“No need,” I said. “We’re going to meet some others on the bus anyway.”
Gunnar was ten years younger than my father and worked as an accountant in quite a large firm in town. He was the only one of the sons to follow in his father’s footsteps; both the others were teachers. Dad at an upper secondary school in Vennesla, Erling at a middle school in Trondheim. Erling was the only one for whom we used the epithet “uncle,” he was more laidback and not so status conscious as the other two. We didn’t see much of my father’s brothers when we were growing up, but we liked them both, they were always fooling around, especially Erling, but also Gunnar, whom both Yngve and I liked best, perhaps because he was relatively close to us in age. He had long hair, played the guitar, and not least, he kept a boat with a twenty horse power Mercury engine at the cabin outside Mandal where he stayed for long stretches at a time in the summer when we were growing up. In my mind, the friends he talked about were wreathed in an almost mythical glow, partly because my father didn’t have any, partly because we hardly ever saw them, they were just people he went out to meet in his boat, and I imagined their lives as an endless cruise between islets and skerries in racing boats during the daytime, with their long, blond hair fluttering in the wind and tanned, smiling faces; playing cards and strumming guitars in the evenings, when they were in the company of girls.
But now he was married and had children, and even though he still had the boat the aura of island romanticism had gone. The long hair too. Tove came from a police family somewhere in Trøndelag, and worked as a primary school teacher.
“Have you had a good Christmas?” she asked, turning to me.
“Yes, great,” I said.
“Yngve was home, I heard?” Gunnar said.
I nodded. Yngve was his favorite, no doubt because he was the first-born and had been at my grandparents’ for so long while Gunnar still lived there. But also presumably because Yngve had not been as fragile and weepy as I had been as a child. He had had great fun with Yngve. So when I saw them together I tried to counteract that, tried to be funny, to crack lots of jokes, to show them I was just as easygoing as they were, just as fun-loving, just as much of a Sørlander as they were.
“He went back a couple of days ago,” I said. “Off to a cabin with some friends.”
“Yes, he’s turning into an Arendaler, you know,” Gunnar said.
We passed the chapel, drove around the bend by the ravine where the sun never shone, crossed the tiny bridge. The windshield wipers beat a rhythm. The fan hummed. Beside me Harald sat blinking.
“Whose party is it?” Gunnar asked. “Someone in your class, I suppose?”
“Girl in the parallel class actually,” I said.
“Yes, everything changes when you go to gymnas,” he said.
“You went to the Cathedral School, didn’t you?” I asked.
“I did,” he said, twisting his head far enough to meet my eyes before returning his attention to the road. His face was long and narrow, like my father’s, but the blue of his eyes was darker, more like Grandad’s than Grandma’s. The back of his head was big, like Grandad’s and mine, while his lips, which were sensitive and almost revealed more information about his inner being than his eyes, were the same as Dad’s and Yngve’s.
We left the forest behind, and the light from the headlights which had for so long picked out trees and crags, sides of houses and escarpments, finally had some space around them.
“It’s at the end of this stretch,” I said. “You can pull up over by the shop there.”
“Okay,” said Gunnar. Slowed to a stop.
“Have a nice time,” I said. “And Happy New Year!”
“Happy New Year to you too,” Gunnar said.
I slammed the door and started to walk towards Jan Vidar’s house while the car turned around and drove back the way we had come. When it was out of sight I began to run. Now we really were pressed for time. I jumped down the escarpment to their property, saw the light in his room was on, went over and banged on the window. His face appeared a second later, staring out into the dark through narrowed eyes. I pointed toward the door. When, at last, he saw me, he nodded, and I walked around to the other side of the house.
“Sorry,” I said. “But the beers are up by Kragebo. We’ll have to get a move on and fetch them.”
“What are they doing there?” he asked. “Why didn’t you bring them with you?”
“My uncle came along while I was walking here,” I said. “I just managed to sling the bags in the ditch before he stopped. And then bugger me if he didn’t insist on driving me here. I couldn’t say no, he would have become suspicious, wouldn’t he.”
“Oh no,” Jan Vidar said. “Shit. What a drag.”
“I know,” he said. “But come on. Let’s get going.”
A few minutes later we were clambering up the slope to the road. Jan Vidar had his hat down over his forehead, his scarf wrapped around his mouth, jacket collar up over his cheeks. The only part of his face that was visible was the eyes, and then only because the round John Lennon glasses he was wearing were misted up, which I noticed as he met my gaze.
“Let’s go for it then,” I said.
“I guess we’d better,” he agreed.
At a steady pace, dragging our legs so as not to use up all our energy at once, we began to run along the road. We had the wind in our faces. The snow swept past. Tears trickled from my tightly pinched eyes. My feet began to go numb, they no longer did what I wanted them to do; they just lay inside my boots, stiff and loglike.
A car drove past, making our lack of speed painfully obvious as a moment later it rounded the curve at the end of the road and was gone.
“Shall we walk for a bit?” Jan Vidar asked.
I nodded.
“Let’s just hope the bags are still there!” I said.
“What?” Jan Vidar shouted.
“The bags!” I said. “Hope no one’s taken them!”
“There’s no bugger around now!” Jan Vidar yelled.
We laughed. Came to the end of the flat and broke into a run again. Up the hill, where the gravel road led to the strange manorlike property by the river, over the little bridge, past the ravine, the ramshackle garage-cum-repair shop, the chapel and the small white 1950s houses on both sides of the road, until we finally arrived at the spot where I had left the two bags. We grabbed one each and began to walk back.
As we reached the chapel, we heard a car behind us.
“Shall we hitch a ride?” Jan Vidar suggested.
“Why not?” I said.
With our left hands clutching the bags and our right thumbs raised we stood with a smile on our faces until the car came. It didn’t even dip its headlights. We jogged on.
“What are we going to do if we don’t get a ride?” Jan Vidar asked after a while.
“We’ll get one,” I answered.
“Two cars go by every hour,” he said.
“Have you got any better suggestions since you’re asking the questions?” I said.
“None,” he said. “But there are a few people at Richard’s.”
“No way,” I said.
“And Stig and Liv are in Kjevik with some friends,” he said. “That’s a possibility too.”
“We decided on Søm, didn’t we,” I said. “You can’t start suggesting new places to go on New Year’s Eve! This is New Year’s Eve, you know.”
“Yes, and we’re standing at the roadside. How much fun is that?”
Headlights approached behind us.
“Look,” I said. “Another car!”
It didn’t stop.
By the time we got back to Jan Vidar’s house, it was eight thirty. My feet were frozen, and for a brief instant I was at the point of suggesting we should give the beer a miss, go to his house and celebrate New Year’s Eve with his parents. Lutefisk, soft drinks, ice cream, cakes, and fireworks. That was what we had always done. As our eyes met I knew the same thought had struck him. But we went on. Out of the residential area, past the road down to the church, around the bend up to the little cluster of houses where, among others, Kåre from our class lived.