The Cold Song Read Free Page A

say this, but couldn’t find the right words—needed them for all sorts of things, without bloody cuts and scratches, but how did you tell Gunnar without ruining everything, without being accused of being a coward?
    They were sitting on the deck outside their secret cottage in the woods, the one they had built the previous summer. They had lit a fire and grilled hot dogs, eaten chips, and had some Coke; they were all Liverpool fans, so they had plenty to talk about; they sang songs too, because there was no one there to hear them,
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
, and Simen had thought to himself that when you sang that song you felt like your life really was about to begin. But then Gunnar—and this was typical Gunnar—had started talking about how just because they spent their summers together that didn’t necessarily mean they were
true
friends. True friends who were there for each other through thick and thin. Gunnar knew a guy who had supported Liverpool for years, and then he had suddenly switched to Manchester United, just because his new neighbor was a fan of Manchester United.
And what the fuck do you do with a guy like that? Is that a true friend?
And Gunnar had launched into a long and complicated speech about blood and pain and true friendship and other things he had obviously been thinking a lot about over the summer, concluding with this very dramatic idea that they become blood brothers. He had come prepared, had it all planned out—that too was just like Gunnar. The bits of broken glass were neatly wrapped in tinfoil—he had broken the bottle in the back garden at home and then washed the shards with dishwashing liquid because, said Gunnar, if you cut your hand with a dirty bit of brokenglass you might die, you might get blood poisoning and die—and he had placed the lumpy little package between them in the sunlight and carefully folded back the foil, as if it were diamonds he had in there, or scorpions.
    And that was the moment when Christian came up with the idea of burying treasure instead—as a symbol of true and everlasting friendship. It was simple: All three of them would have to offer up one thing, and that thing had to be precious, it had to be a sacrifice. No mingling of blood, no cuts or grazes, but stuff,
valuable
stuff, buried deep in the ground, as a symbol of their commitment to each other, to friendship, and to Liverpool F.C.
    They counted steps. When not on their bikes, they counted steps. From Simen’s house to Gunnar’s house, from Gunnar’s house to Christian’s house, from Christian’s house to Simen’s house, from the top of the road, where Jenny Brodal’s house, old and ghostly white, hovered just above the ground, to the bottom of the road where Simen’s parents’ summer cottage lay partly hidden by a worn blue picket fence.
    In Christian’s parents’ garden, located just sixty steps from Jenny Brodal’s house and four hundred and fifty-two steps from Simen’s parents’ cottage, there was a shed. In the shed there was an old light blue tin pail with a lid that Christian’s mother had picked up in a secondhand shop some years earlier. The pail was dented; it had sun-bleached, hand-painted pictures of cows and pretty milkmaids on it, and on one side the words:
Milk—nature’s most nearly perfect food
. Christian told Simen and Gunnar how his father had been mad all daybecause of that pail, his father couldn’t see the sense in spending two hundred kroner on something so stupid, and then Christian’s mother had gotten twice as mad and said well, if his father had just built that terrace out from their bedroom door (as he’d been promising to do for years) she could have dressed it up with troughs and pots and climbing roses and cushions and throws—and she would put flowers in the pail. They could have had their own little Italian veranda. “What the fuck is an Italian veranda,” Christian’s father had said then.
    “I don’t know what an Italian