In the play about St George, they endeavoured to get to the forest scene as quickly as possible. This was the part where they could give their imaginations free rein. They pretended that they were inventors, freely experimenting with every conceivable, and inconceivable, device from bicycle pumps to balloons. They did not, however, use coconut shells to emulate the sound of a horse walking or galloping, Ørn reproduced this perfectly by drumming his fingertips on the coffee table. One small stroke of genius, though, was the chirping of the birds at the beginning, before things began to get creepy, which Ørn produced by rubbing a damp cork against a bottle — for a whole afternoon they amused themselves with producing the distinctive calls of various different birds, taping them and chortling delightedly at all the lifelike results. As the drama grew darker they added more wind — the radio tuned to a station that was off the air — and the rustling of leaves on swaying branches. Peas in a cardboard box sounded like a shower of rain, a couple of tin cans gave the chink of armour. Ørn was a sight to be seen, bouncing back and forth like a yoyo between his various ‘instruments’. ‘When you’re finished with this you’ll be able to get a job as the ball in a pinball machine,’ Jonas said.
The real — the nigh-on insoluble problem — was still the dragon itself. For what does a dragon say? They both tried roaring in different ways, but it sounded as silly as having a lion bark like a poodle. They tried using Ørn’s mother’s Mixmaster, they tried spray cans, they considered — talking of hissing sounds — dripping water onto the cooker hotplate, but were not allowed into the kitchen. Their best solution involved Ørn sitting with his head inside a tin pail, it sounded bloodcurdling enough and would do at a push. By shaking Ørn’s dad’s leather jacket in the air — didn’t it even reek a little of dragon? — they managed to replicate the sound of leathery wingbeats. Finally, Jonas added the crowning touch to their inventiveness by bringing along Daniel’s kerosene lamp which, when they lit it, gave the most glorious sense of fire being breathed.
After numerous dry runs, mainly to get the coordination right, they were ready for the final take. If it turned out well, they were to let the little kids hear it; with any luck they’d scare the socks off them. The introduction went like clockwork, Ørn struck the largest pot lid with a ladle, and Jonas announced in a deep, dramatic voice: ‘Grorud Radio Theatre presents’ — then left a nice pause for effect before intoning in an, if possible, even deeper voice: ‘St George and the Fearful Dragon.’ Another clang of the pot lid. The first part also passed without a hitch, went better than ever before; Little Eagle flew back and forth between the various articles scattered around the room and on the table, screwed and scraped, wafted and rattled, he was the soul of confidence, drumming with his fingers on the tabletop and shaking boxes, ripping clothes — it all sounded quite professional.
St George draws near to the dragon’s lair, in the middle of a dark and forbidding forest; the wind howls, the leaves tremble, the air is rent by a scream: Jonas makes his voice as high-pitched as possible, a princess’s cry for help, a maiden in distress, Jonas switches to the narrator’s neutral, but no less compelling tone, tells how St George leaps off his horse, walks through dry leaves — Little Eagle rakes through strips of paper — sees the dragon come flying towards him — Ørn waves the leather jacket frantically in the air, it sounds good, it sounds really great, this is going to be such a success — the dragon lands with a thud — Ørn jumps off the sofa onto the floor, the dragon comes charging through the undergrowth — Ørn stamps orange boxes to smithereens — they had practically had to go down on their bended knees to get these particular, orange boxes, with slats of just the right thinness, from the grocer — it sounded diabolical, like an elephant, a dinosaur, or yes, a dragon approaching. ‘Now you shall die!’ Jonas cries in St George’s heroic, fearless voice, a challenge which is supposed to be followed by the dragon’s spine-chilling, stupefying fiery breath; Ørn is right on schedule with a lighter held in front of a blowlamp which has so far been used for nothing more exciting than melting Swix ski-wax, but which will now make small children turn weak at the knees; in his mind Ørn is already over by the pail that will lend resonance to the dragon’s hideous roar, but first a terrible blast of flame, the only problem is that suddenly the lighter won’t work, it only goes click, click, Ørn tries frantically, but it’s no good, click click it says, Jonas gazes at him in desperation, it had all been going so beautifully up until now, and there is something about this situation which makes Ørn laugh, to roar with laughter, to laugh in a most particular way, almost gloatingly, spitefully is perhaps the word or carelessly, because he doesn’t take this quite so seriously as Jonas; Little Eagle laughs and laughs, as if he can’t believe this is happening, laughs resignedly, in disbelief, howls with laughter, pops the tin pail over his head in an attempt to smother his mirth, but carries on laughing inside it. ‘You don’t scare me, vile dragon, foul abductor of innocent women,’ Jonas continues in St George’s voice, doing the sword-out-of-scabbard sound, wanting to see the play through to the end for the practice, if nothing else, runs a bread knife over the vacuum’s metal tube, while Little Eagle just laughs and laughs, so hard that he topples off the sofa and knocks over the table, and all his props, including the microphone, making a deafening racket, and they have to stop, switch off the tape recorder. ‘Drat it, that’s just like you, Ørn,’ Jonas fumed, ‘ruining the very end.’
Jonas runs the tape back, though, wanting to hear the recording anyway, to be on the safe side. And it is then, when they come to the fatal point, that it dawns on him: It’s perfect! The clicks sound sinister, you would never guess it was a lighter, it sounds as if the dragon is doing something venomous, working up to something, with its forked tongue. And Ørn’s laughter heightens the tension, not least because it is unintentional, and preceded by a hair-raising pffffft — Ørn’s involuntary reaction actually gave the impression of an honest-to-goodness dragon, a rather menacing, utterly surprising sound, from inside the pail in particular it bordered on something beyond their understanding, a kind of smiling malice, something even more dangerous than a roaring, fire-breathing dragon. Brilliant. And the din produced when Little Eagle knocked everything over provided the cataclysmic soundtrack to a swift but fierce battle in which — no one could be in any doubt — the dragon was killed.
What sort of sound does a dragon make?
An apologetic little laugh?
This was the day on which Jonas learned that creativity can lie in the unexpected, in things one hadn’t thought of, and above all else: in simplicity. Not only that but it might even be that a dragon was killed — for real. He felt proud when he stood with that tape in his hands. To some extent he understood that this spool of tape, this discus of invisible tracks, was more important, that in the long run it also stood for something more valuable than the actual machinery, the tape recorder. At the back of his mind he was also haunted by the thought that these background noises, when isolated, would form the basis for a very different story.
They ran the play for some of the little kids as planned — against their mothers’ will, no doubt — and scared the living daylights out of them. No one could understand why a number of younger children at Solhaug suddenly started waking up in the night, crying and muttering about dragons and not letting them get them. ‘There, there,’ their mothers said. ‘There’s no such thing as dragons.’ And having thought about it for a moment they might have added: ‘Not in Norway anyway.’