Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes: Stories Read online

  ‘I’ll tell you something for nothing,’ Fatso said, ‘if I ever hear that whelp call me Fatso again I’ll do him over!’

  ‘Right, Bomann, I think you should go and sit on your step and finish reading that paper of yours instead of standing here playing the bogeyman,’ Mum said as softly as she could, and then she dragged Arvid indoors for dinner and offal.

  Now Arvid had an enemy for life. For a long time they walked around hating each other from a distance, and whenever Arvid walked past his front-door steps, Fatso shook his fist and Arvid stared down at the flagstones and hissed:

  ‘Fatso, Fatso, Fatso Beerbelly!’

  Every payday Fatso got drunk. It was not unusual, he got drunk on other days as well, but on payday he was drunk before he got home, and even though his wife didn’t mind a drop herself, she never took it well, for she was afraid he would squander or completely blow his money, and she could get pretty angry and loud. Not that she stood on the front step ranting and raving like certain others, outdoors she was as mild and gentle as a lamb, but indoors it was a different matter. It wasn’t difficult to hear, for Fatso lived next door to Arvid and his family, and Selvaag the contractor had taken quite a few short cuts with insulation when the terraced houses were built. He’d taken short cuts on most things, Dad said. The gaps between the floorboards were so wide that the little ones tripped in the cracks and were slower to walk than other children, at least that’s what Dad claimed, so Fatso didn’t dare go home when he’d been drinking after work on payday. Instead he went up to the edge of the forest on the other side of Trondhjemsveien and lay down to sleep. Everyone knew this except his wife, for no one told her. Every single payday night the light burned in Fatso’s kitchen, and there she sat waiting for him and didn’t know where he was.

  And it was summer and Saturday, and Arvid got up early as he always did when he had no school. On weekdays they had to drag him half-unconscious from his bed. It was strange and even he didn’t know why it was like this. But on his days off he jumped on his bike at the crack of dawn and headed for the forest and pedalled along the paths, did motocross and was Basse Hveem. Uncle Rolf had given him a helmet and he had it on. Dad didn’t like it much, do you have to put that bowler on your skull, he would say. He was embarrassed by all sorts of things, like when Arvid wore his Scout uniform outdoors. You look like a Christmas tree, Dad said, and anyway the Scouts are middle class, and it seemed as if he preferred Basse Hveem, who probably wasn’t so middle class.

  Arvid stormed down the last hill, swerved into the horse field in the true style, waved modestly to an invisible crowd and dismounted. This was where the horses from the Bjerke Trotting Stadium lazed around, priming themselves for Sunday, and all the kids had their own favourites. Arvid’s was Thunder, who was brown with white socks and a white mane and was such a handsome sight when he raced around that you couldn’t stop yourself from running.

  Arvid sat down on a rock to rest and that was when he saw a man curled up under a bush. He jumped up and stared, for there was something familiar about that bundle, and he heard sounds that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The bundle turned and looked at him, and it was Fatso. One brace strap had slipped off, and his shirt had ridden up and his belly spilled out, and it was horrible to see.

  Fatso was crying, that was the sound Arvid had heard, and it was the worst thing he had ever experienced, for he had never seen a grown man cry. It was something you stopped doing around the time you were confirmed, the way you stopped wearing nappies a little earlier. At least he hadn’t seen an adult wearing nappies. Those things were automatic, everyone knew that. In a few years he would have hairs round his willy and women got children when they married and so on. He knew about this stuff, you just had to take things as they came without whining, Dad said, and Arvid agreed.

  ‘You’re crying,’ Arvid said.

  ‘The hell I am,’ Fatso said. ‘It’s been raining, right. And I’ve been lying here and haven’t dried myself, but I will now.’

  That was just nonsense because the forest was tinder-dry when Arvid set out and it had not rained for weeks, so Fatso was lying and knew that Arvid knew it and standing there was getting unpleasant.

  ‘Would you do me a favour?’ Fatso asked.

  ‘Can’t,’ Arvid answered. ‘You’re my enemy.’

  ‘Yes, I know, you’re mine too, that’s not the point. Haven’t you heard of an armistice?’ Arvid hadn’t, but he couldn’t admit it, so he just said:

  ‘What do you want me to do?’

  ‘Could you take this wallet …?’ Fatso twisted round and reached into his back pocket, his belly stuck out even more and Arvid looked away. ‘Could you take this and cycle down and give it to my wife? It’s not as full as it should have been, but it’s not as empty as she thinks.’ He held out the wallet to Arvid, but Arvid didn’t feel like taking it.

  ‘Come on, I’m not a leper!’ Arvid didn’t know what a leper was, but if it had anything to do with his belly or his crying, he was not so sure. He carefully took the wallet by the one corner.

  ‘She must have it, see, otherwise she goes mad. Tell her I’m coming home, but not quite yet. And then come back and report. And, boy, you can help yourself to a krone.’

  The wallet was like a brick, it just got heavier and heavier, and he had to hold it close to his chest with his left hand and steer with his right. That was not easy down the hills in Slettaløkka, but he managed. He didn’t touch the money.

  Once down by the terraced house he was so nervous he was shaking, but he rang Fatso’s doorbell and his wife answered, and looked like she had just got up, but she had all her clothes on and there was a light on in the kitchen even though the sun was boiling. He gave her the wallet, said what he had been told to say, and she stood gaping at him as he pedalled down the pathway like a crazy man.

  The hills on the way back up were as tough and unforgiving as blue clay, and several times he thought maybe he should turn round, but he didn’t, and when he reached the top Fatso was sitting on a tree stump crying again. His shirt and braces were back in place, and when he heard the cycle wheels on the gravel he looked up and asked how it had gone.

  ‘Fine,’ Arvid said.

  ‘Good,’ Fatso replied, and there was a short silence, and then Fatso said,

  ‘Arvid?’

  Arvid started at the sound of his name, because Fatso never used his name, he always said ‘you’ or ‘the whelp’ or ‘boy’ or something along those lines, and Arvid wished he had never heard it.

  ‘It’s all right if you call me Fatso, Arvid,’ Fatso said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You are the only person who had the guts to say it to my face even though I know everyone calls me Fatso behind my back. You just call me Fatso!’

  Fatso forced a pale smile through the tears, but Arvid knew he would never call Fatso ‘Fatso’ again, and when he later tried to say ‘Bomann’ aloud to himself it felt as if he had a large cold marble in his mouth, and then he knew he would never talk to him again, ever.

  People Are Not Animals

  He held the piece of bread and jam as level as possible and at the same time tried to flip the little animal over the sand pile it was so desperately struggling to climb, but it kept falling back down. It was a beetle with yellow stripes down its black back, not pretty at all, almost ugly, but it was so sad when it tumbled backwards, so he thought he had to help.

  And in the end he did it, an elegant twist of his foot and the beetle was over, and even if he didn’t expect any gratitude, beetles are quiet creatures, then at least a sign, a wave from one of its legs perhaps, but no. The beetle just headed straight for the next sand heap probably thinking Arvid would give assistance once again, like some super-hero, Superman perhaps, but now this was it. Disgusting insect. With the tip of his shoe he kicked the beetle, and it flew in a large arc over the sandpit, but instead of crashing into the log on the other side it unfolded two small wings, looped the loop and banked beautifully across the road and was gone be
hind Johansen’s Opel Kadett. Why the hell didn’t it do that straight away?

  Now it had gone there was nothing else to concentrate on, and he knew that soon he would have to turn round. He could hear them, their soles scraping sand on the tarmac, and they were whispering to each other.

  He stared down at his feet as he took a bite of his bread, and they were odd, seen from above, large and alien, as though they didn’t belong to his body at all. He had checked in the mirror a few times, but they were not the same feet at all, because the ones in the mirror were OK. Those strange feet sticking out, and the knees. But the knees were his, he could tell by the grazes. Yet they were strange, nobbly and big, and then someone laughed a nasty laugh, and he would rather have been beaten up than listen to what was coming now, but it came anyway and there was nothing he could do about it.

  ‘Arvid fucks his mum! Arvid fucks his mum!’

  They chanted in unison, but that didn’t make it more true, he was only eight years old and hadn’t fucked anyone, and so far he had flatly denied that anyone did such a thing and least of all his mother, but if there was one thing the boys knew about it was his opinions on fucking. That was why they went for him as soon as they had a chance.

  ‘Arvid fucks his mum! Arvid fucks his mum!’

  They would not stop, they just chanted louder and louder, and he felt his fury rising as it always did, even though he tried with all his might to hold it back, and perhaps the worst thing was the way he blushed. With willpower alone he tried to stop it from spreading, but he failed, for just to say that one word aloud was like pulling a trigger, and he had no control over anything, and then he turned and through a mist he saw their faces expanding into huge grins.

  It was too late to stop now, so he just smacked his sandwich into the face of the boy closest to him, splashing jam everywhere. The little group howled with joy and shouted:

  ‘Here it comes! Here it comes! He’s lost it now! Look at him!’

  He flailed around, aiming for a face, hit one, maybe two, but then there was a thud above his right eye and he went down with a boy on top of him, and it was Bjørn, who else. Bjørn, who was ten years old and almost a teenager, who had seen all kinds of things and was as strong as the bear he was named after, and Bjørn grabbed Arvid’s hair and forced his head back so they were staring into each other’s eyes. Arvid could feel the tarmac rubbing against the back of his head, and then with rage in his voice Bjørn shouted:

  ‘When will you get it, you moron. People fuck, or else there wouldn’t be any babies!’

  ‘Only pigs fuck!’ Arvid screamed back.

  ‘No! People fuck just like pigs or dogs or horses or monkeys in a cage! Get that into your thick skull!’ Bjørn was almost in tears he was so angry.

  ‘People aren’t animals! People are people!’

  ‘Jesus, you’re so hopeless,’ Bjørn said. ‘You won’t even get through school.’ He got up, turned to the others standing round them in a circle, and said:

  ‘We’re wasting our time. He’s a complete idiot. He’ll end up in remedial class and become an arselicker.’

  And so they left, shaking their heads, roaring with laughter, and Arvid was lying on the road, staring up into the air, and he was crying. But they were right, he knew that now, for he had asked Dad, and although Dad coughed and looked away and both of them blushed, he didn’t deny it. It was the only explanation, but it was a lot to take for someone who had just stopped believing in God.

  People fucked. Or else there wouldn’t be any babies. That’s the way it was. But he would never do it, wouldn’t want to or dare to or manage to, and he couldn’t care less whether he had children or not. But he felt strangely sad when he thought about that particular thing.

  Call Me Ali Baba

  He believed all the hollows in the fields by the women’s prison were caused by bombing. He imagined that the world was once completely flat and the bombs that fell during THE WAR, in his mind like big heavy bumble bees, had formed the landscape the way it was now.

  When Dad talked about THE WAR, and he often did, for he had been a part of it, Arvid could picture these hollows, and when they were playing in the little valley they called Dumpa it struck him that some of the bombs must have been really big.

  When he found out that no bombs had fallen around where he lived, he couldn’t believe it, for the image of the rolling fields and the bumble-bee bombs had become part of the boy he was, and there was nothing to put in their place.

  He thought the women’s prison was a church, and it looked like a church, but although he knew there were always people inside he never saw anyone coming out. It was so quiet in the courtyard behind the high wire fence, the gravel was red, like nowhere else in the district, and the tall doors were always locked. Sometimes there was a black car in the courtyard, but he had never seen it coming or going.

  He knew there were always people inside for when he played in the fields he saw faces at the windows, and when the women inside waved he waved back, and when the wind was blowing from the right direction their voices fluttered like scraps of paper on the shining autumn air. But when they shouted to him, he ran, and after he was told it was not a church he only played there if he forgot he shouldn’t.

  One time when he did forget, there was a woman standing at a window shouting:

  ‘Give my love to Joakim!’ And she started to laugh aloud when she saw him run. He covered his ears, for he didn’t want to hear, but it was too late and he realised he would always remember the name: Joakim.

  A few days afterwards Dad read aloud from the newspaper about someone who had escaped from prison and Arvid knew at once who it must have been.

  That night she came to him in his dreams and she shouted Joakim! Joakim! until he woke and sat up and he too called Joakim! Joakim! and Mum came bursting into his room and said, for God’s sake, what is going on here?

  Between the high rises and the terraced houses there was a barn. It was red with large grey peeling patches and had stood there for ever, for as long as he had lived, and even though Dad said it was part of a farm that had been there before, Arvid couldn’t care less. The barn was there, and was the Barn.

  ‘Let’s go and play in the Barn,’ the children said to one another, because it was a good place to play, and the fact that they were not allowed made it even better. The grown-ups said it was because the place was falling down, but Arvid thought why would a barn that had stood for as long as he had lived suddenly decide to collapse right now?

  The Barn had a traditional ramp and a big barn door that was shut with a bolt and a big padlock. Arvid and Jon Sand had tried to open it many times, Jon had even tried with a fire-cracker he had swapped with his big brother for a copy of Illustrated Classics, and had stuffed it into the lock. There had been a bang, but that was it. The lock was still intact and the door still closed.

  They jumped from the barn ramp, and the trick was to jump from as high as possible. The higher, the tougher. It could be dangerous, but until now two broken legs were the worst that had happened and that wasn’t too bad.

  Arvid was almost up by the door when he jumped, and there was such a wonderful rush in his belly when he leaped, and he rarely hurt himself because he was so light. The big boys called him Death Diver, and whenever they said that he smiled inside. But he didn’t smile with his lips, he just curled his top lip the way his mother had shown him that Elvis did when he was at his peak, and if there was something Mum knew about it was Elvis. When they played Elvis on the radio she sat at the kitchen table with a cigarette and sang and smoked and knew all the songs by heart, and every morning she sang ‘It’s Now or Never’ in the bathroom.

  Arvid had practised in front of the mirror in the hall and after a while he was so good at curling his lip that many people thought he had been born like that.

  But Jon was the one who could jump furthest. Arvid did the best he could and yet he was always half a metre behind.

  ‘Your legs are too short,’ Jon said. ‘
See for yourself, your knees are almost in your shoes!’ But that couldn’t be right because the doctor at school had said he had a well-balanced body, and when he asked his mother what that meant, she said every part of his body was in its right place and that was a good thing.

  In any case Arvid thought it was better to be the Death Diver than an ordinary long jumper. Jon probably thought so too, Arvid guessed, but he didn’t say that, because they were friends and shared whatever fame and glory came their way.

  ‘I wonder what’s inside,’ Arvid said. They stood there with leaves in their hair, sand in their shoes, staring at the shabby old barn, their knees giving way and their legs shaking after a long but happy stint of jumping.

  ‘Comics,’ Jon said. ‘Newspapers.’

  ‘Comics?’

  ‘Yes, Donald Duck, Texas, Wild West, Prairie, Arbeiderbladet, Jukan, Morgenposten. When they had a paper collection, they brought it all here to the Barn. My big brother said so, for he saw them.’

  ‘Texas comics?’

  ‘Yes, dammit.’

  ‘But then we have to get inside before it’s too late!’

  ‘Sure, but how?’

  They looked at the big walls and felt helpless, the solid barn door and the foundations, and then they both saw it at the same time. The Barn didn’t have proper foundations like terraced houses, it was standing on a square of big boulders, and between the rocks there were gaps. How could they have missed them?

  They ran round the Barn searching for the biggest gap and when they found it Jon almost threw himself in, he squirmed and kicked and shoved until he was stuck, and Arvid had to pull him out again.