“Can you see a big mons anywhere, Geir?” I said.
He shook his head. “But there’s one here with enormous tits. Do you want to see?”
I nodded, and he held up the magazine for me.
Ketil sat some meters from us, with his legs crossed and a magazine in his hands. But after only a few minutes he threw it down and got to his feet.
“I’ve looked at them so many times,” he said. “I’ll have to get some new ones.”
“Where did you get them?” I said, gazing up at him and shielding my eyes from the sun.
“I bought them.”
“BOUGHT THEM?” I said.
“Yes.”
“But they’re old, aren’t they?”
“They’re used, you chump. There’s a hairdressing salon in town that also sells old magazines. They’ve got loads of porn mags.”
“Are you allowed to buy them?”
“Obviously,” he said.
I stared at him for a few seconds. Was he pulling my leg?
Didn’t look like it.
I flicked through. There were photos of two girls on a tennis court. They wore short skirts, one light blue, the other white, white shirts, a sweat band over their wrists, white socks, and white sneakers. Each was holding a racket. Surely they weren’t going to …?
I flicked on.
One was lying on the grass and had opened her shirt so you could see her breasts. Her head was back. Was she wearing any panties?
Nope.
Soon they were both naked, on their knees by the net, with their bottoms in the air. It was fantastic. Fantastic. Fantastic.
“Look, Geir,” I said. “Two playing tennis!”
He glanced at me and nodded, too absorbed in his own pictures to waste any time.
Ketil had walked down to the old, tumbledown pontoon, where he stood skimming stones he must have found on the beach nearby. The water was like a mirror, and every time a stone hit the water, small circular ripples spread outward.
I had flicked through three or four magazines when he reappeared in front of us. I looked up at him.
“It feels good to lie on your stomach and read them,” I said.
“Ha ha ha! So you like rubbing yourself?” he said.
“Yes,” I said.
“I can imagine,” he said. “But I’ve got to be off now. Keep the mags if you like. I’m sick of them.”
“Can we have them?” Geir said.
“Be my guest.”
He kicked the bike stand, raised a hand to say goodbye, and set off up the hill with one hand in the middle of the handlebars. It looked as if he were leading an animal.
It was so obvious to us both that Geir would have to hide the magazines in his room that we didn’t even talk about it when we parted outside my house an hour later.
Mom’s pizzas had thick bases that rose around the edges, making the filling of minced meat, tomato, onions, mushrooms, peppers, and cheese look like a plain surrounded by long ranges of mountains on all sides. We were sitting at the living-room table, as always on Saturday evenings. We had never eaten in front of the television; that belonged to the realm of the unimaginable. Dad cut a piece for me and put it on my plate, I poured myself a glass of Coke from the liter bottle where the words Coca-Cola were printed in white on the greenish glass, not on a red label, which you also saw. Pepsi-Cola wasn’t sold in Sørland, I had drunk it only at the Norway Cup, and apart from the Metro and the breakfast where we could help ourselves to as many bowls of cornflakes as we wanted, that had been one of the tournament’s biggest attractions.
When the pizza was finished, Dad asked if we felt like playing a new game.
We did.
Mom cleared the table; Dad fetched a pad of paper and four pens from his study.
“Would you like to join in, Sissel?” he shouted to Mom, who had started washing up.
“Love to,” Mom said and joined us. She had soap lather on one arm and her temple. “What are we going to play? Yahtzee?”
“No,” Dad said. “We each have a piece of paper and we write down six headings: country, town, river, sea, lake, and mountain. One column for each. Then we choose a letter and the idea of the game is to jot down as many names as we can that begin with the respective letter in three minutes.”
We hadn’t played this one before. But it seemed like fun.
“Is there a prize?” Yngve said.
Dad smiled.
“Only the honor. Whoever wins becomes the family champion.”
“You start,” Mom said. “I’ll put some tea on for us.”
“We can do a trial run,” Dad said. “Then we can actually play when you’re back.”
He looked at us.
“M,” he said. “So, the letter M. Are you with me?”
“Yes,” Yngve said, and was already writing, with one arm shielding his work.
“Yes,” I said.
Mont Blanc, I wrote under mountain. Mandal, Morristown, Mjøndalen, Molde, Malmö, Metropolis, and Munich under town. I couldn’t think of any seas, or rivers. Next was countries. Were there any countries beginning with an M? I went through all the countries I could think of. But no. Moelven. Was that a river? Mo in Rana, that was a town anyway. Midwest? Oh, right, Mississippi!
“Time’s up,” Dad said.
A quick glance at their pieces of paper was enough to confirm that they had beaten me.
“You read yours out, Karl Ove,” Dad said.
When I got to Morristown both Dad and Yngve were laughing.
“Don’t laugh at me!” I said.
“Morristown only exists in The Phantom,” Yngve said. “Did you think it really existed?”
“Sure. And why not? Sala works in the UN building in New York, and that exists, doesn’t it? Why shouldn’t Morristown?”
“Good answer, Karl Ove,” Dad said. “You get half a point for that.”
I made a face at Yngve, who smirked back.
“Tea’s ready,” Mom said. We went into the kitchen and took a cup. I added milk and sugar.
“OK, let’s play properly now,” Dad said. “We’ll do three letters. That’s probably as much as we can manage before bedtime.”
Mom knew almost as few names as I did, it turned out. Or else she wasn’t concentrating as much as Yngve or Dad. However, it was good for me; it was the two of us against them.
After Dad had counted the points from the first round, Mom said she had changed her name.
“I’ve gone back to my old maiden name. So now I’m Hatløy and not Knausgård anymore.”
My blood ran cold.
“You’re not called Knausgård anymore?” I said, staring at her with my mouth open. “But you’re our mother!”
She smiled.
“Yes, of course I am! I always will be!”
“But why? Why aren’t you going to have the same name as us?”
“I was born Sissel Hatløy, as you know. That’s my name. Knausgård is Dad’s name. And your names!”
“Are you getting divorced?”
Mom and Dad smiled.
“No, we’re not getting divorced,” Mom said. “We’re just going to have different names.”
“But a rather stupid consequence of this,” Dad said, “is that we can’t meet Grandma and Grandad for a while. My parents don’t like your mother changing her name, so they don’t want to see us anymore.”
I gaped at him.
“What about at Christmas?” I said.
Dad shook his head.
I started crying.
“This is nothing to cry about, Karl Ove,” Dad said. “It’ll pass. They’re just angry now. And then it’ll pass.”
I scraped my chair back, got up, and ran to my room. After closing my door I heard someone follow. I lay down on the bed and bored my head into the pillow while sobbing loudly with tears flowing as they had never flowed before.