the ice would hold, it creaked and groaned beneath my weight, someone shouted at me from the shore, but it held, of course it held, and now there were just the last steep paths up to the cabin in Kobberhaug and there they were, covered in sweat, by the fire with blackcurrant toddies and cigarettes.
I joined them and they mustered me from top to toe.
‘Who’s this?’ Gunnar asked.
‘Might live here,’ Seb suggested.
‘Think it’s Ole Ellefsæter’s b-b-brother,’ Ola said.
‘Pack it in,’ I said.
‘He speaks Norwegian,’ Gunnar established. ‘Wonder where I’ve seen ’im before.’
And so it went on for ages, but in the end they recognised me and Gunnar asked, ‘Where were you last night? We tried to get tickets for Help.’
‘I was at Help,’ I said under my breath.
They were on me at once, red-faced, yelling and carrying on. They made a terrible racket.
‘Were you? You’ve already been to see Help!’ Gunnar groaned.
‘With Nina,’ I said.
‘Without us! Why the hell didn’t you buy tickets for us, too, eh?’
‘There were only two left,’ I complained.
‘Try that one on those that live in the sticks!’
The table went quiet for a moment. I felt hollow inside. This was on a par with high treason. I would be shot on Appelsinhaug ridgetop, burned on the spot and my ashes would be sprinkled over Lake Bjørnsjøen.
Seb said to the others:
‘Last evening with his girl, so he can do what he likes. Right?’
Gunnar and Ola gave a reluctant nod, it went even quieter.
‘What was it like then?!’ Ola burst out. ‘What w-w-was it like?’
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