We hear the car before we see it, it’s the only sound there is apart from Konrad’s moped, and at full speed it sails up the incline from Veitvetveien, makes a U-turn in front of the depot and comes to a stop by our barrows. The driver jumps out, yanks the side doors back and hauls out the big bundles of newspapers. He drops them on the tarmac, with a loud groan each time, thwack, thwack they go, hitting the ground with a solid thud I’ve always thought had something to do with what is in the newspapers.
I pull out my two bundles and load them on to the barrow, cut the strings and check to see if there are any new subscribers. There are: two. I enter their names in my book and start dragging the barrow towards Grevlingveien. The others set off on their separate routes. Konrad up to Trondhjemsveien, Fru Johansen along Beverveien, which is where I live, and the Vilden family down to the houses along Rådyrveien. Tommy is carrying a huge bundle of papers. As usual he has cut the strings first, and now the papers start slipping and sliding in his arms, and the whole caboodle is on the verge of crashing to the ground. His sister comes over, bends down to give a hand, and they are so wonderful to watch it takes my breath away, but I too have siblings. One brother and a sister. That is, I had a brother. Last year he drove a Volvo Amazon that did not belong to him into the river Glomma and drowned. It happened just a few miles from where we used to live before we moved to Veitvet. It was an Amazon with all the extras: fox tail on the aerial, GT steering wheel and fur-lined seat covers at the front.
The girl in the passenger seat survived. She wept and said they hadn’t touched a drop. I don’t believe that for one moment. Egil had just turned fifteen the autumn before and didn’t have a licence yet. After we moved to Oslo he went back as often as he could when he was old enough to go alone. I didn’t. I only go there when I have to.
My sister moved out just after the accident. She is four years older than me, and of course she too had to go back. Now she lives with her boyfriend in Kløfta. He sells second-hand cars and makes money. I am sure he beats her, but I have never seen anything, and Kari does not say a word. If ever I catch him I’ll beat him up. That won’t cost me much. I have been training for years. With my newspaper money I bought a bench and weights.
I tell my mother.
‘I’ll give him a thrashing,’ I say. And she listens to me and then she quotes Lars Ekborg, the Swede who has a talk show on the radio where he goes on and on about all kinds of shit happening in the world and always rounds off by saying: ‘You’ve got to be tough, you really do!’
‘Is that how you want it?’ she laughs. Sure, it’s easy to make fun, but I know what I know.
I remember Egil and me playing on the living-room floor in our old house. There was a massive cupboard we used to crawl under. My grandfather, who worked at the sawmill in the next village, had made it himself out of some dark wood and there were glass doors. It was a fine cupboard, his greatest achievement, but it must have drained his creativity, for he never made a piece of furniture again.
Then my father came in. It was late, and we should have been in bed by then. He leaned against the door frame and looked at us with a stupid smile on his face.
‘Are there any good children here?’ he slurred. He seemed drunk. I had seen him drunk many times before. I knew the signs.
‘Oh yes,’ Egil said, crawling out from under the cupboard where he had been hiding. He was such an idiot, he would have said yes to anything. I sat on the floor and watched my father leaning heavily against the door frame. I did not trust him.
He straightened up and staggered towards us across the carpet.
‘See this,’ he said, and shoved his hand into his breast pocket and pulled out some banknotes. ‘Here’s a little something for two good boys.’ He stumbled forward with a big grin and pushed a blue five-kroner note at each of us.
‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ Egil cried, and started running round and jumping up and down on the floor. ‘Oh, thank you very, very much, Dad, you’re so kind!’ he shouted. I felt the crisp crackle of the note in my hand. Five kroner was a lot of money to me. Just a little more, with what I had already saved up, and it would be enough to buy the shiny bow I had looked at so many times in the sports shop by the station.
I watched my father standing in the middle of the floor with his hands on his hips and his head at an angle. He didn’t look so drunk now, he was watching us closely and there was a glint in his eye I did not like. Suddenly he burst into laughter, and then his face froze, he came back across the floor and snatched the notes from our hands and said:
‘That’s enough fun for tonight!’ He turned on his heel without a stagger, stuffed the notes back in his breast pocket and marched to the kitchen as straight as a flagpole. ‘Now, get to bed, it’s late,’ he said.
At first my brother stood with his mouth wide open, then he began to howl like the baby he was. ‘Waaaah!’ he wailed. ‘Waaah!’ Tears gushed from his eyes, and I went over to him and punched him in the shoulder.
‘You idiot,’ I said, punching him hard a second time. ‘You goddamn birdbrain, shut up!’ I hissed, and then I walked past him on my way upstairs to bed.
‘I never did anything to you!’ he yelled after me.
It was my last year as Wata, Davy Crockett’s friend of the Creek tribe. As soon as I was on my own, I was Wata. I was twelve years old, and I went up the squeaking stairs to the first floor of what I thought of as our log cabin, and I hated it now, it felt so cramped I could not breathe.
Inside our room, I stood by the window gazing out at the dark edge of the forest, longing to be there. There were paths running through it I knew better than the house I lived in. That night there was a moon, big and yellow, and I lingered and kept watch as Wata would have done, and then I got into bed without cleaning my teeth and hoped that Egil would not be up before I had gone to sleep. I pinched my eyes shut and thought of the shiny bow I would never have.
‘Shit!’ I said aloud in the darkness. ‘You goddamn paleface!’ But that did not help much, and I knew that Wata’s days were numbered. He could not be my companion any longer. I saw him glide through the night, fleet-footed and silent through the trees on his way back into the books, his brown body and his three white feathers gleaming in the moonlight.
Now Tommy has his newspapers under control, his sister gives him a hug, the yellow stripes of his jacket shining, and they disappear round a corner. I take twenty papers from the barrow, fold them under my arm and start working my way along the first houses in Grevlingveien. This is what I like. To be left in peace, feel the morning air on my face, feel every step, how my arms and legs move, and the morning so still, and I don’t have to think about anything. My round goes like clockwork, the shining door handles line up and I feed them with newspapers. I have never missed a single one, never given anyone a paper they shouldn’t have, and I know every door sign so well that at first I don’t even remember what they say, just what they look like, the shape of the letters, the colours and where on the door they are. I can think of a house, picture it, choose that door and then read the sign any time, anywhere, asleep in bed, at school, on holiday, it’s in my bones, and that’s fine with me.
I cross Veitvetsvingen down by the red telephone kiosk. I have a quick look under the grate on the floor to see if any change has fallen through, a habit I guess I’ll never quit, and as always I find two or three kroner. But I blush and hope there is no one watching me from behind their curtains.