Oh, how bloody fantastic it felt!
The taxi came up the hill, I threw the cigarette end to the ground, trod on it and placed the cases in the boot, which the driver — a plump elderly man with white hair and a gold necklace — had opened for me.
‘The harbour, please,’ I said, getting in at the back.
‘Harbour’s big,’ he said, turning to me.
‘I’m going to Finnsnes. On the express boat.’
‘We can fix that for you, no problem.’
He set off downhill.
‘Are you going to the gymnas there?’ he asked.
‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m going on to Håfjord.’
‘Oh yes? Fishing? You don’t look like a fisherman, I must say!’
‘Actually, I’m going there to teach.’
‘Oh, right. Right. There are so many southerners who do that. But aren’t you terribly young to have a job like that? You have to be eighteen, don’t you?’
He laughed and looked at me in the mirror.
I gave a short laugh too.
‘I left school in the summer. I reckon that’s better than nothing.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it is,’ he said. ‘But think of the kids growing up there. Teachers straight from gymnas. New ones every year. No wonder they pack school in after the ninth class and go fishing!’
‘Yes, I suppose it isn’t very surprising,’ I said. ‘But it’s hardly my fault.’
‘No, not at all. And fault? Who’s talking about blame! Fishing’s a much better life than studying, you know! Far better than sitting and studying until you’re thirty.’
‘Yes. I’m not going to study.’
‘But you’re going to be a teacher!’
He looked at me in the mirror again.
‘Yes,’ I said.
There was silence for a few minutes. Then he took his hand off the gear stick and pointed.
‘Down there, that’s your express boat.’
He stopped outside the terminal, set my cases on the ground and closed the boot again. I gave him the money, not knowing what to do about a tip, I had been dreading this the whole journey and solved the problem by saying that he could keep the change.
‘Thank you!’ he said. ‘And good luck!’
Bye bye, fifty kroner.
As he rejoined the road I stood counting the money I had left. I didn’t have much, but I could probably get an advance, surely they would understand that I wouldn’t have any money before the job started?
With its one main street, numerous plain concrete buildings, probably hastily erected, and its barren environs girdled by mountain ranges in the distance, Finnsnes, it struck me a few hours later, sitting in a patisserie with a cup of coffee in front of me and waiting for the bus to leave, looked more like a tiny village in Alaska or Canada than Norway. There wasn’t much of a centre, the town was so small that everything had to be considered the centre. The atmosphere was quite different here from in the towns I was used to, because Finnsnes was so much smaller, of course, but also because no effort had been made anywhere to make the place look attractive or homely. Most towns had a front and a back, but here everything looked pretty much the same.
I leafed through the two books I had bought in the nearby shop. One was called The New Water by a writer unfamiliar to me, Roy Jacobsen; the other was The Mustard Legion by Morten Jørgensen, who had played in a couple of the bands I had followed a few years ago. Perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea to spend my money on them, but after all I was going to be a writer, it was important to read, if only to see how high the bar was set. Could I write like that? This was the question that kept running through my brain as I sat there flicking through the pages.
Then I ambled over to the bus, had a last smoke outside, put my cases in the luggage compartment, paid the driver and asked him to tell me when we were in Håfjord, walked down the aisle and sat on the penultimate seat on the left, which had been my favourite for as long as I could remember.
Across from me sat a lovely fair-haired girl, perhaps one or two years younger than me, she had her satchel on the seat, and I imagined she went to the gymnas in Finnsnes and was on her way home. She had looked at me when I got onto the bus, and now, as the driver shifted into first gear and pulled away from the stop with a jerk, she turned to look at me again. Not lingeringly, no more than a glance, and barely a fleeting one at that, but still it was enough to give me a stiffie.
I put on my headset and inserted a cassette into the Walkman. The Smiths, The Queen is Dead. So as not to appear intrusive, I concentrated on staring out of the window on my side for the first few kilometres and resisted all impulses to look in her direction.
After passing through a built-up area, which began as soon as we left the centre and extended for quite a distance, where around half the passengers got off, we came to a long deserted straight stretch. Whereas the sky above Finnsnes had been pale, covering the town beneath with its vapid light, here the shade of blue was stronger and deeper, and the sun hanging over the mountains to the south-west — whose low but steep sides obscured a view of the sea that had to be there — caused the red-flecked, in places almost purple, heather which grew densely on either side of the road to glow. The trees here were for the most part deformed pines and dwarf birches. On my side the green-clad mountains the valley rose up to meet were gentle, hills almost, while those on the other were steep and wild and alpine, although of no great height.
Not a person, not a house, was to be seen.
But I hadn’t come here to meet new people; I had come to find the peace I needed to write.
The thought sent a flash of pleasure through me.
I was on my way, I was on my way.
A couple of hours later, still engrossed in music, I saw a signpost up ahead. From the length of the name I concluded it had to be Håfjord. The road it pointed to led straight into the mountainside. It was not so much a tunnel, more a hole, the walls seemed to have been blasted out, and there was no light in there either. Water streamed down from the roof of the tunnel in such quantities that the driver had to turn on the windscreen wipers. When we emerged on the other side, I gasped. Between two long rugged chains of mountains, perilously steep and treeless, lay a narrow fjord, and beyond it, like a vast blue plain, the sea.
Ohhh.
The road the bus followed hugged the mountainside. To see as much of the landscape as I could I stood up and crossed to the other row of seats. From the corner of my eye I noticed the fair-haired girl turn towards me and smile when she saw me standing there with my face pressed against the window. Below the mountains opposite there was a small island, densely packed with houses on its inner landward side, completely deserted on the outer side, at least that was how it looked from this distance. There were some fishing boats moored inside a harbour with a mole around. The mountains continued for perhaps a kilometre. Closest to us, the slopes were clad in green, but further away they were completely bare and grey and fell away with a sheer drop into the sea.
The bus passed through another grotto-like tunnel. At the other end, on a relatively gentle mountain slope, in a shallow bowl, lay the village where I would be spending the next year.
Wow.
This was just brilliant!
Most of the houses huddled around a road that wound its way through the village like a U. Beneath the road at the bottom was what looked like a factory building in front of a quay, it must have been the fish-processing plant, beyond it there were lots of boats. At the end of the U stood a chapel. Above the road at the top was a line of houses, behind them there were dwarf birches, heather and scrub up to the point where the valley stopped and a large mountain rose on either side.