At home we played La Boheme with Jussi Bjorling and Victoria de los Angeles on the gramophone, and my mother always began sniffling when Musetta drags in the sick Mimi in act four. Then I'd go into another room, leaving the door open behind me. Not because I wanted to hear my mother crying, but because I was listening to the music. And then I could shed some tears of delight, too.

Before I'd seen Chaplin's Limelight, Puccini and Tchai- kovsky were the only real geniuses I'd encountered. When I was at home by myself, I would play the final movement of the Symphonic Pathetique. It would have been very embarra.s.s- ing if my mother had found me out. I was big enough to like capers, but even I had to admit that I was a bit young to be in raptures over cla.s.sical music. I tried to play the music at full volume whilst keeping an ear out for my mother on the stairs. Sometimes the little man would stand by the front door and listen for footsteps down in the lobby.

I had read about Tchaikovsky in the encyclopaedia. He had died of cholera just a few days after he'd given the first performance of the Symphonic Pathetique. His life's work was complete. After the first performance of the Symphonic Pathetique he no longer bothered to sterilise his drinking water. He'd written his own requiem, and now he had no more tunes left inside him. He was finished with this world.

I, too, felt rather finished with the world when the last chords of the Symphonic Pathetique faded away.

Death was something my mother and I never talked about. I never talked to her about girls either. I was just as careful to conceal a Playboy magazine as I'd been to cover up listening to the Symphonic Pathetique.

I was only seven when we saw East of Eden with James Dean as Cal. My mother almost broke down at the end of the film when Cal's girlfriend has to beg his father to love him. 'It hurts not to be loved,' she said. 'It makes people evil. Show him that you love him. Try! Please!'

Cal's father hated his son because he thought the boy had taken his mother's part when she'd left her husband and children and become a steely brothel-keeper. Before he died he did manage a reconciliation with his son. He told him to send the nurse away. 'I want you to look after me,' he said. It was the same as saying that he loved his son.

My mother found it hard to speak about that film. I realised she was the one who'd told my father to move out.

That wasn't normal in those days. It was rare for a mother with a small child to throw the father out of their flat.

As I was going to bed that evening, she suggested we ask my father to Sunday lunch. It was all right by me, but nothing came of it, and I wasn't going to nag her into picking up the phone and inviting him.

I had certain vague, almost dreamlike impressions of things that had happened in the flat before my father left. It is possible to remember the atmosphere of a dream without actually being able to break the dream itself. I knew there was something cold and hard that I was trying to repress, and so well did I consign it to oblivion that I could no longer remember what it was I was trying to forget.

The only thing I recalled about that time was some mysterious things I'd dreamt about a man who was exactly my height, but who was nevertheless a real, grown-up man with a hat and a stick and that, suddenly one morning, he'd appeared in the flat in broad daylight. He'd moved into our flat around the same time my father moved out.

I imagined that perhaps there was someone out in dreamland who was missing him. Possibly the little man had left his wife and children too, or perhaps he'd been kicked out of the fairy tale where he belonged because he'd misbehaved. But it was also feasible that he commuted between two realities. I wondered whether the little man sneaked back to dreamland during the night while I was asleep. That wouldn't be so strange, because I certainly went there when I slept. The really odd thing was that the little fellow was capable of swaggering about the flat in the middle of the day.

I was the only person in my cla.s.s with divorced parents. But the father of one of the girls was a communist, and Hans Olav's dad had been in prison.

Having divorced parents wasn't a problem. I preferred being with them one at a time. I also think I got better Christmas presents from my mother and father than other children got from their parents. I always got two presents.

My mother and father couldn't even co-operate over gifts.

On the contrary, I think they vied to give me the nicer present. They never gave anything to each other.

My father took me to watch skating heats and ski- jumping. He was an expert on lap times and form ratings.

It's not his fault I've turned out the way I have. We went to Holmenkollen to watch the three ski-jumping Ts: Toralf Engan, Torbjorn Yggeseth and Torgeir Brandtzasg. They jumped before Wirkola, the supreme champion. That was easy. Jumping before Wirkola wasn't difficult.

When I was eight, my father and I took the boat to Copenhagen. We only spent one night there, but that even- ing we went to the Tivoli Gardens. I thought I'd been to an amus.e.m.e.nt park before, but the Tivoli in Copenhagen was worlds away from 'Ivar's Tivoli' in Oslo. I felt like a tourist from some Third World country. What must Danish children think of us Norwegians when they go to 'Ivar's Tivoli' in Oslo, I wondered in horror and dismay.

My father was in high spirits. I think he was feeling rather proud of himself for getting me out of the country and a safe distance away from my mother. On the ship he'd said in a man-to-man sort of way that a few days to herself would do my mother the world of good. It wasn't true, I felt sure she wanted to come to Copenhagen with me, but it had obviously been out of the question once my father had proposed that he and I should go. I think my father knew that I'd really rather have gone to the Tivoli Gardens with my mother. Then my mother and I could have strolled amongst the crowds and gossiped about the things we saw and thought. My mother and I often had identical notions.

Or we could have gone to a cafe and had a nice chat.

My father's trouser pockets were full of Danish money and he wanted us to ride the dodgems and the ghost train, the merry-go-round and the big dipper, the Ferris wheel and the tunnel of love. I was only eight, but I was acutely aware of the embarra.s.sment of having to do the tunnel of love with my father, bad breath and all. It was awful being jammed in a little boat with him, listening to artificial birdsong in a tunnel full of paper flowers and pastel shades.

I think my father felt pretty pained as well, because he didn't utter a word. I was scared he might suddenly put his arm around me and say something like: 'Isn't this lovely, son?

Don't you think so, Petter?' The worst thing of all was that I felt convinced it was just what he wanted to do, only he didn't dare put his arm round my shoulders because he knew I wouldn't like it. Perhaps that was why neither of us spoke.

It was mainly for my father's sake that I went on all the rides. I was more interested in going round looking at everything the Tivoli Gardens contained. I'd made up my mind to note every detail, right down to each little tombola and hot-dog stand. From the very first instant I'd known that this visit would entail a lot of work when I got back, I'd been seriously inspired. I walked around thinking that soon I'd be going home to create the world's finest amus.e.m.e.nt park. This was after I'd given up drawing, so I had to make an effort to remember exactly how everything was. In the end I succeeded in forming a detailed picture of Copen- hagen's Tivoli Gardens, but I had to draw it in my head, I had to get it all off pat. It wasn't easy to concentrate, because now and then I had to look up at my father and say something to him too - he mustn't think I was moping.

Just before we left, I won a soft toy in the shape of a red tiger. I gave it to a little girl who was crying. My father thought I was being kind, he didn't realise that I wasn't interested in red, cuddly tigers. If my mother had seen me win such a thing, she'd have given one of her characteristic peals of laughter.

Even before our visit to the Gardens had come to an end, I'd mentally constructed a ghost train with everything from dangling skeletons to ghosts and monsters. But I'd also positioned a real live man in the middle of my tunnel, a perfectly ordinary man in a hat and coat, who might, for instance, be eating a carrot. I imagined that the people riding the ghost train would give an extra, ear-piercing scream when they suddenly caught sight of a real person in the tunnel.

In certain situations the sight of a live person can be as scary as that of a ghost, especially in a ghost tunnel. Ghosts inhabit the imagination, and if something real enters the imagination, it can seem almost as eerie as if some fantasy figure had suddenly loomed up in real life.

I was truly frightened the first time I saw that little man with his bamboo stick outside the confines of a dream, but the novelty soon wore off. If elves and trolls began to stream out of the woods all of a sudden, we'd naturally be alarmed, but sooner or later we would get used to them. We'd have to.

Once I dreamt I'd found a purse containing four silver dollars. I'd have been pretty shaken if I'd woken up and found myself holding that same purse in my hand. I'd have had to try to convince myself that I was still asleep, and then make another attempt to wake up.

We think we're awake even when we're dreaming, but we know we're awake when we're not sleeping. I had a theory that the little man with the walking-stick lay sleeping somewhere in dreamland and only dreamt that he inhabited reality. Even at the time of my visit to the Tivoli Gardens I was a good bit taller than him. I'd begun to call him Metre Man because he was only a metre tall.

I said nothing about these new rides to my father; I wasn't trying to complain. Perhaps it was a bit unfair that the result of all this inspiration was to blossom in my mother's vicinity: she became more and more jealous because my father was the one who'd taken me to Copenhagen. 'You've got amus.e.m.e.nt parks on the brain,' she said a few days after I got home. I observed that perhaps that was because I'd been a huge tivoli in a previous life. My mother laughed. 'You mean you worked in a huge tivoli in a previous life,' she said. I shook my head and emphasised that I'd actually been an entire amus.e.m.e.nt park.

I took plenty of punishment as a child. It was never my father who hit me, or my mother.

I reckoned that the reason I never got smacked by them, was that they were divorced. Because they didn't share the same house they could never agree about when I deserved punishment. My mother was only too painfully aware that if she were hard on me, my father would be the first to hear about it. Sometimes I'd ring my father and ask if I could stay up an hour or two longer than my mother had decreed. He always supported me when he glimpsed an opportunity of making me happy and my mother cross at the same time, thus completing his satisfaction. And when I needed more money than my mother was willing to give me, I would also ring my father. My father was never angry. He only saw me once a week. We agreed this was enough.

It was the boys at school who beat me up, and that wasn't much to boast about, because I wasn't big or strong. They called me Little Petter Spider. When I'd been younger, my father and I had visited the Geological Museum and we'd seen a piece of amber with a spider, millions of years old, embedded in it, and I'd mentioned this spider at school on one occasion. We'd been learning about electricity and I informed the cla.s.s that the word 'electricity' was derived from the Greek word for 'amber'. From then on I was known only as Little Petter Spider.

Though small in stature, I had a big mouth. That was why I got beaten up. I was especially glib when there were adults close by or when I was just about to hop on a bus or lock myself into the flats. I could get so carried away at moments like these that I never gave a thought to the following day. I wasn't good at what is now called forward-planning, I never took the trouble to make a risk a.s.sessment. I would come face to face with the boys again, of course, and when I did there wasn't always a grown-up about.

I was much more skilful with words than my peers, and better at telling stories too. I found it easier to express myself than many of the pupils who were three and four cla.s.ses above me. This brought me many a bruise. There was too little emphasis on freedom of speech in those days. We'd learnt about human rights at school, but we were never reminded that freedom of speech applies just as much to children and amongst children.

On one occasion, Ragnar sent me hurtling into a drying rack so hard that it cut my head open. As soon as I began to bleed I found the courage to say a whole lot of things I'd otherwise have kept to myself. I dished up some startling home truths about Ragnar's family - for example, that his father was always getting drunk with down-and-outs - and Ragnar didn't retaliate now. He could at least have answered my accusations, but Ragnar wasn't much good at talking, he just stood there and stared at me bleeding. So I called him a cowardy custard who didn't dare shut me up because everything I said was true. I claimed to have once seen him devouring dog t.u.r.ds. Next, I said that his mother had to wash him on a big changing mat in the living-room because he p.i.s.sed and s.h.i.tted in his trousers. Everyone knew his mother bought nappies at the shop, I observed. She bought so many she got a discount. Blood was pouring from my head. Four or five boys stood watching me solemnly.

My hand told me that my hair was all wet. I felt cold. I said that the whole street knew that Ragnar's father was a country b.u.mpkin. I also knew, I said, why he'd moved to the city. It was a secret that even Ragnar might not be privy to, but one that I would willingly divulge now. Ragnar's father had to move to Os...o...b..cause he'd been arrested by the police, and the reason he'd been arrested was that he'd been s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g sheep. He screwed them so much that many of the sheep got ill, I said. They got s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g sickness, acute s.c.r.e.w.i.n.g sickness, and one of the sheep had even died of it.

That sort of thing's not too popular, I revealed, not even north of Oslo. After this last piece of information they all ran off. I wasn't quite sure if this was due to the sheep north of Oslo or the blood pouring from my head. But now there was a big pool of it on the tarmac at my feet. It surprised me that the blood near my brain was so viscous and sticky. I'd imagined it to be a shade brighter and a little thinner than other blood. For some moments my gaze shifted to a luminous sign over the bas.e.m.e.nt entrance. BOMB SHEL- TER it said in large, green letters, and I tried to read the words backwards, but the green letters just made me feel queasy. Suddenly Metre Man came rushing round the corner of the building. I was already a head and a half taller than him. He looked up at me with a startled expression, pointed up at my hair with his bamboo stick and exclaimed: ' Well, well! What now?'

I felt unhappy about returning to my mother, because I knew she hated the sight of blood, and especially mine. But I had no choice. As soon as I got in, my mother wrapped my head in cotton towels until I looked like an Arab, and we took a taxi to Accident & Emergency. I had to have twelve st.i.tches. The doctor said that was the record for the day.

Afterwards we went home and had pancakes.

This is recalled reality. I still have a broad scar on my forehead. It's not the only scar I incurred. I've got several similar 'distinguishing marks'. Now, at least, they've stopped noting that sort of thing on my pa.s.sport.

Of course my mother wanted to know what had hap- pened. I said I'd got into a fight with a boy I didn't know because he said that my dad screwed sheep. For once my mother took pity on my father. She was usually the first to slag him off behind his back, but a line had to be drawn somewhere. I think she saw something n.o.ble in my defence of my father's honour. 'I can see why you got angry, Petter,'

was all she said. 'One doesn't say that sort of thing. I quite agree.'

I never told tales. Telling tales was like mimicking real events. It was far too ba.n.a.l. Squealing or lashing out was only for people who weren't good at expressing themselves.

I got thumped less once we began to get homework. That was because I helped the other pupils in the cla.s.s with their tasks. I never sat down and did school work with them - that would have been far too boring, and I was frightened of making friends. But it became more and more usual for me to do my own homework first and, when I'd finished that, to do the same thing once or twice more. It was these extra answers that I could give away or sell for a bar of chocolate or an ice-cream to one of the others in the cla.s.s.

As a rule we could choose between three or four essay subjects. When, for example, I'd written the story 'Almost an Adventure', I'd get an itch to do the essay ent.i.tled 'When the Lights Went Out' as well. But I wasn't allowed to hand in both essays. So I could give one of them away to Tore or Ragnar.

Helping Tore and Ragnar with their homework was a good idea, because then they wouldn't beat me up. That wasn't princ.i.p.ally out of grat.i.tude. I think they were frightened I'd announce to the cla.s.s that I'd done their essays for them. Saying so wouldn't get me into trouble with the teacher. It wasn't my fault we were only allowed to give one answer each. And I hadn't handed in Tore's or Ragnar's work. They had appropriated these essays themselves. It was obvious.

I never went round touting such extra pieces of work, but gradually cla.s.smates would approach me and ask if they could purchase some a.s.sistance. A number of transactions took place this way, and they weren't always done for money or chocolate, but often for quite different sorts of returns. It might be nothing more than a couple of obscene words in a needlework cla.s.s or a s...o...b..ll placed on the teacher's chair. I remember such homework help continu- ing to the age when a task could be bartered with one of the boys in return for the loosening of a female cla.s.smate's bra strap. Only one or two girls in our cla.s.s had begun to use a bra, and they weren't the nicest ones. While such favours remained outstanding the debtor was in danger, as I might eventually feel myself obliged to tell the teacher that I'd taken it upon myself to help ivind or Hans Olav with his homework.

Homework help wasn't limited to Norwegian. I could offer written answers in geography, religious instruction, local history and maths. All that mattered was that they weren't too similar to my own answers. First, I'd do my own maths homework without any errors. Thereafter it didn't take long to work up a couple more sets of answers, but this time I had to insert the requisite number of errors in the sums. It wouldn't have been at all plausible for Tore to hand in homework that was totally error free. Tore was satisfied with a C+, so I had to prepare a C+ answer. If someone else also wanted a C+ answer, it had to be of the same standard, but obviously the mistakes couldn't be the same.

It wasn't that uncommon for me to produce homework for a D or D+. There was a market at this standard too.

I well understood why Arne and Lisbeth couldn't be bothered to do homework when the results never produced more than a D+ or a C-. However, I never took any payment for D answers, there had to be a limit. I considered it payment enough to do them. I was particularly fond of producing answers with lots of mistakes. They required more ingenuity than unblemished ones. They demanded more imagination.

If I was really strapped for cash, and my mother and father were on speaking terms for once and neither would grant me more than my regular pocket money, I would occasion- ally produce a B-A or even an A. I believe I once even managed to deliver an A+ in geography for Hege, who was a championship dancer at Ase and Finn's Dancing School and was practising like mad for a samba and cha-cha-cha compet.i.tion. On such occasions I would often introduce a small error into my own offering, and thus aim for a B+ so as not to eclipse the other answer. Then the teacher would write 'A little lacking in concentration, Petter?' - or some- thing in that vein. It was all so amusing. Even then, in the early sixties, a few teachers had introduced what later became known as 'differentiation'. Maintaining that an answer meriting a B+ was lacking in concentration was a differentiated comment. Had it been Lisbeth's work, he would have written 'Congratulations, Lisbeth! A really solid piece of homework.' The teacher didn't know that I'd made the mistake for fun. He didn't realise I'd cheated just to get a worse mark.

The upshot was that Hege had to read her exceptional geography task to the entire cla.s.s. She hadn't reckoned on that, but the teacher was adamant that she go up at once and sit at his desk. He came down and took Hege's place, which was next to mine. I sat at the third desk from the front in the middle row, and Hege sat on my right, only now the teacher was there. So Hege began to read. She was one of the best at reading aloud, but now she read so quietly that the teacher had to ask her to speak up. Hege raised her voice, but after a moment it broke and she had to begin again. She glanced down at me several times, and once I waved discreetly back with my left index finger. When she'd finished reading the teacher began to clap, not for her delivery, but for the content of the essay, and so I clapped as well. As Hege made her way back to her desk I asked the teacher if we could watch her do the cha-cha-cha as well, but he said jocularly that that would have to wait for another time. Hege looked as if she were about to pull a face at me, but she didn't dare.

Perhaps she was afraid I might suddenly s.n.a.t.c.h glory away from her by telling the cla.s.s that it was I who'd gallantly stepped in to do her homework while she practised so intensely for a dancing compet.i.tion. There could never be any question of that, as Hege had been most punctual in paying what had been agreed - I'd already got the two and a half kroner. But this didn't seem to put her mind at rest. She didn't realise just how often I helped cla.s.smates with their homework. It wasn't the first time I'd sat listening as an opus of mine was read to the cla.s.s and, far from minding, I relished it. I was the Good Samaritan. I helped the whole cla.s.s.

Hege was in the same set as me when we started grammar school and in the first year we had an amusing wager. Laila Nipen, one of our teachers, had won a load of money on the lottery and she'd spent it buying a brand new Fiat 500. I think I was the one who suggested that some of us boys might carry the tiny car through the double doors of the school entrance and set it down right in the middle of the a.s.sembly hall. Hege thought it was a great idea, but she didn't think we'd got the nerve. I saw my chance and suggested she swear a solemn oath to come on a romantic trip to the woods with me if Laila's Fiat made it to the a.s.sembly hall within the week. If it didn't, I'd do her maths homework for an entire month. A couple of days later the car was in the hall. The entire operation took just ten minutes, during a break when we knew there was a staff meeting. We even had the temerity to tie an outsized, light- blue ribbon round the little red car to make it look like a proper lottery prize. For its part, the school never found out who'd been responsible for that mischievous little prank, but Hege was now honour-bound to take a trip to the woods with me. She didn't try to overlook the obvious subtext in 'romantic'. Hege was no fool, she knew just how scheming I could be, and after all, I had helped to carry an entire car into the hall just for her sake. Anyway, I think she liked me. We found a secluded, unlocked shack. It was the first time I'd been with a naked girl. We weren't more than fourteen, but she was fully developed. I thought she was the loveliest thing I'd ever touched.

Now and then I used to help the teachers too. I was constantly feeding them amusing ideas for essay t.i.tles and other homework. A couple of times I offered to help the teacher mark our maths work. On other occasions I might ask for further, or more detailed, information about a subject the teacher had touched on in cla.s.s. If we'd been learning about the Egyptians in a history lesson, I would exhort the teacher to tell the cla.s.s about the Rosetta stone. Without this stone, scholars would never have been able to interpret hieroglyphics, I explained, and so we'd have known very little about how the ancient Egyptians thought. When the teacher told us about Copernicus, I asked if he could touch on Kepler and Newton too, because it's well known that not all Copernicus' suppositions were correct.