It's Fine By Me (5 page)

‘Isn’t he supposed to be in Denmark? I heard his grandfather had died.’

‘He didn’t want to go there. I guess that’s his business.’

My mother shrugs, I eat and then the telephone rings. We have a telephone now. She answers it cautiously. ‘Hello?’ she says.

‘It’s Arvid,’ she says. I get up from the table, still chewing, and take the receiver.

‘Hi,’ I say, and chew a little slower for it is hard to make out what he’s saying, but I understand that he wants me to come over. ‘OK, I’ll be right there,’ I say and gently put the receiver down, and as I am doing so, I hear his voice again and I lift it quickly, but then it’s the dialling tone.

‘I have to rush,’ I tell my mother and grab another piece of bread and eat it going into the hall and put my jacket on and my shoes.

‘Didn’t you say you would stay home today?’

‘I never said that,’ I say, and know full well I said so yesterday. I open the door and turn, and she is standing in the light from the kitchen window and is no more than a silhouette and that makes it easier.

‘What about letting me know if more than the two of us will be living here?’ I say, and I am outside before she has the time to answer.

5

I WALK UP
Beverveien towards the Metro station by the shopping centre. It is twelve o’clock. Over the rooftops I can hear the bells ringing after church. It’s still cold, but the sky is all blue and the sun is thawing the mud on the road, and it leaves grey-brown stripes on my shoes, and outside the station there are shards of glass and blood-stains on the tarmac. They are pink and pale after the night. On the corner in front of Stallen, which used to be Glasmagasinet, people are looking at the display they have seen a hundred times before. They’re pretending to be out for a Sunday stroll. But I know them and know they are circling the centre waiting for Geir’s bar to open at one. They just can’t stay at home any longer and keep their fists in their pockets to hide their shaking hands. I feel like yelling at them, for Christ’s sake pull yourselves together, and stay out of my way! I know they won’t pull themselves together, it’s too late. They are old, their days are over, everything they have known is gone, all the things they could do, and now here they stand, scraping their feet against the ground, letting the clock tick them closer to their first gulp, and then they’ll sit and drink until their bodies calm down and will talk rubbish about everything being so wonderful, and when evening comes, they have to go home, and so they fall asleep early and hope their
dreams won’t be too bad, and then they wake up the next morning as always.

I open my jacket at the neck, I suck in the air and expand my chest to its limit, and then I walk round to the lower side of the shopping centre and along Grevlingveien to Veitvetsvingen and down to the house where Arvid lives.

I knock first, and then I ring the bell, but there is no answer even though I wait for about five minutes, so I turn the handle, and the door is open, and I step into the hall.

‘Arvid?’ I call, not too loud, and there is no response. I walk on into the living room and see that he has thrown up in the middle of the floor. Luckily for him there is lino down and not the wall-to-wall carpet almost everyone has now. I go into the kitchen and fill a bucket of water, find a rag and wash the floor and pour the crap down the sink and flush it with hot water so it will all go away. That’s no easy job. What’s left I have to remove with a paper towel and throw in the waste bin. I take the bin bag from the stand, tie it up and put it in the hall ready to be carried out. The smell is not the greatest, so I open the door.

I wash my hands and go back to the living room and head for the stairs. At the foot of the stairs there is a bookcase with Tolstoy and Ingstad and Gorky and Jack London and all the others. It belongs to Arvid’s father, from before the war, but Arvid took it over long ago. It has rose carvings along the front at the top and women’s bodies and men’s faces down the sides, and the wood is dark with oil and not like anything else in the flat. I run my fingers over one of the female bodies, then go upstairs, the steps creaking as they always do, and I can hear Arvid groan inside his room.
I look in and there he is, lying flat on the bed with his clothes on and his head over the edge, talking into a bucket.

‘Interesting conversation,’ I say, and walk straight in and open the window because the air is thick and bad for his health.

‘Comedian,’ he gurgles into the bucket. On the floor is the ashtray we used last night, full of dog ends. I pick it up, empty the mess down the toilet and wash it in the sink. The bottle beside the bed was half full when I left last night. It’s empty now.

‘Have you heard the news on the radio?’ I ask.

‘No, Goddamnit.’

‘Nixon’s announced a full withdrawal.’

‘What!?’ He yanks his head up from the bucket. ‘Is that true?’

‘No, but you could do with a shower. It’s not beyond you.’

‘Idiot!’ He tries to stand up, and his face goes all white and he has to sit back down. He swallows and struggles with something stuck in his throat.

‘Come on,’ I say, but he is resting his head on his arms and looks as if maybe he’s crying. I go out and find a towel in the cupboard by the bathroom and toss it through the door. It hits him on the forehead.

‘Pull yourself together. Get into that shower, and then we’re out of here.’ I go downstairs and sit down in the living room and roll a cigarette. At first it is quiet up there, and then I hear him shuffling across the floor, and at last the shower starts, a trickle at first and then stronger, and I go to the balcony door and stand in the sun, smoking. It’s nice
and warm against the sunny wall, and I close my eyes and finish the cigarette and flick the butt on to the lawn. Back in the living room, I go to the bookcase, run my fingers over the spines and stop at the centenary editions of Tolstoy from 1928 and wonder if Arvid’s father has really read them all. I pull out the first volume of
Anna Karenina
, read the first sentence I have read many times before:

‘All happy families resemble each other; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way,’ it says, and Arvid turns off the shower. I put the book on the shelf and slump into a chair and wait. It takes him ten minutes to come down, still pale, but he is clinging on.

‘Mush, mush!’ he says, as Helge Ingstad does in his book
Trapper’s Life
when he wants the dogs to set off. It’s been our code for years and seems a bit childish now, but I take the hint and jump to my feet and say:

‘Did you ask about the car?’

‘I had to sweet-talk him for half an hour,’ he says and pulls the keys from his pocket.

‘Will you drive or shall I?’

‘Are you out of your mind? I’m not sober.’ He throws me the keys and I catch them with one hand, grab my jacket from the chair and walk towards the door.

‘Don’t forget the bin bag on your way out,’ I say.

We take Trondhjemsveien out of town to Gjelleråsen Ridge. The car is a black Opel Kadett, not exactly the latest model, but well looked after, and I feel good sitting behind the wheel. I have had my licence for two months; Arvid and I
took our tests at the same time. Before that, I had only driven a tractor out in the countryside. The cars were Egil’s thing, he was obsessed and pestered his way into most of those around our place from the time he was ten, but I do like the movement and freedom and always stretch the speed limit. Arvid rolls his window down all the way, and his head is almost out of the car, the wind blows in and it gets cold, but he shuts his eyes and opens his mouth and refuses to roll the window back up.

‘You’ll get your head chopped off or a sparrow down your throat,’ I say.

‘Aw, shut up,’ he answers and I swerve the car wheel to give him a scare, but he doesn’t care.

‘Leaving Oslo,’ I say as we pass the sign by Skillebekk. ‘Akershus County next. Nittedal or Skedsmo?’

‘Skedsmo,’ he says from outside the car, and I turn at the crossroads at the top of the ridge and drive down the long, winding hill behind Mortens Kro, the restaurant there, and on to the Hellerud plain.

‘Please, not Lillestrøm.’

‘OK.’ I turn into the road for Nittedal church and Solberg, down a steep incline and cross the narrow bridge over the Nitelva river. Along the banks there are boys with fishing rods casting their lines and having a good time in the warming sun. One of them has just landed a perch, its scales glinting, and I stop the car and watch. Arvid opens the door, gets out and goes over to a bush where he throws up and then slides down the embankment to the river and washes his face in the ice cold water.

‘We should have brought fishing tackle,’ he says, coming
back up behind the car and is in a cheery mood all of a sudden.

‘Well it’s too late now, you have soiled the water.’

He gets back in, and I do a perfect hill start without the handbrake. The fields rise steeply on both sides of the river and yellow and grey they arch in a pattern of shapes and lines against the blue sky, and I don’t know why, but it
does
something to me.

‘Left or right?’ I ask at the first junction.

‘Right, or else we’ll be back in Nittedal.’ I turn right, up a gravel road and wonder what’s with him and Nittedal.

The road winds between sloping fields and slowly climbs, and then we are at the top. Down to the left, the valley opens beneath a lattice of shadows and light on the meadow, and moving north it narrows into a funnel and only the gleaming road heads on to Harestua. We can barely make out Glitre Sanatorium, its solid yellow shape in the foothills. There is a strong wind here: a gust catches the car and almost blows us into the ditch, and I wrench the wheel against the wind and the car lurches forward like a drunk man’s car, and I give Arvid a glance and wonder how his gut feels. But he laughs, he’s having a good time.

‘Step on it,’ he says, leaning back and putting his feet on the dashboard. ‘Shit, I feel so much better now.’

We enter Skedsmo by Nittedal church through a grove of spruce trees. There are a few houses, and there is a bus shelter, and Arvid points at the trees.

‘Do you remember when we trudged through those trees to the Krakoseter cabins with our rucksacks down round our knees? We had to sing the Scout song the whole way.
Do you remember when you got your pants filled with Coke? Being a Scout was such great fun.’

I do remember, and I remember exactly how much fun the Scouts were. We had joined the Scouts for a year because of the trips they went on, and I remember that one time I didn’t finish a cross-country run because I’d been lying in the heather watching a fox attack a pigeon. The Scout leaders came crashing and yelling through the forest and scared the fox out of its wits and dragged me down to the cabins. And when we were there, I had to stand on my hands out in the yard surrounded by Girl Guides while two leaders held me up by the feet and a third poured a bottle of Coke down each trouser leg. Then they forced me to walk around for two hours without changing my clothes while the Coke dried into sticky patches all over my body. When at last they allowed me to wash and I had borrowed some clean clothes from Arvid, I went into the leaders’ room and punched the scoutmaster. He was even a member of the goddamn Rotary Club.

I remember the burnt bread over the fire and the burnt sausages and the assistant Scout leader who was thirty-five and still lived with his mother and always wanted to ask the new boys back to his room at home. We’re going to a jamboree in America in the autumn and have to discuss it, he kept saying, and who didn’t want to go to America? But he was the only person who had ever heard about that trip to America, and I remember how relieved I was when I walked alone down the path through the forest to the bus stop on my last day after being expelled from the Scouts, and I promised myself I would never join anything organised again.

‘You still remember it, don’t you?’ Arvid asks and starts singing, and I chime in and soon we bawl at the top of our voices:

Dear father in heaven so high, hear my heart’s silent prayer, toiling on earth beneath the sky, give me the strength and wit to care, help me to live by thine own son’s creed, to honour my parents, the land and laws, and help all others in word and deed, obeying Scout vows and aiding our cause!

And we remember every word and every note of the song, and know we will never forget them for as long as we live.

At the Skedsmo junction the road goes north to Gjerdrum. There are fields on both sides the whole way, and behind them is the dense forest. The road twists and turns, goes up hill and down dale, and the driving is never boring. I keep the speed up as much as I dare, go even faster on the straights and change down before the bends and try to stay as close as possible to the point when the Opel just might lose traction and skid off the road, but not quite, because the car is not mine. The telephone poles flash past, and I feel a rush in my body that is new and makes my head spin, and now would be a good time to hear Jimi Hendrix play ‘Crosstown Traffic’ or ‘Purple Haze’. Arvid sits quietly with his hair blown back, just watching, then he picks up his tobacco and rolls two cigarettes, lights them both with the dashboard lighter and pokes one in my mouth.

‘God, it’s wonderful,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been here before. Is this where you come from?’

‘Not quite.’

Not quite, but not far off either. I thought I had forgotten how everything looked, but I haven’t forgotten a thing.

I have not forgotten the cornfields in autumn, or Lake Aurtjern in July or the apple tree outside my window, and all I had to do was reach out and pick an apple, or the long gravel road where Siri Skirt used to walk and show her bottom for two ten øre coins, and she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and once I was allowed to walk round twice while she held her skirt up under her chin; or the rafting holiday on Lake Hurdal. My father forced me to come with him, and made me pull up a pike that scared me witless, and when I refused, he hit me in the face, and then I hammered a nail into my foot, and we were forced to go home.