Geir was standing outside, ready, when I arrived, and we sprinted off. Up the hill, over the long plain where there were boats under tarpaulins in front gardens, mostly plastic boats but also some small dinghies, and one cabin cruiser, renowned far and wide. The lawns were brown, the trees behind the houses orange and red, the sky was blue. We had taken off our jackets and knotted them around our waists. Walked up past Ketil’s house, onto the gravel road and through the gate that marked the end of the road and the start of the path. On the other side of the field was the new parish hall, where Ten Sing, with all the blonde girls, rehearsed and had their meetings.
The stream alongside the path was full, cool green water, flowing lazily down the gentle slope. It got its color from the heather, the grass, and the plants the water flowed and lay across. Only minor ripples on the surface revealed that it was moving. Where the hill became steeper and the stream fell with a roar we began to run. The white stones littering the path were a matte gray in the shadow, a gleaming yellow in the sun. Ahead of us someone was walking uphill and we slowed down. It was an elderly couple. She had gray hair and a cardigan; he had a cord jacket with leather patches on the elbows and a stick in his hand. His mouth was open and his jaw trembled.
We turned and looked after them.
“That was Thommesen, that was,” Geir said.
We hadn’t seen him since he had us in the second class.
“I thought he’d died ages ago!” I said.
We took the old shortcut through the forest and emerged on the edge above the garbage dump. The mountain of white plastic bags and black garbage bags glinted in the full sun. A dozen or so seagulls were screaming and flapping their wings. We clambered down the slope and wove our way between all the objects, which in some places were stacked high, perhaps four times higher than us, and in others lay strewn about with nothing on top. We were looking for bags and cardboard boxes, and there was no shortage of them, also containing magazines, weeklies that the elderly read: Hjemmet and Allers and Norsk Ukeblad, weeklies for girls: Starlet and Det Nye and Romantikk, piles of newspapers, mostly Verdens Gang and Agderposten, but also Vårt Land and Aftenposten and Dagbladet; we found A-Magasinet and Kvinner og Klær, horsey magazines for girls, Donald Duck comics and a fat Fantomet album from the late sixties that I immediately put to one side, a Tempo album as well, some Kaptein Miki comics, and one Agent X9 paperback, which I was pretty pleased with, but it didn’t alter the fact that what we were searching for, that is, magazines like Alle Menn, Lek, Coctail, and Aktuell Report, and perhaps even a few foreign magazines, because there were quite a few Danish ones in circulation, one called Weekend Sex, for example, and some Swedish and English ones, was nowhere to be found. We didn’t find a single porn magazine! What was going on? Had someone beaten us to it? They had to be here!
After an hour’s searching we gave up and flopped down in the heather to read the normal magazines we had found. Perhaps because I’d had my mind set on something quite different and had felt the expectation all day, I wasn’t really happy about just sitting there. Something was missing, and I got up, paced between the trees, looked down at the stream, perhaps a wade in the water was the answer?
“Want to go for a wade?” I called.
“Sure. Just got to read this first,” Geir said without looking up from his magazine.
I went over to the two bags of bottles we had found. Most of them were the long, brown ones with the yellow Arendals Bryggeri label, but there was also the odd dumpy, green Heineken bottle. I took one of them out. There was a bit of earth and grass stuck to the outside, and I wondered if it had been lying on the edge of a lawn for a while and had been picked up when the garden was being prepared for winter.
The lust was still there in my stomach.
I rotated the bottle in my hand. The dark-green glass lit up in the sun.
“Do you think it’s possible to stick your willy in this?” I said.
Geir rested the magazine on his lap.
“Ye-eah,” he said. “If the neck’s not too narrow. Are you going to try?”
“Sure,” I said. “Are you?”
He got up and came over. Took a bottle.
“Think anyone can see us here?” he said.
“No, are you crazy?” I said. “We’re in the middle of the forest. But we could move over there, to be on the safe side.”
We walked toward the trunk of a large pine tree. I undid my belt and dropped my trousers to my knees, took out my willy with one hand and held the bottle in the other. I pressed my willy into the top, the glass neck was cold and hard against my soft, warm skin, and actually too narrow, but with a bit of humping and pumping and wriggling, it slipped inside. A tingle ran down my back as my willy throbbed and the bottle seemed to tighten around it, harder and harder.
“I can’t get it in,” Geir said. “It won’t go.”
“I’ve done it!” I said. “Look!”
I turned to him.
“But I can’t budge it,” I said. “There’s no room. It’s stuck!”
To show how stuck it was, I let go of the bottle. It hung between my legs.
“Ha ha ha,” Geir laughed.
I was about to pull my willy out when I felt a sharp pain shoot up.
“Ow. Ow, ow, ow, shit!”
“What’s the matter?” Geir said.
“Ow! Ow! Oh, FUCK!”
It was a stabbing pain, as if from a knife or a jagged piece of glass. I pulled as hard as I could and got my willy out of the bottle.
On the tip of it there was a black beetle.
“OH! FUCK! FUCK! FUCK!” I howled. I gripped the beetle or whatever it was, it was black with big claws, pulled it off, and hurled it as far as I could, while running back and forth waving my arms.
“What’s the matter?” Geir said. “What’s the matter? What’s the matter, Karl Ove?”
“A beetle. It was biting my willy!”
At first he stared at me, slack-jawed. Then he burst into laughter. It was exactly his kind of humor. He rolled around in the heather laughing.
“Don’t tell anyone!” I said, doing up my belt. “Have you got that?”
“Yeah-heh-heh-heh!” Geir said. “Ha ha ha ha!”
Three times I made him promise he wouldn’t tell anyone as we walked uphill, each carrying a bag and with the sun beating down on our necks. I also said a short prayer to apologize for my swearing.
“Should we go down and get the deposit on the bottles at Fina now?” Geir said.
“Do they take beer bottles there?” I said.
“Oh, that’s right,” Geir said. “We’d better hide them then.”
We walked back across the field, jumped over the stream, and there, on the other side, in a clump of trees below the chapel, we left the bags of bottles. Pulled up some ferns and tufts of grass and covered them as well as we were able, glanced around to make sure no one was nearby, then calmly moved away, knowing that if you ran you drew attention to yourself, up the road next to the chapel, which we then started to follow.