I had forgotten all about the streak of orange juice. My surprise as I shook my head must have had a dash of authenticity about it because his attention wandered as he bent down and ran his finger over the thin line of orange. Even his imagination would hardly stretch far enough to guess it was caused by my flinging an orange at the floor just there, on the landing outside the kitchen.
He straightened up and walked into the kitchen, I sat down on the stool as usual, he took a packet of pollock from the fridge, placed it on the counter, fetched flour, salt, and pepper from the cupboard, sprinkled them on a plate, and began to turn the soft, slippery fillets in the mixture.
“Tomorrow after school we’ll go to Arendal and buy you a birthday present,” he said without looking at me.
“Shall I go with you? Isn’t it supposed to be a secret?” I said.
“Well, you know what you want, don’t you?” he said. “Soccer uniform, right?”
“Yes.”
“You can try it on and then we’ll know if it fits,” he said, pushing a knob of butter from the knife into the frying pan with his finger.
What I wanted was Liverpool colors. But when we went to the Intersport shop they didn’t have Liverpool uniforms on the stand.
“Can’t we ask one of the people working here? Perhaps they’ve got some in stock?”
“If it’s not hanging up, they haven’t got it,” Dad said. “Take one of the others.”
“But I support Liverpool.”
“Take Everton then,” he said. “It’s the same town.”
I looked at the Everton shirt. Blue with white shorts. Umbro.
I looked at Dad. He seemed impatient, his eyes were wandering.
I put on the shirt over my sweater and held the shorts in front of me.
“Well, it looks good,” I said.
“Let’s take it then,” Dad said, grabbing the shirt and shorts and going to pay. They wrapped them up while he counted the notes in his fat wallet, combed his hair back with his hand, and looked into the street outside, which was crowded with shoppers, now, three weeks before Christmas.
On my birthday I woke up very early. The parcel containing the soccer uniform was in my wardrobe. I couldn’t wait to try it on. Tore off the paper, took out the outfit, pressed it against my nose, was there any better smell than new clothes? I put on the glistening shorts, then the shirt, which was rougher, a bit uneven against your skin, and the white socks. Then I went into the bathroom to look at myself.
Turned from side to side.
It looked good.
It wasn’t Liverpool, but it looked good, and they were from the same city.
Suddenly Dad swung open the bathroom door.
“What are you up to, boy?” he said.
He eyed me.
“Have you opened your present?” he shouted. “On your own?”
He grabbed my arm and hauled me into my bedroom.
“Now you wrap it up again!” he said. “NOW!”
I cried and took off the uniform, tried to fold it as well as I could, placed it in the paper, and stuck it together with a bit of the tape that was still sticky.
Dad oversaw everything. As soon as I had finished, he snatched the parcel out of my hands and left.
“Actually I should have taken it from you,” he said. “But now I’ll keep it until we give you the rest of your presents. It is your birthday, after all.”
As I knew what I was getting and I had even tried the uniform on in the shop, I had been sure it was the day that was important and that on the day I could wear it. I hadn’t seen it as one of the presents I would be given when we ate the birthday cake in the afternoon. It was impossible to make him understand. But I was right, he wasn’t. The uniform was mine when all was said and done! On that day it became mine!
I lay in bed crying until the others got up. Mom was in high spirits and wished me a happy birthday when I went into the kitchen, she had baked fresh rolls the evening before, which she was warming up in the oven, and she was boiling some eggs, but I didn’t care, my hatred for Dad cast a cloud over everything.
In the afternoon we ate cake and drank pop. I had never been allowed to invite friends on my birthday, and nor was I on this one. I was sullen and surly, I ate the cake without a word, and when Dad put the presents in front of me, with a smile that showed no insight into what had happened that morning, as though it were possible to start afresh, I looked down and unwrapped the Everton uniform without showing any sign of pleasure.
“How nice,” Mom said. “Are you going to try it on?”
“No,” I said. “I tried it on in the shop. Fits perfectly.”
“Put it on,” Dad said. “So Mom and Yngve can see.”
“No,” I said.
He eyed me.
I took the uniform to the bathroom, changed, and went back in.
“Excellent,” Dad said. “I bet you’ll be the coolest on the field this winter.”
“Can I take it off now?” I said.
“Wait till we’ve finished with the presents,” Dad said. “Here’s one from me.”
He passed me a small, square packet that had to be a cassette.
I opened it.
It was the new Wings cassette. Back to the Egg.
I looked at him. He looked out of the window.
“Do you like it?” he said.
“Oh yes,” I said. “It’s the new Wings cassette! I’ll play it now!”
“Hang on a moment,” he said. “You’ve got a couple of presents left.”
“Here’s a tiny one from me,” Mom said.
It was big but light. What could it be?
“Just something for your room,” she said.
I unwrapped it. It was a stool. Four wooden legs and a kind of net seat between them.
“What a great stool,” Yngve said.
“Thanks, Mom,” I said. “It’ll be good for when I read!”
“And here’s one from me,” Yngve said.
“Really?” I said. “I wonder what you’ve come up with this time?”
It was a book on how to play the guitar.
I looked at him with moist eyes.
“Thank you very much,” I said.
“It’s got scales, solos, everything,” he said. “Very simple. There’s a black dot for where you have to press. Even you can follow that.”
For the rest of the day I listened to Back to the Egg.
Yngve came in and said that John Bonham, the drummer in Led Zeppelin, was on one of the songs. And he had read in the newspaper that a Norwegian priest spoke at the beginning of one of the songs. It had to be at the start of the LP, we figured out, “Reception,” where there was a recording off the radio.
“There!” Yngve said. “Play it again!”
And then I heard it, too.
“Men la oss nå prøve et øyeblikk å se i dette lys av Det nye testamentet,” a faint, grating old man’s voice said.
The thought that neither Paul McCartney, Linda McCartney, Denny Laine, Steve Holly, nor Laurence Juber had a clue what was being said there, but that Yngve and I did, as we were Norwegian, sent my senses into free fall.
As always, Dad was kind all Christmas, even in the morning. As New Year’s Eve approached and the shops finally opened for a few hours, Mom drove to Arendal to buy some food and fireworks. She must have intimated that perhaps it wasn’t necessary to spend hundreds of kroner on rockets, as Dad always did, at any rate, it was she who had the responsibility for buying fireworks while Dad kept well in the background.
It wasn’t a great success.
Dad usually showed us the rockets he had bought and said, well, this year we were going to knock Gustavsen into a cocked hat, for instance, or there were going to be a few really big bangs this year! When New Year’s Eve came we would see him standing outside on the shimmering snow astutely and meticulously arranging the launch site. With a strand of hair hanging down over his face, which his beard almost blotted out in the darkness, he would set up the clothesline in the snow and line the biggest rockets up against it, and place the others in a whole battery of bottles and hollow objects. Once the preparations had been made, he would wait until half past eleven. Then he would call us outside and the New Year was brought in with several salvoes. He started small, with a few little firecrackers or sparklers that Yngve and I were allocated, and then he gradually stepped up the power until the biggest rocket was launched at twelve. Afterward he would declare that there had been lots of wonderful rockets this year but we, as usual, had had the best. That, of course, was open to debate because we were not the only ones to invest money in fireworks, Gustavsen and Karlsen did, too.