“Say hello and tell him I was here,” he said.
“OK,” I said.
He dragged himself to the car using his arms, opened the door, and lifted himself up into the seat. I watched him through widened eyes. In the car, his slow, helpless movements were transformed, he revved the engine and reversed up the incline at speed, shot down the road, and was gone.
I closed the door and went to my room. No sooner was I lying on the bed than the door downstairs opened.
From the sounds I worked out that it was Yngve.
“Are you here?” he shouted up the stairs. I got up and went out.
“I’m so hungry,” he said. “Want to have supper now?”
“It’s only a little after eight,” I said.
“The earlier, the better,” he said. “And I can make some tea for us. I’m absolutely ravenous.”
“Call me when it’s ready,” I said.
A quarter of an hour later we were at the table eating bread, each with a big mug of tea in front of us.
“Was there a car here this evening?” Yngve said.
I nodded. “The paralyzed guy on the council.”
“What did he want?”
“How should I know?”
Yngve looked at me.
“Someone was talking about you today,” he said.
My blood ran cold.
“Oh?” I said.
“Yes, Ellen.”
“What did she say?”
“She said you had a funny walk.”
“She didn’t!”
“Yes, she did. But it’s true, isn’t it. You do have a funny walk. Haven’t you ever noticed?”
“I do NOT!” I shouted.
“Oh yes, you do,” Yngve said. “Little shrimp can’t even walk normally.”
He got up and walked across the kitchen floor, falling forward with every step. I watched him with tears in my eyes.
“There’s nothing wrong with my walk,” I said.
“Ellen said it, not me,” he said, sitting down. “They talk about you, you know. You’re a little weird.”
“I AM NOT!” I shouted, throwing my bread at him as hard as I could. He moved his head to one side, and it hit the stove with a soft splat.
“Is Karlikins upset now?” he said.
I stood up with my mug in my hand. When Yngve saw that he got up, too. I hurled the hot tea at him. It hit him in the stomach.
“You’re so sweet when you’re angry, Karl Ove,” he said. “Poor little shrimp. Want me to teach you how to walk? I’m good at walking, you know.”
My eyes were filled with tears, but that wasn’t why I couldn’t see anything, it was because I was seething with anger inside and the red mist had descended.
I flew at him and punched him with all my strength in the stomach. He grabbed my arms and twisted me round, I tried to wriggle loose, he held me tight, I kicked out, he pulled me harder to him, I tried to bite him on the hand, and he pushed me away.
“Now, now,” he said.
I flew at him again, intent only on punching him in the face, smashing his nose, and if there had been a knife there I wouldn’t have hesitated to plunge it into his stomach, but he knew all that, it had happened many times before, so he did what he always did, held me tight and squeezed while calling me a little shrimp and saying I was so sweet when I was angry until I tried to bite him and he couldn’t keep my head at a distance and he pushed me away. This time I didn’t go for him again; instead I ran out of the kitchen. On the living-room table there was a fruit bowl from which I took an orange and I flung it at the floor with all my might. It split open and a thin jet of orange juice spurted up and sprayed the wallpaper.
Yngve stood in the doorway watching.
“What have you done?” he said.
I looked at him. Then I saw the line of juice on the wallpaper.
“You’d better wash it off, you idiot,” I said.
“It won’t wash off,” he said. “The stain will just get bigger. Dad will be livid when he sees that. What’s wrong with you?”
“He might not see it,” I said.
Yngve just gawped at me.
“Well, we can hope,” he said, bending down and taking the orange into the kitchen. From the rustling noises that followed I gathered he was putting it at the very bottom of the garbage can. He came back with a cloth and wiped the floor.
I was trembling so much I could barely stand upright.
The juice ran in a thin line and I couldn’t imagine how Dad could avoid seeing it when he came home.
Yngve washed the kettle and the two cups. Threw away the bread, picked up the crumbs. I sat in the chair by the dining table with my head in my hands.
Yngve stopped near me.
“Sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to make you cry.”
“Yes, you did.”
“It’s just that you get so angry,” he said. “Surely you can see that it’s tempting? I have said sorry.”
“It’s not that,” I said.
“What is it then?”
“My funny walk.”
“Come on,” he said. “Everyone walks in a different way. The main thing is to move forward. I was only kidding, really. I wanted to make you angry. And I succeeded. The way you walk is no stranger than anyone else’s.”
“Sure?”
“Sure as eggs are eggs.”
When Dad came home I was in bed. In the darkness I lay listening to his footsteps. They didn’t stop on the landing as I had expected but continued into the kitchen. He fiddled around in there for a while before coming out again. And he didn’t stop on the landing this time, either.
He hadn’t seen anything.
We were saved.
The next evening I went to the swimming class with Geir. We caught the bus from Holtet to the bus station in Arendal and walked up the hills to Stintahallen, each carrying a bag over our shoulders. In my bag I had some dark-blue Arena swim trunks, a white Speedo cap with the Norwegian flag on the side, a pair of Speedo goggles, a bar of soap, and a towel. We had been members of Arendal Swim Club since the previous winter. We could barely swim then, just getting from one end of the pool to the other was an enormous effort, bordering on the impossible, but since it was actually expected of us, as an absolute minimum in a swim club, and the coach, a man with tattoos on his arms who wore clogs, followed us along the side of the pool shouting, it took us a surprisingly short time to get by without any problems. We weren’t good, at least not if you compared us to the older boys who sometimes walked around inside, with their slim, long-limbed yet muscular bodies, and who powered through the water with open mouths and bug-eye goggles. In comparison to them we were more like tadpoles, I sometimes mused, splashing and straining and just as likely to swim sideways as forward. But even though we gradually improved and could soon swim a thousand meters in the course of a training session it wasn’t thanks to my progress that I continued, I knew I would never be a competitive swimmer because when the competitions came and I gave everything it was never enough, I couldn’t even overtake Geir — no, it was all the rest I liked, starting the moment we clambered onto the bus and continuing through the evening darkness on the road to Arendal, the deserted town we passed through, the shops we always stopped outside on our way to the class, and inside the hall, this large public building with its strange mixture of inside and outside, which we were funnelled through from standing at the entrance wrapped up in winter clothes to standing almost naked, fifteen minutes later, wearing only a strip of cloth at the edge of the pool, after having passed through the minor ritual of undressing, showering, and dressing, and then throwing ourselves into the wonderfully transparent, cold water that smelled of chlorine. That was what I liked. The sounds echoing around the pool, the night outside the windows, the coral-jewel partition between lanes, the diving boards, the thirty-minute-long hot showers we had afterward. Then the process was reversed and we went from being pale, fragile, semi-naked boys with big heads to once again standing fully clothed in the winter outside, with wet hair under our hats and the smell of chlorine on our skin, our limbs deliciously tired.