It's Fine By Me by Per Petterson Read Free Book Online Page A

Coke dried into sticky patches all over my body. When at last they allowed me to wash and I had borrowed some clean clothes from Arvid, I went into the leaders’ room and punched the scoutmaster. He was even a member of the goddamn Rotary Club.
    I remember the burnt bread over the fire and the burnt sausages and the assistant Scout leader who was thirty-five and still lived with his mother and always wanted to ask the new boys back to his room at home. We’re going to a jamboree in America in the autumn and have to discuss it, he kept saying, and who didn’t want to go to America? But he was the only person who had ever heard about that trip to America, and I remember how relieved I was when I walked alone down the path through the forest to the bus stop on my last day after being expelled from the Scouts, and I promised myself I would never join anything organised again.
    ‘You still remember it, don’t you?’ Arvid asks and starts singing, and I chime in and soon we bawl at the top of our voices:
Dear father in heaven so high, hear my heart’s silent prayer, toiling on earth beneath the sky, give me the strength and wit to care, help me to live by thine own son’s creed, to honour my parents, the land and laws, and help all others in word and deed, obeying Scout vows and aiding our cause!
    And we remember every word and every note of the song, and know we will never forget them for as long as we live.
    At the Skedsmo junction the road goes north to Gjerdrum. There are fields on both sides the whole way, and behind them is the dense forest. The road twists and turns, goes up hill and down dale, and the driving is never boring. I keep the speed up as much as I dare, go even faster on the straights and change down before the bends and try to stay as close as possible to the point when the Opel just might lose traction and skid off the road, but not quite, because the car is not mine. The telephone poles flash past, and I feel a rush in my body that is new and makes my head spin, and now would be a good time to hear Jimi Hendrix play ‘Crosstown Traffic’ or ‘Purple Haze’. Arvid sits quietly with his hair blown back, just watching, then he picks up his tobacco and rolls two cigarettes, lights them both with the dashboard lighter and pokes one in my mouth.
    ‘God, it’s wonderful,’ he says. ‘I’ve never been here before. Is this where you come from?’
    ‘Not quite.’
    Not quite, but not far off either. I thought I had forgotten how everything looked, but I haven’t forgotten a thing.
    I have not forgotten the cornfields in autumn, or Lake Aurtjern in July or the apple tree outside my window, and all I had to do was reach out and pick an apple, or the long gravel road where Siri Skirt used to walk and show her bottom for two ten øre coins, and she wasn’t wearing anything underneath, and once I was allowed to walk round twice while she held her skirt up under her chin; or the rafting holiday on Lake Hurdal. My father forced me to come with him, and made me pull up a pike that scared me witless, and when I refused, he hit me in the face, and then I hammered a nail into my foot, and we were forced to go home.
    ‘Hey, look at the petrol gauge,’ Arvid suddenly shouts, ‘we’re out of petrol. Have you got any money? I think I’m skint.’ He puts his hand in his pocket and we pull into the Shell station in Ask and empty our pockets. We have twenty-five kroner between us. I let the car roll to the first petrol pump and sit waiting for Arvid to get out and fill up. But he doesn’t move. We stare straight ahead, and we don’t speak, and then he says:
    ‘I’ve never filled a car with petrol.’
    ‘Me neither.’
    ‘I don’t even know where the petrol tank is. Do you?’
    ‘I have no idea.’
    ‘Perhaps they come out and do it for us?’
    ‘They stopped doing that ages ago.’
    ‘Shit.’
    We both get out and walk round the car and realise we have parked on the wrong side of the pump. Then a Ford