Authors: Roy Jacobsen
“Tent,” said Linda, taking the key with tentative hands and staring at it, before dropping it in her glass of milk.
“Linda!”
“Freddy 1 has never been on holiday!” I shouted.
“It’s a crying shame!”
“Why do you call him that actually – Freddy 1?”
“Because that’s his name!”
“Give me the key, Linda.”
Linda stuck her hand in the milk, fished out the key and gave it to Mother who wiped it and her hand with the tea towel, shaking her head. But then she stopped and examined the key, the way she had examined the golden hare she had been given for Christmas and had started to wear in the shoe shop, I had noticed.
“And sleeping bags?” she asked, all at sea.
Kristian had considered that, too. There wasn’t a thing Kristian had not considered. Even a collapsible, green canvas bucket which we could use to transport water from the outside tap and hang on a pine tree beside the tent, a bucket with a valve at the bottom that could be opened and closed, and if we hung it high enough we could stand underneath and take a shower, which was very pleasant if the sun had warmed the water first.
But by now Mother was thinking this was beginning to sound too planned, as if he was trying to wheedle his way in with us, what with the T.V. and the food and the golden hare and the chess board, which in the meantime by the way I had been allowed to “borrow” and at this moment was set up on my desk.
“Freddy 1’s coming!” I repeated irrepressibly. “I’m not going without Freddy 1!”
“Don’t
you
start!” Kristian snapped, looking as though he was going to smash his fist down on the table.
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Mother said, taking my side straight away.
“Ugh, what a crew,” Kristian said, rising to his feet in his huge khaki get-up and striding towards the door.
“Angry,” said Linda as his door was slammed shut.
Mother sat down, we didn’t move, eyeing each other across the table, and there was the shiny key and Kristian’s half-eaten piece of bread and they spoke to us in a way which prompted us to look at each other with even more gravity and Mother to wipe a few despairing strands of hair from her face and sigh:
“What has got into us?
All he wants to do is lend us a burned tent!”
We had never heard anything so funny, we collapsed over the table, killing ourselves with laughter, unable to stop, and we had no plans to, either, for this was perhaps the only thing which could bring us back to our senses. Mother got up and flung open the door to the lodger’s room and shouted out:
“Come and finish your food and don’t sit there sulking.”
Now things were beginning to take shape. Kristian came back with a semi-annoyed smile on his family-less face, but diplomatically resumed his place and went through the motions of continuing his meal while Mother poured him some more coffee and said that, of course, we appreciated his offer, it was just so sudden, what about from Tuesday onwards, for a week, what did he think about that?
“Fine, fine, no problem.”
But it would be wrong to say that I had finished having my say.
“Freddy 1’s coming!” I repeated while Mother was still riding the waves with a devil-may-care wind in her sails.
“O.K., but then you and I are going up this minute to ask!”
She had her sandals on in a flash, and I was barefoot anyway, it was summer, down the stairs and across the deserted lawn at a pace that gradually decreased as Mother thought things through and asked me some probing questions about Freddy 1’s mother, whom she had seen often enough, but with whom she had never exchanged a word, but there were rumours going round …
Mother’s galleon carried us up to the third floor, where I rushed to ring the doorbell. But no-one opened. We heard a good deal of shouting inside, an argument about who would open the door, I guessed, between Freddy 1 and his mother, a battle which the mother lost.
She came to the door and was calm and pleasant and looked with raised eyebrows from one to the other as we explained our errand, and she answered, fine, that would be nice, and:
“Of course Freddy should go on holiday. He’s never been anywhere in his life.”
But Freddy 1 still did not show himself. And I thought that was a bit odd, because he was inside listening to find out who it was and what we were talking about. I shouted that he was coming on holiday with us on Tuesday.
“Do you hear me?!”
To that, however, Freddy 1 replied no.
“What
was that!” his mother shouted, turning in his direction, still without shifting herself a millimetre, she guarded this door, not even
I
had crossed this threshold, Freddy 1’s only friend.
“No,” he said again.
I saw Mother roll her eyes as Freddy 1’s mother made the typical desperate-mother grimace that was mastered to such a level of perfection on this estate, and shrugged her round shoulders and said something to the effect that there was no making sense of this boy.
But I couldn’t give in and shouted back that we were going on a boat and would be on a huge island and would go swimming and live in a tent.
Freddy 1 was unbending.
“No!” came back the response, as adamant as before. And by then Mother had had enough. She muttered a flurried goodbye to Freddy 1’s mother and grabbed me by the shirtsleeves and dragged me down the stairs and on to the deserted grass that still tickled, nice and sun-warm beneath my bare feet, now she was in a real temper.
“Blinking nonsense you’ve got in your head, Finn!”
As though I had abused her trust in the most appalling way.
“He’ll be kicking himself now!” I yelled. “Let’s go back up!”
“Are you out of your mind?!”
“I know him. He’ll be kicking himself!”
“I’ll give you kicking himself!” Mother hissed in my face and simply turned on her heel and stamped off.
This was a blow to my plans.
I ran after her, but said nothing for the rest of the evening, didn’t mention Freddy 1 once, not even when we got down to packing. It was a good thing that Linda had just been given a new school bag for when she started at school; Mother went up into the loft and dug out an old rucksack which must have been through a couple of world wars, said goodness me, stuck her nose inside and held it up and ran her eyes over it with a woman’s disgust and went back up into the loft and returned with the suitcase bearing Dombås on the address label.
“You can’t go camping with a suitcase,”
Kristian said, who was spending the evening in front of his television, he got up and went into his room to return with a canvascoloured bundle of fabric that turned out to be a kitbag, with strings and brass rings and two shoulder straps so that it could be carried on your back. “This is what I take.”
“Oh yes,” said Mother, looking warily at the shapeless sack.
Kristian pulled out a map of the island to show us where his tent was and ringed a water tap, a shop, two beaches and a party area – we were itching to leave. Each of us glowed like a sun. And when he put a cross by a secret jetty where you could lie on your stomach and fish for crabs I felt goose-pimples all the way down my spine like bristly fur. The only fly in the ointment was Freddy 1. And when I sat by the window before bedtime to see whether he was sitting by his window, full of regret, he was nowhere to be seen, the boy who lived on that windowsill, either to keep watch, to lower something, to heave water balloons out or simply to sit there staring. But by then I had at any rate managed to devise a plan. It wasn’t a very good one, but then even good plans have a tendency to go down the pan.
On Tuesday morning we set off at the crack of dawn, in sunshine, dragging Kristian’s kitbag down to the bus stop and onto the bus, where the conductor joked that we would have to buy a ticket for it, and we got off at Wessels plass and lugged it down to the harbour where the boat would be waiting for us. But it wasn’t. We were three hours too early, it emerged, because Kristian’s timetable was last year’s.
There was so much to see here, though, sailing ships and ferries and yachts and swarms of people buying fish and shrimps from an armada of fishing smacks and cutters bobbing up and down in the sewage-tainted water, and whole trains that regularly ploughed their way through the crowds with lots of noise and hissing and whistling and green flags and uniformed men hanging on the outside, waving with their hats and shouting to the unwary that they had better move out of the way, the train was coming, for crying out loud.
After we had placed our kitbag with care on one of the jetties, it looked like a small sofa, Mother said that she had a little errand to run and, for God’s sake, keep an eye on Linda while she was gone, make sure she didn’t fall over the edge.
“Hold
her!”
“Yes, yes, yes.”
But no sooner had we started to argue about how hard I should hold her than Mother was back.
“Look what I found,” she beamed.
There was Marlene with so much make-up on that at first we didn’t recognise her, and a man we had never seen before, but who introduced himself with a smile as Jan, Marlene’s boyfriend. They were both wearing burgundy uniforms, like the confectionery sellers in Ringen Cinema. They were on their way to work, up there, Jan pointed, in the direction of Akershus Fortress. Marlene grabbed Linda under the arms and lifted her and hugged her and said how big you’ve got, my little girl, although she could hardly have grown a millimetre in the two weeks that had passed since we last saw her.
“And Finn, too,” she said, to balance the books.
When they heard that our boat wouldn’t be leaving for a good two hours they invited us up to Friluften Restaurant for a cup of coffee, there are not many customers so early in the day, and perhaps they have something else as well, who knows, Jan said with a roguish wink to me, swinging the kitbag onto his back and carrying it as it was obviously designed to be carried, it looked brilliant, and we followed them across the Town Hall square and the railway line up to the restaurant where we sat down at what Jan called the Mayor’s Table – the Mayor often sat here drinking beer, smoking cigars and holding important meetings – on the outside edge so that we had a view of the whole harbour.
Mother ordered coffee and an almond cake while Linda and I had enough ice cream for our whole estate, in fountain-like glasses on such high stems that Linda had to steady hers in her lap.
Then we sat on our own while Mother went off on an errand. Jan came over and asked if sir or madam would like any more and whistled and made bowing motions left, right and centre in a way that made him look disturbingly like Uncle Tor.
But this was very different from the last time I had been to a restaurant which, as far as I could remember, was in the middle of a forest one bitterly cold January day; here white, large-patterned cloths covered all the tables, black-headed gulls hung over us in guffawing flocks, the Town Hall bells chimed and the train sang as it clattered past beneath us and the boats came and went and the harbour throbbed and the cranes swung and swayed along the wharves as far as Akers Mekaniske Verksted where our father had once worked, and died.
The only thing we could not hear was foghorns, which I would have liked, and I described them to Linda. But what use were foghorns in the sunshine? We were already so far from home, we weren’t afraid, we weren’t hungry, we weren’t even bored.
But then once again I spotted something you spend a few days or weeks or maybe half a lifetime trying to understand, like the clock whose hands point in the wrong direction: Mother was back and standing by the entrance talking with Marlene, who was balancing a silver tray on upright fingers badly wanting to take two glasses of beer to one of the tables, Mother and Marlene in discussion about something or other, excited and emotional, but also concerned, Mother, who caught sight of us sitting where she had left us, so wonderfully exhausted from all the ice cream, and she waved and said something with her red mouth which we couldn’t hear in all the buzz of conversation, whereupon she opened the bag she was carrying in her hand and held up a small bathing costume, for Linda, I could see. Marlene turned and smiled to us in the sunshine and waved, then said a few parting words to Mother, floated off like a burgundy swan between the white tables and placed first the tray, then the glasses in front of two be-suited men at the back, and smiled and took out a little notebook from her apron pocket and laughed at something one man said, and wrote something, and said something again, and received money which she counted in her left hand before curtseying and responding to another witticism by turning her back in a wonderful sweeping movement – it was a dance, on roses, a High Mass, but what was it that I had seen?
Mother came and showed Linda the bathing costume, which was dark blue and had a large, yellow water lily at the front, she said she should put it in her satchel because we had to go now. Jan put down a tray with two prawn sandwiches on the neighbouring table, hurried over and heaved the kitbag up on his back and carried it in the way it was meant to be carried, out of the restaurant, down the stairs, over the train lines to the boat, yes, he even climbed on board with us and made sure we got a seat right at the back, at the stern, the observation post, as he called it, because it is not the ridge of hills around the fjord that should be viewed as you leave Norway’s splendid capital but the town itself as it retreats into the distance.
“See you,” he said with a wink to Mother, who looked like a sleeping angel as she made herself comfortable on the worn leather-look seat and leaned against the railing, raising her face to the sun and I suppose closing her eyes behind the jet-black glasses.
The town vanished in a golden haze, with the Town Hall and the cranes at Akers Mekaniske Verksted like a last farewell salute as I sensed that something was happening inside me, in my innards. And in my mouth. It filled with liquid. It must have been the huge ice cream on its way back up. And then it came, not over the railing because I had no idea what was going on, but all over the deck, a white Amazonian flood between gym shoes and sandals and sleeping bags and fishing rods and passengers who jumped up shouting all manner of things. I stayed down on my knees in a kind of praying posture, astonished at all the lumpy cheeselike matter there had been room for inside me, red and yellow bits of fruit so whole and untouched they looked as if they could be re-used. Mother helped me to my feet and said my poor love and a number of other embarrassing things and tried to wipe me down with toilet paper while a sturdily built male figure in a black helmsman’s jacket and clattering wooden clogs shouldered his way through the crowd with a broad grin and a slithering hose and started flushing down the deck, after first shouting so that everyone could hear: