Whenever Eva tried to play with other children Anders pulled her away; he wanted to keep her to himself. He liked it best when there were just the two of them.
But sometimes the group took over. There were so many youngsters at Silkestrå it was difficult to keep the others at bay. In the basement there was a room where some parent had installed a table-tennis table. The children would take their cassette players down there and dance to Michael Jackson, Prince and Madonna, and later to rap music. Anders found his own spot. He always sat on the ventilation pipes in the corner and did not join in the dancing or the table tennis. From there he could see everything, and was left in peace. There was a smell of urine in that corner. Whenever the smell spread through the basement, Anders got the blame. ‘It stinks of pee, it must be Anders!’ the others laughed.
The ants in the wall had a permanent path from the grass, across the tarmac, along the edge of the footpath, across a grating and up the steps. Anders would sit there waiting.
‘You’re going to die!’
‘Got you!’
He picked them up one by one and squashed them. Sometimes with his thumb, sometimes his index finger. ‘You and you and you and you!’ he decided, there on the steps, master of life and death.
The little girls found him disgusting. He was so intense, and he was cruel to animals. For a while he had some rats in a cage and would poke them with pens and pencils. Eva said she thought he was hurting them, but he took no notice. Anders caught bumblebees, dropped them in water and then brought them up to the surface in a sieve so he could watch them drown. Pet owners at Silkestrå made it clear to their children that Anders was not to come anywhere near their cats or dogs. Anders was often the only one not invited to come and stroke other children’s new puppies or kittens.
Little by little, Eva started to get a feeling that something was wrong. But she dared not tell her parents that she did not want to play with Anders any more, because her mother and Wenche were by now good friends. Wenche was teaching them how to adapt to life in Norway, and she passed on clothes that no longer fitted Anders and Elisabeth.
Eva never told her parents that it was Anders who broke the heads off the neighbours’ roses, leaving just the stalks; who threw stones through open windows and ran away; or that he teased and bullied kids who were smaller than him, ideally the new arrivals who had not acquired the language to defend themselves.
One of his victims was a skinny little boy from Eritrea. On one occasion, Anders found an old rug, rolled him up in it and jumped up and down on him. ‘Don’t do that, you’re hurting him!’ cried Eva. But she stood on the sidelines, watching.
There was only one thing Anders could not abide. Being told off. Then, he would melt away while the other kids were left there to take a scolding for scrumping apples or ringing on doorbells and running away. Anders would creep out again when things had calmed down.
Once, he could not get away in time and was caught by Mrs Broch. To get his revenge after her rebuke, he peed on her doormat. He peed on her newspaper. He peed in her letterbox. Later, he went and peed in her storeroom. It was from then on that he got the blame for the stale urine smell in the basement.
One of the victims of his bullying was a girl with a mental disability. One day, Anders squashed a rotten apple into the face of the girl’s favourite doll just as her father was going by. ‘You bother my daughter one more time and I’ll hang you on the clothesline in the cellar,’ her father, a university professor, roared.
Anders took notice. A father’s threats were something he had respect for. He never went near the girl again.
He was by now seeing his own father in the school holidays. The first time, he was four and a half and his father took him for a week’s summer holiday at a cabin by the sea. Jens would occasionally ring Wenche and say he wanted to see his son. The boy sometimes ran and hid, and the other children were sent out to look for him.
Jens usually spent his summers at a country cottage in Normandy. Then Wenche would deliver Anders to the Scandinavian Airlines staff at Oslo airport, and after a two-hour flight he would be picked up by his father in Paris. Sometimes his older half-siblings would be there. They went on family outings or to the beach. At the summer cottage it was mainly Jens’s third wife who took care of the little boy. She had no children of her own and grew fond of Anders, who also became attached to her. He was overjoyed whenever she offered to read him a story. ‘Do you really want to?’ he would ask her. ‘Are you sure you’ve got time?’ He would sit curled up on her lap for hours while he was being read to. He calmed down there. And seemed to forget everything around him.
When Eva started school, Anders was in Year 3. He would not acknowledge her any longer. Not at school, that is.
The blue garden, the park and the forest were separate from school – like different continents. Their friendship only belonged in one of them.
This gave the little girl the space she needed to find her own friends. One of them was the girl who lived on the ground floor of their block of flats. She was scared of Anders too. Every time she went out of the door, she was afraid he was going to spit on her from the second floor. It had only happened once, but that was enough to make a horror of gobs of spit dog her entire childhood.
Eva finally got her own group of friends. She was now tough enough to say no to Anders when he wanted her to come out and play.
Anders was on his own again.
But one day he latched onto some classmates. It proved not to be so hard, after all. He just said hello, and they said hello back.
In his primary-school years, there was nothing very remarkable about Anders. He was there, but did not draw attention to himself. He joined the Scouts, he played football and rode round on his bike with his friends.
What marked him out from the others was that his parents were never there for him. The football team relied on parents to take turns driving the players to matches and tournaments. He always had to get a lift with others, mostly with Kristian, who lived close by. Team sports were never really Anders’s thing. He had poor ball control and often misjudged passes, but he was there.
Anders was average at most things: average height, average at school, an average sort of bully. He was far from the worst, and also capable of showing a kind of concern, like helping a bullied child who’d been hit in the face with a snowball look for his glasses. If the glasses were covered in snow he would brush them clean before handing them back.
One boy in the class was a particular target. Ahmed was nicely dressed, tall and dark – the only Pakistani in the school. He would generally sit and read in the library at break time so he would not have to face the school playground alone.
They called him Brownie.
Then one day Ahmed retaliated for the first time, and knocked Anders over. When Anders struggled to his feet, battered and bruised, everything had changed.
It was the start of a friendship.
They ran around the forest together, played basketball, went to each other’s flats to watch films. Even at primary school, the two of them were keen to earn money. Every day they waited for the newspapers to arrive. Once the copies of Aftenposten had been delivered they transferred them to their trolleys and lugged them round to the front doormats in the neighbourhood.
Anders had found a friend.
Al-Anfal
Remember when God revealed to the angels: ‘I am with you, so grant believers resolve. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the unbelievers. So strike above the necks, and strike their every finger!’ For they defied God and His Messenger, and who so defies God and His Messenger, God is severe in retribution. Here it is: so taste it! For the unbelievers the torment of the Fire!