I spent the last weeks of the summer in Arendal. Rune, the programme director at the radio station, ran a kind of agency, he sold cassettes to local petrol stations, and when one evening I complained that I didn’t have a summer job he suggested I sold his cassettes on the street. I bought them from him for a fixed sum, he wasn’t bothered about only making a small profit, and so I could sell them at whatever price I liked. The towns in Sørland were full of tourists in the summer, purse strings were loose, if you were selling music from the charts you were bound to be in with a chance.
‘Good idea,’ I said. ‘My brother’s living in Arendal this summer. Perhaps I can set up there?’
‘Perfect!’
And so one morning I loaded a bag of clothes, a camping chair, a camping table, a ghetto blaster and a box of cassettes into mum’s car, which Yngve had at his disposal all summer, sat in the passenger seat, put on my new Ray-Bans and leaned back as Yngve engaged first gear and set off down the hill.
The sun was shining, which it had done all July, there was very little traffic on this side of the river, I rolled down the window, stuck out my elbow and sang along with Bowie as we raced through the spruce forest, the gleaming river appearing and disappearing between the trees, occasionally alongside sandbanks where children were swimming and screaming and shouting.
We chatted about grandma and grandad, whom we had visited the previous day, about how time seemed to stand still there compared with the house in Søbørvåg, where in the last two years it seemed to have accelerated and caused everything to go into decline.
We drove through the tiny centre of Birkeland to Lillesand and from there onto the E18, the stretch I knew inside out after all the journeys back and forth in my childhood.
I put on a cassette by the Psychedelic Furs, their most commercial LP, which I loved.
‘Have I told you about the girl who came up to me in London?’ Yngve said.
‘No,’ I said.
‘“You’re the spitting image of the lead singer in Psychedelic Furs,” she said, and then she wanted someone to take a photo of us together.’
He looked at me and laughed.
‘I thought it was Audun Automat from Tramteatret you looked like?’ I said.
‘Yes, but that’s not quite as flattering,’ he said.
We drove past Knut Hamsun’s Nørholm property, I leaned forward to look past Yngve and into the grounds, I had been there once, on a class trip when I was in the ninth, we were shown round by Hamsun’s son and saw the cottage where he wrote and a few pieces of furniture he had made.
Now it was empty and looked overgrown.
‘Do you remember dad saying he had seen Hamsun on the bus to Grimstad once?’
‘No,’ Yngve said. ‘Did he say that?’
‘Yes, an old man with a stick and a white beard.’
Yngve shook his head. ‘Imagine all the lies he’s told us over the years. There must be loads we still believe without realising it.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I can’t say I’m sorry he’s moving.’
‘No,’ Yngve said. ‘Nor me.’
Dad and Unni had got jobs in Northern Norway, they were going to work at the same gymnas and during recent weeks had packed everything they owned and sent it north. They would be driving up in a couple of days’ time.
‘Has Kristin recovered from the wedding?’ I said. ‘I assume it must have been a bit of a shock?’
‘It was somewhat special, yes,’ he said.
We drove down to Grimstad, past the Oddensenter Mall, the old Hotel Norge, where Hamsun had done some of his writing, up the steep incline and onto the wide plain.
‘And what was that business with the hotel?’ I said. ‘They booked a room at the hotel where we ate, they even went up to see it. But did they sleep there?’
Yngve shrugged.
‘Perhaps they went back there after we left?’
‘Didn’t look like that.’
‘No, but there are a few things in their lives they don’t plan. Such as when they said, if you remember, they wouldn’t be having a honeymoon. But the day after they caught the boat to Denmark and stayed at a hotel in Skagen.’
‘That’s true,’ I said.
We drove past Kokkeplassen, mum’s old workplace, where I had been at a nursery for a year, and I craned my neck, there had been a cliff there, we had climbed up a tree over the cliff every day, I seemed to remember. But it wasn’t a cliff, it was just a little slope, I could see now. And the tree must have been chopped down. Then we motored down the hill with Arendal below us and beyond it the island of Tromøya, in all its nostalgic splendour, flooded with sunshine.
‘Well?’ Yngve said. ‘Are you going to find a pitch right now?’
‘May as well,’ I said.
Nothing had been arranged in advance; Rune thought all you had to do was ask in a shop whether they minded if you set up outside in the street and used their electricity, and then hope they didn’t charge you a commission. Offer them a couple of hundred if they dithered was his advice.
Yngve parked the car, we walked down the pedestrianised street, I popped into a randomly chosen boutique and asked whether it was all right if I sold cassettes in the street outside and if they had a socket I could use. Might attract customers for them too.
No problem.
Once that was arranged we drove up to his bedsit. He had taken his prelims that spring, after finishing the foundation year in comparative politics before Christmas, and now he was working at the Central Hotel in town to earn some money for a trip to China he and Kristin were planning later in the autumn.
The bedsit he rented was by Langsæ, outside Arendal, and I would be staying for three weeks, sleeping on a lilo on the floor.
We hadn’t spent so much time together since we were little.
The next day he drove me to the town centre with all my paraphernalia. It was fantastic standing there in the quiet morning streets, with the sea so blue and heavy and still before us, erecting the old yellow 1970s camping table, arranging the cassettes on it — Genesis, Falco, Eurythmics, Madonna and anything else that sold well in those months — pulling the cable from the shop, plugging in the cassette recorder, sitting down on the chair, putting on my shades and pressing play.
The King of Arendal, that was me.
Beside my table was an ice cream stand, and soon after I arrived a girl started work there. She swept the street in front, carried in a few boxes, came out with a rag in her hand and wiped the outside of the window, went back in and stayed there.
She looked great. Reddish hair, freckles, big curves. When I saw her next, half an hour later, she was wearing a white apron.
Terrific!
But she didn’t look in my direction, not once.
That could be arranged.
Gradually people began to trickle by, they walked up and down the small pedestrian street, passed my table several times, I kept a careful eye on them and was quick to recognise faces and bodies. Some of them stopped and examined my selection of cassettes, and if they pointed to one, I jumped up, took an unopened one from the box beside the table, pocketed the money they passed me, thanked them, registered a cross on a sheet of paper I kept handy and sat down.
What a job!
At eleven sales began to take off with a vengeance. Through to one I sold loads of cassettes, then business flagged until I shut up shop at a few minutes to four, when Yngve came to collect me.
At his place I counted out the money due to Rune and put it in a plastic bag. The rest I spent when we went out in the evening. I bought bottles of white wine in ice buckets, danced, chatted to whoever came over to Yngve’s table. White wine, that was the discovery of the summer for me, it slid down like water, and the buzz it produced made me feel light and happy.