My Struggle: Book One (9 page)

“Are you eating this evening?” I asked.

He glanced up at me.

“You just help yourself,” he said.

“Okay,” I said. “I'll be up in my room afterward, alright?”

He didn't answer, kept reading
Agent X9
in the light from the sofa lamp. I cut off a large chunk of sausage and ate it while sitting at the desk. He probably hadn't bought me a birthday present, it occurred to me, Mom would be bringing one with her from Bergen. But wasn't it his job to order a cake? Had he thought about it?

When I returned home from school the next day, Mom was there. Dad had picked her up from the airport, they were sitting at the kitchen table, there was a roast in the oven, we ate with candles on the table, I was given a check for five hundred kroner and a shirt she had bought in Bergen. I didn't have the heart to say I would never wear it, after all she had gone around a string of shops in Bergen looking for something for me, found this, which she thought was great and I would like.

I put it on, we ate cake and drank coffee in the living room. Mom was happy, she said several times it was good to be home. Yngve rang to say happy birthday, he probably wouldn't be home until Christmas Eve, and I would get my present then. I left for soccer practice; when I returned at around nine they were up at the flat in the barn.

I would have liked to chat with Mom on my own, but it didn't look as if that was going to be possible, so after waiting up for a while I went to bed.
The next day I had a test at school, the last two weeks had been full of them, I walked out of every one early, frequented record shops or cafés in town, sometimes with Bassen, sometimes with some of the girls in the class, if it happened casually and couldn't be interpreted as my forcing myself on them. But with Bassen it was okay, we had begun to hang out together. One evening I had been at his place, all we did was play records in his room, even so I was flushed with happiness, I had found a new friend. Not a country boy, not a heavy metal fan, but someone who liked Talk Talk and U2, the Waterboys and Talking Heads. Bassen, or Reid, which was his real name, was dark and good-looking, immensely attractive to girls, although this didn't seem to have gone to his head, because there was nothing showy about him, nothing smug, he never occupied the position he could have, but he wasn't modest either, it was more that he had a ruminative, introverted side to him which held him back. He never gave everything. Whether that was because he didn't want to or he couldn't, I don't know, often of course they are two sides of the same coin. For me his most striking feature, though, was that he had his own opinions about things. Whereas I tended to think in boxes, for example in politics, where one standpoint automatically presupposed another, or in terms of taste, where liking one band meant liking similar bands, or in relationships, where I never managed to free myself from existing attitudes regarding others, he was an independent thinker, using his own more or less idiosyncratic judgments. Not even this did he boast about, on the contrary, you had to know him for quite a while before it became apparent. So this was not something he used, it was what he was. If I was proud to be able to call Bassen a friend it was not only because he had so many good qualities, or because of the friendship itself, but also, and not least, because his popularity might rub off on me as well. I was not conscious of this, but in retrospect, if nothing else, it is patently obvious; if you are on the outside you have to find someone who can let you in, at any rate when you are sixteen years old. In this case the exclusion was not metaphorical, but literal and real. I was surrounded by several hundred boys and girls of my age, but could not enter the milieu to which they all belonged. Every Monday I dreaded the question
they would all ask, namely, “What did you do over the weekend?” You could say “Stayed at home watching TV” once, “Played records at a friend's house” once as well, but after that you had to come up with something better if you didn't want to be left out in the cold. This happened to some on day one, and that was how it stayed for the rest of their time at school, but I didn't want to end up like them at any price, I wanted to be one of those at the center of things, I wanted to be invited to their parties, go out with them in town, to live their lives.

The great test, the year's biggest party, was New Year's Eve. For the last few weeks people had been talking about nothing else. Bassen was going to be with someone he knew in Justvik, there was no chance of hanging onto his shirttails, so when school broke up for Christmas I had not been invited anywhere. After Christmas I sat down with Jan Vidar, who lived in Solsletta, about four kilometers down the hill from us, and that autumn had started to train as a pâtissier at the technical college, to discuss what possibilities were open to us. We wanted to go to a party and we wanted to get drunk. As far as the latter was concerned, that would not be much of a problem: I played soccer for the juniors, and the goalkeeper, Tom, was an all-round fixer and he wouldn't mind buying beer for us. A party, on the other hand . . . There were some ninth-class semicriminal, dropout types who apparently were getting together in a house nearby, but that was of no interest whatsoever, I would rather have stayed home. There was another crowd we knew well, but we were not part of it, they were based in Hamresanden and included people with whom we had either gone to school or played soccer, but we had not been invited and although we could probably have gate-crashed somehow they didn't have enough class in my eyes. They lived in Tveit, went to the technical college or had jobs, and those of them who had cars had fur-covered seats and Wunderbaum car fresheners dangling from the mirror. There were no alternatives. You had to be invited to New Year's parties. On the other hand, at twelve o'clock people came out, assembled in the square and at the intersection to fire off rockets and let the new year in amid screams and shouts. No invitation needed to participate in that. Lots of people at school
were going to parties in the Søm area, I knew, so what about going there? It was then Jan Vidar remembered that the drummer in our group, whom we had accepted out of sheer desperation, an eighth-class kid from Hånes, had said he was going to Søm for New Year's Eve.

Two telephone calls later and everything had been arranged. Tom would buy beer for us and we would be with kids from the eighth and ninth classes, hang around in their cellar till midnight, then go to the intersection where everyone gathered, find some people I knew from school and hook up with them for the rest of the evening. It was a good plan. When I got home that afternoon, in a studied casual way, I told Mom and Dad I had been invited out on New Year's Eve, there was a party in Søm with some of my class, was it all right if I went? We had guests coming, my father's parents and brother, Gunnar, and his family, but neither Mom nor Dad had any objections to my going.

“How nice!” Mom said.

“That's alright,” Dad said. “But you've got to be home by one.”

“But it's New Year's Eve,” I said. “Couldn't we make it two?”

“Okay. But two o'clock then, not half past. Is that understood?”

So, on the morning of the thirty-first we cycled to the shop in Ryensletta, where Tom was waiting, gave him the money, and were handed two bags, each containing ten bottles, in return. Jan Vidar hid the bags in the garden outside his house, and I cycled home. Mom and Dad were in full swing, cleaning and tidying in preparation for the party. The wind had picked up. I stood outside my bedroom window for a moment watching the snow whirl past, and the gray sky that seemed to have descended over the black trees in the forest. Then I put on a record, grabbed the book I was reading and lay down on the bed. After a while Mom knocked on the door.

“Jan Vidar on the phone,” she said.

The telephone was downstairs in the room with the clothes cupboards. I went down, closed the door, and picked up the receiver.

“Hello?”

“Disaster,” Jan Vidar said. “That bastatd Leif Reidar . . .”

Leif Reidar was his brother. He was twenty-something years old, drove a souped-up Opel Ascona, worked at the Boen parquet factory. His life was not oriented toward the southwest, toward the town, toward Kristiansand, like mine and most other people's, but toward the northeast, to Birkeland and Lillesand, and because of the age gap I never quite got a handle on him, on who he was, what he actually did. He had a moustache and often wore aviator sunglasses, but he was not the average poser, there was a correctness about his clothes and behavior that pointed in another direction.

“What's he done?” I asked.

“He found the bags of beer in the garden. Then he couldn't keep his damn mitts off, could he. The bastard. He's such a hypocritical jerk. He told me off,
him
, of all people. I was only sixteen and all that crap. Then he tried to make me tell him who had bought the beer. I refused of course. Doesn't have shit to do with him. But then he said he was going to tell my dad if I didn't spill the beans. The fucking hypocrite. The . . . Jesus Christ, I had to say. And do you know what he did? Do you know the little shit did?”

“No,” I said.

In the gusts of wind, the snow projected like a veil from the barn roof. The light from the ground-floor windows shone softly, almost clandestinely, into the deepening dusk. I glimpsed a movement inside, it must have been Dad, I thought, and sure enough, the next second his face took shape behind the windowpane, he was looking straight at me. I lowered my eyes, half-turned my head.

“He forced me into the car and drove down to Tom's with the bags.”

“You're kidding.”

“What a prick he is. He enjoyed it. He seemed to be fucking reveling in it. Taking the moral high ground all of a sudden, the shit.
Him
. That really pissed me off.”

“What happened?” I asked.

When I glanced over at the windows again the face had gone.

“What happened? What do you think? He gave Tom an earful. Then he told me to give the bags of beer to Tom. So I did. And then Tom had to give
me the money. As though I were a little brat. As if he hadn't done the same when he was sixteen. Fuck him. He was lapping it up, he was, wallowing in it. The indignation, driving me there, giving Tom hell.”

“What are we going to do now? Go there without the beer? We can't do that.”

“No, we can't, but I winked at Tom as we left. He got the message. So I called him when I got home and said sorry. He still had the beers. So I told him to drive up to your place with them. He's picking me up on the way, so I can pay him.”

“Are you coming
here
?”

“Yes, he'll be at my place in ten minutes. So we'll be with you in fifteen.”

“I've got to think.”

It was then I noticed that the cat was lying in the chair beside the telephone. It looked at me, started licking one paw. In the living room the vacuum cleaner roared into life. The cat turned its head in the direction of the sound. The next second it relaxed. I leaned over and stroked its chest.

“You can't drive all the way up. That's no good. But we can just leave the bags at the roadside somewhere. No one will find them up here anyway.

“Bottom of the hill maybe?”

“Below the house?”

“Yes.”

“Bottom of the hill below the house in fifteen minutes?”

“Yes.”

“All right. So remember to tell Tom not to turn around in our drive, and not by the mailboxes either. There's a shoulder a bit higher up the road. Can he use that?”

“Okay. See you.”

I hung up and went into the living room to Mom. She switched off the vacuum cleaner when she saw me.

“I'm off to see Per,” I said. “Just want to wish him a happy new year.”

“Fine,” Mom said. “Send our regards if you see his parents.”

Per was a year younger than me and lived in the neighboring house a
couple of hundred meters down the hill. He was the person I spent the most time with in the years we lived here. We played soccer as often as we could, after school, on Saturdays and Sundays, during vacations, and a lot of that was spent finding enough players for a decent game, but if we couldn't, we played two-a-side for hours, and if we couldn't do that, it was just Per and me. I booted the ball at him, he booted it at me, I crossed to him, he crossed it to me, or we played twosies, as we called it. We did this, day in, day out, even after I had started at the gymnas. Otherwise we went swimming, either under the waterfall, in the deep part of the pool and where you could dive from a rock, or down by the rapids where the torrent swept us along. When the weather was too bad to do anything outside, we watched a video in their cellar or just hung around chatting in the garage. I liked being there, his family was warm and generous, and even though his father could not stand me I was welcome all the same. Yet despite the fact that Per was the person I spent the most time with, I did not consider him a friend, I never mentioned him in any other context, both because he was younger than me, which was not good, and because he was a country boy. He wasn't interested in music, hadn't a clue about it, he wasn't interested in girls or drinking either, he was quite content to sit at home with his family on the weekends. Turning up for school in rubber boots didn't bother him, he was just as happy walking around in knitted sweaters and cords as jeans he'd outgrown and T-shirts emblazoned with Kristiansand Zoo. When I first moved here he had never been to Kristiansand on his own. He had hardly ever read a book, what he liked was comics, which for that matter I also read, but always alongside the endless list of MacLean, Bagley, Smith, Le Carré, and Follet books I devoured, and which I eventually got him interested in as well. We went to the library together some Saturdays, and to Start FC's home games every other Sunday, we trained with the soccer team twice a week, in the summer we played matches once a week, in addition to which we walked together to and from the school bus every day. But we didn't share the same seat, for the closer we got to school and the life there, the less of a friend Per became, until by the time we got to the playground we had no contact at all. Strangely
enough, he never protested. He was always happy, always open, had a well-developed sense of humor and was, like the rest of his family, a warm person. Over the Christmas period I had been down to his place a couple of times, we had watched some videos and we had skied on the slopes behind our house. It had not occurred to me to invite him out on New Year's Eve, the idea didn't even exist as a possibility. Jan Vidar had a non-relationship with Per, they knew each other, of course, as everyone knew everyone else up here, but he was never alone with him and saw no reason to be either. When I moved here Jan Vidar hung out with Kjetil, a boy our age who lived in Kjevil, they were best friends and always in and out of each other's houses. Kjetil's father was in the service, and they had moved around a lot, from what I understood. When Jan Vidar started to spend time with me, mostly because of a common interest in music, Kjetil tried to win him back, kept calling and inviting him over, made inside jokes that only they understood when the three of us were together at school; if that didn't work he resorted to more devious methods and invited both of us. We cycled around the airport, hung out in the airport café, went to Hamresanden and visited one of the girls there, Rita. Both Kjetil and Jan Vidar were interested in her. Kjetil had a bar of chocolate which he shared on the hill with Jan Vidar, without offering me any, but that fell flat as well because all Jan Vidar did was break his piece in two and pass me half. Then Kjetil released his grip, directed his attention elsewhere, but for as long as we went to the same school he never found any friends who were as close as Jan Vidar had been. Kjetil was a person everyone liked, especially the girls, but no one wanted to be with him. Rita, who was generally cheeky and tough, and never spared anyone, had a soft spot for him, they were always laughing together and had their own special way of talking, but they were never more than friends. Rita always saved her most mordant sarcasm for me, and I was always on my guard when she was around, I never knew when or how the attack would be launched. She was small and delicate, her face thin, her mouth small, but her features were well-formed and her eyes, which were often so full of scorn, shone with a rare intensity; they almost sparkled. Rita was attractive, but still wasn't seen as such, and could be so unpleasant to others that perhaps she never would be.