Fallen Angels Page 2

  He scrutinised me. Then he shot me a gentle smile. ‘It’s strange, meeting you again after such a long time. A lot of water’s flowed under the bridge, eh?’

  I nodded in agreement. A lot of water indeed.

  Then he carried on up. He rang the doorbell as he put the key in the lock and held the door open for me.

  We went into a long, dark hallway. On the floor was an open, light-brown leather satchel. Shoes and boots were strewn across the floor and on a chair there were piled four or five jackets of various sizes and styles. On a little chest of drawers I espied an old-fashioned black telephone under a stack of brochures, free newspapers and unopened junk mail. Somewhere nearby I felt the monotonous throb of disco rhythms.

  The door to a blue kitchen was open. Plates, cups, glasses and breakfast items were still on the table and a somewhat sickly smell of rancid fat and stale carrots wafted out to us.

  Jakob closed the kitchen door and opened another, to the sitting room. ‘Come in, Varg.’ Then he shouted: ‘Maria! Are you at home?’

  After an unhurried pause a door opened further down the corridor and the pop music became louder. ‘What’s up?’ a young girl said.

  Jakob’s voice was drowned out as he advanced down the corridor.

  I looked around the large sitting room, which was L-shaped as two rooms had been merged and the dividing wall replaced with a big, white sliding door. At the back, on wooden flooring treated with lye, there was a black grand piano surrounded by rag rugs and black-and-white pictures on the walls. One wall was covered with shelves of books and sheet music, and inside a half-open cupboard I glimpsed a not inconsiderable collection of records and cassettes.

  The part of the room I was in now was full of contrasts. The majority of the furniture was old-fashioned, in a kind of imitation baroque style, with ornate legs and upholstered in a smooth, brown-and-green patterned material. Two modern, black leather armchairs, two others in a burlap fabric and a child’s spindle-back chair completed and reinforced the impression of a lack of system.

  In the traditional sixties style wall shelving were a radio, a record turntable, a CD and cassette player and in the middle of the floor a TV set with a VCR underneath. Beside the bow-legged baroque sofa was a rack crammed full with newspapers, and in all the free spaces, on the wall shelving, the table, floor and shelves were piles of newspapers, magazines, books and sheet music. Strewn across the floor were Lego blocks, dolls, Playmobil pieces, sketch pads and crayons in the most delightful chaos I had experienced since I was divorced.

  The mixture of style and content was apparent on the walls as well. Crucifixes and icons hung side by side with graphics by Elly Prestegård and Ingri Egeberg, a watercolour by Oddvar Torsheim and a Hardanger landscape. A pavement artist had sketched the three children at various points in their short lives. All three looked as children do in such sketches: like tourists to life before their visas run out.

  The eldest child was entering the sitting-room now, with her father.

  Maria wore grey jeans and a pink jumper. Her hair was fairer than Jakob’s, but she had the same round facial features he’d had. Her eyes were blue and ill at ease, her mouth was adolescent, and she wore a pink lipstick and blushed becomingly when her father said: ‘Say hello to Varg, Maria. He’s an old classmate of mine.’

  She passed me a limp hand and mumbled something incomprehensible. Then she beat a hasty retreat to her room.

  ‘She‘s going out,’ Jakob said awkwardly, as though he still hadn’t got used to his daughter making arrangements he no longer authorised. ‘We’ll have to pick up Grete from the crèche and take her to Åse’s. I’ll ring her and ask if that’s alright. Petter can look after himself when he comes home. I’ll leave a note for him.’

  He cast around, heaved a pile of newspapers to one side with his foot, gave up trying to create a better impression and went out to make a call.

  Åse?

  I tried to remember his sister, but I could barely recall that he even had one.

  While he was talking on the telephone, I picked up a magazine and leafed through. It was one of those literary journals where you need to be relentlessly academic in order to work out the layout and require a degree in semiotics to understand a word. I studied the pictures.

  Jakob reappeared in the doorway, carrying a plastic bag in one hand. ‘That was fine. Shall we go?’ He shouted down the corridor: ‘Bye, Maria.’ But the only response came from a-ha. He shrugged and guided me back out through the door. ‘Kids,’ he muttered.

  We picked up his youngest child from the crèche by St John’s church. She was wearing a dark-red raincoat, with long yellow cuffs to protect her hands from the rain, and blue-and-white rubber boots. Her cheeks were flushed and gooseberry jelly ran from both nostrils. She smiled as she met us, revealing two missing front teeth.

  Her shyness was different from her sister’s. She didn’t blush, she watched me from the corner of her eye all the way from the gate to the car. In one hand she was holding a blue plastic bucket with a handle that had come away on one side. In the other, she was holding the wettest teddy bear I had ever seen. ‘She won’t let it go for an instant,’ Jakob mumbled. ‘I have to wash it when she’s asleep, otherwise she’d insist she went into the washing machine with it.’

  Jakob’s sister lived in a street off Nye Sandviksvei with a man who worked on oil rigs and a Saint Bernard that had to be at least a hundred years old. It barely batted an eyelid as we passed it on the stairs. ‘Åse hasn’t got any children,’ Jakob said, as if that explained everything.

  Åse opened the door and I still didn’t remember her. She was ten years younger than us and as such belonged to a different generation. Now she was a new experience: tall, wearing a colourful plaid smock, light-brown elephant cord trousers and grey felt slippers. She was the archetypal mamma and I had an inkling why her beaming smile never seemed to reach her eyes.

  We shook hands and of course she didn’t remember me. Neither of us gave the impression we had missed anything.

  She and Jakob agreed that Grete might as well stay the night.

  Then we drove up to Stølen and parked the car. That was the last thing we did while still in full control of ourselves. The next few days passed on autopilot, as they often do when you have lost all ability to make decisions.

  3

  We started gently, each with a beer, in a bar reminiscent of a folk-craft gift shop, from the hard, wooden benches to the buxom waitresses. The faces around us were plump and bland, either because they were young or because their owners had drunk too much beer. There was a buzz of conversation around us.

  ‘How long’s it been, Varg? Since we last saw each other properly? I mean, talked?’

  ‘Since 1965.’

  His eyes assumed a faraway look. ‘1965? Can you really remember that with such accuracy?’

  I nodded.

  ‘1965,’ he said. ‘Johnson was president of the USA. The Vietnam War was escalating. The Beatles brought out Rubber Soul. The Harpers were at the peak of their career, and you and I…’

  ‘Had gone our separate ways.’

  He beckoned for two more beers and they arrived at the table before the froth had had time to settle.

  ‘Odd how life goes in circles, Varg. We could draw geometrical shapes. Find where they intersect.’

  ‘In the strangest of places.’

  ‘You’re right. In the strangest of places.’

  ‘How did it all end with The Harpers?’

  He didn’t answer straightaway, but hummed the tune of one of their most popular songs and finished it on an ugly, dissonant note. ‘But we had some good years, Varg.’

  ‘In The Harpers?’

  He grimaced. ‘You and I. Before, I mean.’ He took a swig. ‘I often think back on childhood as the only truly happy time in our lives.’

  ‘You may be right about that.’

  ‘No responsibilities, no worries, apart from someone threatening to beat you up after school, but we k
new from experience this would pass. By the following week all these things would be forgotten.’

  ‘Yes, often as not.’

  ‘The seasons, Varg. They were as long as eternity. Winters, we would go tobogganing in the streets where there were hardly any cars. Or hang on to the back of the Minde bus down to the big Klosteret square, and for another few hundred metres, if we were really lucky.’

  ‘We used to call it bumper skiing.’

  ‘Yes, that’s right. And the summers when we swam in Nordnes from the seventeenth of May. Springtime with all the street games, autumn with bike trips to the orchards in Minde. All…’ he puckered his lips and said sadly ‘…gone.’

  ‘Remember how Paul would sit at the back of the class and make cheeky comments? And how Bergesen had an extra-long pointer made by the woodwork teacher so that he could whack Paul around the head from his desk?’

  ‘Paul, yeah. Let’s give him a bell, shall we?’

  ‘Good idea.’

  ‘I’ll do it.’

  While Jakob was phoning I allowed the atmosphere of a country & western festival to wash over me. Most of the people around me were half our age and belonged to the v.b.c. generation: videos, beer and crisps. A spare tyre was their trademark; they were sitting knees akimbo and horseless, knocking back the beer one early winter afternoon in this western saloon. Outside, darkness had fallen, a grizzled grey because of the sleet, artificially suffused by Bryggen’s toxic-yellow street lighting.

  Jakob returned with two more beers. ‘Paul will be round soon.’

  ‘He’s been round for years,’ I said. ‘He looks like he’s permanently six months’ pregnant.’

  Jakob shook his head. ‘To think Paul’s a journalist. Well, he was never short of a witty word. But I always saw him as a grocer. What do you reckon?’

  ‘Grocers are a dying breed. Not even the RSPCA’s worried about them.’

  ‘And you…’ He studied me with cheery distrust. ‘Surely you don’t call yourself a detective, do you?’

  ‘What do you think I should call myself? A consultant?’

  ‘Why not? A private-investigation consultant. No, I know: a crime consultant. Doesn’t that sound more confidence-inspiring?’

  He leaned forward. ‘So if I needed help one day … all I’d have to do was call you.’

  ‘Fine, as long as you don’t call me a private dick. I’ve been called that a few times already,’ I said, downing a mouthful of amber nectar.

  A shadow fell over our table. We looked up. There was Paul Finckel, hips swaying and hands splayed out to the side to represent a tutu as he burst into an old Bergensian song: ‘Ingeborg, she…’

  Jakob joined in the refrain: ‘Ingeborg…’

  At the neighbouring table two youths clapped their hands loudly, more for exercise than out of any enthusiasm. Paul Finckel turned around anyway and gracefully acknowledged the applause, raised a finger for ‘a beer, no, three over here, frøken, for me and my friends’, then dropped down heavily on the vacant part of the wooden bench where I was sitting.

  ‘What’s the deal?’ he asked, looking around.

  The deal was three beers and off to the next bar, a little further into Bryggen. Here the clientele was older, drinkers were more hardened and it was possible to have a conversation without being assaulted by music.

  Like in Alice in Wonderland, we didn’t just drink from bottles that made us smaller than we were, we became younger too. Around the table with the checked cloth we shrank into three young boys, caught somewhere in the critical vacuum between ten and thirteen, ready to launch ourselves into life’s mysteries.

  Paul Finckel regained the hair he had lost on top, recovered the Elvis quiff that his thin hair had never quite been able to emulate, sat at his desk at the back with the eternal half-smirk on his lips, a thorn in every teacher’s side and a joker for whom success was predestined. He moved back into Abels gate, the short, steep street between Nordnesveien and Haugeveien, the middle son of three, but the only one with innate wit, the brother of two sisters, all the children of an electrician called Per, and he had a narrow, rectangular face beneath a mane of fair hair, which gave rise locally to the inevitable nickname of Lys-pæren: the light bulb.

  Jakob Aasen became beardless and pimply from a very young age, a thoughtful model pupil from Claus Frimannsgate, son of a shop assistant in a respectable gentlemen’s outfitter’s and a mother who taught the piano, at home.

  ‘Are your parents still alive?’ I asked.

  ‘My mother’s dead. That’s her grand piano I have. My dad’s alive though. But the shop where he worked has been bought up by the fashion people, Bik Bok.’

  Paul Finckel burst into loud laughter. ‘Do you know what Oddvar Torsheim, the artist, once said to me during an interview? “I can’t talk to anyone wearing a Bik Bok T-shirt. When I first saw the words emblazoned on his chest, I thought it was his name.”’

  We laughed with him.

  And me?

  I was the only son of a tram conductor who studied Norse mythology in his free time and for whom the greatest moment in his life was giving his name to his son. I moved back to the crooked, green house, in the middle of an alley where there was now a block of flats and a rough-and-ready football pitch, straight across from Anita, who had the tightest sweater and biggest baps in the street, excluding all the forty-plus heavy-weights with their pre-war jugs and windowsills strong enough to support them when they were leaning out and chatting with the neighbours. On dark autumn evenings my eyes were glued to the illuminated blind over the window where Anita undressed, in the hope that I might glimpse a silhouette, a hope which was dashed forever when she became pregnant with Johnny’s child, moved to Paddemyren and took an unretractable step into adult ranks.

  ‘What are you thinking about, Varg?’ Finckel asked.

  I returned to the present. ‘You wouldn’t believe me if I said.’

  ‘I believe most things about you.’ His eyes glinted indecently. ‘It seemed to be doing you some good at any rate.’

  I got up and nodded towards the toilet. ‘I’m just, er…’

  ‘Was it that good?’ Again peals of laughter.

  I looked at them, from above. Jakob and Paul. We hadn’t exactly been the three musketeers and it was more than twenty years ago. But perhaps this would be our last evening together.

  I had stopped counting the beers, I was getting more and more drunk, and I felt as light as an elephant in a parachute. The room felt warm and cosy, with the large wall-paintings of Bergen harbour, the brown partitioned stalls and the straddle-legged waitresses, who seemed to have been there forever. A chorus of growling voices, like good-natured bears waking up, rose and fell, and were gone as the toilet door slammed behind me.

  A man in his mid-fifties was bent over one of the urinals. His shoulder-length hair fell untidily over his forehead, a deep, reddish-brown scar ran diagonally from one bushy eyebrow and his wet mouth was surrounded by fox-red stubble, stained with nicotine. He stood with one hand on the wall to steady himself and the other holding tightly on to the leaning tower of Pisa as though it were the only thing worth clinging to in life.

  When I entered, he looked up and said, ‘Schlompfssmrrf.’

  ‘I quite agree,’ I said.

  ‘Varsjågorogknfff,’ he continued, with great conviction, while addressing my knee.

  I did my duty, buttoned up and asked if I could help in any way.

  He was so taken aback that he almost fell over. But his other hand came to the rescue and he managed to retain his balance. For the first time I understood what he said: ‘Hrrschlemme-n-peace.’

  I nodded, said, enjoy the rest of your day, and rejoined the others. They were ripping the reputations of local politicians to pieces.

  Paul Finckel had decided he wanted to go dancing. ‘I feel like a bit of hokey-cokey,’ he leered.

  Jakob’s head was beginning to loll to the side. ‘I can’t remember the last time I had a dance,’ he slurred.

>   ‘The last time I did doesn’t bear remembering,’ I said.

  ‘Come on,’ Finckel said. ‘It’s not as alarming as it sounds.’

  Hesitantly, we drained our glasses and found our way into the fresh air. Great dollops of sleet were falling, as if breathless angels were blowing misshapen soap bubbles into the town through their trumpets.

  Bergen was like one big Christmas parcel. Spray-painted spruce branches glittered, light bulbs swayed overhead, Santas sat in kitschy shop windows where price tags dominated rather than the items, and from camouflaged speakers blared songs and carols that sounded like canned recordings of bygone children’s parties. All the way up Torgalmenningen they had planted the annual forest of yule trees, and the Salvation Army, busily collecting clothes a few weeks before Christmas, was lightening the load for the City Refuse Department.

  Finckel led the way – across the market square and back in time. ‘Do you two remember when we used to go dancing in Viking Hall; to the Espeland Hall or on the Askøy ferry to Bergheim; or at Kjøbmannen where all the special Easter brews had made their first appearances? Well, you, Jakob, you went everywhere, didn’t you.’

  Jakob nodded. ‘There isn’t a dance venue in Bergen and the region I haven’t played at. But of course we saw everything from a slightly different angle, those of us on stage.’

  ‘If I had wings, I’d fly – with The Harpers to the sky. With The Harpers to the sky,’ Finckel wailed. Then he came down to earth. ‘But, you, Varg, you weren’t often with us, were you?’

  ‘Oh, yes, I was, but maybe not with you, Finckel.’ For some reason I couldn’t warm to the idea of using his Christian name. He went through life as a Finckel and Finckel was what rolled off my tongue.

  But he was right. I seldom went to dances. In those years I preferred the Saturday meets at the parish hall where Rebecca’s father held forth. And many more years were to pass before I went dancing with her…

  We stood in a queue somewhere. Finckel was telling jokes non-stop while Jakob was swaying in heavenly harmony. In front of us Saint Peter in doorman’s uniform was checking that we were wearing a tie and letting in a few at a time.