(an affectionate pastiche)
So did I tell you about the time when I was a teenager and me and my friend, Jan Vidar, tried to go to a party in Kristiansand on new year’s eve? His friend, Tom, said he would buy the beer for him, and dropped the bottles off in his car. But Jan Vidar’s brother found it and made him return it and swap it back for the money. Tom winked at us, and later we went and got it back. I had to hide it in the woods outside my house before evening. I was wary of my father, but his mood always changed whenever our grandparents were coming, and he said alright we could go to town until 2 in the morning. They think we’ll be going to a friend’s house, so we’ll need to hitchhike and then take a bus. So I said goodbye to my grandma and started the walk through the snow to Jan Vidar’s house after collecting the beer. The snow had settled on the dark bottles, and the sky was luminous and open. Every time a car comes by, I think it’s my uncle Gunnar, so I have to hide the beer in the ditch and walk on, but it’s not him so I go back and collect it. Past the parquet factory, where all the kids work in the evenings, assembling palettes. It was piecework, and they were country kids, never realised that the tally could be cheated. For a while I was worldly and a curiosity, the local girls used to cycle ten kilometres just to take a look at me, but there was nothing interesting in them to me. Past the frozen waterfall and the ravine where it was never warm even in summer. At the top there was Pal’s house, he was slow on the uptake and we could tease him, his mother was always angry with red eyes. I was rude to her once, and laughed about it with Jan Vidar afterwards, and now she always looks at me with hatred. His house is a mess, broken machinery all over the lawns, why do people want to live like that? I thought, or do they think it’s normal?. His father was always quiet and kind, and would let us in to play anyway.