Another time I had gone up there without warning, it was evening, I was too tired to go back to town after soccer practice, and Tom from the team had driven me. In the light from the kitchen I could see Dad sitting with his head supported on one hand and a bottle of wine in front of him. That was new too, he had never drunk before, at least not while I had been around, and certainly not alone. I saw it now and didn’t want to know, but I couldn’t go back, so I kicked the snow off my shoes as loudly and obviously as I could against the steps, jerked the door open, slammed it shut again, and so that he would be in no doubt as to where I was, I turned on both bath taps, sat on the toilet seat and waited for a few minutes. When I went into the kitchen no one was there. The glass was on the drainer, empty, the bottle in the cupboard under the sink, empty, Dad was in the flat beneath the hayloft. As if this were not mysterious enough I also saw him driving past the shop in Solsletta one early afternoon; I had skipped the last three classes and gone to Jan Vidar’s before the evening training session in Kjevik sports hall. I was sitting on the bench outside the shop smoking when I saw Dad’s snot-green Ascona, it was unmistakeable. I threw away the cigarette, but saw no reason to hide, and stared at the car as it passed, even raised my hand to wave. He didn’t see me, he was talking to someone in the passenger seat. The next day he came by, I mentioned this to him, it had been a colleague, they were working together on a project and had spent a few hours after school at our house.
There was a great deal of contact with his colleagues during this period. One weekend he went to a seminar in Hovden with them, and he went to more parties than I can ever remember him going to before. No doubt because he was bored, or didn’t like being on his own so much, and I was glad, at that time I had begun to see him with different eyes, no longer the eyes of a child, rather those of someone approaching adulthood, and from that point of view I preferred him to socialize with friends and colleagues, as other people did. At the same time I did not like the change, it made him unpredictable.
The fact that he had defended me at the parents’ evening contributed to this view of him. Indeed, it was perhaps the most significant factor of them all.
I collected together the clothes in the room, replaced the cassettes one by one in the rack on the desk and stacked the schoolbooks in a neat pile. The house had been built in the mid-1800s, all the floors creaked, sounds permeated the walls, so I knew not only that Dad was in the living room below but also that he was sitting on the sofa. I had planned to finish Dracula but I didn’t feel I could until the situation between us had been clarified. In other words, until he knew what I was planning to do and I knew what he was planning to do. Furthermore, I couldn’t just go downstairs and say: “Hi, Dad, I’m upstairs reading.” “Why are you telling me that?” he would ask, or at least think. But the imbalance had to be rectified, so I went downstairs, took a detour through the kitchen, something to do with food maybe, before taking the final steps into the living room, where he was sitting with one of my old comics in his hand.
“Are you eating this evening?” I asked.
He glanced up at me.
“You just help yourself,” he said.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll be up in my room afterward, alright?”
He didn’t answer, kept reading Agent X9 in the light from the sofa lamp. I cut off a large chunk of sausage and ate it while sitting at the desk. He probably hadn’t bought me a birthday present, it occurred to me, Mom would be bringing one with her from Bergen. But wasn’t it his job to order a cake? Had he thought about it?
When I returned home from school the next day, Mom was there. Dad had picked her up from the airport, they were sitting at the kitchen table, there was a roast in the oven, we ate with candles on the table, I was given a check for five hundred kroner and a shirt she had bought in Bergen. I didn’t have the heart to say I would never wear it, after all she had gone around a string of shops in Bergen looking for something for me, found this, which she thought was great and I would like.
I put it on, we ate cake and drank coffee in the living room. Mom was happy, she said several times it was good to be home. Yngve rang to say happy birthday, he probably wouldn’t be home until Christmas Eve, and I would get my present then. I left for soccer practice; when I returned at around nine they were up at the flat in the barn.
I would have liked to chat with Mom on my own, but it didn’t look as if that was going to be possible, so after waiting up for a while I went to bed. The next day I had a test at school, the last two weeks had been full of them, I walked out of every one early, frequented record shops or cafés in town, sometimes with Bassen, sometimes with some of the girls in the class, if it happened casually and couldn’t be interpreted as my forcing myself on them. But with Bassen it was okay, we had begun to hang out together. One evening I had been at his place, all we did was play records in his room, even so I was flushed with happiness, I had found a new friend. Not a country boy, not a heavy metal fan, but someone who liked Talk Talk and U2, the Waterboys and Talking Heads. Bassen, or Reid, which was his real name, was dark and good-looking, immensely attractive to girls, although this didn’t seem to have gone to his head, because there was nothing showy about him, nothing smug, he never occupied the position he could have, but he wasn’t modest either, it was more that he had a ruminative, introverted side to him which held him back. He never gave everything. Whether that was because he didn’t want to or he couldn’t, I don’t know, often of course they are two sides of the same coin. For me his most striking feature, though, was that he had his own opinions about things. Whereas I tended to think in boxes, for example in politics, where one standpoint automatically presupposed another, or in terms of taste, where liking one band meant liking similar bands, or in relationships, where I never managed to free myself from existing attitudes regarding others, he was an independent thinker, using his own more or less idiosyncratic judgments. Not even this did he boast about, on the contrary, you had to know him for quite a while before it became apparent. So this was not something he used, it was what he was. If I was proud to be able to call Bassen a friend it was not only because he had so many good qualities, or because of the friendship itself, but also, and not least, because his popularity might rub off on me as well. I was not conscious of this, but in retrospect, if nothing else, it is patently obvious; if you are on the outside you have to find someone who can let you in, at any rate when you are sixteen years old. In this case the exclusion was not metaphorical, but literal and real. I was surrounded by several hundred boys and girls of my age, but could not enter the milieu to which they all belonged. Every Monday I dreaded the question they would all ask, namely, “What did you do over the weekend?” You could say “Stayed at home watching TV” once, “Played records at a friend’s house” once as well, but after that you had to come up with something better if you didn’t want to be left out in the cold. This happened to some on day one, and that was how it stayed for the rest of their time at school, but I didn’t want to end up like them at any price, I wanted to be one of those at the center of things, I wanted to be invited to their parties, go out with them in town, to live their lives.
The great test, the year’s biggest party, was New Year’s Eve. For the last few weeks people had been talking about nothing else. Bassen was going to be with someone he knew in Justvik, there was no chance of hanging onto his shirttails, so when school broke up for Christmas I had not been invited anywhere. After Christmas I sat down with Jan Vidar, who lived in Solsletta, about four kilometers down the hill from us, and that autumn had started to train as a pâtissier at the technical college, to discuss what possibilities were open to us. We wanted to go to a party and we wanted to get drunk. As far as the latter was concerned, that would not be much of a problem: I played soccer for the juniors, and the goalkeeper, Tom, was an all-round fixer and he wouldn’t mind buying beer for us. A party, on the other hand. . There were some ninth-class semicriminal, dropout types who apparently were getting together in a house nearby, but that was of no interest whatsoever, I would rather have stayed home. There was another crowd we knew well, but we were not part of it, they were based in Hamresanden and included people with whom we had either gone to school or played soccer, but we had not been invited and although we could probably have gate-crashed somehow they didn’t have enough class in my eyes. They lived in Tveit, went to the technical college or had jobs, and those of them who had cars had fur-covered seats and Wunderbaum car fresheners dangling from the mirror. There were no alternatives. You had to be invited to New Year’s parties. On the other hand, at twelve o’clock people came out, assembled in the square and at the intersection to fire off rockets and let the new year in amid screams and shouts. No invitation needed to participate in that. Lots of people at school were going to parties in the Søm area, I knew, so what about going there? It was then Jan Vidar remembered that the drummer in our group, whom we had accepted out of sheer desperation, an eighth-class kid from Hånes, had said he was going to Søm for New Year’s Eve.