He cast intermittent glances at me as he drove. The countryside around us had levelled out. Low trees, heather, moss, brooks, shallow, completely black tracts of water and, in the distance, chains of tall rugged peaks. He had filled the tank just outside Finnsnes, there was still a smell of petrol in the car, it made me feel slightly nauseous.
He glanced at me again.
‘Could you put some music on? There are some cassettes in the glove compartment.’
I opened it and transferred the pile of cassettes to my lap.
Sam Cooke. Otis Redding. James Brown. Prince. Marvin Gaye. UB40. Smokey Robinson. Stevie Wonder. Terence Trent D’Arby.
‘You’re a soul man, are you?’ I said.
‘Soul and funk.’
I inserted the only cassette I had heard before: Prince, Parade. Leaned back in the seat and gazed up at the mountains, which, at the bottom, were covered with a green tangled carpet of bushes and small trees, further up with moss and heather, also green.
‘By the way, why did you steal the cigarettes?’ Nils Erik said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me. You can do what you like as far as I’m concerned. I’m just curious, that’s all.’
‘Did you see?’ I said.
He nodded.
‘You have got the money, after all,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t as if you took them out of sheer deprivation, was it.’
‘No,’ I said.
‘What if you’d been caught? How would that have looked? As a teacher, I mean.’
‘Was I caught?’
‘No.’
‘No? So then it’s purely hypothetical,’ I said.
‘We don’t have to talk about it,’ he said.
‘I don’t mind talking about it,’ I said. ‘Talk away.’
He gave a short laugh.
The ensuing silence was long but not unpleasant, the road was straight, the mountains were beautiful, the music was good, Nils Erik an outdoor type I didn’t much care for.
But then my attitude changed. It was as though I had gone so far in one direction and now I was beginning to return because there was something unresolved here. Nils Erik, he hadn’t done anything to me, didn’t wish me any harm, he was curious, that was all, and perhaps a bit pushy, and out here, where I didn’t know anyone, perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing.
I hummed along to ‘Sometimes it Snows in April’.
‘Have you heard Prince’s latest?’ I said. ‘Lovesexy.’
He shook his head.
‘But if he comes to Norway or Sweden in the summer I’ll go and see him. His concerts are fantastic these days. I talked to someone who had seen him on the Sign o’ the Times tour. They said it was the best concert they’d ever seen.’
‘I fancy it too,’ I said. ‘But it’s good, the new one, that is. Not as good as Sign o’ the Times but. . As a matter of fact I reviewed it when it came out for Fædrelandsvennen and almost made a huge blunder.’
I looked at him.
‘I’d read in some English music mag that he was illiterate, and I was going to write that, you know. I was on the point of pitching the whole article that way, that Prince couldn’t read, but luckily it struck me as a bit odd and I dropped the idea. Afterwards I realised it was probably music that he couldn’t read. But I don’t know. And it’s not good, all the vague information you accumulate, the stuff you carry around with you that’s not remotely true. If you say anything, it’s a bit embarrassing, but if you actually write it and it’s in the newspaper the day after, that’s worse.’
‘I thought that was what newspapers were all about,’ Nils Erik said, smiling, his eyes on the road.
‘You can say that again,’ I said.
Further ahead lay the road to Håfjord, a thin grey line leading to a small black gap in the mountain.
‘By the way, I got a long letter from my girlfriend on Tuesday,’ I said.
‘Oh yes?’ he said.
‘Yes. Well, girlfriend may be stretching it. We were together during the summer. Her name was Line. .’
‘Was? Did she die this week?’
‘For me, yes. That was the point. She finished it. Wrote that I was a nice person blah blah blah, but she’d never been in love with me and it was the right time to finish now because I was moving up here.’
‘So you’re footloose and fancy free,’ Nils Erik said.
‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s what I was about to say.’
A car emerged from the tunnel, it was small and black like a dung beetle, but soon it grew in size, it was going at a considerable speed.
The driver raised a hand as he passed, Nils Erik responded, slowed down and turned into the last short stretch before the village.
‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows who we are while we don’t know anyone.’
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve ended up in an incredibly intimidating place.’
He twisted one of the levers by the steering wheel for full beam and flicked the other up to activate the windscreen wipers. Drops of water splashed on the bonnet, windscreen and roof. The drone of the engine rebounded off the rock face, it surrounded us like a kind of shell, which vanished the moment we exited the tunnel, and the blue fjord spread out before us.
‘Are you a free man then?’ I said.
‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I’m very free in fact. I haven’t had a girlfriend for several years.’
Was he gay?
Oh, no, don’t say he was one of them?!
He was in fact a bit odd. And those rosy cheeks. .
‘There’s not much of a selection up here,’ he said. ‘But nor is there much competition. So I reckon they cancel each other out.’
He laughed.
Not much of a selection. What was that supposed to mean? There weren’t many other gays here?
My insides chilled as I stared across the matt blue surface of the sea.
‘Torill is a cheery type,’ he said.
Torill!
False alarm!
I looked at him again. Even though his eyes were on the road some of his attention was on me.
‘But she’s old,’ I said.
‘Old? Not at all!’ he said. ‘If I had to guess I would say twenty-eight. Maybe thirty. It’s possible. But, first off, she’s not old! And, second off, she’s sexy. Yes, very sexy.’
‘Well, you could have fooled me,’ I said.
‘I’m not eighteen years old, Karl Ove. I’m twenty-four. So twenty-eight is not old. Or unattainable.’ He chuckled. ‘The fact that she may be unattainable for me is quite a different matter.’
We drove slowly down the narrow road squeezed under the mountainside. The local motorists drove just as fast here as anywhere else, but not Nils Erik, he was the cautious sensible type, I had begun to realise.
‘And you?’ he said. ‘Have you got your eye on anyone?’
I smiled. ‘In fact, there was a girl on the bus when I was coming here. She’s at the gymnas in Finnsnes. Lives in Hellevika.’
‘Aha!’
‘We’ll have to see. Nothing else I’m aware of.’
‘Vibeke’s a jolly girl,’ he said.
‘Do you mean fat?’
‘No, but you know. . she’s nice, she is. Bit chubby maybe, but what does that matter? And Hege, she’s. . well, high maintenance, I reckon. But attractive. Isn’t she?’
‘You’re game for anything, are you?’ I said.
‘Women are women, that’s my motto.’
Then the village lay beneath us. Nils Erik pulled up outside my flat, carried in the shopping bags while I took the big cardboard box containing the stereo, then he said bye and drove off to his place. I set up the stereo, put on Sulk by the Associates, an utterly insane LP I listened to stretched out on the sofa. After a while I began to write some letters, kept them brief as I had a lot of them to do, what was important right now was not what I wrote but the short story I enclosed with all of them.