‘I’ll be rid of them in two months,’ he said, following my gaze. ‘I’ve had them for a year. They don’t bother me now, but I can’t wait.’
‘What’s wrong with your leg?’
‘Car accident.’
‘So what happened to the car?’
He laughed so much he almost fell off his crutches.
‘I don’t know. I didn’t see it. Someone drove into me from behind, and I blacked out and woke up in my grandmother’s spare room.’ He laughed again, his whole face smiling. ‘When I woke up, I thought I was in heaven, because the first thing I saw was one of those pictures where it says Jesus lives.’
‘So you believe in God then?’
‘No, I never have, but when I woke up in my grandmother’s house, I thought perhaps I’d been wrong. Luckily then, I worked out where I was. That picture had always been there.’
He leaned on his crutches, dangling one leg over the grip and laughed non-stop. I had decided not to make friends with anyone at this school, but this bloke was hard to refuse.
‘Something wrong with your eyes?’
‘I can’t take the bright light,’ I said and felt bad about it, because that wasn’t quite true, but it was truer than other things I had said. ‘I start throwing up straight away.’
‘Fair enough,’ he said, and there was a silence, and I felt like a fraud. But then a ball rolled our way. I saw it first and was going to give it a kick, but then he saw it too, got ready, and using his crutches as a pommel horse, he thumped the ball with his good leg so hard it flew to the other end of the playground and smacked into the fence. It was impressive, but not something you did on a football field.
‘Not bad,’ I said, and he just kept on grinning and said:
‘My name’s Arvid, by the way,’ and then the bell rang.
This time it was easier to enter the classroom, I was not the last one in, but I kept my glasses on. As long they left me in peace, this day might be OK.
When we were all seated at our desks, Levang went up to the dais and sat down as well, crossed his hands and let his gaze wander around the class until it settled on me. He smiled, I felt my neck go stiff, and then he said in a very friendly voice:
‘Well, Audun. There wasn’t much time in the first lesson, but now I was wondering if maybe you could tell us something about what it’s like where you come from. Most of the class, you know, haven’t lived anywhere else but here in Veitvet. What’s it called, the place where you grew up?’
I should have known. He wasn’t going to leave me in peace. He was a nice man, no doubt about it, and he was doing this for my sake, he wanted me to feel at home. I shrugged.
‘I mean, it could be interesting for us to hear about. Did you live on a farm?’
‘There’s nothing to tell,’ I said in a loud voice. The black-haired girl was giggling again.
Levang smiled, his face slightly flushed. ‘Surely that can’t be true,’ he said. ‘I mean, you’re thirteen years old, after all. You must have experienced lots of things that are different from what we are used to here.’
‘I said there’s nothing to tell!’
‘Are you sure?’ he asked. Then I got up from the desk, grabbed my schoolbag from the hook on the side and made for the door. No one was giggling now.
Arvid turned to look at me, but his eyes told me nothing of what was in his mind.
‘Oi, where are you going?’ Levang said, and then he got up and took a few steps to cut me off. I felt my whole body tense up. I looked past his shoulder to the door, but there was no point in trying.
‘I’ve always done my homework,’ I said. ‘I’ve always paid attention. You can see my school report if you like, but you have no right to ask me questions about things that have nothing to do with school.’
‘Whoa there, Audun, I think you’ve got the wrong end of the stick. I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said and tried to catch my eye, but I was looking right past his ear and didn’t answer.
‘Well, let’s talk about this some other time. Please would you go to your desk now.’ I turned and walked back down between the desks. I took a quick glance at Arvid’s face, and then I sat down and hung up my bag and stared out of the window.
II
2
AUTUMN HAS COME, and I am on my newspaper round. Jimi Hendrix just died, they are playing ‘Hey Joe’ on the radio, and I have passed my driving test. I have my reefer jacket on, a pair of checked flares and a broad, red plaited belt with a loop buckle. Down the flare from the knee is a row of shiny buttons. It’s the latest fashion, and if anyone had seen me I would have really stood out. But not many people are up, only a lamp in the odd window, and as I walk the hills up from the block where I live towards the depot in the shopping centre, it’s a quarter past five. There is a frozen silver sheen on the lawns between the rows of terraced houses, and it’s not yet morning. I have had my hair cut in a moderate-mod style after several years of long hair, and I am not sure it’s such a big hit. So the gloom suits me fine.
I am tired, I still have homework to do and a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach tells me something at school is not going the right way. What I do, I do well enough. What I hear, I remember and understand, I am not an idiot, but it’s as if the rest of my class has taken off on some journey they forgot to tell me about, as if there is a secret pact between teacher and students that does not include me. They know something I do not, and that’s how it has been for a long time now.
The others stand waiting in front of the entrance, I am the last to turn up, but there are no newspapers in sight. Konrad is there, and Fru Johansen, and the entire Vilden family, the two children yawning and leaning against their father’s back. This is what they live off, four newspaper rounds morning and afternoon, day in, day out. The oldest child, a girl, is fourteen years old, the boy twelve. They look as though they have just come out of the forest, you’d expect pine needles in their hair, but they live in Rådyrveien, in a flat, like the rest of us from Veitvet do. The mother is so ugly and bony that you have to like her, and the father, tall and distant, nods politely to the left, right and centre, and never says a word, just smiles and looks over our heads at something we don’t quite comprehend. High plains and spruce forests, I have always imagined. The girl is so attractive it’s hard to look her in the face.
‘Hi, Audun,’ says the boy called Tommy, and I say:
‘Hi Tommy, cool jacket.’ We often talk, I lend him old Cowboy and Indian books, and we are pals. He always seems to have a cold, a red patch under his nose, and he wears a striped, yellow jacket lined with fur and smiles happily, even though he has had the jacket on all week, and I have said ‘cool jacket’ every morning. I don’t talk to his sister, her eyes are so big and brown that after walking the same route for several years I still don’t know her name. But she looks at my new trousers.
We wait. It’s the third day in a row that the newspapers are late. Konrad’s moped is chugging away on its stand, he doesn’t switch it off unless he has to and burns up a hell of a lot of petrol. He already wears a cap, a grey bobble cap without a bobble that he pulls down so hard his ears stick out, like the retarded kids you see in town sometimes, and you wonder why they have to dress them like that. He has woollen gloves on with the fingers cut off, and his fingers are black with the old ink. He is fifty years old and lives with his sister in the terraced house right across from the women’s prison, and no one can wedge a newspaper behind a door handle like him. In one flowing movement his hand makes an arc in mid-air and the fat Aftenposten is lodged under the handle as hard as a board and never comes loose. How easy it looks, and yet I have tried it many times, and I cannot do it.