I once had a girl, or should I say, she once had me?
She showed me her room, isn’t it good, Norwegian wood?
Fantastic, fantastic.
Then I went on reading about Madame Curie until ten and I switched off the light. As I drifted into sleep, as whatever existed in my room was somehow diluted with images, where they came from I had no idea, but I accepted them nonetheless, the door was suddenly thrust open and the light switched on.
It was Dad.
“How many apples have you had today?” he said.
“One,” I said.
“Are you sure? Grandma said she gave you one.”
“Really?”
“But you had one after dinner, too. Do you remember?”
“Oh yes! I’d forgotten that one!” I said.
Dad switched off the light and closed the door without another word.
The next day after dinner he called me. I went into the kitchen.
“Sit down,” he said. “Here’s an apple.”
“Thanks,” I said.
He handed me an apple.
“Sit here and eat it,” he said.
I glanced up at him. He met my gaze, his eyes were serious, and I looked down, started to eat the apple. Once it was finished, he handed me another. Where had he got it from? Had he got a bag behind his back or what?
“Have another,” he said.
“Thanks,” I said. “But I only eat one a day.”
“You had two yesterday, didn’t you?”
I nodded, took it, and ate it.
He handed me another.
“Here’s another,” he said. “This is your lucky day.”
“I’m full,” I said.
“Eat your apple.”
I ate it. It took me longer than the first two. The bite-sized chunks seemed to be lying on top of the food from dinner; it was as though I could feel the cold apple flesh down below.
Dad handed me another.
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“There were no limits yesterday,” he said. “Have you forgotten? You must have had two apples because you wanted them. Today you can have as many as you want. Eat.”
I shook my head.
He leaned down. His eyes were cold.
“Eat your apple. Now.”
I started eating. Whenever I swallowed my stomach contracted and I had to swallow several times not to throw up.
He was standing behind me, there was no way I could trick him. I cried and swallowed, swallowed and cried. In the end, I couldn’t go on.
“I’m so full!” I said. “I simply can’t eat any more!”
“Eat up,” Dad said. “You like apples so much.”
I tried a couple more bites, but it was no good.
“I can’t,” I said.
He looked at me. Then he took the half-eaten apple and threw it in the trash can in the cupboard under the sink.
“You can go to your room,” he said. “Now I hope that has taught you a lesson.”
Inside my room there was only one thing I longed for, and that was to grow up. To have total control over my own life. I hated Dad, but I was in his hands, I couldn’t escape his power. It was impossible to exact my revenge on him. Except in the much-acclaimed mind and imagination, there I was able to crush him. I could grow there, outgrow him, place my hands on his cheeks, and squeeze until his lips formed the stupid pout he made to imitate me, because of my protruding teeth. There, I could punch him in the nose so hard that it broke and blood streamed from it. Or, even better, so that the bone was forced back into his brain and he died. I could hurl him against the wall or throw him down the stairs. I could grab him by the neck and smash his face against the table. That was how I could think, but the instant I was in the same room as he was, everything crumbled, he was my father, a grown man, so much bigger than me that everything had to bend to his will. He bent my will as if it were nothing.
That must have been why, unwittingly of course, I was converting the inside of my room into an enormous outside. When I read, and for a while I did hardly anything else, it was always the world outside I moved in as I lay still on my bed, and not just the world that existed in the here and now, with all its foreign countries and foreigners, but also the one that had been, from Stokke’s Bjørneklo, the Stone Age boy, to the one in the future, such as in Jules Verne’s books. And then there was the music. It, too, opened my room with its moods and the strong emotions it evoked in me, which had nothing to do with those I normally felt in life. Mostly I listened to The Beatles and Wings, but also to Yngve’s music, which for a long time was bands and solo artists like Gary Glitter, Mud, Slade, The Sweet, Rainbow, Status Quo, Rush, Led Zeppelin, and Queen, but who in the course of his secondary school years were changing, as other, quite different, music began to sneak its way between all these old cassettes and records, like The Jam single and a single by The Stranglers, called No More Heroes, an LP by the Boomtown Rats and one by The Clash, a cassette by Sham 69 and Kraftwerk, as well as the songs he recorded off the only radio music program there was, Pop Spesial. He started to have friends who were interested in the same music and also played the guitar. One of them was called Bård Torstensen, and one day at the beginning of May when Dad was out for a few hours and thus the house was left unguarded, he joined Yngve in his room. They sat playing guitar and listening to records. After a while there was a knock at my door, it was Yngve, there was something he wanted to show Bård. I was reclined on the bed reading and got up when they came in.
“Look,” Yngve said, going over to the Elvis poster I had on the wall over the desk. “Can you guess what’s on the back?”
Bård shook his head.
Yngve loosened the drawing pins, took the poster down, and turned it around.
“Look,” he said. “Johnny Rotten! And he hangs it up with Elvis on the front!”
Both of them laughed.
“Can I buy it off you?” Bård said.
I shook my head.
“It’s mine.”
“But you’ve got it up the wrong way round!” Bård said, laughing again.
“I haven’t,” I said. “That is Elvis, you know!”
“Elvis is the past!” Bård said.
“No, he isn’t. Not Elvis Costello,” Yngve said.
“That’s true,” Bård said.
After they had gone I looked at the two pictures for a while. The one called Johnny Rotten was ugly. Elvis was good-looking. Why should I swap the ugly one for the good-looking one?
Outdoors, we did what we always do every spring: cut branches off the birch trees, tie bottles onto the remaining stumps, collect them the next day, full of light-colored, viscous sap, and drink it. We cut branches off the willow trees and made flutes from the bark. We picked large bunches of white wood anemones and gave them to our mothers. Well, we were too big for the latter really, but it was a gesture, it was us being good, then one morning, when we had only three hours, I dragged Geir with me into the forest, I knew a place where there were so many anemones that from a distance it looked like snow on the ground. Not without some self-torment, though, for flowers were living beings, picking them was killing them, but the cause was good, with their help I could spread happiness. The light fell in shafts through the branches, the bog was a luminous green, and we each picked an enormous bunch, which we ran home with.