Beatles (17 page)

‘So that’s where you are,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘Aren’t you going to play the record?’

‘I think I’ll wait a bit,’ I said.

We said nothing for a while. That was what was so good about Uncle Hubert, you didn’t have to talk all the time, even if he was with you. But, despite that, I said, ‘Uncle Hubert?’

‘Yes.’ He looked at me.

‘Uncle Hubert. My girlfriend has moved away, too.’

For a second his eyes wandered, then a great clarity came over him, great and pure, we two, we two had understood everything now, and he hugged me. Above us Jensenius, the fattest of angels, was singing a carol,
Deilig er jorden,
and we unravelled, thread by thread, that Christmas Eve of 1965.

It was the day after Christmas and we were sitting in Seb’s room gazing at
Rubber Soul
. No one said anything for a long time. We sat bent over the record, silent, almost angry, just as John, George, Ringo and Paul stood over us returning stony looks.

We didn’t recognise ourselves.

‘What’s it like?’ Seb asked in a hushed voice.

‘Haven’t listened to it yet.’

They looked at me and nodded. Now I had made up for the
Help
gaffe. I carefully took the record out of the sleeve, Seb placed it on the new Gerard player, pressed ON and the pick-up rose automatically and sank onto the grooves, as gently as a cat’s paw.

We sat around for the rest of the evening playing the record again and again, our ears were large shells and we were lying on the bottom of the sea, listening intently, trying to decipher the songs as they came to us. Gunnar pointed in despair at the picture of John in the spruce forest as we listened to ‘Norwegian Wood’, and we didn’t understand a thing.

‘Norwegian wood!’ Gunnar moaned. ‘Norwegian wood! And what the hell is a sitar!’

Seb had his head in the loudspeaker trying to hear a sitar, had to be a pretty weird thing. But Ola was happy with ‘What Goes On’, had found a couple of pencils he was tapping, he was on the road to recovery. ‘Michelle’ was a bit too soppy for me, but ‘Girl’ hit me like a thunderbolt, made me feel bitter and warm. ‘Nowhere Man’ passed me by, way over my head. Gunnar was on the verge of tears, sweat was trickling down his forehead, his mouth wide open, speechless.

‘What’s actually h-h-happened?’ Ola mumbled.

At that moment the door was flung open and Seb’s father, the captain, stood there with tanned face, white shirt unbuttoned, sleeves rolled up, all the hair on his chest and arms issuing forth like black moss.

‘Hello, boys. You look down in the mouth!’

‘Dad,’ Seb began. ‘What’s a sitar?’

He came into the room and spread his legs as if the seas were rough.

‘Sitar? Well, I’ll tell you what it is. Once we were transporting oil to Bombay. And the cook was an Indian. Worked like a Trojan. You need quite a bit of food on board a boat, you know. And that Indian… you see, Indians don’t eat meat, because they think their forefathers might suddenly reappear one day as cows or grasshoppers, and hence they don’t eat meat. But our Indian had to cook meat every single day and you can’t imagine how that must have been for him, to believe that you were serving up your grandfather every day. Well, anyway, there was never any hassle with that Indian.’

Seb cleared his throat.

‘Dad, what’s a sitar?’

‘Don’t rush me. There was no hassle with this man, no, that is, there was a helluva lot of hassle because, you see, he played the sitar every night. That was his comfort. A big instrument. Must have had a hundred strings. Sounds like crotchety women.’

‘So it’s an Indian guitar?’ Seb asked.

‘Right. Nice to meet you boys.’

With that, the captain was gone. We put ‘Norwegian Wood’ on again.

Wow. India?

It was a strange Christmas holiday. We did the same as we always did, skied like crazy in Nordmarka, played ice hockey in Urra Park, chucked snowballs through open windows. Yet it was different. More snow fell than ever before, banks of snow grew up to the skies, people had to spend the night in snow caves just attempting to cross the road. That was exactly how it was. Huge piles of snow on all sides. It was as though we had lost something, a part of ourselves. The four alien faces, distorted, were always looking down at us and we avoided their gaze. In the evening I lay looking at the old pictures on the walls, The Beatles in Arlanda each with a bouquet, The Beatles with medals, Ringo on John’s back straddled by Paul and George. It was a long time ago now, I longed to be back then, when everything was ordered and great. But at the same time it was exciting, it felt like an electric shock going up and down my spine. And when I closed my eyes
Rubber Soul
spun inside me, and I fell back, further than before, and one night I screamed in my sleep and woke the whole town, my mother and father at any rate. They came rushing in, but by then it was all over.

I sent Nina a New Year’s card, spent an entire day toiling over four lines. In the end I wrote everything back to front with my left hand, just as Leonardo da Vinci had done. And the card was a picture of Munch’s
Scream
.

New Year’s Eve came, we went to Gunnar’s in the evening and had ice cream and chocolate sauce. We sat in his room with the same expressions and the same muddled brains and as the gramophone played
Rubber Soul
we began to get quite desperate.

‘The sitar is pretty cool,’ Seb ventured.

We looked at him.

‘I mean, it’s pretty hard to try somethin’ like that, I mean, no one’s ever bloody done it before!’

Stig suddenly appeared at the door with a beer in each hand.

‘
Rubber Soul
is the best album The Beatles have made,’ he said. ‘I prostrate myself in obeisance.’

He bowed to the floor with a huge flourish. We understood nothing.

‘Do you agree?’ he said as he rose.

‘Ye-es.’

‘Bloody hell, what kind of drips are you! Compare “Love Me Poo” and “Piss Piss Me” with “Nowhere Man” and “Norwegian Wood”! Eh!’

It went quiet. Stig stared at us in astonishment, then burst into laughter, put the beer down on the bookcase and joined us on the floor.

‘Bob Dylan said The Beatles should sharpen up their bloody lyrics! Just listen to “Nowhere Man”. That’s how it is, isn’t it. Everyone walks around wearing blinkers. They don’t give a damn about anythin’, they don’t give a damn about havin’ atomic bombs hangin’ over our heads, they close their eyes to all the cruelty and only think about plastic and materialism. That’s what it’s about, isn’t it!’

We put the record on again. Stig was well into it.

‘Listen to that baroque piano! Swings like crazy! And Norwegian wood does not mean forest or wood. It means tobacco, you know. The tobacco Indians smoke. Peace pipe, folks.’

He sat with us until ‘Michelle’ slowed and faded, then he snatched his beer and made for the door. We went on playing records, we kept playing until fireworks went off outside the window, big colourful explosions. It was twelve o’clock.

We went out onto the balcony. Gunnar’s parents were there, too. The air was cold and good and we felt very warm inside. Happy New Year! Yes. It was on its way. It was great. We were on schedule. Gunnar’s father wanted to take a photo of us. We folded up our collars, sucked in our cheeks, lowered our eyelids and crouched down over his brand new flash camera. He told us to smile and not to look so angry. He hardly recognised us.

That was how it should be.

On the last day of the holiday we waded up Thomas Heftyesgate humming ‘Norwegian Wood’ and pondering the future of The Snafus. It was a year to our confirmation, so we had to get hold of the equipment. It was no good practising with pencils, elastic bands off jam jars or badminton racquets. All of a sudden we heard a loud din in a garage just beyond the English embassy. It wasn’t a record player at full blast, it was a band. We stopped dead in the snowdrift, crept closer. A band. They began to sing, it sounded totally out of tune, but it was a band. We stood listening for a long time
and while they were playing a guitar version of ‘Lappland’ someone came behind us and we jumped out of our skins.

‘Wanna join the fan club?’ bleated a fat tub with greasy hair and a blue double-breasted jacket.

‘W-w-we were just p-p-passin’,’ Ola stammered.

The music stopped and the garage door opened. We peeped in and there stood everything we had dreamt of, electric guitars, microphones, big drums, amplifiers and loads of cables criss-crossing the stone floor. The musicians had red jackets, hair covering their foreheads and ears and were at least twenty years old.

‘Found these fans,’ said the greaseball.

‘Shut the door before our bollocks get permafrost,’ the drummer shouted and we were shoved in and the garage door was slammed to.

‘Got a gig,’ the manager said, lighting a cigarette and blowing fifteen rings up to the ceiling. ‘Tutti frutti job with cream. Party night at Vestheim.’

He turned to us.

‘Which school do you go to, boys?’

‘Vestheim,’ I said.

He drew closer.

‘Goodo,’ he said. ‘Goodo with sugar on. You’ll be in the front row.’

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘If they let us in.’

‘Say Bobby said it was alright, then you’ll get in. Just say Bobby said it was alright.’

The band started another song: ‘Cadillac’. Bobby was snapping his fingers. The guitarist’s solo was very intense, but the singer’s voice snapped like a matchstick in the refrain.

‘Have to get shot of that catarrh,’ Bobby shouted afterwards. ‘Otherwise they got into the groove.’

‘What’s the name of the b-b-band?’ Ola asked.

‘The Snowflakes,’ Bobby said. ‘Remember the name.’

‘The Snowflakes,’ Ola repeated. ‘Do you only play in the w-w-winter?’

Now Ola would have to keep his mouth shut before we were pitched out on our noses. Seb was already giving him a poke in the back.

‘No, smart-arse. We’re called The Raindrops in the summer.’

The Snowflakes started up again, an instrumental: ‘Apache’. The solo guitarist moved the tremolo arm and the notes billowed out into the room in slow motion. Bobby trotted to and fro in front of them, crouching down and cupping his ears.

‘The sound’s good,’ he declared afterwards.

There was a hammering on the door. Bobby opened up and in charged three girls who threw themselves over Bobby and then kissed the band, but when they came to us, they stopped dead.

‘Fans,’ Bobby explained. ‘The Vestheim Fan Club committee. Playing there one evening.’

‘Cool,’ said one of the girls. ‘Can’t we go out and have a beer?’

‘T’rrific idea,’ Bobby said. ‘Come on, guys. Let’s cool it with a few beers.’

He looked down at us.

‘We’re agreed then, are we?’ Bobby said.

We nodded. Didn’t quite know what we had agreed to, though.

‘Perhaps we could have a bit of a jam?’ Seb asked.

Bobby eyed him and had a long think.

‘Jam?’

‘Just try a bit.’

‘That’s fine,’ the bass player said. ‘But take it easy. Sensitive equipment.’

‘That’s okay,’ Bobby said with a frown. ‘Take it easy. Expensive gear.’

So they wandered off, the girls had sweaters with ‘Snowflakes’ written on the back.

Ola pounced on the drums, Gunnar and Seb each grabbed a guitar and I stood by a microphone and we went for it. We screamed and shouted, I moaned and shrieked into the mike and my voice emerged from somewhere else and sounded quite different. Gunnar hammered away at the two chords he knew and Seb did his best to break a string. We kept this up for at least half an hour, it sounded quite awful and quite beautiful.

Then Gunnar shouted ‘Stop’.

There was an abrupt silence. We were exhausted. Ola hung over his stool like an old bedsheet.

‘We have to
know
what we’re playin’,’ Gunnar said. ‘So that we can play
together
.’

‘What shall we play then?’ Seb wondered.

We deliberated.

‘We’ll write our own songs,’ I said.

Seb agreed.

‘Of course! We’ll make our own music! Why the hell hadn’t we thought of that before?’

‘But we haven’t done anything yet, for Christ’s sake. We have to decide what we can play
now
!’

‘“Norwegian Wood”,’ said Seb.

‘Without a sitar?’

‘We can try.’

We tried, but we never found the melody. And then we were back at square one. Our stomachs vibrated, we should at least have been wearing a kidney belt, we jumped around, I lay on the floor, screaming wildly, Ola’s bass drum was kicking like crazy, Seb was plucking the strings so that it sounded like forty sitars and ten randy cats and Gunnar was striking firm chords to keep the whole thing more or less together.

‘Just like in the Cavern!’ Seb yelled. ‘Just like in the Cavern!’

We shifted into something vaguely like ‘Twist And Shout’, the sweat was steaming off us, girls in the crowd were tearing their hair and wanted to get near us on the stage, we gave everything we had, everything and the last drop, and a bit more, then the garage door burst open, I was lying on my back and silence fell over me like an avalanche. There stood the girls, squiffy, Bobby, with gaping eyes, and The Snowflakes, with broad grins.

I scrambled up, Gunnar and Seb crept out from under the guitars and Ola put down the drumsticks and appeared from behind the bass drum.

‘What the hell was that?’ Bobby said.

‘We were playin’,’ I whispered.

‘Playin’! Do you call that playin’?’

‘What’s your name?’ asked one of the girls, leaning towards me.

‘The Snafus,’ I said in an even softer voice.

Then they began to laugh. Everyone laughed. We skulked towards the door.

‘Just a sec,’ Bobby shouted. ‘You remember the gig?’

We nodded.

‘So tell everyone you know about The Snowflakes. Got that?’

We nodded.

‘Deal’s a deal, boys,’ he sibilated in Norwegian English.

We left the garage, tired and sweaty, the cold froze our clothes to our bodies.

‘Imagine havin’ a garage like that to practise in!’ Gunnar said after we had calmed down a bit. ‘Then we would definitely be better than The Snowflakes!’