Per Petterson - Ashes in My Mouth, Sand in My Shoes

And it was summer and Saturday, and Arvid got up early as he always did when he had no school. On weekdays they had to drag him half-unconscious from his bed. It was strange and even he didn’t know why it was like this. But on his days off he jumped on his bike at the crack of dawn and headed for the forest and pedalled along the paths, did motocross and was Basse Hveem. Uncle Rolf had given him a helmet and he had it on. Dad didn’t like it much, do you have to put that bowler on your skull, he would say. He was embarrassed by all sorts of things, like when Arvid wore his Scout uniform outdoors. You look like a Christmas tree, Dad said, and anyway the Scouts are middle class, and it seemed as if he preferred Basse Hveem, who probably wasn’t so middle class.

Arvid stormed down the last hill, swerved into the horse field in the true style, waved modestly to an invisible crowd and dismounted. This was where the horses from the Bjerke Trotting Stadium lazed around, priming themselves for Sunday, and all the kids had their own favourites. Arvid’s was Thunder, who was brown with white socks and a white mane and was such a handsome sight when he raced around that you couldn’t stop yourself from running.

Arvid sat down on a rock to rest and that was when he saw a man curled up under a bush. He jumped up and stared, for there was something familiar about that bundle, and he heard sounds that made the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. The bundle turned and looked at him, and it was Fatso. One brace strap had slipped off, and his shirt had ridden up and his belly spilled out, and it was horrible to see.

Fatso was crying, that was the sound Arvid had heard, and it was the worst thing he had ever experienced, for he had never seen a grown man cry. It was something you stopped doing around the time you were confirmed, the way you stopped wearing nappies a little earlier. At least he hadn’t seen an adult wearing nappies. Those things were automatic, everyone knew that. In a few years he would have hairs round his willy and women got children when they married and so on. He knew about this stuff, you just had to take things as they came without whining, Dad said, and Arvid agreed.

‘You’re crying,’ Arvid said.

‘The hell I am,’ Fatso said. ‘It’s been raining, right. And I’ve been lying here and haven’t dried myself, but I will now.’

That was just nonsense because the forest was tinder-dry when Arvid set out and it had not rained for weeks, so Fatso was lying and knew that Arvid knew it and standing there was getting unpleasant.

‘Would you do me a favour?’ Fatso asked.

‘Can’t,’ Arvid answered. ‘You’re my enemy.’

‘Yes, I know, you’re mine too, that’s not the point. Haven’t you heard of an armistice?’ Arvid hadn’t, but he couldn’t admit it, so he just said:

‘What do you want me to do?’

‘Could you take this wallet …?’ Fatso twisted round and reached into his back pocket, his belly stuck out even more and Arvid looked away. ‘Could you take this and cycle down and give it to my wife? It’s not as full as it should have been, but it’s not as empty as she thinks.’ He held out the wallet to Arvid, but Arvid didn’t feel like taking it.

‘Come on, I’m not a leper!’ Arvid didn’t know what a leper was, but if it had anything to do with his belly or his crying, he was not so sure. He carefully took the wallet by the one corner.

‘She must have it, see, otherwise she goes mad. Tell her I’m coming home, but not quite yet. And then come back and report. And, boy, you can help yourself to a krone.’

The wallet was like a brick, it just got heavier and heavier, and he had to hold it close to his chest with his left hand and steer with his right. That was not easy down the hills in Slettaløkka, but he managed. He didn’t touch the money.

Once down by the terraced house he was so nervous he was shaking, but he rang Fatso’s doorbell and his wife answered, and looked like she had just got up, but she had all her clothes on and there was a light on in the kitchen even though the sun was boiling. He gave her the wallet, said what he had been told to say, and she stood gaping at him as he pedalled down the pathway like a crazy man.

The hills on the way back up were as tough and unforgiving as blue clay, and several times he thought maybe he should turn round, but he didn’t, and when he reached the top Fatso was sitting on a tree stump crying again. His shirt and braces were back in place, and when he heard the cycle wheels on the gravel he looked up and asked how it had gone.

‘Fine,’ Arvid said.

‘Good,’ Fatso replied, and there was a short silence, and then Fatso said,

‘Arvid?’

Arvid started at the sound of his name, because Fatso never used his name, he always said ‘you’ or ‘the whelp’ or ‘boy’ or something along those lines, and Arvid wished he had never heard it.

‘It’s all right if you call me Fatso, Arvid,’ Fatso said, ‘it doesn’t matter. You are the only person who had the guts to say it to my face even though I know everyone calls me Fatso behind my back. You just call me Fatso!’

Fatso forced a pale smile through the tears, but Arvid knew he would never call Fatso ‘Fatso’ again, and when he later tried to say ‘Bomann’ aloud to himself it felt as if he had a large cold marble in his mouth, and then he knew he would never talk to him again, ever.

He held the piece of bread and jam as level as possible and at the same time tried to flip the little animal over the sand pile it was so desperately struggling to climb, but it kept falling back down. It was a beetle with yellow stripes down its black back, not pretty at all, almost ugly, but it was so sad when it tumbled backwards, so he thought he had to help.

And in the end he did it, an elegant twist of his foot and the beetle was over, and even if he didn’t expect any gratitude, beetles are quiet creatures, then at least a sign, a wave from one of its legs perhaps, but no. The beetle just headed straight for the next sand heap probably thinking Arvid would give assistance once again, like some super-hero, Superman perhaps, but now this was it. Disgusting insect. With the tip of his shoe he kicked the beetle, and it flew in a large arc over the sandpit, but instead of crashing into the log on the other side it unfolded two small wings, looped the loop and banked beautifully across the road and was gone behind Johansen’s Opel Kadett. Why the hell didn’t it do that straight away?

Now it had gone there was nothing else to concentrate on, and he knew that soon he would have to turn round. He could hear them, their soles scraping sand on the tarmac, and they were whispering to each other.

He stared down at his feet as he took a bite of his bread, and they were odd, seen from above, large and alien, as though they didn’t belong to his body at all. He had checked in the mirror a few times, but they were not the same feet at all, because the ones in the mirror were OK. Those strange feet sticking out, and the knees. But the knees were his, he could tell by the grazes. Yet they were strange, nobbly and big, and then someone laughed a nasty laugh, and he would rather have been beaten up than listen to what was coming now, but it came anyway and there was nothing he could do about it.

‘Arvid fucks his mum! Arvid fucks his mum!’

They chanted in unison, but that didn’t make it more true, he was only eight years old and hadn’t fucked anyone, and so far he had flatly denied that anyone did such a thing and least of all his mother, but if there was one thing the boys knew about it was his opinions on fucking. That was why they went for him as soon as they had a chance.