Only a forty-year-old man could have written that. I am forty now, as old as my father was then, I’m sitting in our flat in Malmö, my family is asleep in the rooms around me. Linda and Vanja in our bedroom, Heidi and John in the children’s room, Ingrid, the children’s grandmother, on a bed in the living room. It is 25 November 2009. The mid-1980s are as far away as the 1950s were then. But most of the people in this story are still out there. Hanne is out there, Jan Vidar is out there, Jøgge is out there. My mother and my brother, Yngve — he spoke to me on the phone two hours ago, about a trip we are planning to Corsica in the summer, he with his children, Linda and I with ours — they are out there. But dad is dead, his parents are dead.
Among the items dad left behind were three notebooks and one diary. For three years he wrote down the names of everyone he met during the day, everyone he phoned, all the times he slept with Unni and how much he drank. Now and then there was a brief report, mostly there wasn’t.
‘K.O. visited’ appeared often.
That was me.
Sometimes it said ‘K.O. cheerful’ after I had been there.
Sometimes ‘good conversation’.
Sometimes ‘decent atmosphere’.
Sometimes nothing.
I understand why he noted down the names of everyone he met and spoke to in the course of a day, why he registered all the quarrels and all the reconciliations, but I don’t understand why he documented how much he drank. It is as if he was logging his own demise.
Starting school again after the holidays was like being sent back to Go: it turned out that everything was as it had been when I started gymnas the previous year. The class was new, the pupils and teachers unknown. The sole difference was that there had been twenty-six girls in the first class while there were only twenty-four in the second.
I sat on the same seat, in the left-hand corner at the back, seen from the front, and I behaved in the same way: spoke up during lessons, discussed what teachers said, got into fights with other pupils over political or religious issues. When the breaks came everyone in the class joined the crowd they belonged to or the friends they had from before, and I invested all the physical and mental strength I possessed into avoiding the humiliation it was to be left standing somewhere on your own.
I went up to the library and read books such as The Falcon Tower by the twenty-year-old writer Erik Fosnes Hansen, only four years to go until I am twenty, I thought, perhaps my name will be on the front of a book then? I sat in the classroom on my chair pretending I was doing homework. I walked up to the petrol station opposite the school premises and bought something, anything, more often than not an Oslo newspaper because I couldn’t read it with others around and so that was a plausible reason for sitting alone in the canteen during the endlessly long lunch break. Or I acted as if I was searching for someone. Up and down the stairs, through the long corridors, sometimes to Gimlehallen or over to the business school, in pursuit of a fictional person for whom I searched high and low. But usually I stood smoking by the entrance, because that act by its very nature determined where I should be, where I was entitled to be, where there were also others, my ‘friends’ to those who wondered.
My fear of being seen as friendless was not without some justification. One day there was a new note on the noticeboard. A student who had recently moved to the town and didn’t know anyone at the school wanted someone to be friends with, if anyone was interested they could meet him by the flagpole at twelve the next day.
The area around the flagpole at twelve the next day was packed with pupils. Everyone wanted to observe this friendless creature, who naturally enough didn’t show up.
Had it been a hoax? Or had this friendless creature got cold feet when he saw the crowd?
I suffered with him, whoever he was.
One day I went to Nye Sørlandet and asked to speak to the person responsible for the newspaper’s music section. I was shown into the office of someone called Steinar Vindsland. He was young with dark big hair which was cut short at the back and on the sides, much in the style of the bass player in Simple Minds, and had a bristly chin and a gleam in his eye. I said who I was and what I wanted.
‘Well, we don’t have a regular record reviewer,’ he said. ‘I usually do the reviews, but I’ve got so many bloody other jobs to do it would be great if someone else could do that.’
He studied me.
I had dressed for the occasion, put on my black and white checked shirt, which was like the one The Edge wore, studded belt and black trousers.
‘Who do you like then?’
I said, and he nodded.
‘We’ll give you a spin. Look,’ he said, rummaging through the piles of records spread across the desk. ‘Take these with you and write about them. If it’s good, you’re our new record reviewer.’
I sat down and wrote all weekend, draft after draft, and when Monday came round I walked down to the newspaper after school and delivered six handwritten pages. He read them standing up in his office, at a disconcertingly fast tempo. Then he fixed me with his gaze.
‘I’m looking at our new record reviewer,’ he said.
‘Did you like it?’
‘It’s good. Have you got a few minutes?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’ll take a few shots of you and make a little file. Ask you a couple of questions. Are you at Katedralskolen?’
I nodded. He grabbed a camera from the table, lifted it to his face and pointed it at me.
‘Sit down there,’ he said, indicating the corner of the room.
My spine ran cold as I heard the clicks of the camera.
‘Here,’ he said. ‘Grab these records and hold them up facing me.’
He passed me three LPs and I held them up while staring into the lens with as serious an expression as I could muster.
‘You like U2, you said. Who else?’
‘Big Country. Simple Minds. David Bowie. And Iggy, of course. Talking Heads. R.E.M. Chronic Town, have you heard them? Shit hot. Really great.’
‘Oh yes. Have you got a mission statement?’
I could feel my cheeks burning.
‘Nooo,’ I said.
‘Any particular axes to grind? Musically speaking? The gigs we get in town? Music programmes on NRK? Any views on that?’
‘Yes, well, it’s shocking that there’s only one good music programme on the radio and nothing on TV.’
‘Great!’ he said. ‘You’re still sixteen, are you?’
‘Yes.’
‘That’s it then. We’ll run it tomorrow. You start next week. Is that all right?’
‘Yes.’
‘Pop in on. . erm Thursday and we can discuss the nitty-gritty.’
He shook my hand.
‘And by the way,’ he said on the way out.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘You can’t write in longhand. That’s no good. If you haven’t got a typewriter, get one!’
‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’
Then I was outside on the street.
It was too good to be true. I was the record reviewer for a newspaper! Sixteen years old! I lit a cigarette and set off. The dry tarmac, the windows darkened in places with exhaust fumes, all the cars made me think I was in a city. I was a music journalist on my way through the streets of London. Coming hotfoot from a hectic editorial office.
Steinar Vindsland had been exactly as I had imagined a journalist to be. Unbelievably fast. Everything happened fast. They had deadlines, that was why they had to nail their articles at breakneck speed.
And he knew about music. Probably knew Harald Hempel. Maybe some of the bands in Oslo.