Beatles (18 page)

‘We
are
better than The Snowflakes,’ Seb shouted. ‘They just play shit.’

I threw a snowball in the air and I could swear it never came down again.

‘They don’t even know what a s-s-sitar is!’Ola snorted.

School began, Christmas was over. Christmas trees stood in gateways and backyards, brown and bare like fish bones. Stars vanished from windows and re-appeared in the sky on cold, pitch-black nights. A new year. Everything had changed. Everything was the same. Except that Skinke, the gym teacher, had had a new idea. We should swim. On such cold days he announced that it was important and proper that we should swim. For then we would acquire another subcutaneous layer of fat on our bodies, which would protect us against the cold. Viz. the polar bear. And with that we tramped down to West Oslo Baths and jumped into the chlorine. Skinke patrolled the pool blowing his whistle and screaming orders.

‘Where’s Fred?’ gurgled Gunnar, spitting out green water.

I took a gander.

‘Here he comes,’ I said.

Here came Fred Hansen. His ribs jutted out like the steps of a staircase above the bony hips from which flapped his Tarzan bathing trunks. He hesitated for a few seconds, then strode onto the diving board and launched himself like a contorted seal, jackknifed and hit the water without a splash, without a sound. And there he stayed. Fred Hansen didn’t surface. Skinke waved his arms about and yelled. We could see Fred on the bottom like a grey shadow, a skinny deepwater fish. It seemed to last forever and Skinke was on the point
of diving in when Fred shot up like a torpedo, almost erect in the water, he really did, Fred leapt like a trout, then he began to swim, front crawl, it was the most elegant crawl I had ever seen, he surged through the water like a transported log, hardly seeming to move, his thin arms driving him forward as though he had a propeller behind his feet.

‘That’s great!’ Skinke shouted. ‘That’s great, Fred! Keep it up!’

Fred kept it up, back and forth, back crawl, butterfly, front crawl, the rest of us wallowed there, splashing around like disabled hippos, but Fred was a seal, he was a seal!

In the shower afterwards we all stared at him. It was unbelievable.

‘You’re a bloody good swimmer,’ we said.

Fred blushed and vanished in the steam.

Then we sprinted back to school. Our hair was deep-frozen by the time we reached Skovveien and our fringes stood up like peaks on caps. After arriving in the classroom we slowly thawed out and water streamed down our faces, and the girls sitting in the window row laughed.

The day Gjermund Eggen won the gold in the fifty-kilometre cross country event we had the school party at Vestheim. We met at Seb’s two hours before the kick-off. His mother had joined his father in Marseille where his new boat was moored. In the meantime Seb’s grandmother had moved in and she sat at the back of the sitting room embroidering and didn’t hear the clinking in Gunnar’s bag as we tiptoed across the carpet.

‘Lager!’ Seb said after we had barricaded the door.

‘Only stuff I could find,’ Gunnar said.

‘If we do press ups afterwards, we’ll be p-p-pickled,’ Ola said. We looked at him.

‘To heat the b-b-blood. Then it goes to your h-h-head quicker.’

Seb levered open the bottles with his belt buckle and we each had a swig. It tasted of gym bag.

‘Pretty good,’ Gunnar said.

We nodded and Seb passed cigarettes around. Then we sat there puffing and quaffing lager in blazers with shiny buttons and grey drainpipe trousers. Paul was wailing ‘When I Saw Her Standing There’ on the record player. That was how life should be, no doubt about it.

At eight we stumbled through the streets, crashed into lamp posts, tripped and grinned and held onto each other, howled at the heavens and sprayed our names in yellow in the snow, as far as it went, it went as far as surname and address, wow, what a night this was going to be.

In the playground people were huddled together in dark clusters. We could hear music from a record player. In one corner a square bottle was doing the rounds. Red faces shone out. Suddenly we were not so mouthy any more, we descended the stairs as erect as flagpoles, hearts pounding behind our shirts and five kroner in our fists. We hung our duffle coats in the cloakroom, which didn’t smell of sweat and athlete’s foot but perfume, raisins and something else exciting. Skinke, his arms crossed, in a double-breasted silver suit and yellow tie, his hair Brylcreemed, stood guard at the entrance.

‘Great somersault,’ he said to me as we passed.

In the gymnasium there was no longer a smell of cowshed, it was a new room, with garlands hanging from the ceiling, large fishing nets extended across the walls, balloons, candles and a long counter where you could buy Coke, buns and sausages, and in the corner a big stage with all The Snowflakes’ equipment. We calmed ourselves down with a Coke and took a cautious look around. Girls in wide dresses, girls in tight dresses, tall girls with their hair up and black eyes and thin shoes, standing still. And the boys in shiny suits, the
gymnas
students, some wearing Beatle jackets, and we stood there in blazers, starched shirts and knitted ties, feeling pre-shrunk.

People were streaming in the whole time, the place was filling up, some were rowdy and lurched around like overjoyed elephants. Everywhere the talk was of Gjermund Eggen and his gold in the fifty-kilometre, and Bjørn Wirkola’s ski-jumping. Names were shouted, balloons burst, girls’ laughter. Then the lights were dimmed a fraction and all went quiet. The Snowflakes filed onto the stage wearing red jackets, green trousers and white shoes. Bobby was standing at the side adjusting some cables. They launched into ‘A Hard Day’s Night’, we shut our ears and moved back as far as we could, for this could not be allowed, they could not be permitted to play The Beatles like this.

‘Feeble version,’ Seb groaned, sticking corks into both ears.

The jungle was alive. Leopards stalked through the grass, scented the wind and moved step by step towards the antelopes. The pumas sat by the wall bars waiting for an unwitting hare to hop past. The zebras frolicked around and the elephants lay down to sleep. Outside in the darkness, hyenas and wolves howled, the ones who had not been admitted.

Some girls from Gunnar’s and my class stood close by, overdressed and heavily made-up. They were giggling and their eyes rolled around the room like marbles.

‘Aren’t you boys goin’ to ask them?’ Seb grinned.

‘Got a girl in Copenhagen,’ I answered.

The Snowflakes burst into a Swedish number, ‘
Där björkorna susa
’. Bobby was on the stage adjusting a few bits and pieces and putting on manager airs. Girls had lined the wall bars and the atmosphere was beginning to pick up. We went to the toilet, taking off our ties on the way, and the toilet was just as crowded. In the midst of the bodies was Roar from the B class, chief hooligan and troublemaker.

‘Psst!’ he hissed as we entered.

He was holding a fluted bottle, taking immense swigs and wiping the sweat off his forehead.

We stood by the urinal and unbuttoned.

‘That Guri,’ Roar erupted, his voice unusually high-pitched. ‘That Guri who’s in the C class, she’s as randy as a stoat. Spread her legs for five øre, she would.’

The gang gave a low chuckle. Seb looked down at the dark yellow piss in which brown dog-ends were floating.

‘That’s why she left. Bun in the oven. Fucks in the fields, she does. Biggest quim in town!’

Seb spun round and stood in front of him.

‘Shut your mouth!’ he snarled.

Roar looked up in astonishment.

‘Didn’t quite catch that.’

‘Button it, arsehole features,’ Seb said.

The toilet went quiet. A circle formed around Seb and Roar. The atmosphere was taut.

‘What did you say?’ Roar said, passing the bottle to a flunkey.

‘Arsehole,’ Seb enunciated.

Now everyone knew something had to happen and the circle widened. Ola stood gawping. Gunnar clenched his fists and sent me a look. I closed my eyes. Then a voice boomed out from behind us.

‘And what is going on here?’

Skinke. The circle crumbled away, Roar took his bottle and slipped into a cubicle. We sauntered back to the gymnasium.

The Snowflakes were in the groove. They were playing ‘Apache’, the tremolo arm quivering and shaking. Bobby had organised a chorus of banshees who were jumping up and down in front of the stage, the three girls from the garage. We sneaked past Bobby’s gaze and picked up a Coke.

‘Watch out for Roar,’ Gunnar whispered.

‘He can’t get away with talkin’ that kinda shit,’ Seb hissed, sinking his teeth into a currant bun.

‘He’s p-p-pissed,’ Ola said.

‘Doesn’t help.’

Skinke was back in position at the door, broad-shouldered, puckered brow. A few girls from the gymnasium were sticking close to him and trying to get him out on the floor, but Skinke was unshakable. Kerr’s Pink, wearing a blue suit and perforated shoes, replaced him and the girls were all over him and he was dragged onto the dance floor amid stamping and cheering.

All of a sudden Ola was gone. Clean gone.

‘Where’s Ola?’ Gunnar asked.

‘No idea,’ I said. ‘He just went to buy a bun.’

We asked Seb. His head was bowed and he was still seething.

‘Isn’t he here?’

‘Nope.’

‘There he is,’ Gunnar shouted, pointing.

There he was. Ola was on the dance floor. Ola was on the dance floor with the tallest girl in the school, Klara, from the B class, the goalkeeper in the handball team. We stared, stared so much our eyebrows were perpendicular. Ola almost melted into all of Klara. She swung him round and round to The Snowflakes playing ‘Dancing Shoes’ and from time to time we saw Ola throw back his head and gasp for air.

We didn’t say a word, not a single word. There was nothing left to say.

The music came to an end and Ola wriggled out of her clutches. Klara was holding his head like a handball, but Ola slipped away, good thing he had put on hair lotion before we left, he darted in and out between the couples and came over to us with a look of horror on his face.

‘Help,’ he said.

‘There’s nothin’ we can do,’ Gunnar said with a grave mien.

‘Here she comes,’ I said.

Klara was on her way.

‘Help,’ Ola said and we formed a circle around him and smuggled him away to a safer place.

Kerr’s Pink had climbed onto the stage and now he was holding a speech. He talked about youth and
joie de vivre
, about fun and seriousness. After a while he got quite hot in his suit and there was the odd whistle from the audience. Bobby motioned to his banshee choir, Kerr’s Pink was dragged off and The Snowflakes hammered away at a mindless Finnish folk dance.

Then Seb went missing.

‘We’ll have to look for him,’ Gunnar said with concern.

We trawled the gymnasium, but no one had seen anything of Seb.

‘He might’ve gone out,’ I said.

On the way out we met a group of bully boys with Roar at the head, and the mod guy who had been with Guri that time, and the two smooth types who had taken the piss out of Ola on the first day. They banged into us and I felt the rush in my stomach that I was so afraid of, it passed through my body like a gust of wind, and I knew that anything could happen now.

Gunnar raised his shoulders and his head seemed to sink down into his back.

‘Come on then!’ he said through clenched teeth and we stormed past Skinke and up the stairs.

It was ice cold and dark in the playground. The silence was only broken by hushed chuckles and muffled whispers. We couldn’t see a thing.

‘Sebastian!’ we shouted.

No one answered.

We began to search. It didn’t take that long. Seb was in the
snowdrift by the shed, face down in the snow. We hauled him to his feet and bundled him over to an illuminated window. Blood was running from his nose, his head, and there was a large wound across his forehead. Gunnar couldn’t look, couldn’t stand the sight of blood.

‘The bastard was wearin’ a knuckleduster,’ Seb groaned.

I flew down to the cloakroom and fetched our duffle coats, and then we took Seb home. His grandmother wasn’t in the least surprised when we turned up with him.

‘Tripped down some stairs,’ I said.

She produced some iodine, gauze and cotton wool.

‘That’s what I’ve always said,’ she said. ‘Stairs are much too steep nowadays. Much too steep. You’ll have to take care in future.’

One evening we couldn’t find Ola. He wasn’t at home and his mother thought he was with one of us. We shot down the stairs and looked for footprints in the fresh snow. Ola’s overshoe with diagonal stripes on the sole pointed in the direction of Drammensveien, but there all the tracks vanished.

‘Perhaps he caught the tram,’ Seb said.

‘Tram? Where would Ola go on the tram?’

Gunnar looked worried, made a snowball and threw it at the statue of Nobel.

‘Perhaps he’s got mixed up in somethin’,’ he said.

The Silks, the gang from the posh area of town? The Frogner gang?

We had to start our search again. We went down to Mogga Park, not a sign of Ola, continued up Bygdøy Allé, snow began to fall, now the last of Ola’s boot prints would be obliterated for ever.

‘Let’s try Frogner Park,’ Gunnar suggested.

We walked there. We shouted, but there was no answer, just a rustle when the branches could no longer support the snow. We trudged up to Dogland. The wind was blowing the snow through the air horizontally. The cemetery gate creaked and the spruce trees stood like grand old ladies at the side, in black dresses, a whole flock of them, and their singing sounded eerie.

‘He’s not here. Let’s hop it,’ Gunnar said.

Then we heard a sound, not so far away, someone sneaking through the snow.

‘Ola,’ we shouted in hope.

The sound was gone, then it reappeared in another spot, beneath the lamp post right in front of us. And in the cone of light stood a flasher with his pants down and his knob sticking out, his face completely blue. We screamed with shock then packed some really hard snowballs and bombarded him. He leapt off down the path with his pants down and his knob sticking out, whining and yelling.