‘But there’s no disgrace in a name,’ Simon went on; he knew when it was time to bury the hatchet. ‘They named me J. F. Kennedy. He was a president like me, you know. But unfortunately he got shot in Dallas.’
Simon smiled out over his audience.
‘I’m too much of an optimist to sit waiting for the same fate!’
His parents grinned with relief. Gunnar had persuaded Simon to take the time to write his speech out properly, rather than just scribbling a few notes as he generally did. This was going really well!
From the podium Simon cautioned against bullying, in daily life, at school and above all on the internet, where the pillorying of those unable to defend themselves ‘could have far-reaching consequences’. He ended with how much money they had raised, their contribution to the water aid project in Cambodia and the campaign against the closure of Sjøvegan Upper Secondary School.
Then he paid tribute to the Constitution and his homeland, and the school band struck up the Norwegian national anthem, ‘Yes, we love this country’.
Hundreds of voices were raised and blown out to sea by the wind. As the final notes faded, the square came to life. Parents and young children moved on to their local parties with cake and games, the old folk headed back to their care home, the lonely returned to empty houses and the asylum seekers plodded back up the steep hill to their centre. Their sky-blue banner with the silver fox and the Norwegian flag would be stowed away in a box room until it was time to take it out again, unroll it and press it for another 17 May.
The russ were off to slump in their rooms. In rooms that still harboured half-forgotten memories of a time when they were pink or pale blue. Spiderman and Britney Spears stickers still adorned the walls; football posters hung side by side with district champion certificates and school timetables. Some of the rooms were even home to a few overlooked soft toys, and their owners could carry on being children for just a little while longer, for one more short summer.
Most of them would gradually disperse from this town of scarcely two thousand inhabitants, with one clothes shop, a chemist, a sports hall and an asylum-seekers’ centre. They would go out into the world, get down to their studies or do their military service. Some would stay on and work at the supermarket or the care home, and others didn’t quite know what to do, there were too many options, so they would take a gap year to think it over.
Simon dutifully accompanied his parents and Håvard to the local party in Upper Salangen, where they had once lived, next door to his grandparents. Now he was the hero; just imagine, the russ president himself had put in an appearance. He played along and stayed in his role, while the children competed for his attention.
The midnight sun was just three days away. In the months to come, the sun would never set.
The Sæbø family turned into the drive of the blue house on the bend, just below the church, where the key was always under the doormat. Simon stumbled into his room, pulled off his russ overalls and collapsed into bed. By the window looking out over the fjord, the red and yellow Manchester United logo painted on the wall stood out boldly. To shield himself from the bright evening light he had closed the curtains. The design on the fabric was of a boy with a skateboard under one arm and a football under the other.
Still, it was not entirely dark. Above his bed shone a heart. It was made out of fluorescent stars. Stars his girlfriend had stuck on his ceiling one evening.
A few more weeks of school and then summer stretched ahead, shiny and glorious.
He had got himself a job in the churchyard, just up the hill behind the house. All he had to do was cross the garden, step over the fence and walk a little way along the road, then he could go in through the gate by the church. His job would be to cut the grass, weed and water and keep the graves tidy throughout the summer holidays, apart from a couple of weeks, for which he had other plans. It would make a nice change to potter round the peaceful churchyard, be outside, feel the sun and get away from the classroom.
So, at last: over the summer, real life would begin. JFK had it all mapped out.
In one of the books on his shelf there was a quotation: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’
One day he was going to make speeches like Kennedy too.
Poison
A thousand kilometres further south, in one of Norway’s thickest forests, a man stood in an open yard, boiling up sulphuric acid. The clear, viscous liquid was bubbling on an improvised hotplate and a stench of rotten eggs hung in the air. He was in the lee of a red-painted barn and could not be seen from the road. An electric cable, ten metres long, trailed to a socket inside the barn.
The farm consisted of a white-painted house, the barn, a summer cowshed, farmhands’ quarters and a red storehouse raised on pillars, plus a garage. It lay on the eastern side of the Glomma river and looked out over dense forest to the east, while the view to the west was of green pasture and fields. The coltsfoot was blooming at the edges of the ditches and white wood anemones carpeted the dark ground beneath the fir trees.
Vålstua, built around 1750, was the first smallholding attached to the larger farm of Vål, a bit further down the wide river. Some ground and a small patch of forest went with it, but it was quite a few years since the place had been properly farmed. The owner was in prison for having run a hash plantation there. Presumably he had thought it was easy to hide away in the country, people said, shaking their heads. But no, if there was one place where the locals kept their eyes open it was here, and everybody knew there had been funny business going on at Vålstua. You hardly ever saw the people who lived there, yet there had been feverish activity in the outbuildings. People noticed things like that.
Before he began his sentence, the owner advertised the farm for rent on various websites. A young man from Oslo got in touch. He was going to start sugar beet production, he said. When he came to look round, he told the owner that he had completed three thousand hours of self-tuition in agronomy, and knew someone at the agricultural college at Ås. The farm was idyllic, and the place got the sun late into the evening, the owner responded. Afterwards he told his girlfriend he’d been surprised that the well-dressed young West Ender did not say a word about the beautiful views and scarcely bothered to look at the main farmhouse.
They agreed on a rent of ten thousand kroner a month. The owner wished his new tenant the best of luck and went off to serve his sentence of a couple of years.
The sound of drums and trumpets carried from the nearby hamlets. A light morning mist lay over the landscape, but sunny intervals were forecast for later in the day.
No 17 May celebration would be complete without some mild admonitions from the local paper. This year, Østlendingen had advised local residents not to buy confetti spray, which contained harmful solvents. Customs had stopped large quantities of it at the Swedish border in the run-up to National Day, the paper reported. And the russ had been banned from bringing water pistols to their procession in case they frightened children, prompting vehement protests from the russ.
These were the topics of conversation as the children played and the older people took wood anemones and wreaths of birch leaves to their family graves in the churchyard, in accordance with local tradition.
There was one news item that cast a slight shadow over the festivities. The previous night, a russ van belonging to a girl from an immigrant background had been daubed with swastikas. Nobody wanted that sort of thing here.