It's Fine By Me (2 page)

I am tired, I still have homework to do and a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me something at school is not going the right way. What I do, I do well enough. What I hear, I remember and understand, I am not an idiot, but it’s as if the rest of my class has taken off on some journey they forgot to tell me about, as if there is a secret pact between teacher and students that does not include me. They know something I do not, and that’s how it has been for a long time now.

The others stand waiting in front of the entrance, I am the last to turn up, but there are no newspapers in sight. Konrad is there, and Fru Johansen, and the entire Vilden family, the two children yawning and leaning against their father’s back. This is what they live off, four newspaper rounds morning and afternoon, day in, day out. The oldest child, a girl, is fourteen years old, the boy twelve. They look as though they have just come out of the forest, you’d expect pine needles in their hair, but they live in Rådyrveien, in a flat, like the rest of us from Veitvet do. The mother is so ugly and bony that you
have
to like her, and the father, tall and distant, nods politely to the left, right and centre, and never says a word, just smiles and looks over our heads at something we don’t quite comprehend. High plains and spruce forests, I have always imagined. The girl is so attractive it’s hard to look her in the face.

‘Hi, Audun,’ says the boy called Tommy, and I say:

‘Hi Tommy, cool jacket.’ We often talk, I lend him old Cowboy and Indian books, and we are pals. He always seems to have a cold, a red patch under his nose, and he wears a striped, yellow jacket lined with fur and smiles happily, even though he has had the jacket on all week, and I have said ‘cool jacket’ every morning. I don’t talk to his sister, her eyes are so big and brown that after walking the same route for several years I still don’t know her name. But she looks at my new trousers.

We wait. It’s the third day in a row that the newspapers are late. Konrad’s moped is chugging away on its stand, he doesn’t switch it off unless he has to and burns up a hell of a lot of petrol. He already wears a cap, a grey bobble cap
without a bobble that he pulls down so hard his ears stick out, like the retarded kids you see in town sometimes, and you wonder why they have to dress them like that. He has woollen gloves on with the fingers cut off, and his fingers are black with the old ink. He is fifty years old and lives with his sister in the terraced house right across from the women’s prison, and no one can wedge a newspaper behind a door handle like him. In one flowing movement his hand makes an arc in mid-air and the fat
Aftenposten
is lodged under the handle as hard as a board and never comes loose. How easy it looks, and yet I have tried it many times, and I cannot do it.

We hear the car before we see it, it’s the only sound there is apart from Konrad’s moped, and at full speed it sails up the incline from Veitvetveien, makes a U-turn in front of the depot and comes to a stop by our barrows. The driver jumps out, yanks the side doors back and hauls out the big bundles of newspapers. He drops them on the tarmac, with a loud groan each time, thwack, thwack they go, hitting the ground with a solid thud I’ve always thought had something to do with what is in the newspapers.

I pull out my two bundles and load them on to the barrow, cut the strings and check to see if there are any new subscribers. There are: two. I enter their names in my book and start dragging the barrow towards Grevlingveien. The others set off on their separate routes. Konrad up to Trondhjemsveien, Fru Johansen along Beverveien, which is where I live, and the Vilden family down to the houses along Rådyrveien. Tommy is carrying a huge bundle of papers. As usual he has cut the strings first, and now the papers start
slipping and sliding in his arms, and the whole caboodle is on the verge of crashing to the ground. His sister comes over, bends down to give a hand, and they are so wonderful to watch it takes my breath away, but I too have siblings. One brother and a sister. That is, I had a brother. Last year he drove a Volvo Amazon that did not belong to him into the river Glomma and drowned. It happened just a few miles from where we used to live before we moved to Veitvet. It was an Amazon with all the extras: fox tail on the aerial, GT steering wheel and fur-lined seat covers at the front.

The girl in the passenger seat survived. She wept and said they hadn’t touched a drop. I don’t believe that for one moment. Egil had just turned fifteen the autumn before and didn’t have a licence yet. After we moved to Oslo he went back as often as he could when he was old enough to go alone. I didn’t. I only go there when I have to.

My sister moved out just after the accident. She is four years older than me, and of course she too had to go back. Now she lives with her boyfriend in Kløfta. He sells second-hand cars and makes money. I am sure he beats her, but I have never seen anything, and Kari does not say a word. If ever I catch him I’ll beat
him
up. That won’t cost me much. I have been training for years. With my newspaper money I bought a bench and weights.

I tell my mother.

‘I’ll give him a
thrashing
,’ I say. And she listens to me and then she quotes Lars Ekborg, the Swede who has a talk show on the radio where he goes on and on about all kinds of shit happening in the world and always rounds off by saying: ‘You’ve got to be tough, you really do!’

‘Is that how you want it?’ she laughs. Sure, it’s easy to make fun, but I know what I know.

I remember Egil and me playing on the living-room floor in our old house. There was a massive cupboard we used to crawl under. My grandfather, who worked at the sawmill in the next village, had made it himself out of some dark wood and there were glass doors. It was a fine cupboard, his greatest achievement, but it must have drained his creativity, for he never made a piece of furniture again.

Then my father came in. It was late, and we should have been in bed by then. He leaned against the door frame and looked at us with a stupid smile on his face.

‘Are there any good children here?’ he slurred. He seemed drunk. I had seen him drunk many times before. I knew the signs.

‘Oh yes,’ Egil said, crawling out from under the cupboard where he had been hiding. He was such an idiot, he would have said yes to anything. I sat on the floor and watched my father leaning heavily against the door frame. I did not trust him.

He straightened up and staggered towards us across the carpet.

‘See this,’ he said, and shoved his hand into his breast pocket and pulled out some banknotes. ‘Here’s a little something for two good boys.’ He stumbled forward with a big grin and pushed a blue five-kroner note at each of us.

‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ Egil cried, and started running round and jumping up and down on the floor. ‘Oh,
thank you very, very much, Dad, you’re so kind!’ he shouted. I felt the crisp crackle of the note in my hand. Five kroner was a lot of money to me. Just a little more, with what I had already saved up, and it would be enough to buy the shiny bow I had looked at so many times in the sports shop by the station.

I watched my father standing in the middle of the floor with his hands on his hips and his head at an angle. He didn’t look so drunk now, he was watching us closely and there was a glint in his eye I did not like. Suddenly he burst into laughter, and then his face froze, he came back across the floor and snatched the notes from our hands and said:

‘That’s enough fun for tonight!’ He turned on his heel without a stagger, stuffed the notes back in his breast pocket and marched to the kitchen as straight as a flagpole. ‘Now, get to bed, it’s late,’ he said.

At first my brother stood with his mouth wide open, then he began to howl like the baby he was. ‘Waaaah!’ he wailed. ‘Waaah!’ Tears gushed from his eyes, and I went over to him and punched him in the shoulder.

‘You idiot,’ I said, punching him hard a second time. ‘You goddamn birdbrain, shut up!’ I hissed, and then I walked past him on my way upstairs to bed.

‘I never did anything to you!’ he yelled after me.

It was my last year as Wata, Davy Crockett’s friend of the Creek tribe. As soon as I was on my own, I was Wata. I was twelve years old, and I went up the squeaking stairs to the
first floor of what I thought of as our log cabin, and I hated it now, it felt so cramped I could not breathe.

Inside our room, I stood by the window gazing out at the dark edge of the forest, longing to be there. There were paths running through it I knew better than the house I lived in. That night there was a moon, big and yellow, and I lingered and kept watch as Wata would have done, and then I got into bed without cleaning my teeth and hoped that Egil would not be up before I had gone to sleep. I pinched my eyes shut and thought of the shiny bow I would never have.

‘Shit!’ I said aloud in the darkness. ‘You goddamn paleface!’ But that did not help much, and I knew that Wata’s days were numbered. He could not be my companion any longer. I saw him glide through the night, fleet-footed and silent through the trees on his way back into the books, his brown body and his three white feathers gleaming in the moonlight.

Now Tommy has his newspapers under control, his sister gives him a hug, the yellow stripes of his jacket shining, and they disappear round a corner. I take twenty papers from the barrow, fold them under my arm and start working my way along the first houses in Grevlingveien. This is what I like. To be left in peace, feel the morning air on my face, feel every step, how my arms and legs move, and the morning so still, and I don’t have to think about anything. My round goes like clockwork, the shining door handles line up and I feed them with newspapers. I have never
missed a single one, never given anyone a paper they shouldn’t have, and I know every door sign so well that at first I don’t even remember what they say, just what they look like, the shape of the letters, the colours and where on the door they are. I can think of a house, picture it, choose that door and
then
read the sign any time, anywhere, asleep in bed, at school, on holiday, it’s in my bones, and that’s fine with me.

I cross Veitvetsvingen down by the red telephone kiosk. I have a quick look under the grate on the floor to see if any change has fallen through, a habit I guess I’ll never quit, and as always I find two or three kroner. But I blush and hope there is no one watching me from behind their curtains.

There are only terraced houses along the road, and a few years ago I thought maybe it was posher to live here rather than in the tenement blocks, until I realised that the blocks were just two terraced houses on top of each other, and inside they were identical. At the bottom of the hill, on the left, there is a terrace of eight flats. Arvid lives in the one next to last. It’s the only house with balconies, and in the old days Arvid was nervous it would make him upper class, because nobody we knew lived in a house with a balcony. But I didn’t reckon three and a half square metres of balcony was enough to make him upper class, especially since his father worked night shifts at the Jordan brush factory. Arvid was happy to hear that. Under no circumstances did he want to be upper class, and as far as that goes, we both stand firm.

I walk up the flagstone path and round the back of Arvid’s
house. There are four subscribers here. His father is not among them, but as I pass I stop at the kitchen window and peer in. It’s dark inside, so he is not home from the night shift yet. I turn at the end of the house and on to the road again, and look up at Arvid’s window on the first floor, pick up a pebble and throw it against the pane. I hear it hit the glass and Arvid is there at once. I don’t know anyone who’s such a light sleeper, and he is often tired at school. He sticks out his dark head, I roll up a newspaper tight and skim it at an angle like a boomerang, and it makes a perfect arc, and Arvid snatches it out of the air before it hits the window frame. We have done this before.

‘Latest news from Vietnam,’ I say.

‘I guess they’re bombing Hanoi again.’ He yawns and runs his hand through his hair which is curly and very thick.

‘You bet,’ I say. Arvid is in the National Liberation Front group at school. He can go on for hours about it. I am a passive member, I have too many other things on my mind.

‘I’ll read it later,’ he says, ‘I have stuff to do. I’ve got to go.’

‘What sort of stuff?’

‘You’ll see it when you see it.’

‘See you at school,’ I say and he salutes me with a clenched fist behind the window. I walk towards the barrow and then turn on my heel, but he is gone and I grab the handle and trudge round the bend back towards Grevlingveien.

Morning is coming, but there is not much light yet, it’s October, after all, and the early risers are coming down the road towards the Metro. I say hello and one of them looks at my hair and another one at my trousers and is annoyed
because I am late, but I splay my hands and say it’s not my fault, and then a few papers tumble to the ground. The man looks up, rolls his eyes, and I mutter a silent curse.

Old Abrahamsen comes out on to the step and angrily slams the door behind him. Every day he does this and has done so for as long as I can remember. He works at the harbour and is carrying his rucksack. He used to live in Vika, not far from where he worked, straight out of the door, past Oslo West station and there he was, but they demolished Vika and now he has to travel into town every morning, and even though it’s fifteen years since he had to move, he is still fuming. The Metro is too newfangled, so he walks up Trondhjemsveien and takes the number 30 bus as he has been doing for almost two decades.

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘Just in time for the paper – read it on the bus,’ and he smiles and says:

‘Well, you know,
Aftenposten
is really not my thing, but you have to keep up to date.’

I know, he is a socialist, but he is so stingy he has literally weighed the
Aftenposten
and the left-wing
Arbeiderbladet
and found that with
Aftenposten
he gets more kilos for his money. He puts the paper under his arm and all of a sudden is a much happier man and is off down the road, the rucksack bumping on his back.