My Struggle: Book 3 (39 page)

My blood ran cold.

“Oh?” I said.

“Yes, Ellen.”

“What did she say?”

“She said you had a funny walk.”

“She didn’t!”

“Yes, she did. But it’s true, isn’t it. You do have a funny walk. Haven’t you ever noticed?”

“I do NOT!” I shouted.

“Oh yes, you do,” Yngve said. “Little shrimp can’t even walk normally.”

He got up and walked across the kitchen floor, falling forward with every step. I watched him with tears in my eyes.

“There’s nothing wrong with my walk,” I said.

“Ellen said it, not me,” he said, sitting down. “They talk about you, you know. You’re a little weird.”

“I AM NOT!” I shouted, throwing my bread at him as hard as I could. He moved his head to one side, and it hit the stove with a soft splat.

“Is Karlikins upset now?” he said.

I stood up with my mug in my hand. When Yngve saw that he got up, too. I hurled the hot tea at him. It hit him in the stomach.

“You’re so sweet when you’re angry, Karl Ove,” he said. “Poor little shrimp. Want me to teach you how to walk? I’m good at walking, you know.”

My eyes were filled with tears, but that wasn’t why I couldn’t see anything, it was because I was seething with anger inside and the red mist had descended.

I flew at him and punched him with all my strength in the stomach. He grabbed my arms and twisted me round, I tried to wriggle loose, he held me tight, I kicked out, he pulled me harder to him, I tried to bite him on the hand, and he pushed me away.

“Now, now,” he said.

I flew at him again, intent only on punching him in the face, smashing his nose, and if there had been a knife there I wouldn’t have hesitated to plunge it into his stomach, but he knew all that, it had happened many times before, so he did what he always did, held me tight and squeezed while calling me a little shrimp and saying I was so sweet when I was angry until I tried to bite him and he couldn’t keep my head at a distance and he pushed me away. This time I didn’t go for him again; instead I ran out of the kitchen. On the living-room table there was a fruit bowl from which I took an orange and I flung it at the floor with all my might. It split open and a thin jet of orange juice spurted up and sprayed the wallpaper.

Yngve stood in the doorway watching.

“What have you done?” he said.

I looked at him. Then I saw the line of juice on the wallpaper.

“You’d better wash it off, you idiot,” I said.

“It won’t wash off,” he said. “The stain will just get bigger. Dad will be livid when he sees that. What’s wrong with you?”

“He might not see it,” I said.

Yngve just gawped at me.

“Well, we can hope,” he said, bending down and taking the orange into the kitchen. From the rustling noises that followed I gathered he was putting it at the very bottom of the garbage can. He came back with a cloth and wiped the floor.

I was trembling so much I could barely stand upright.

The juice ran in a thin line and I couldn’t imagine how Dad could avoid seeing it when he came home.

Yngve washed the kettle and the two cups. Threw away the bread, picked up the crumbs. I sat in the chair by the dining table with my head in my hands.

Yngve stopped near me.

“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”

“Yes, you did.”

“It’s just that you get so angry,” he said. “Surely you can see that it’s tempting? I
have
said sorry.”

“It’s not that,” I said.

“What is it then?”

“My funny walk.”

“Come on,” he said. “Everyone walks in a different way. The main thing is to move forward. I was only kidding, really. I wanted to make you angry. And I succeeded. The way you walk is no stranger than anyone else’s.”

“Sure?”

“Sure as eggs are eggs.”

When Dad came home I was in bed. In the darkness I lay listening to his footsteps. They didn’t stop on the landing as I had expected but continued into the kitchen. He fiddled around in there for a while before coming out again. And he didn’t stop on the landing this time, either.

He hadn’t seen anything.

We were saved.

The next evening I went to the swimming class with Geir. We caught the bus from Holtet to the bus station in Arendal and walked up the hills to Stintahallen, each carrying a bag over our shoulders. In my bag I had some dark-blue Arena swim trunks, a white Speedo cap with the Norwegian flag on the side, a pair of Speedo goggles, a bar of soap, and a towel. We had been members of Arendal Swim Club since the previous winter. We could barely swim then, just getting from one end of the pool to the other was an enormous effort, bordering on the impossible, but since it was actually expected of us, as an absolute minimum in a swim club, and the coach, a man with tattoos on his arms who wore clogs, followed us along the side of the pool shouting, it took us a surprisingly short time to get by without any problems. We weren’t good, at least not if you compared us to the older boys who sometimes walked around inside, with their slim, long-limbed yet muscular bodies, and who
powered
through the water with open mouths and bug-eye goggles. In comparison to them we were more like tadpoles, I sometimes mused, splashing and straining and just as likely to swim sideways as forward. But even though we gradually improved and could soon swim a thousand meters in the course of a training session it wasn’t thanks to my progress that I continued, I knew I would never be a competitive swimmer because when the competitions came and I gave everything it was never enough, I couldn’t even overtake Geir – no, it was all the rest I liked, starting the moment we clambered onto the bus and continuing through the evening darkness on the road to Arendal, the deserted town we passed through, the shops we always stopped outside on our way to the class, and inside the hall, this large public building with its strange mixture of inside and outside, which we were funnelled through from standing at the entrance wrapped up in winter clothes to standing almost naked, fifteen minutes later, wearing only a strip of cloth at the edge of the pool, after having passed through the minor ritual of undressing, showering, and dressing, and then throwing ourselves into the wonderfully transparent, cold water that smelled of chlorine. That was what I liked. The sounds echoing around the pool, the night outside the windows, the coral-jewel partition between lanes, the diving boards, the thirty-minute-long hot showers we had afterward. Then the process was reversed and we went from being pale, fragile, semi-naked boys with big heads to once again standing fully clothed in the winter outside, with wet hair under our hats and the smell of chlorine on our skin, our limbs deliciously tired.

I also liked the feeling of being enclosed inside myself when I put on my swimming cap and goggles, not least during competitions, when I had a whole lane of my own waiting for me beneath the starting blocks, but often the thoughts waiting there, in swimming’s astronaut-like loneliness, became chaotic and sometimes also panicked. There could be water in the goggles, it slopped against my eyes, making them sting and preventing me from seeing, which of course upset the purity of my thoughts. I could swallow water and I could make a mess of the turn, which left me so breathless that I swallowed more water. And I could see that the swimmers in the adjacent lanes were already way ahead, which I was told by the voice inside me intent on winning, and I started a discussion with it. But even though this inner dialogue, which carried on calmly while I was swimming and fighting for all I was worth, and was therefore lent an almost panic-stricken aura, a bit like a military HQ deep in an underground bunker with officers speaking in controlled tones while the battles raged overhead, had the effect of me increasing the tempo, and for a few seconds I really gave it my all, it didn’t help in the slightest, Geir was ahead of me and would remain so, and I couldn’t understand that, I was obviously better than him, I knew so much more than him, also about the will to win. Nevertheless, he was the one to touch the pool wall
then,
and I touched it … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … … …
then.

When the coach blew his whistle and the session was over for another week, it was not without some relief that I put my hands on the edge of the pool and heaved myself up, to run with Geir across the tiled floor into the shower, where the pace seemed to be slower, at least our pace was released as we took off our caps and trunks and entered the showers, to feel with closed eyes the heat spreading through our bodies, no longer needing to say or do anything, not even having to bother to laugh as one of the men on his way into the pool, which was now open for all comers, began to sing. There was something dreamlike about the atmosphere inside, the white bodies that appeared in the doorway and stood under the showers with slow, introspective movements, the sound of water beating against the tiles and mingling with the muffled noise from outside, the steam saturating the air, the hollow resonance of voices whenever anyone spoke.

Normally we stood around long after those we had trained with had gone. Geir with his face to the wall, me with my face to the room, to hide my backside. I snatched occasional glances at him when he wasn’t paying attention. He had thinner arms than me, yet he was stronger. I was a little taller than him, yet he was faster. That wasn’t why he swam faster than me, though. It was because he wanted it more. It was different with his drawings, they were just something he could do, it was in him, it had always been there. Apart from people, he could reproduce everything in precise detail. Houses, cars, boats, trees, tanks, planes, rockets. It was a mystery how he could do it. He never copied, as I did, his mother never let him use either a ruler or an eraser. Now and then his Norwegian could throw up oddities, such as
fantisere
and
firkanti
instead of
fantasere
and
firkantet,
and
en appelsin
instead of
et appelsin,
and even though I corrected him every time, he continued to say them as though these terms were a feature of him that was as permanent as the color of his eyes or the set of his teeth.

Then he noticed my glance and his eyes met mine. With a smile on his lips he stretched up and pressed the palm of his hand against the shower head, stopping the jet, and the water appeared to bulge beneath it. He laughed and turned to me. I held my hands out. My fingertips were red and swollen from the water.

“They look like raisins,” I said.

He examined his.

“Mine, too,” he said. “Imagine if your whole body had gone like that when we were swimming!”

“My ball bag always goes all wrinkly,” I said.

We bent forward and peered down. I ran a finger slowly over the hard yet sensitive folds of skin and a tingle went through me.

“Stroking it feels nice,” I said.

Geir looked around. Then he turned off the shower, went to the row of hooks, and began to dry himself. I grabbed a bar of soap and squeezed hard. It skidded along the floor of the room, hit the wall in the corner, and finished up over one of the grids. I turned off the shower and was about to follow Geir when I suddenly couldn’t bear the thought of the soap lying there in the middle of the floor. I picked it up and threw it in the bin by the wall. I pressed my face against the dry frotté material of the towel.

“Imagine what it will be like when we’ve got pubes,” Geir said, walking with his legs wide apart.

I laughed.

“Imagine what it will be like if they’re really long!” I said.

“Right down to your knees!”

“Then we’d have to comb them!”

“Or make a ponytail!”

“Or go to the hairdresser’s! I’d just like a trim round my dick, please!”

“Oh, yes. And how would you like it, sir?”

“Crew cut, please!”

At that moment the door opened and we stopped laughing. A fat, elderly man with sad eyes came in and the vacuum the laughter had left in us was soon filled with giggles as he first nodded to us and then turned away in embarrassment to remove his trunks. As we grabbed our swimming things and were leaving the shower room, Geir said loudly:

“I bet he’s got a whopper!”

“Or a teeny-weeny one!” I said, just as loudly, and then we slammed the door behind us and ran into the changing room. We sat laughing, wondering whether he had heard us or not, until the normally quiet atmosphere also impacted on us and we sluggishly began to pack our gear and get dressed. The only sounds you could hear inside were feet on linoleum, rustling noises as legs were slipped into trousers, arms into jackets, the metallic clink as lockers were opened or closed, someone sighing to himself, perhaps drained by the heat in the sauna.

I took my bag from the locker and put my swimming things inside. First, the goggles, which I held in my hand and examined for a second, because they were new and filled me with such pleasure that they were mine. Next, trunks, cap, and towel and, last of all, the soap case. With its gently rounded lines, greenish color, and faint aroma of perfume, the case belonged to another world from the rest of my swimming equipment, intimately connected with Mom and the items in her wardrobe: earrings, rings, flasks, buckles, brooches, scarves, and veils. She herself was unaware there was such a world, she had to be, otherwise she would never have bought me a woman’s bathing cap that time. Because a woman’s cap belongs to that world. And if there was one thing everyone knew it was that one world should never be associated with the other.

Beside me Geir was almost ready. I stood up, pulled on my underpants, took my long johns, and put one leg in, followed by the other. Then I pulled them up tight to my waist before turning and starting to search through my clothes for my socks. I found only one and searched through the pile again.

It wasn’t there.

I looked in the locker.

Nothing, empty.

Oh no!

No, no, no.

I frantically went through my clothes again, shook item after item in the air, hoping desperately to see it drop out onto the floor in front of me.

But it wasn’t there.