Exposed at the Back (2 page)

Quitting Lasts Forever

Steinar Brunsvik heard the sound of breathing behind him as he passed the big block of flats in Grefsenkollveien. He looked over his shoulder. There were two men in their twenties on racing bikes. He couldn’t just let them overtake him. Sweat was dripping from his forehead down his cheeks and into his mouth. It tasted of salt. He spat and wiped his face.

It was high summer, the last day of July, and would soon be 6 o’ clock in the evening but it was still 30 degrees.

‘Bloody heavy bastard mountain bike,’ Steinar said. He fixed his gaze on the rough tarmac and kept on pedalling. It helped to hear the other two on his tail, their breathing more and more laboured.

‘1 km,’ read the white paint on the tarmac.
Less than a kilometre to go
, he thought while passing.

10 metres further on he would hit a steep hill. Steinar turned to see the young men behind. When he moved his hand towards the gear shift he saw the relief on their faces. The ruse worked. They thought he was about to move down a gear.

Just as the younger men changed gear, Steinar responded with a tougher gear. The men changed into the wrong gear again. Steinar gained a few metres, then a few more. Soon he was 50 metres ahead, putting on as much of a spurt as he could. 500 metres to the top. He was nearing his maximum heart rate. Had he wrong-footed them too soon?

His thighs and calves were on fire, and the saltiness in his mouth was replaced by the tang of battery acid. Steinar concentrated all his force onto the pedals. Down into the next push. ‘What the hell am I doing?’ he thought, gritting his teeth and pedalling even harder.

They were approaching the final bends. First a gradual one to the left, then a tighter one to the right. 100 metres to go.

He caught a glimpse of the black wooden building on the left, but his gaze was fixed on the road. One of the younger cyclists was right behind him now. 50 metres to go. 20 metres. The other guy’s front wheel was right next to Steinar’s. 10 metres. 5 metres. 2 metres from the top the young guy slipped past, winning by a just a few centimetres. Steinar collapsed on the handlebars.

‘Bloody hell, you’re crazy. On a mountain bike,’ said the younger man.

Steinar managed to give him a high five as the other man came up the last few metres. He wheeled the bike over to a bench outside the café at the front of the wooden building, and lay down. He had an uncontrollable spasm in his left calf, and his head was swimming.

A few minutes later he sat up and pinched the root of his nose hard between his thumb and forefinger as he closed his eyes. He let out a deep breath before opening his eyes again.

The view took away what little breath he had left. It always did. He held both his hands like a visor above his sunglasses, which weren’t giving him enough protection in the late afternoon sun. He let his eyes drift from the top of Ekebergåsen to the centre of Oslo and the port, across the harbour to Bygdøy and all the way over to Bærum. Everywhere looked warm and deserted. Oslo was at its best in July, when half the inhabitants left the city. Why didn’t more of them stay in Oslo and go on their holidays in freezing, foggy November instead?

For the second day in a row the Golden case was on the front page of the papers. The tabloid
VG
had the headline ‘BRUTALLY MURDERED’ and a picture of Golden framed by what was supposed to resemble a blood spatter. The headline was taken from a brief police statement, which also said that the culprit was unknown and that no apparent motive had been found yet. The amount of money Golden kept in his office led journalists to speculate that Golden had interrupted a burglary in progress. Steinar thought about the possible motive. It wasn’t strange that somebody would kill a football agent. The strangest thing was that it hadn’t happened before.

Steinar didn’t normally read the sports pages anymore, but now football was everywhere. It was even creeping into the comment pages, and he could barely open his web browser without encountering photo galleries of Golden meeting football executives at home and abroad.

Steinar took note of one person in particular in the background of one of the photos. A man whose name the journalists hadn’t found
out, described only as Golden’s business partner, but who Steinar recognised well. Business partner? Steinar had no idea that Golden had anything to do with that bastard. He got back on his bike and gripped the handlebars. They creaked.

Steinar took a long sip of his special blend of coffee, Red Bull and cranberry juice. It washed away the last remaining taste of blood and acid. He put the bottle back in its holder, turned the bike round, started his stopwatch and began rolling downhill. He sped up as the view vanished, then he turned the bike into the woods, down along the steep gravel track.

His cycling computer showed 55 km per hour. With little shifts of his weight he managed to avoid the biggest stones, but he hit a large bump and the bike took off, so high and far that he had time to think in mid-air. He made a perfect landing then threw himself into a sharp bend. As he rounded the corner a man was standing 10 metres in front of him with his back turned, waiting for his dog to do its business.

‘Out of the way!’ Steinar shouted.

The man turned his head, eyes wide open, but stood stock still. Steinar swung onto the high bank above the ditch, cycling along it almost horizontally.

His muscles couldn’t take the strain for more than another few tenths of a second. He used all his strength to force the bike back onto the track, scraping against a withered tree trunk. It would hurt tomorrow, when there was no more adrenaline to relieve the pain. He heard the man behind him shouting four-letter words.

The track flattened out. Steinar kept on pedalling until he came to a small car park in the woods at Akebakkeskogen. He stopped the clock.

His arm was bleeding from the scrape with the tree, but the cut looked clean. In the old days, Steinar had lost pieces of flesh on bone-dry astroturf and slid on muddy grass pitches with open wounds. This was nothing.

A couple of minutes later his heart rate was back to normal. He checked his watch. Four seconds off his personal record. So close it was irritating. Lance Armstrong’s mantra came back to him as it always did in such situations: ‘Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever.’

Steinar had quit too soon once before. He got into the saddle and started back up the hill.

30 minutes later he was back in Akebakkeskogen. The same course, the same route, a new personal record. A feeling of calm descended.
He drank his lukewarm cocktail and wiped his hand over his drenched forehead. The blood on his arm had dried now, but it was probably best to wash it before going home.

He wheeled his bike between the houses until he came to the junction of Lofthusveien and Kjelsåsveien. A couple of pensioners were sitting on the terrace outside the little red newsagent’s shop. One of them was holding up a lottery ticket. Ahead of Steinar was a low building with the big yellow and black sign of Skeid sports club. He walked towards the changing rooms. A man was sitting on the steps that led into the kit room. The man was in his fifties, wearing only a pair of blue Adidas shorts. Everything about him was sagging, the bags under his eyes, his flabby pecs, his arms and the length of ash from his cigarette almost touching the ground. It seemed highly unlikely that he would manage to lift it back up to his mouth.

‘I’m just going to use your loo,’ said Steinar.

The man didn’t answer. He’d given in to the heat.

The changing rooms were decorated with the odd patch of faded red paint, and the benches had been given a bit of blue; otherwise the space was dominated by black mould, which made it look as if flames had licked up the once-white walls. Steinar went into the showers.

He cleaned his cuts and patted them with toilet paper. Then he went back out of the changing rooms, ready to walk up the gravel track and out of the area.

At the top of the climb he looked down at the gravel pitch, and at the red shelters over the substitutes’ benches. Grass was growing through the gravel in a few places. Nothing in the world could match the beauty of an old gravel pitch. Then Steinar heard a whistle from the astroturf behind him, the referee blowing for a foul. A voice cut through the air: ‘No!’

Steinar had dropped football altogether, but he recognised the sounds instinctively. And the smells. Of newly baked waffles, coffee and sweat. He had to watch, at least for a while.

10 years had passed, and Steinar thought he’d got over it, but the picture in the paper had reawakened the ghosts of the past.

How could the man who destroyed Steinar’s life and career be Arild Golden’s partner?

The Talent Factory

‘No!’

Like the rest of the people in Nordre Åsen, Benedikte jumped when she heard the scream, which echoed halfway up the Grorud Valley. An over-excited supporter of the Oppsal Gutter 95 boys’ team had seen enough of Stanley’s dribbling skills.

And it was Stanley, Skeid’s child prodigy, who Benedikte had come to see. Stanley was considered Norway’s foremost footballing talent, and he would soon be 15, the age when agents could secure the rights to represent young players. According to a tip-off received by TV2, Arild Golden had reached a verbal agreement with the family, so the other agents in Norway had given up. But now that he was dead, Stanley was fair game. There would be a real fight to sign the Skeid player.

Every time Stanley got the ball it was as if the whole world stopped. For a brief moment, Benedikte was able to sympathise with the Oppsal defender who had his eyes nervously fixed on Stanley’s red Nike boots. Then Stanley shimmied to the right. A hundred small pieces of black rubber were sent flying up from the artificial turf. The defender had sunk down on both heels, glued to the playing surface, his hands out to the sides, palms facing forward, his mouth wide open. He was like a cartoon character who had run straight into a pane of glass, trying to get his body to do as it was told, to follow the red shoes, but it was too late.

Benedikte looked over towards the chain-link fence next to the corner flag. Per Diesen had arrived. Diesen was wearing a plain, white V-neck T-shirt and blue tartan shorts partially held up by a gold-coloured belt. His hair was bleached white and stood on end here and there in a kind of organised chaos. A pair of scintillating blue eyes were hidden behind his black sunglasses. He bent one knee and leant against
the fence, resting most of his weight on his elbows.

Stanley was unknown to most football fans but Per Diesen was a superstar. Diesen was 22, a playmaker with Oslo club Vålerenga and on the Norwegian national squad. For several months now he’d been linked to a number of major European clubs. But he’d started at Skeid. Like many other top Norwegian players, he played at youth level here in Oslo’s East End talent factory.

His transfer to the team’s big brother Vålerenga had been controversial. There was a media storm, like so many times before when a major talent had been ‘stolen’ from a smaller club. Skeid claimed it was swindled out of both his transfer fee and a percentage of any possible future transfers but, luckily for Diesen, all their anger was directed at his agent, Arild Golden. Here, on his home ground, everyone seemed genuinely pleased to see him.

Per Diesen’s talent was unquestioned. His looks led to a host of sponsorship deals and he was usually chosen as the players’ media spokesman, not to mention securing various modelling contracts. Arild Golden had promoted Diesen as a Norwegian David Beckham, his potential earnings much higher than his basic player’s income of 2.5 million kroner.

Diesen was the first Norwegian football player from the top league, Tippeligaen, to live-tweet from the changing rooms at half-time. Arild Golden launched an online reality show, in co-operation with the tabloid paper
VG
, based on Diesen’s life. The title was
Per Diesen TV
, or
PDTV
for short.

The series went through a tough start. Like most famous footballers who made money out of their appearance, Diesen was rumoured to be gay, which turned off large segments of the football audience. At away matches in Bergen or Lillestrøm he was bombarded by chants about how much he liked ‘back passes’ and ‘banana shots’.

‘Peeeeep!’

The referee, in his luminous yellow strip, had to blow his whistle especially hard since he had no desire whatsoever to move outside the centre circle. When he awarded a free kick, the whole neighbourhood knew about it. Benedikte looked over at Diesen again, who ran his left hand through his hair.

PDTV
was intended to be a kind of football-meets-
Entourage
concept, with a handsome, young player working his way through Oslo’s most attractive women. The only problem was that Diesen didn’t have any
of these female liaisons. If a single footballer went for more than a few weeks without pulling a girl, he had to be gay. Surely a man in his position had plenty of opportunities? But he hadn’t been linked to any minor
Pop Idol
contestants or even to an extra from that interminable soap opera
Hotel Cæsar
.

Everything changed, though, when Golden introduced Diesen to the glamour model Sabrina. They fell in love and moved in together. The homophobic chants died down, and his playing became even better. Diesen was leading the fantasy football statistics in the papers, his self-confidence was back, and his web series had become Norway’s most watched online programme. Per Diesen had a lot to thank Arild Golden for.

PDTV
was also where Diesen’s pop career was launched. Together with his best pal and teammate at Vålerenga, macho centre-back Marius Bjartmann, he’d recently released the single ‘Bleed for the Team’, which was currently at number one in the charts. It was true: a footballer could be more than just a footballer.

A ripple of expectation went through the crowd. Skeid had been given a throw-in and Stanley was getting ready. Throw-ins weren’t usually exciting, but Stanley did somersault throw-ins. Benedikte had seen them before, but not from such a young boy. Stanley ran towards the touch-line, dropped the ball to the ground and spun in the air. He made a perfect landing on the touch-line and let the ball go just as it passed his head, but he threw it too far. The ball flew over all the players who’d gathered in front of the goal, and there would be a throw-in from the other side. Still, the boy’s not even 15, thought Benedikte, before turning back to look at Diesen.

Diesen looked uncomfortable as Skeid supporters crowded around him. He signed autograph after autograph but also checked his watch several times. Eventually, he patted a young lad on the back, said something and walked towards the exit. The lads sang the well-known chorus from his song: ‘Yeaaaah! Bleed for the teaaaam!’