Tore Renberg - See You Tomorrow

Keep your wits about you, Jani said. I’m not sure about this.

Rudi turns his head and looks at her.

‘Hey, Chessi, come on, we’ll knock this on the head. What was it we were arguing about, what was it that stirred up this lousy atmosphere, eh?’

‘Don’t remember,’ says the low voice from the back seat.

‘There you have it. It’s gone. Vanished! Hey, baby, it’s you and me and your ass! You know I’ll kill anyone who comes near you. You know you can count on it, count on Rudi whipping out his monster cock and flogging them to death? If anyone other than Rudi screws you, yeah, so much as fucking looks at you, then I’ll break every bone in their body? Oh yeah. Rudi’s a real man! Like Granny used to say: I can trust you, Rudi.’

‘Oh Jesus…’ comes the voice from the back seat. ‘Here we go again…’

‘Eh?’ says Rudi and acts as if he didn’t hear what she said.

‘Nothing.’

He glances in the mirror. The tears have dried. She sticks the small, pink tip of her tongue out between her thin lips and moistens them.

‘Exactly,’ he says, fired up at the sight of her, and takes a deep breath: ‘Nothing and kein Problem, Mädchen. Now we’re going to go to work, and there’s no telling what we might run into in this forest, but Pål is this guy’s name and he’s got ein problem .’ Rudi frowns suddenly, as if he’s just thought of something. ‘Pål, you don’t know anyone called Pål, do you?’

‘Pål, eh, no, don’t think so.’

‘What’s going on, Pål shmål,’ laughs Rudi, repressing the thought. ‘There’s only one way out of here: piece by piece! like Slayer say. What’s gonna happen, Pålly Bålly? No one knows, baby! Like Foo Fighters say.’

‘Queens of the Stone Age.’

‘Eh?’

‘Queens of the Stone Age. No One Knows.’

‘Jesus. Are you gonna nitpick about that now? Who’s the dishcloth here?’

Rudi suppresses his irritation and says no more. They draw closer to the woods and the radio is playing Coldplay. It’s pop music. And he hates pop music. But those violins and that melody, they get into your brain, and the lyrics, they force their way through your body, and everything reminds you of that troll sitting in the back seat: He’s got to have it.

Because he loves it. And he’s a man of love.

‘Rudi, can you turn off that homo music? It makes me want to puke.’

Rudi pretends not to hear what she said, and raising his voice, making it sound like an engine straining at full pelt, says: ‘Yeah, yeah, dishcloth or not, there’s one thing Rudi knows for sure, and that’s that tonight, Chessi, tonight I’m going to screw you seven ways to fuckin’ Sunday.’

A little girl, really.

Fifteen years of age. Her mum works at the church, her dad’s a lawyer and she oozes naivety. She’ll be sixteen in January. If she’s telling the truth, that is. She might be adding a few months on to her age. Girls lie all the time, especially about things like that. That’s the thing about them. The way they view the truth, it’s not the same way we do. The truth is always changing with girls. Runs from their mouths like dribble from old people.

But they’re so bloody gorgeous.

So, so bloody gorgeous.

It would be a lot easier living with a man, as his last foster father used to say, before he added: ‘Not that I’m a fucking homo.’

Homos. That’s just sick. It’s one thing to like boys, but not to like girls, that’s even worse.

They’re so bloody gorgeous.

When there are girls in the room, the rest of the world disappears. It just fucking explodes. There’s nothing else in the room other than them. And it’s a good feeling, like sniffing glue. Helicopter. Daniel has felt it a thousand times, and he wants to feel it again, because that’s the point of this life: if it’s good, get more of it.

More, more, more.

If you want to strip this scrap heap of a life down to its essence, then it’s girls you’re talking about. Daniel can sit behind the drum kit and play, he’s a good drummer, a dynamic player, he’s as tight as a sphincter, but in his head, while the sticks are hitting the skins, it’s girls he’s thinking about. They tumble around in his head while he plays. Big ones and small ones; fat ones and thin ones, all kinds of girls. Tits, twats, asses, thighs, lipstick, tights, stockings, blouses, bras, dresses, kerchiefs, make-up, those straps between stockings and panties and everything that goes with a girl. It’s been like that ever since he was a little boy. Ever since he was in kindergarten on the other side of the city. There were just as many girls going round in his head when he was playing then as when he was bigger, on the football pitch, practising penalty after penalty, and as there are now when he’s banging on the drums.

And what is wrong with that?

Sometimes he gets the feeling people think there’s something wrong with it, about life being about girls. But Daniel doesn’t care about that. What he wants to do is get his own flat, whenever Child bloody Welfare will let him, work out a couple of times a week, get drunk at the weekends, play in a good band, get some gigs, release some records and get some stuff out on iTunes, YouTube and Spotify, maybe play a few festivals, maybe make a living playing music like Kvelertak, Purified in Blood and Kaizers Orchestra. Dejan’s brother — crazy all that stuff Dejan and his family went through in Serbia — Dejan’s brother knows a guy who knows one of the guitarists in Purified. Daniel and Dejan saw them at the Rått og Råde festival, seriously kickass: The sky is falling, death is calling, to the grave. It’s not just people in Rogaland who like them, people from Oslo like them too. He just needs to keep at it. If it doesn’t work out he’ll have to get a job, and he’s no wuss, even though his grades aren’t great, pass candidate in every subject except PE. He’s never shied away from work. If someone tells him to do something, he’ll grit his teeth until his jaw aches and do the job, no matter how bloody dirty it is.

Then he’ll spend the rest of his time, and money, on girls.

That’s what he feels is meaningful , as his foster mother and child protection officer say. And if anyone believes that’s the wrong way to live your life, then they can just go on believing it. If they feel it’s wrong that he thinks girls are so fucking sexy, soft and gorgeous, and he wants to buy them stuff, like houses and make-up and whatever they want, then they can go on feeling it’s wrong.

Daniel’s rock-hard fuckplan is to find a girl who’s not a handful. She has to have her head screwed on and she can’t have a face on her in the morning like she’s sucking a lemon, and she can’t spend three hours deciding what kind of jeans to buy. She has to think the jeans he wants her to wear are the best. He’ll be the one looking at her after all. That’s the kind of girl he wants for himself. A girl who likes the fact he thinks she’s well gorgeous and well sexy, a girl who doesn’t look at other boys and isn’t running around flirting.

Who knows, maybe he’s already found that girl.

Because she is sexy, Sandra.

And she doesn’t look at other boys. And she doesn’t moan.

The test will be how often she wants to do it with him.

It’ll be a shambles if he’s together with a woman who only wants to do it a little while he wants to do it a lot. On average once a day, he reckons. So he can’t be with someone who only wants it every four days. And there’s one other thing that’s just as important, and that’s that she doesn’t poke and pry. He’s had enough of that already, from Child Welfare, foster parents, social workers and psychologists, so he doesn’t want to be with a girl who pokes and pesters. Respect to Sandra, because she’s twigged that. When something comes up in conversation that he can’t face talking about, she looks at him with those well gorgeous eyes that make Daniel think of some kind of exotic bird, her lips glisten and it’s just like there’s light in those three freckles on her nose, and that little mousy mouth of hers drives him nuts, the pursed lips with the slightly protruding teeth, and she gets it, gets that there’s certain things you don’t want to get into. She’s understood what all those childcare losers haven’t: if you talk and talk and talk about things, pull them out of the ground like rabbits, then everything goes to shit.