‘Excuse me?’
Rudi shakes his head and clicks his tongue with a disapproving tsk . He rummages in his pockets. Produces a five kroner coin and drops it in her cup. The woman casts her eyes downward and bows her head.
‘And the next time I’m walking through my city, I don’t want to see you. By then you’ll have returned to the loser land you’re from and participated in it’s reconstruction, or else you’ll have got your act together, found a job and gone on a course to learn Norwegian. Yeah, who knows Aunty Bulgaria, before you know it you could be standing for a political party in elections in our country and speaking up on behalf of the immigrants’ cause, and then I’ll hear you say: Don’t abuse people’s hospitality! Pull yourselves together! Put away the paper cup! ’
She bows again and Rudi hurries off towards Arneageren Square. He stops when he reachs the open area in front of Kulturhuset .
Fuck, really in your face, this city.
Too much bloody ruckus, pain in the hole with people pestering, trying to get you to do one thing or another, people putting on plays, writing books, arguing in the papers and kicking up a fuss about one thing or another, not to mention them earning so much money. In that respect it’s not so strange Toska and his gang decided to head here.
The quiet, peaceful times are gone, thinks Rudi. Back when you could sit in Granny’s garden, look around at nature and think deep thoughts.
Rudi realises he’s lost in thought and he hurries on towards Platekompaniet record shop. He comes to a halt as he walks in the door. It’s a long time since he’s been here, hasn’t bought a lot of albums in the last few years and the ones he has he’s picked up at Statoil. He looks around in surprise. He walks along the shelves. Games, DVDs, Blu-ray. Fuck’s sake, where the hell are the CDs? Jesus, isn’t this supposed to be a record shop? He goes further down the aisles, films, films, games, games, reaches the counter and at the very end on the right-hand side he spots a few shelves of CDs.
A shop assistant walks past, a smallish guy with a crew cut.
‘Oi,’ says Rudi. ‘Not too many bloody albums in here. What’s going on?’
The assistant smiles. ‘No, well, we don’t sell many CDs any more—’
‘You don’t sell many?’ Rudi says, raising his voice slightly. ‘Well, that’s not so strange, seeing as you don’t have any.’
The guy in the blue Platekompaniet T-shirt shrugs: ‘So what is it you’re looking for?’
‘Ah, you know,’ Rudi says, lowering his voice and taking a glance around to see if there’s anybody he knows around. ‘Metallica, Motörhead, Slayer…’
‘We do have a selection of metal, lot of Maiden on special offer, for instance—’
‘Don’t you think I’ve got Maiden? The entire collection!’ says Rudi, with a dismissive wave. ‘No, you see, it’s a present, for a niece of mine, and y’know, kids today, they only like pop—’
‘Well, actually a lot of them are into metal too, they—’
‘Maybe they are,’ Rudi says, in an irritated tone, ‘but my niece isn’t. She wants…’
Rudi clears his throat.
‘Yeah?’
‘Well,’ he says. ‘Coldplay’.
‘Coldplay, yeah,’ says the guy, ‘great band. Which album were you thinking of?’
Rudi squirms. He bends towards the guy.
‘Y’know … that one … eh…’ He clears his throat again. Then, in a low voice, he hums: ‘Du-du-du-du-du-du-du-du-du…’
The record shop guy smiles and Rudi feels an urge to plant a fist in his face.
‘Viva La Vida,’ the guy says. ‘The Beatles couldn’t have done better. We’ve got it over here.’
‘Hm,’ Rudi says, nodding while the guy goes to get the CD. ‘Yeah, that’s the one.’ Then, raising his voice says: ‘But listen, record dude, you really need to do something about this shop!’
The guy walks back around the counter with the CD in his hand. ‘Is it a present?’
‘Yeah,’ Rudi hastens to reply, ‘you don’t think I bloody well want that shit for myself, do you? You don’t actually think Rudi—’ He stops himself, no names. ‘You don’t actually think a metal man like me is going to sit in the Volvo—’ Again he checks himself, no details. ‘You don’t actually think a regular guy who works in an office…’ — that’s nice, yeah, an office — ‘…has a good job in an office listens to that kind of poppy shit on his PC while he’s shuffling papers around?’
The record shop guy laughs. Again. Rudi clenches his fists. What the fuck is he chuckling about?
‘No,’ Rudi says, restraining himself, producing his wallet and extracting a two hundred kroner note, ‘I’ll tell you this — back when I was a kid, this was a cool town to live in. When I moved in with my granny after my folks split up, there must have been at least five record shops in Stavanger, and they were record shops, capisce? ’
The guy laughs. Again. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘I worked in a few of them so I know what you’re talking about.’ And then he gets a kind of serious look on his face. He leans across, begins tapping the gift-wrapped CD lightly on the counter. ‘No,’ he says, ‘things are really going downhill. I had to remove a whole rack of CDs just a couple of weeks back. It’s just the way things are. People don’t buy music any more. Now they download everything, you know. They steal.’
‘Jesus,’ Rudi says, feeling a degree of sympathy for the guy with the crew cut. ‘Hard times.’
The guy nods. ‘They are indeed.’
‘Just constant grief,’ says Rudi, looking around. There’re hardly any other people in the shop. ‘But what can you do? We’ve all got work to do, don’t we? We all try and land the good jobs, and sometimes the big fish come to town, but you don’t always—’ Rudi stops himself. ‘No, it’s not as though an office job in local government is that great either, if you know what I mean.’
The guy behind the counter nods. ‘I remember the old days. Fåsen Records. Fona. Platon Discs. Free Record Shop. Toots Music.’
‘The good old days,’ Rudi says with a sigh.
‘Yeah,’ says the guy. ‘Thousands of records.’
Rudi places the two hundred kroner note on the counter. ‘I feel for you, hombre. You’re upagainstsomerealshithere and I think you know what I’m referring to. The internet. The black death of the modern age. If you ever need any help, all you have to do is pick up the phone and—’
Rudi stops himself again.
‘Respect to you and your loved ones,’ he says. ‘And fuck Coldplay, metal up your ass!’
‘I like Coldplay,’ says the guy behind the counter.
‘Heh heh,’ Rudi chortles, ‘that is your massive problem! No, but seriously, my niece is going to be made up when she gets this pop shit from Uncle Rudi.’
The guy behind the counter laughs. ‘Yeah, if she has a CD player, that is.’
Rudi leans towards him. ‘Listen, mate, I’m going to level with you. Rudi — this is Rudi here in front of you. Come here, let me shake your hand. Rudi’s going to level with you. I don’t have a niece. That’s just some shit I made up. I’m an honest-to-God metal man. A pen-pusher. Have to work hard to earn a crust. Shuffle papers for the council. At the moment we’ve got our hands full with that new crossroads in Tjensvoll. Tonnes of people complaining about how it takes twice as long for the lights to change since the new intersection was finished. And who is it has to deal with these complaints? Who is it has to answer the calls when people ring up to give out yards about us regular local council employees? And who do you think suffers? It’s the little people. The old and the sick. It’s the old people who ring us up, desperation in their voices because their hearing aid isn’t working, because they can’t find their bedpan or because they don’t have a grandchild to go and look after them. That’s my working day. I’m a straight-up metal man. Got a best friend who weighs 120 kilos. Got a woman I’m never planning to let go. You know. It’s like Judas Priest say, you remember, “Fever”? “Fever. You set my soul on fire. You fill my nights with desire.” And people say there’s no soul in metal? People sit around listening to Coldplay? Christ, I’m telling you, here we are, living in the wealthiest city in the world, the city David Toska and his handpicked crew chose to …. and … well, you can just get so bloody depressed thinking about it. Where’s the humanity? Yeah. No. You could go on about it all day, eh? Pleasure meeting other people who are sound. There’re not many of us left, brother! I thought you were a tosser, but you’re not — you’re the last man standing. And now I’ll give you a little quiz here — what two metal tracks am I thinking of?’
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