Anne Lisbet, Solveig, and Vemund’s neighborhood, where lots of other children lived, one or two years older or younger than us, was drawn into our world when we started school. The same applied to all the other neighborhoods where my classmates lived. It was as if a curtain went up, and what we had assumed was the whole stage turned out to be only the proscenium. The house on the hillside, whose completely level garden we could see from the top, balancing as it were on the edge of a white wall that plunged straight down, maybe five meters, with a green wire fence on top, was no longer just a house but the house where Siv Johannesen lived. Fifty meters further away, behind the dense forest, a road came to an end, and it was along there that Sverre, Geir B, and Eivind lived. A bit further down, but in a very different area, a very different world, lived Kristin Tamara, Marian, and Asgeir.
They all had their places, they all had their friends, and in the course of a few weeks at the end of the summer everything was opened to us. It was both new and familiar, we looked similar, we did the same things and were thus open to one another. Yet at the same time each one of us had something of his or her own. Sølvi was so shy she could barely talk. Unni worked at the market with her parents and brothers every Saturday, selling vegetables they had grown themselves. Kristin Tamara wore glasses with a patch over one eye. Geir Håkon, who had always been so tough, stood writhing with embarrassment in front of the blackboard. Dag Magne had a permanent grin on his face. Geir had received the last rites when he was born because they thought he was going to die. Asgeir always smelled vaguely of piss. Marianne was as strong as a boy. Eivind could read and write and was so good at soccer. Trond was small and ran like lightning. Solveig was so good at drawing. Anne Lisbet’s father was a diver. And John, well, he had more uncles than anyone else.
One day, when we had been at school for the first three lessons, and the bus had dropped us off by the supermarket at twelve, Geir and I walked home with John. The sun was shining, the sky was blue, the road dry and dusty. When we came to John’s house, he asked if we wanted to go up and have some juice. We did. We followed him up to the veranda, took off our satchels, and sat down on the plastic chairs they had. He opened the door to the house and shouted.
“Mom, we want some juice! I’ve got some boys from the class here!”
His mother came to the door. She was wearing a white bikini, her skin was tanned, her long hair dark blonde. The whole upper part of her face was covered by a pair of large sunglasses.
“How nice,” she said. “I’ll see if we’ve got some juice for you.”
She went into the sitting room and disappeared through a door. There was an empty feeling about the room. It looked like ours, but there was less furniture, and there were no pictures on the walls. Two of the girls from our class walked past on the road below. John leaned over the balcony and shouted after them, saying that they looked like monkeys.
Geir and I laughed.
The girls didn’t take any notice and went on their way. Marianne, who was taller than all the boys, had a high forehead, high cheekbones, and long, blonde hair hanging down either side of her face, like curtains. Now and then, when she was angry or desperate, she frowned and had a very special look in her eyes, which I liked. She could also lose her temper and give as good as she got, unlike the other girls.
John’s mother came out with a tray holding three glasses and a jug of juice, put a glass in front of each of us, and filled it. The ice cubes floated around close together at the top of the red juice. I watched her as she went back in. She wasn’t good-looking, yet there was something about her that made you notice her and watch.
“Were you looking at my mom’s ass?” John said with a loud laugh.
I didn’t know what he meant. Why would I look at his mother’s behind? It was embarrassing as well, because he had said it so loudly that she too must have heard it.
“No, I wasn’t!” I said.
He laughed even more.
“Mom!” he shouted. “Come out here a minute!”
She came, still in her bikini.
“Karl Ove was looking at your ass!” he said.
She slapped his face.
John continued to laugh. I looked at Geir: he was staring into space and whistling. John’s mother went inside. I emptied the glass of juice in one go.
“Would you like to see my room?” John said.
We nodded and followed him through the dark sitting room to his room. There was a poster of a motorbike on one wall and a semi-naked woman, her skin orange from all the sun, on the other.
“It’s a Kawasaki 750,” he said. “Would you like some more juice?”
“Not for me,” I said. “I’ve got to be getting home for dinner.”
“Me too,” Geir said.
The dog snarled at us as we left. We walked down the hill without speaking. John waved to us from the veranda. Geir waved back.
Why would I have looked at John’s mother’s butt? Was there something about butts I hadn’t understood? Why did he shout that out at me? Why did he tell her that? Why did she slap him? And why on earth did he continue laughing afterward? How could you laugh when your mother has hit you? In fact, when anyone has hit you?
I had looked at his mother, and had a vague sense of guilt when I did so, because she was almost naked, but not at her butt, why would I do that?
It was the first time I had been to John’s house, and it would be the last. We played soccer and went swimming with John, but he was not someone whose house we went to. Everyone was a bit frightened of him because even though we said he acted tough but actually wasn’t, we all knew that in fact he was. He sought the company of boys in the classes above us, was the only one of us who got into fights, and was the only boy who would talk back to teachers and refuse to do what they said. He was tired in the mornings because he was allowed to go to bed whenever he liked, and when he talked about his home life in class, which we all did, it was always about some uncle staying with them. Neither he nor any of us questioned the status of these men, and why would we? John had more uncles than anyone we knew, that was all there was to say about that.
A few days later, a Saturday at the beginning of September, one of those early-autumn days the summer has stretched into and filled to saturation, when the fields are hot and dusty, the sky deep blue, and the first withered leaves whirl through the air almost in a way that is contrary to nature, as the wind is still so mild and all the faces you see are glistening with sweat, Geir and I were walking up through the estate. With us we had a packed lunch and a bottle of juice. We had planned to follow a route we had heard about, it forked left at the end of a long, flat stretch, more or less where the path to the Fina station began. To get there we had to cross land belonging to a house we knew very little about, except that the owner could get angry because one Sunday that spring a crowd of us had been playing soccer on the grass at the far end of his property, bordered on one side by rocks and a stream on the other, when, after half an hour, he had stormed out and started yelling and shaking his fists at us almost before he was within hearing distance, whereupon we all ran away at once. But now we weren’t going to play soccer, now we were only going to cross his fields, along the stream toward the path, which was actually a little track, strewn with small, flat, mostly white, stones. We came to a gate, which we pushed aside, and then we were in a part of the island where we had never been before. The track, lined by tall trees, was in shadow, and it was like walking through a tunnel. Further down, there was a curve in the path and white rock glistened in the sunshine. That was the cliff where the stones we were walking on must have come from. We stopped in front of it. It wasn’t craggy or semi-rotten, so to speak, the way some more porous rocks might be after being blasted, nor was it flaky or slightly rough, the way bare rock and several of the uncovered crags you could come across in the forest were, no, this cliff was completely smooth, almost like glass, and consisted of many slanting surfaces. Was this a vein of gemstones we had stumbled upon? It seemed like it. On the other hand, it was too close to the estate for that, there was absolutely no chance that we had discovered something no one else had, we knew that, but we still filled our knapsacks with fragments of rock. Then we continued down. The stream followed the track, higher up it ran through a deep gully, then fell, where the slope began, trickling downward through a series of small terraces. At one point, where the stream ran almost level with the track, we tried to build a dam. We carried rock after rock to it, covered the crevices between them with moss, and after perhaps half an hour we had managed to make the water flow across the track. Suddenly we heard shots. We exchanged glances. Grabbing our knapsacks, we set off at a run. Shots? Could it be hunters? After a few hundred meters the track leveled out. It lay in deep greenish-black shadow, produced by dense rows of tall, overhanging spruce trees. A hundred meters or so away we caught sight of a tarmac road, and we stopped, for the shots were clearer now, and they were coming from our left. We walked between the trees, across the soft cover of blueberry bushes and heather and moss, up a gentle slope, and in front of us, perhaps twenty meters below, bathed in sunshine, there was an enormous clearing full of garbage.