“It was,” I replied. “Could be late though?”
We laughed.
“Christ,” I said. “Well, at least we can have a beer now!”
I couldn’t open the bottles with the lighter, so I passed it to Jan Vidar. Without saying a word, he whipped the tops off both and handed me one.
“Oooh, that was good,” I said, wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “If we knock back two or three now we’ve got ourselves a base for later.”
“My feet are fucking frozen,” Jan Vidar said. “How about yours?”
“Same,” I said.
I put the bottle to my mouth and drank for as long as I could. There was just a drop left after I lowered it. My stomach was full of froth and air. I tried to belch, but no air came up, just bubbles of froth that ran back into my mouth.
“Open another, will you,” I said.
“Okay,” Jan Vidar said. “But we can’t stand here all night.”
He flipped off another cap and passed me the bottle. I put it to my mouth and closed my eyes in concentration. I downed just over half. Another frothy belch followed.
“Oh Christ,” I moaned. “Maybe not such a good idea drinking this fast.”
The road we were standing by was the main thoroughfare between the towns in Sørland. It was normally packed with traffic. But in the ten minutes we had stood there only two cars had passed, both heading for Lillesand.
The air beneath the powerful streetlamps was full of swirling snow. The wind, made visible by the snow, rose and fell like waves, sometimes in long, slow surges, sometimes with sudden twists and twirls. Jan Vidar kicked his left foot against his right, the right against the left, the left against the right. .
“Come on, drink” I said. I knocked back the rest, threw the empty into the forest behind the shelter.
“Another one,” I demanded.
“You’ll be chucking up soon,” Jan Vidar said. “Take it easy.”
“Come on,” I said. “One more. Soon be damn near ten o’clock, won’t it?”
He flipped the top off another bottle and passed it to me.
“What shall we do?” he asked. “It’s too far to walk. The bus has gone. There are no cars to get a lift with. There isn’t even a telephone box nearby so that we can ring someone to pick us up.”
“We’re going to die here,” I said.
“Hey!” Jan Vidar shouted. “There’s a bus. It’s an Arendal bus.”
“Are you kidding?” I said, staring up the hill. He wasn’t, for there, around the bend at the top, came a wonderful, tall bus.
“Come on, sling the bottle,” Jan Vidar said. “And smile nicely.”
He stuck out his hand. The bus flashed, stopped, and the door opened.
“Two to Søm,” Jan Vidar said, handing the driver a hundred-krone note. I looked down the aisle. It was dark and completely empty.
“You’ll have to wait to drink that,” the driver said, taking the change from his bag. “Okay?”
“Of course,” Jan Vidar said.
We took a seat in the middle. Jan Vidar leaned back and placed his feet against the panel that shielded the door.
“Aahh, that’s better,” I said. “Nice and warm.”
“Mm,” Jan Vidar concurred.
I bent forward and started to unlace my boots.
“Have you got the address of where we’re going?” I asked.
“Elgstien something or other,” he said. “I know more or less where it is.”
I removed my feet from the boots and rubbed them between my hands. When we came to the small unmanned service station, which had been there for as long as I could remember and had always been a sign that we were approaching Kristiansand and on our way to see my grandparents, I put my feet back, tied the laces, and was finished just as the bus pulled into the Varodd Bridge stop.
“Happy New Year,” Jan Vidar shouted to the driver, before leaping into the darkness after me.
Even though I had driven past on numerous occasions I had never set foot here, except in my dreams. Varodd Bridge was one of the places I dreamt of most. Now and then I just stood at the foot and gazed at the towering mast, or I walked onto it. Then the railing usually disappeared and I had to sit down on the road and try to find something to hold onto, or the bridge suddenly disintegrated and I slid inexorably toward the edge. When I was smaller it was Tromøy Bridge that fulfilled this function in my dreams. Now it had become Varodd Bridge.
“My father was at the opening,” I said, nodding toward the bridge as we crossed the road.
“Lucky him,” Jan Vidar said.
We plodded in silence toward the built-up area. Normally there was a fantastic view from here, you could see Kjevik and the fjord that came into the land on one side and stretched far out to the sea on the other. But tonight everything was as black as the inside of a sack.
“Has the wind dropped a bit?” I asked at some point.
“Seems like it,” Jan Vidar said, turning to me. “Have those beers had any effect, by the way?”
I shook my head.
“Nothing. What a waste.”
As we walked, houses began to appear. Some were empty and dark, some were full of people dressed in party clothes. Here and there people were letting off rockets from verandas. In one place I saw a gaggle of children waving sparklers in the air. My feet were frozen again. I had curled up my fingers in the mitten not holding the bag of bottles, to little effect. Now we would soon be there, according to Jan Vidar, who then stopped in the middle of an intersection.
“Elgstien’s up there,” he pointed. “And up there. And down there, and down there too. Take your pick. Which one shall we take?”
“Are there four roads called Elgstien?”
“Apparently so. But which one should we take? Use your feminine intuition.”
Feminine? Why did he say that? Did he think I was a woman?
“What do you mean by that?” I asked. “Why do you think I have feminine intuition?”
“Come on, Karl Ove,” he said. “Which way?”
I pointed to the right. We started to walk that way. We were looking for number thirteen. The first house was twenty-three, the next twenty-one, so we were on the right track.
Some minutes later we were standing outside the house. It was a seventies build, and looked a bit run-down. The snow on the path to the front door had not been cleared, not for a long time, judging by the line of knee-deep tracks that wound toward the house.
“What was his name, the boy whose party this is?” I asked as we stood by the door.
“Jan Ronny,” Jan Vidar said, and rang the bell.
“Jan Ronny?” I repeated.
“That’s his name.”
The door opened, it must have been the host standing in front of us. He had short, blond hair, pimples on his cheek and around the top of his nose, wore a gold chain around his neck, black jeans, a cotton lumberjack shirt, and white tennis socks. He smiled and pointed at Jan Vidar’s stomach.
“Jan Vidar!” he said.
“Right first time,” Jan Vidar said.
“And you are. .,” he said, brandishing his finger at me. “Kai Olav!”
“Karl Ove,” I said.
“What the fuck. Come on in! We’ve already started!”
We took off our outdoor clothes in the hall and followed him downstairs to a cellar room, where there were five people. Watching TV. The table in front of them was covered with beer bottles, bowls of chips, packs of cigarettes and tobacco pouches. Øyvind, who was sitting on the sofa with his arms around his girlfriend, Lene, only in the seventh class but still great and so forward you never thought about the age difference, smiled at us as we went in.
“Hi there!” Øyvind said. “Great you could make it!”
He introduced the others. Rune, Jens, and Ellen. Rune was in the ninth class, Jens and Ellen were in the eighth while Jan Ronny, who was Øyvind’s cousin, was at technical school, a budding mechanic. None of them had dressed up. Not so much as a white shirt.