“What was so good that you lost track of time?” he said.
I sat down next to Yngve. Dad was sitting at the end to the right, Mom at the end to the left. The Formica table with a gray-and-white marble pattern and gray edging, shiny legs, and gray rubber feet was set: brown dinner plates, green glasses with Duralex written on the bottom, a basket of crispbread, a big pot from which protruded a wooden ladle.
“Been out with Geir,” I said, leaning forward to check if there was a piece of meat in the ladle I lifted out a moment later.
“Where did you go then?” Dad asked, lifting his fork to his mouth. Something pale yellow, perhaps onion, was lodged in his beard, on his chin.
“Down to the forest.”
“Oh yes?” he said, chewing several times and swallowing, his eyes trained on me the whole time.
“I thought I saw you on your way up the hill?”
I sat transfixed.
“It wasn’t us,” I said at length.
“Nonsense,” he said. “What devilry were you up to there since you won’t admit that’s where you were?”
“But we weren’t on the hill,” I said.
Mom and Dad exchanged glances. Dad said no more. I could move my hands again. I filled my plate and started eating. Dad helped himself to another portion, still with the same apparent gliding movements. Yngve had finished eating, and sat next to me looking down in front of him, one hand resting on his thigh, the other on the edge of the table.
“And how was the schoolboy’s first day?” Dad asked. “Did you get any homework?”
I shook my head.
“Was the teacher nice?”
I nodded.
“What was her name again?”
“Helga Torgersen,” I said.
“That’s right,” Dad said. “She lives … did she say?”
“In Sandum,” I said.
“She seemed so lovely,” Mom said. “Young and pleased to be there.”
“But we got there late,” I said, relief spreading through my body at the turn the conversation had taken.
“Oh?” Dad said, looking at Mom. “You didn’t mention that?”
“We got lost,” she said. “So we arrived a few minutes late. But I don’t think we missed anything important. Did we, Karl Ove?”
“No,” I mumbled.
“Don’t talk with your mouth full,” Dad said.
I swallowed.
“All right,” I said.
“And what about you, Yngve?” Dad said. “Any surprises on the first day?”
“No,” Yngve said, sitting up straight in his chair.
“You have soccer practice today, don’t you?” Mom said.
“Yep,” Yngve said.
He had changed teams, had left Trauma, which was the island team where all his friends played, with its fantastic uniform, blue shirts with a white diagonal stripe, white shorts and blue-and-white socks, for Saltrød, a club in a little town just across Tromøya Sound. Today was his first session there. He would have to cycle over the bridge alone, which he had never done before, and all the way to the training ground. Five kilometers, he had said it was.
“Didn’t anything else happen at school today then, Karl Ove?” Dad said.
I nodded and swallowed.
“We’re going to have a swimming class,” I said. “Six lessons. At another school.”
“There you go,” Dad said, running the back of his hand across his mouth, but without removing the ribbon of onion from his beard. “That’s not a bad idea. You can’t live on an island and not be able to swim.”
“And it’s free, too,” Mom said.
“But I need a swimming cap,” I said. “Everyone does. And maybe some new swimming trunks? Not shorts, but the kind … well.”
“We can find a cap for you. But your shorts will have to do you for now,” Dad said.
“And goggles,” I said.
“Goggles as well?” Dad said, looking at me with a teasing expression. “We’ll have to see about that.”
He shoved his plate away and leaned back.
“Great meal, Mom!” he said.
“Thanks, Mom,” Yngve said, and snuck off. Five seconds later we heard the sound of his bedroom door being closed.
I stayed at the table for a little longer, in case Dad wanted to chat with me. He gazed out the window for a while, at the four boys hanging over the handlebars of their bikes by the second crossroads, then he got up, put his plate in the sink, took an orange from the cupboard, and went down to his study, the newspaper folded under his arm, without saying another word to anyone. Mom started clearing the table and I went to Yngve’s room. He was packing his bag. I sat down on his bed and watched. He had real soccer cleats, a pair of black Adidas with screw-on studs, decent Umbro shorts and some yellow-and-black IK Start socks. Mom had bought black-and-white Grane socks for him at first; he didn’t want them, so he gave them to me. But the best equipment he had was the Adidas tracksuit, it was blue with white stripes, in some smooth, shiny material, not that matte, crepe, elastic, gymsuit-style material that all tracksuits used to be made of. Sometimes I sniffed it, buried my nose in the smooth material, because it smelled wonderful. Perhaps I thought that because I wanted one myself so much the smell was imbued with my own desire, perhaps I thought it because the smell, so thoroughly synthetic, didn’t remind me of anything else – it didn’t seem to belong to this world. That in some way it bore a promise of the future. In addition to this tracksuit, he also had some blue-and-white Adidas wet-weather gear.
He said nothing as he packed. Pulled the big, red zipper to and sat down at his desk. Looked at the schedule lying on it.
“Did you get any homework?” I said.
He shook his head.
“We didn’t either,” I said. “Have you covered your books yet?”
“No, we’ve got the whole week to do it.”
“I’m going to do it tonight,” I said. “Mom’s going to help me.”
“Good for you!” he said, getting up. “I’m off. If I’m not back before midnight the headless man’s devoured me. I’d like to see how he manages that!”
He laughed and went downstairs. I watched him from the bathroom window, saw him put first one foot on the pedal, then shove off with the other and swing it over the crossbar and pedal as fast as he could in the highest gear until he reached the hill at such a speed that he could freewheel down to the crossroads.
When he had disappeared from view I went onto the landing, stood motionless for a moment to locate Mom and Dad. But all was silent.
“Mom?” I called softly.
No answer.
I went into the kitchen, she wasn’t there, then into the back room, she wasn’t there, either. Could she have gone to their bedroom?
I went there and stood outside the door for a moment.
No.
In the garden perhaps?
From various windows I scoured all four sides of the garden without catching a glimpse of her.
And the car was parked outside, wasn’t it?
Yes, it was.
Not knowing where she was somehow loosened my hold on the house, it was slackened in a confusing, quite disturbing way, and to counter it I went into my room and sat down on the bed to read some comics; that was when it struck me that of course she was downstairs in Dad’s office.
I almost never set foot in there. The few times I had, it had been to ask about something, if I could stay up and watch a particular TV program, for example, after knocking first and waiting for him to say, “Come in.” Knocking on the door came at a great cost, often so high that I preferred to go to bed without seeing the program. On a couple of occasions he had actually asked us to come in, when he wanted to show us something or give us something, such as envelopes with stamps on them. We put them in the sink in the spare kitchen, which, as far as I knew, was used exclusively for that purpose, to dissolve the gum, and, after drying them for a few hours, we were able to put them in our albums.
Otherwise I never went there. Even when I was on my own at home it never occurred to me. The risk that he would find out was much too great, he would discover anything untoward that was going on, he would sniff it out by some means or other, however well I tried to cover my tracks.
As he had with the hill when we were having dinner. Even though he hadn’t seen anything, only us on our way up, he knew we had been doing something wrong. Had he not been in such a good mood he would have brought everything into the open.
I lay on my stomach and started reading a
Tempo.
It was Yngve’s, he had borrowed it from Jan Atle, I had already read it many times. It was for older kids and for me it had a strong aura of belonging to a distant but utterly radiant world. I didn’t have any particular preferences regarding the settings of the comic books – it made no difference whether it was the Second World War, as in
På Vingene
or the
Kamp
series; nineteenth-century America, as in
Tex Willer, Jonathan Hex,
or
Blueberry
; England between the two World Wars, as in
Paul Temple
; or the fantasy realities, which the Phantom, Superman, Batman, the Fantastic Four, and all the Disney characters appeared in – but my feelings for them were different, they aroused different emotions in me, such that some of the series in
Tempo,
for example, the one that took place on a racetrack, or some in
Buster,
for example,
Johnny Puma
and
Benny Goldenfoot,
were particularly absorbing, perhaps because they were closer to the reality that I knew existed. In the summer you could see motorcyclists wearing the leathers and helmets with Formula 1 visors, you could see the low-slung cars with all those spoilers on TV, where they occasionally crashed into the barriers or one of the other cars, rolling over and catching fire, the driver being either burned to death or emerging from the flaming wreckage and calmly walking away.
Usually I was totally engrossed by these stories, without giving them a thought, the whole point of course was that you didn’t think, at least not with your own thoughts, you just followed the action. That afternoon, however, I quickly put the comic to one side, for some reason I couldn’t sit still, and it wasn’t much later than five o’clock, so I decided to go out again. I stopped at the top of the stairs, not a sound, she was still down below. What was she doing? She was hardly ever there. At least not at this time, I thought, bending down for my shoes in the hallway and tying the laces. I knocked on the door to Dad’s study. That is, the door leading to the corridor into which three rooms opened: the bathroom, the study, and the kitchen with the little box room at the end. In fact, it was a self-contained flat, but we had never rented it out to anyone.
“I’m going out!” I shouted. “Up to Geir’s!”
That is what I had been told to do, to tell them if I was going anywhere and say where.
Nevertheless, after a few seconds of silence, Dad’s irritated voice sounded from inside the study.
“All right, all right!” he shouted.
A few more seconds of silence passed.
Then Mom’s voice, friendlier, as if to compensate for Dad’s.
“That’s fine, Karl Ove!”
I shot out, closed the door carefully behind me, and ran up to Geir’s. I stood outside, called a few times until his mother came around the house. She had gardening gloves on, and was otherwise wearing khaki shorts, a blue blouse, and a pair of black clogs. In her hand she was holding a red trowel.
“Hi, Karl Ove,” she said. “Geir went out with Leif Tore a while ago.”
“Where did they go?”
“I don’t know. He didn’t say.”
“OK. Bye.”
I turned and walked slowly down the drive with my eyes glazed with tears. Why hadn’t they called at my house?
I stopped by the barrier between the two roads. Stood for a moment stock-still, listening. Not a sound. I sat down on one of the barriers. The rough concrete chafed against my thighs. Dandelions grew in the ditch below, all gray with dust. There was a grid next to it, rusty and with a sun-faded cigarette packet stuck between the bars.
Where could they have gone?
Down to Ubekilen?
Down to the pontoons?
To the soccer field and the play area?
Had Geir taken Leif Tore to one of our places?
Up the mountain?
I scanned the mountain. No sign of them there anyway. I got to my feet and started to make my way down. At the crossroads by the cherry tree there were three ways to choose among, if you were going to the landing stages. I chose the one to the right, through the gate, along the path covered with soil and twigs beneath the deep shadows from the tops of the enormous oaks, down to the field where we usually played soccer even though it sloped on both sides and the grass was knee-high, trampled from very early spring, there were also sapling trees growing on it, past the cliff with its grayish crags, generally bare but with some low scattered cover, and on through the forest to the road. Beyond it there was the new marina, blasted out of the rock, with three identical quays, all with wooden gangways and orange pontoons.
They weren’t there, either. I walked along one pontoon anyway; a double-ender had just moored at the tip, it belonged to Kanestrøm, and I went over to see what was happening. Kanestrøm was alone on board and peered up as I stood by the bow.
“So it’s you who’s out and about, is it?” he said. “I’ve been doing a bit of fishing, as you can see.”
The sun glinted on his glasses. He had a moustache, short hair, a little bald patch on top, and wore denim shorts, a checked shirt, and sandals.
“Would you like to see?”
He held up a red bucket in my direction. It was full of thin, slippery mackerel with bluish, glistening skin. Some were twitching, and the movement seemed to spread to the other bodies lying so close to one another it was as though it were one and the same creature.
“Wow!” I said. “Did you catch all of them?”
He nodded.
“All in the space of a few minutes. There was a huge shoal just offshore. Now we’ve got enough food for several days!”
He put the bucket down on the narrow gangway. Lifted an old gasoline canister, and put it down beside the bucket. Then some fishing lines and a can of hooks and lures. Humming an old song all the while.
“Do you know where Dag Lothar is?” I said.
“No, I’m afraid I don’t,” he said. “Are you looking for him?”