As a hipster he hated hipsters, and especially male hipsters. There was something insubstantial, unmanly, about that dreamy, idealistic striving for the natural, the original, the authentic; about a hipster trying to look like a lumberjack who lived in a log cabin and grew and shot his own food, but who was still an overprotected little boy who thought modern life, quite rightly, had stripped away all his masculinity, leaving him with a feeling of being helpless. Bjørn had this suspicion about himself confirmed during a Christmas party with his old schoolmates back home in Toten, when Endre, the cocky headmaster’s son, who was studying sociology in Boston, had called Bjørn a typical “hipster loser.” Endre had brushed his thick black fringe back with a smile and quoted Mark Greif, who had written an article in the New York Times saying that hipsters compensated for their lack of social and career achievements by trying to claim cultural superiority.
“And that’s where we have you, Bjørn, an employee of the state in your mid-thirties, in the same job you were in ten years ago, thinking that as long as you have long hair and farmer’s clothes that look like they were bought second-hand from the Salvation Army, you can still rise above the younger, short-haired, straighter colleagues who passed you by on the career ladder years ago.”
Endre had said this in a single long sentence without pausing for breath, and Bjørn had listened and thought: Is this true, is this what defines me? Was this what he, a farmer’s son, had fled the rolling fields of Toten to become? A feminised, militant conformist and loser? A failed, backward-looking police officer looking for an image to contradict that? Who used his roots — a quirky old car, Elvis and old country-music heroes, fifties hairstyles, snakeskin boots and his dialect — to trace a line back to something authentic, down to earth, but that was about as honest as the politician from west Oslo who takes off his tie, rolls up his shirtsleeves and says “gonna” and “gotta” as many times as he can when making election speeches in factories.
Maybe. Or, if that wasn’t the whole truth, perhaps it was part of it. But did it define him? No. Just as little as the fact that he had red hair defined him. What defined him was that he was a damn good forensics officer. And one other thing.
“Maybe you’re right,” Bjørn had replied when Endre paused for breath. “Maybe I am a pathetic loser. But I’m nice to people. And you’re not.”
“What the hell, Bjørn, are you upset?” Endre had laughed, putting a comradely, sympathetic hand on his shoulder, and smiling conspiratorially at the onlookers, as if this were a game they were all playing, one where Bjørn hadn’t understood the rules. OK, Bjørn may have drunk one glass too many of the moonshine they were serving for reasons of nostalgia rather than cost, but he had felt it then, just for a moment, had felt what he might be capable of. That he could have planted a fist in the middle of Endre’s sociological smirk, broken his nose and seen the fear in his eyes. Bjørn had never got into fights when he was growing up. Not once. So he’d known nothing about fighting before he started at Police College, where he had learned a thing or two about close combat. Such as the fact that the surest way to win a fight is to strike first and with maximum aggression, which effectively brings nine out of ten fights to an immediate conclusion. He knew that, he wanted to do it, but could he? What was his threshold for resorting to violence? He didn’t know, he had never been in a situation in which violence had looked like an adequate solution to the problem. Which it wasn’t now either, of course. Endre posed no physical threat, and all a fight would accomplish was a scandal and possibly being reported to the police. So why had he wanted to do it so badly: to feel the other man’s face under his knuckles, hear the dead sound of bone against flesh, see the blood spray from his nose, see the fear on Endre’s face?
When Bjørn went to bed in his boyhood bedroom that night he hadn’t been able to sleep. Why hadn’t he done anything? Why had he merely muttered “No, ’course not, I’m not upset,” waited for Endre to take his hand off his shoulder, mumbled something about needing another drink, then found some other people to talk to before leaving the party shortly afterwards? Those insults would have been the real cause. The moonshine could have been used as an excuse for getting into a fight at a party; that would have been acceptable in Toten. And it would have ended with one punch. Endre wasn’t a fighter. And if he had hit back, everyone would have cheered for him, for Bjørn. Because Endre was a wanker, he always had been. And everyone loved Bjørn, they always had. Not that it had been much help to him growing up.
In Year 9, Bjørn had finally manned up and asked Brita if she wanted to go to the local cinema in Skreia. The manager of the cinema had taken the astonishing decision to show Led Zeppelin’s filmed concert, The Song Remains the Same. Fifteen years after it was released, admittedly, but that didn’t bother Bjørn. He had gone looking for Brita and eventually found her behind the girls’ toilet. She was standing there crying, and sobbed to Bjørn that she had let Endre sleep with her at the weekend. Then, during break, her best friend had told her that she and Endre were now together. Bjørn had comforted Brita as best he could, then, without much preamble, asked if she’d like to go to the cinema with him. She had just stared at him and asked if he’d heard what she’d just said. Bjørn said he had, but that he liked both Brita and Led Zeppelin. At first she snorted “no,” but then she seemed to have a moment of clarity and said she’d like to go. When they were sitting in the cinema it turned out that Brita had asked her best friend and Endre to go as well. Brita had kissed Bjørn during the film, first during “Dazed and Confused,” then in the middle of Jimmy Page’s guitar solo in “Stairway to Heaven,” thereby sending Bjørn a fair way up those stairs. Nonetheless, when they were alone again and he had walked her home from the cinema, there hadn’t been any more kissing, just a short “goodnight.” One week later, Endre broke up with the best friend and got back together with Brita.
Bjørn had carried these things inside him, of course he had. The betrayal he should have seen coming, the punch that hadn’t come. And that nonexistent punch had somehow confirmed what Endre had said about him, that the only thing that was worse than the shame of not being a man was the fear of being a man.
Was there a clear thread between then and now? Was there a causal connection, was this explosion of rage something that had built up and just needed a fresh humiliation to detonate it? Was the murder somehow the punch he hadn’t managed to land on Endre?
The humiliation. It had been like a pendulum. The prouder he felt at being a father, the greater the humiliation when he had realised the child wasn’t his. The pride when his parents and two sisters had visited mother, baby and father in hospital and Bjørn had seen the delight on their faces. His sisters who were now aunts, his parents now grandparents. Not that they weren’t already, Bjørn was the youngest and the last to get started, but even so. He realised that they hadn’t been sure it would ever happen for him. His mother hadn’t thought that bachelor style of his had boded well. And they loved Katrine. There had been a slightly strained atmosphere during their first visits to Toten, when Katrine’s direct, chatty Bergen attitude had come up against Toten’s restrained, taciturn understatement. But Katrine and his parents had met each other halfway, and during the first Christmas lunch at the farm, when Katrine came downstairs after making a real effort to look nice, Bjørn’s mother had nudged him in the side and looked at him with a mixture of admiration and astonishment, a look that seemed to ask: How did you manage to catch that?