Of all the things I had done and that would come back to haunt me during these days the encounter with my grandparents was the worst. But surely they couldn’t know that I had drunk so much, could they? Surely they couldn’t know that I had not only been drinking but also smoking hash, could they? No, they couldn’t. And in my diary for the beginning of June that year I wrote that the months I had been a russ, celebrating the end of school, were the happiest in my life. I used those words: the happiest in my life.
Why did I write that?
Oh, I was so happy. I laughed and was free and friends with everyone.
At the end of June I left home, mum drove me to a flat at the hospital, I worked there for a month, was together with Line, drank wine in the evenings and at the weekends, smoked hash whenever I could get my hands on it. Espen rejected it point blank, it was filth, he said, and he continued to insist the story about the man he had found dead on the night before 17 May was true. One afternoon he rang up to say there had been an article in the newspaper about a man discovered floating in the harbour. ‘That’s him!’ Espen said. I didn’t know if he really meant it or was just trying to get as much mileage from the joke as he could. He said he had a vague memory, as if in a dream, of him dumping the body overboard. Why would you have done that? I said. I was drunk, he answered. No one else but you saw any dead man. It’s just a fantasy. No, he said, it’s true. What about the man sitting with us in the boat? Don’t you remember him? Yes, I do. You saw him then? Yes. He was dead. Now, come on, Espen, if he’d been dead why would you have heaved him over the side and then run to get us? I don’t know.
The month had been packed with such incidents, I wasn’t sure whether they had happened or not, and this combined with the feeling I had that everything was possible, that there were no limits and the enormous tracts of time of which I remembered nothing caused me to begin to lose sight of myself. It was as though I had disappeared. In part I liked this, in part I didn’t. The routines at the hospital, where I was mostly responsible for setting and clearing the tables at mealtimes and otherwise helping with anything of a practical nature, neutralised this feeling but didn’t erase it because in the evening I always went out, drank with the people I met, it was summer and there was always someone around I knew. One evening we were refused admission to Kjelleren, so Bjørn and I climbed up on the roof of the block behind, ran all the way across the rooftops, found a skylight, crawled in, went down to Kjelleren, which was absolutely empty, it must have taken us an hour. We went up a few floors, entered a flat, someone woke up and shouted at us, we said we had gone in the wrong door, walked amid gales of laughter to Tresse, a square in the centre of town where Bjørn’s dad had a flat and we could sleep. In the morning I rang the hospital and said I was ill, they probably didn’t believe me, but what could they do?
That night I drank with a radio technician, Paul, who had driven us to an Imperium concert in Oslo, and on the way home, in the middle of the night in Telemark, at twenty degrees below, the car skidded, left the road doing a hundred kilometres an hour, brushed against a lamp post, flew through the air and landed in a ditch. We’re going to die, I thought, and the idea of it didn’t bother me in the slightest. We didn’t die, the car was a write-off but we were in good shape. It was a great story, one we could tell others, also the sequel, the old house where we knocked on the door, the rifle standing in the hallway, the feeling of being in another, nastier world than our own, and the incredible cold outside as we hitched for more than two hours wearing trainers and suit jackets. We sat talking about that at Kjelleren, Paul and I and his girlfriend, she was wonderful, perhaps twenty-three, twenty-four, I had secretly had my eye on her for ages, and when she suggested taking a taxi back to hers to smoke some dope, of course I said yes, we smoked, and when I smoked I sometimes became so unbelievably horny, and sitting next to her on the sofa it hit me at once, I grabbed her, she laughed and wriggled away, saying she loved Paul, and then she put her hand between my legs and laughed even more and said you’ve grown up. Downstairs in Kjelleren she had been quiet most of the time, Paul had smiled at us, he trusted her, which he was right to do.
At work the next day they said nothing, but I noticed of course, I wasn’t someone they were interested in keeping however much effort I made to mollify them. I was employed for only a month, and when the time was up, I went back to our house, which was no longer ours, mum had sold it, for the next two days we packed everything into boxes, and then a big removal van came and took the lot.
Except for one thing, and that was the cat.
What should we do with the cat?
Mefisto?
Mum couldn’t have the cat where she was going to live, and I definitely couldn’t take him to Northern Norway.
We would have to have him put down.
He wound around our legs, mum put a tin of liver paste in his carrier, he ran in, mum closed the door, put the carrier on the passenger seat and drove to the vet in town.
That afternoon I lay on the rocks beneath the waterfall and swam. On my return, mum’s car was in the garage. She was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee. She got up when I entered, walked past me without saying a word, her eyes downcast.
‘Is Mefisto dead now then?’ I asked.
Mum didn’t answer, just shot me a glance, then opened the door and went out. Her eyes were brimming.
That was the first time I had seen mum cry.
Eight days later, in a foetal position on the sofa in Håfjord, I lay asleep after emptying the contents of my stomach into the toilet, so wonderful. My sleep was light, the revving of a car engine somewhere was all it required for me to open my eyes. But I didn’t have anything to do, I had no duties, I could lie in bed and sleep all Saturday and Sunday. Monday was an eternity away, I mused as I lay there feeling sleep steal over me again.
There was a ring at the door.
I went to answer it, surprised at how light my body felt.
It was Sture.