But it wasn’t there.
“What’s up?” Geir said. He was sitting, fully clothed, on the opposite bench watching me.
“I can’t find my other sock,” I said. “Can you see it?”
He leaned forward and looked under the bench.
“It’s not there,” he said.
Oh no!
“But it’s got to be somewhere,” I said. “Can you help me look? Please!”
I could hear my voice quivering. But Geir didn’t let on that he’d noticed, if indeed he had heard anything at all. He leaned over and looked under all the benches while I walked toward the showers in case it had got caught up in my towel and dropped out. It wasn’t there, either. Perhaps, inadvertently, I had packed it in my bag with the other swimming things?
I hurried back and emptied the contents of my bag on the floor.
But no. No sock.
“It wasn’t anywhere there?” I said.
“No,” Geir said. “But we have to get going, Karl Ove. The bus is leaving soon.”
“I have to find the sock first.”
“Well, it’s not here. We’ve looked everywhere. Can’t you just go without it?”
I didn’t answer. Once again I shook all the clothes, crouched down, and scanned the floor under the benches; once again I went into the shower room.
“We’ve got to go now,” Geir said. He held his watch in front of me. “They’ll be angry if I miss the bus.”
“Can you search while I get dressed?” I said.
He nodded and halfheartedly wandered around examining the floor. I put on my T-shirt and sweater.
On the top shelf perhaps?
I stood on the bench and peered along.
Nothing.
I put on my trousers and quilted vest, zipped up my jacket, and sat down to tie my laces.
“We’ve got to go now,” Geir said.
“I’m getting there,” I said. “You wait outside.”
After he had left I hurried back into the shower room. I looked in the trash can, ran my hand along the windowsills, and even opened the door to the pool.
But no.
Geir was standing by the hill when I went out. He started running down before I had even caught up with him.
“Wait for meee!” I cried. But he showed no signs of stopping, he didn’t even turn, and I sprinted off after him. Down into the darkness, past the gray trees, into the light on the road below. For every step I took the bare foot rubbed against the coarse leather of my boot. I’ve lost my sock, a voice inside me said. I’ve lost my sock. I’ve lost my sock. A ticking started in my head. It happened now and again when I was running, my head ticked, somewhere inside my left temple, tick tick, it went, but although it was alarming, sounding as if something had come loose or perhaps it was rubbing against something else, I couldn’t tell anyone, they would just say I had a screw loose and laugh.
Tick, tick, tick
Tick, tick, tick
I ran behind Geir all the way down to the candy shop where we went; the bag of candy we came out with was always the high point of these trips. Geir was waiting outside, impatiently shifting from one foot to the other. I stopped in front of him. As a result of the snowplows’ work we were standing half a meter higher than usual, and the new angle changed our view of the candy shop. It had a cellar-like feel to it, and this feel transformed everything, at a glance I saw the shelves were only “shelves,” that the goods were “goods,” displayed in a very ordinary room in a house, in short that the shop was a “shop,” although I didn’t articulate this to myself, it was just an idea that struck me and disappeared as quickly as it had come.
Geir opened the door and went in.
I followed.
“Are we very short of time?” I said.
“Yes,” he said. “It goes in eleven minutes.”
In the back room the assistant put the newspaper down, came into the shop, and stood behind the counter with a bored, even slightly disdainful expression on her face. She was old and repulsive; there were three long, gray hairs growing out of a mole on her chin.
The whole of one wall was covered with pipes and pipe cleaners, cigarette rolling machines and papers, tobacco pouches and cigarette packets, cigar boxes and snuff tins of various shapes and colors, all with different writing and small, stylized images of dogs, foxes, horses, sailing ships, racing cars, black men smiling, sailors smoking, and women in casual poses. The candy shelf, which we were both looking at now, covered the whole of the second wall. Unlike the tobacco products, the candy had no packaging; chocolates, hard candies, and gumdrops were in transparent plastic jars and represented themselves, with no pictures between them and us: what you saw was what you got. The black ones tasted of salt or licorice, the yellow ones of lemon, the orange ones of orange, the red ones of strawberry, the brown ones of chocolate. The small, square pieces of chocolate with the hard surfaces, called Rekrutts, were filled with hard caramel, just as the promised shape; the heart-shaped chocolates, for their part, were filled with a soft, jelly-like mass tasting of apricot, also as expected. The color codes applied to the candies and the gumdrops, with a few exceptions, which on these evenings we tried to narrow down. Some black candies could taste dark green while some dark-green ones tasted green in a throat pastille or eucalyptus kind of way — in other words lighter — and not a sweet-type green, which you would imagine from the color. And then there were the black candies that actually tasted like the King of Denmark aniseed candies, an orangey brown. The strange thing was that it was never the other way around, there were no orangey-brown King of Denmark candies that tasted black, nor had we ever come across any eucalyptus-green candies that tasted like sweet green or black ones.
“What would you like?” the assistant said.
Geir had put the money he would spend on the glass counter and leaned forward to see the range of candies better, the signs of time pressure evident on his face.
“Errr …,” he said.
“Hurry up!” I said.
Then it all came out in a rush.
“Three of those, three of those, and three of those, and four of those and one of those and one of those,” he said, pointing to the various jars.
“Three of …?” the assistant said, opening an empty paper bag and turning to the stand.
“The green ones. Oh, make that four. And then three of the red and white ones. You know, polka d … and then five babies’ dummies …
When we emerged from the shop, each with a small bag in hand, there were just four minutes to go before the bus left. But that was enough time, we told each other, running down the stairs. The steps, covered with hard-trodden snow and ice, were slippery, so we had to hold on to the banisters, which was at odds with the speed we were after. Beneath us lay the town, the white streets appearing almost yellow in the reflection from the lamps, the bus station, where the buses skidded in and out like sleds in the snow, and the tall church with the red tiles and green spire. The black sky arched above everything, strewn with twinkling stars. When there were only ten to fifteen steps left Geir let go of the banister and set off at a sprint. After a couple of strides he lost balance and his only chance to stay upright was to run as fast as he could. He swept down the hill at a blistering pace. Then he changed tactics and decided to slide instead, but his upper body had more momentum, he was pitched forward and plunged headlong into the drift beside the road. It had all happened so fast that I didn’t start laughing until he was lying in the snow.
“Ha ha ha!”
He didn’t move.
Was he seriously hurt?
I walked as briskly as I could over the last stretch and stopped beside him. At first he drew breath in short, sob-like bursts. Then came a long, hollow groan.