Exposed at the Back Read Free

track, scraping against a withered tree trunk. It would hurt tomorrow, when there was no more adrenaline to relieve the pain. He heard the man behind him shouting four-letter words.
    The track flattened out. Steinar kept on pedalling until he came to a small car park in the woods at Akebakkeskogen. He stopped the clock.
    His arm was bleeding from the scrape with the tree, but the cut looked clean. In the old days, Steinar had lost pieces of flesh on bone-dry astroturf and slid on muddy grass pitches with open wounds. This was nothing.
    A couple of minutes later his heart rate was back to normal. He checked his watch. Four seconds off his personal record. So close it was irritating. Lance Armstrong’s mantra came back to him as it always did in such situations: ‘Pain is temporary, quitting lasts forever.’
    Steinar had quit too soon once before. He got into the saddle and started back up the hill.
    30 minutes later he was back in Akebakkeskogen. The same course, the same route, a new personal record. A feeling of calm descended.He drank his lukewarm cocktail and wiped his hand over his drenched forehead. The blood on his arm had dried now, but it was probably best to wash it before going home.
    He wheeled his bike between the houses until he came to the junction of Lofthusveien and Kjelsåsveien. A couple of pensioners were sitting on the terrace outside the little red newsagent’s shop. One of them was holding up a lottery ticket. Ahead of Steinar was a low building with the big yellow and black sign of Skeid sports club. He walked towards the changing rooms. A man was sitting on the steps that led into the kit room. The man was in his fifties, wearing only a pair of blue Adidas shorts. Everything about him was sagging, the bags under his eyes, his flabby pecs, his arms and the length of ash from his cigarette almost touching the ground. It seemed highly unlikely that he would manage to lift it back up to his mouth.
    ‘I’m just going to use your loo,’ said Steinar.
    The man didn’t answer. He’d given in to the heat.
    The changing rooms were decorated with the odd patch of faded red paint, and the benches had been given a bit of blue; otherwise the space was dominated by black mould, which made it look as if flames had licked up the once-white walls. Steinar went into the showers.
    He cleaned his cuts and patted them with toilet paper. Then he went back out of the changing rooms, ready to walk up the gravel track and out of the area.
    At the top of the climb he looked down at the gravel pitch, and at the red shelters over the substitutes’ benches. Grass was growing through the gravel in a few places. Nothing in the world could match the beauty of an old gravel pitch. Then Steinar heard a whistle from the astroturf behind him, the referee blowing for a foul. A voice cut through the air: ‘No!’
    Steinar had dropped football altogether, but he recognised the sounds instinctively. And the smells. Of newly baked waffles, coffee and sweat. He had to watch, at least for a while.
    10 years had passed, and Steinar thought he’d got over it, but the picture in the paper had reawakened the ghosts of the past.
    How could the man who destroyed Steinar’s life and career be Arild Golden’s partner?

The Talent Factory
    ‘No!’
    Like the rest of the people in Nordre Åsen, Benedikte jumped when she heard the scream, which echoed halfway up the Grorud Valley. An over-excited supporter of the Oppsal Gutter 95 boys’ team had seen enough of Stanley’s dribbling skills.
    And it was Stanley, Skeid’s child prodigy, who Benedikte had come to see. Stanley was considered Norway’s foremost footballing talent, and he would soon be 15, the age when agents could secure the rights to represent young players. According to a tip-off received by TV2, Arild Golden had reached a verbal agreement with the family, so the other agents in Norway had given up. But now that he was dead, Stanley was fair game. There would be a real fight