It's Fine By Me Read Free

routes. Konrad up to Trondhjemsveien, Fru Johansen along Beverveien, which is where I live, and the Vilden family down to the houses along Rådyrveien. Tommy is carrying a huge bundle of papers. As usual he has cut the strings first, and now the papers startslipping and sliding in his arms, and the whole caboodle is on the verge of crashing to the ground. His sister comes over, bends down to give a hand, and they are so wonderful to watch it takes my breath away, but I too have siblings. One brother and a sister. That is, I had a brother. Last year he drove a Volvo Amazon that did not belong to him into the river Glomma and drowned. It happened just a few miles from where we used to live before we moved to Veitvet. It was an Amazon with all the extras: fox tail on the aerial, GT steering wheel and fur-lined seat covers at the front.
    The girl in the passenger seat survived. She wept and said they hadn’t touched a drop. I don’t believe that for one moment. Egil had just turned fifteen the autumn before and didn’t have a licence yet. After we moved to Oslo he went back as often as he could when he was old enough to go alone. I didn’t. I only go there when I have to.
    My sister moved out just after the accident. She is four years older than me, and of course she too had to go back. Now she lives with her boyfriend in Kløfta. He sells second-hand cars and makes money. I am sure he beats her, but I have never seen anything, and Kari does not say a word. If ever I catch him I’ll beat him up. That won’t cost me much. I have been training for years. With my newspaper money I bought a bench and weights.
    I tell my mother.
    ‘I’ll give him a thrashing ,’ I say. And she listens to me and then she quotes Lars Ekborg, the Swede who has a talk show on the radio where he goes on and on about all kinds of shit happening in the world and always rounds off by saying: ‘You’ve got to be tough, you really do!’
    ‘Is that how you want it?’ she laughs. Sure, it’s easy to make fun, but I know what I know.
    I remember Egil and me playing on the living-room floor in our old house. There was a massive cupboard we used to crawl under. My grandfather, who worked at the sawmill in the next village, had made it himself out of some dark wood and there were glass doors. It was a fine cupboard, his greatest achievement, but it must have drained his creativity, for he never made a piece of furniture again.
    Then my father came in. It was late, and we should have been in bed by then. He leaned against the door frame and looked at us with a stupid smile on his face.
    ‘Are there any good children here?’ he slurred. He seemed drunk. I had seen him drunk many times before. I knew the signs.
    ‘Oh yes,’ Egil said, crawling out from under the cupboard where he had been hiding. He was such an idiot, he would have said yes to anything. I sat on the floor and watched my father leaning heavily against the door frame. I did not trust him.
    He straightened up and staggered towards us across the carpet.
    ‘See this,’ he said, and shoved his hand into his breast pocket and pulled out some banknotes. ‘Here’s a little something for two good boys.’ He stumbled forward with a big grin and pushed a blue five-kroner note at each of us.
    ‘Oh, thank you, thank you,’ Egil cried, and started running round and jumping up and down on the floor. ‘Oh,thank you very, very much, Dad, you’re so kind!’ he shouted. I felt the crisp crackle of the note in my hand. Five kroner was a lot of money to me. Just a little more, with what I had already saved up, and it would be enough to buy the shiny bow I had looked at so many times in the sports shop by the station.
    I watched my father standing in the middle of the floor with his hands on his hips and his head at an angle. He didn’t look so drunk now, he was watching us closely and there was a glint in his eye I did not like. Suddenly he burst into laughter, and then his face froze, he came