With the penalties now so severe, the taggers had to make extra sure to eject any potential squealers at an early stage, and it grew even harder for newcomers to join their circle. But luckily for the posh boys from Skøyen, Ahmed knew one of the older taggers, Minor. He provided Morg and friends with an entrée to that desirable set of steps.
In the winter of 1994, when Anders was in Year 8 at school, the camera lenses of the world were for once trained on Norway. The government wanted to highlight healthy living, and Members of Parliament appeared on television jumping up and down and slapping their arms to keep warm, under the slogan ‘A Fit Nation for the Winter Olympics’.
The Oslo city authorities had a major push to make the city spotlessly clean and shiny, and ran aggressive campaigns to mobilise public opinion against ‘vandalism, violence and defacement of the city’ in the run-up to the Olympic Games. The Labour city council launched an anti-graffiti campaign that became known as ‘Taggerhead’. Posters on the underground showed a boy with an empty expression. The space where his brain should have been was filled with a ball bearing like those inside aerosol paint cans.
The Lillehammer Games of 1994 generated a mood of national excitement, the Norwegian athletes won a string of gold medals and the whole country let itself be intoxicated by Gro Harlem Brundtland’s slogan: ‘It’s typically Norwegian to be good at things.’
Anders, who had just turned fifteen, couldn’t have cared less about being good at skiing. He had nothing in common with the aristocracy in knee breeches, up on the hill. Since his last, truncated stay with his weekend parents as a two-year-old, no one had taken him on any Sunday trips to the forest. The city was his jungle.
These were quiet weeks in the capital. It was bitterly cold all over Oslo. The days were an icy blue, the nights clear and starry. Morg did not let temperatures of minus twenty deter him from the only competition that mattered – winning the title of King. Several nights a week he climbed down from the balcony of his apartment to leave his signature on the city.
One night, he and Ahmed traipsed down to the bus station in Skøyen. One of them would keep watch while the other tagged. They swapped places, got freezing cold and swapped again, keeping their arms moving to stay warm. In the middle of the Winter Olympics, at around two in the morning while Morg was on guard, they got caught.
The boys were arrested and taken to the police station. Their parents were called. Their misconduct was reported and registered, but since neither of them had been arrested before, and in view of their age, their punishment was to wash buses for a couple of weeks in the summer holidays. But they were warned to stop tagging and told they would not be let off so lightly next time.
At last they had something to brag about at Egertorget. They had kept their mouths shut.
Anders peppered his story with gestures and phrases he had picked up from the immigrant gangs. Sometimes he substituted Arabic words for Norwegian ones, like the toughs in the hard gangs did.
Fucking hell, it’s him again, thought Net, a tagger from the East End, in slight irritation. Unaware of each other, Morg and Net had both spent periods at the Centre for Child and Adolescent Psychiatry. Net was a rebellious boy who bristled at the slightest thing. He went to the school at the centre and was under observation at the same time as Anders was attending the nursery there. Having grown up in Grünerløkka, which in the 1980s was a working-class district that Ris parents instructed their offspring to avoid, he had the credibility that Anders lacked. He started tagging when he was twelve and was among the most skilful, a graffiti artist with a style all of his own. In adult life, Net was to become part of the established art world.
‘Consept was after us and the law took us,’ Anders went on in his immigrant speak, his ‘Kebab Norwegian’. ‘It was, like, well sick!’
There was furtive laughter from the steps.
Not many West Enders came to Egertorget, so Net had noticed Anders, the nobody with a craving to be let in. But Net could also see that Anders wanted more than simply to hang out there. He was ambitious and determined, not just vaguely interested like so many of the others. Should they accept him?
It was a feeling that ran deep. You just couldn’t trust that lot from the other side of town. The West End might have the capital, but the East End boys owned the street: the walls were free.
And anyway, Morg was so ordinary, in Net’s opinion. Mediocre. Average. No particular asset to a crew.
Becoming part of a crew was the next step for Anders. Before he could be King. Put his name alongside the greats. But to be part of all that, you had to be invited to join. And the invitation was slow in coming.
As the hard layer of trampled snow turned to slush in March, Morg found himself arrested again. Again he kept his mouth shut. And again he walked free.
In the fifteen years of Anders’s lifetime, the number of non-Western immigrants in Norway had risen almost fivefold. In Oslo, the change was even more marked. By about the mid-1990s, a third of those living in the eastern areas of Oslo city centre were from immigrant backgrounds. The largest group was the Pakistani community, who had come to Norway for work in the 1970s. Their children had one foot in each culture; the girls were closely supervised and generally not allowed out after school, the boys had a freer rein.
In Anders’s eyes, the foreigners were the heroes. Their gangs were rougher round the edges and tougher than those of the Norwegian kids. The Labour-run city council had bought flats for refugees on the western side of town to counteract the ghetto effect in the east. The flats were in the blocks and terraces round where Anders lived, and were referred to as ‘the slum’ by the snobs who lived further up the hill in the same school catchment area.
There were sharp contrasts between the socially sheltered Norwegian middle class and the immigrants. Inherited codes of honour that were alien to Norwegians explained some of the conflicts that arose, but often it was just that people found it hard to get along. Wenche grew more and more vocal in her annoyance with the Somali children running round the blocks of flats and making a noise at all hours of day and night, while the foreign arrivals could be bitter about Norwegians who welcomed them by throwing firecrackers onto their balconies. One Somali father on an adjoining staircase armed himself with a bat so he could administer a good hiding to the boys who had sprayed water at his son. ‘Don’t water my son!’ he yelled out over Silkestrå.
It wasn’t worth picking fights with the gangs. One of Anders’s friends was beaten up by a foreign gang as a payback for something. A few days later, the gang leader was clubbed down by two Norwegians outside the Rimi supermarket and left bleeding in the street. Revenge had to be countered with yet more revenge. One evening, some of the gang members climbed over the wall of the Bygdøy mansion belonging to the shipping billionaire John Fredriksen, the richest man in Norway. His fourteen-year-old twin daughters had friends round at the time, and the boy who had carried out the revenge attack – the boyfriend of one of the daughters – was there. The gang got in through an open window. Their intended target hid in Mrs Fredriksen’s wardrobe. They found him, dragged him out, beat him until he was covered in blood, broke his fingers and threw him down a flight of stairs. Leaving the boy lying unconscious on the floor, the gang calmly left.
The gangs had their territories and defended them like young wolves. Where Anders lived, the boundary ran along the tram line. It was wisest to stay on the right side of it. Skøyen, Hoff, Majorstua, Marienlyst and Tåsen were all controlled by different gangs, most of them based on ethnicity, and if any of them needed help they would call in their relations from the East End.