It was Upper Romerike police district calling. I said:
‘Hello, this is Tommy.’
I was a bit out of breath, I hadn’t run a metre. I drank too much, that was why.
‘Could you come up here and collect your father.’
‘I don’t think my father’s alive,’ I said, and the policeman said:
‘He’s not so sprightly at the moment, I’ll give you that, but he’s not dead.’
‘Are you certain it’s my father,’ I said. ‘How can you know,’ and the policeman said:
‘Who else could it be.’
I had been so sure he was dead. I tried to work out how old he might be now. Seventy-five, maybe. Or even older. So he was alive. It was hard to imagine.
Back then, in 1966, we lived in Mørk. My father was a dustman. He worked on a dustcart. He was the man who stood on the footplate with his hands in gloves and the gloves round the steel bar at the back where the shiny, curved shutter door slammed down like a huge bureau top when the cart drove off, and creaked open when my father jumped from the footplate and the dustcart still moving, and him running into the sheds or along the kerb where most of the bins were. He pulled the square hundred-litre metal bins out or dragged them across the gravel and hoisted them up on to his shoulder and poured what was in them into the back of the cart and ran back with the empty bins to fetch more. Sometimes he took two at once, one in each hand, and hoisted them on to his shoulders in one parallel movement and walked over to the cart and leaned forward in a towering bow so that the garbage poured out on either side of his head. I had seen him do it many times. To me it was a disgusting sight.
My father would never be one of the drivers who flew so high in their polished cabs not bothering to look out of the window while he slaved away along the road, not watching him while he showed off with the two bins at once, no, they didn’t, so, without an audience, he carried them, one on each shoulder, and was the strongest man in the district. No, not even then could they be bothered to look out of the window but instead sat with their hands on their knees hunched over the wheel half asleep waiting for my father to carry the bins back to their sheds and jump back on to the footplate again and smack the shiny metal, so they could drive the fifty or a hundred or two hundred metres to the next bins. He had a driving licence, my father, but they never let him drive. He never flew so high.
He was incredibly strong. When the men stood out on the lawns in the evening lifting weights, lifting anything they could get their hands on, lifting milk churns and car wheels, lifting several at once, lifting flagstones and scrap metal and pumping it up and down until the skin on their biceps almost split, there was no one who could beat him. And so you would expect him to use his arms, or his fists, when he beat us. But he didn’t, he used his legs, and of course they were strong too, his legs, and it was logical if you gave it some thought, the way he ran up and down the road with the bins, that his legs would be strong as well.
He used his boots. He kicked us. He kicked our bottoms from behind, and at times it was so painful, and for Siri and the twins it was really bad. They couldn’t take the punishment that I could and didn’t have the muscles back there to handle his kicks. But he didn’t discriminate, he treated both sexes equally. He kicked all four of us.
In the evening when my father had fallen asleep with the TV still on, we got together in the room we shared on the first floor and pulled down each other’s pants and lay stomachs down bottoms up on one of the beds, showing each other the red and blue marks and the hard scabs where the skin had split and not quite healed yet, and we compared size and colour to see who had got the worst treatment that day or any other day when he was in the the mood, which he often was, and we all had our fair share, but normally it was me who got the most, because I was the eldest and a boy.
It was sad to see the state of my sisters, and I calmed them down and said the nicest things about their behinds and said the bruises didn’t look as bad as they probably felt, and they would soon be pretty again, if that was what they were worried about. And it was. They were afraid they would not be pretty again soon enough, for it was difficult to sidle through the showers every single time they had gym at school, and they couldn’t turn and always had to keep their backs against the wall, and they didn’t know what to say if anyone asked them why they looked that way. As for me, I didn’t give a shit, and if anyone had asked me, I would have told them the truth, but they rarely did. They didn’t dare. Everyone thought I was scary.
It wasn’t so easy for my sisters, though.
One evening, when we were sitting together in our room, and I was about to pat them and stroke their behinds as I always did to comfort them and say they were pretty no matter how they looked, I felt a sudden urge to comfort them in that way and stroke them where it hurt the most, and it came in a rush that feeling, and overwhelmed me. And I patted them once and stroked them again, I stroked all three of them, one after the other, and then I turned to look out the window and my throat felt tight, and out there of course, the Easter snow lay high, a gleaming yellow in the light from the outside lamp by the door, and everywhere else it was dark. It looked so beautiful, it’s true, I had always liked snow when it looked like that, warm and yellow, as in a film with all the lights and the snow, a Christmas film that we all liked to see together, which was on every year on Christmas Day. But in the room the lamps were lit, and I stroked my three sisters again, and they were so lovely no matter how their behinds looked, and I wanted so much to comfort them in this way, more than I had ever done, and I saw myself sitting on the edge of the bed stroking them up and down with my hand, and it was then I realised that this could not go on. And I spoke my thoughts and said, I cannot go on like this, comforting you in this way, and the twins didn’t understand why and burst into tears. They needed that comfort, they said, you have to do what you’ve always done, they said, or else it will only get worse, and of course I could see that they needed the comfort, but it was too late now. It was too late because suddenly I had felt in my gut how much I wanted to stroke their behinds, I had felt the heat, and I had already stroked them too many times that evening. My palms told me how much I liked it. And then everything was changed, and it couldn’t be as it had been before. Only Siri turned and looked at me, and I knew she had understood what I had understood. That she couldn’t stroke my behind any more, nor I hers.
I hated my father especially then, for he was the one who had kicked me into that room with the girls, the secret room that both existed and did not, which I now reluctantly had to leave because it was too late, because I had seen myself in my own mirror, seen my tanned hand on the girls’ white skin with the red and blue bruises from my father’s boot, and in this way he kicked me out again. That was how it felt, and I hated him for that, too.
I hated my father. Everyone knew I hated my father. Jonsen, my only adult friend in the neighbourhood, knew it. They all did, right down to the end of the road, they knew I hated my father, and they eyed me warily and came out of their houses in the evening, and some joined my father in his childish games lifting scrap metal on the lawn and were such stupid cowards and then went back in and watched TV and went to work in the morning and came back and all the time waiting for what they knew was coming. And the few friends I had, caught the bus to school, which I did too, and came back and did their homework and watched High Chaparral on the Swedish channel at half-past seven, which I did too, if it suited my father, and they were all waiting for what was to come. But I wasn’t ready.