One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad Read Free Book Online Page B

take a scolding for scrumping apples or ringing on doorbells and running away. Anders would creep out again when things had calmed down.
    Once, he could not get away in time and was caught by Mrs Broch. To get hisrevenge after her rebuke, he peed on her doormat. He peed on her newspaper. He peed in her letterbox. Later, he went and peed in her storeroom. It was from then on that he got the blame for the stale urine smell in the basement.
    One of the victims of his bullying was a girl with a mental disability. One day, Anders squashed a rotten apple into the face of the girl’s favourite doll just as herfather was going by. ‘You bother my daughter one more time and I’ll hang you on the clothesline in the cellar,’ her father, a university professor, roared.
    Anders took notice. A father’s threats were something he had respect for. He never went near the girl again.
    *   *   *
    He was by now seeing his own father in the school holidays. The first time, he was four and a half and his father tookhim for a week’s summer holiday at a cabin by the sea. Jens would occasionally ring Wenche and say he wanted to see his son. The boy sometimes ran and hid, and the other children were sent out to look for him.
    Jens usually spent his summers at a country cottage in Normandy. Then Wenche would deliver Anders to the Scandinavian Airlines staff at Oslo airport, and after a two-hour flight he wouldbe picked up by his father in Paris. Sometimes his older half-siblings would be there. They went on family outings or to the beach. At the summer cottage it was mainly Jens’s third wife who took care of the little boy. She had no children of her own and grew fond of Anders, who also became attached to her. He was overjoyed whenever she offered to read him a story. ‘Do you really want to?’ he wouldask her. ‘Are you sure you’ve got time?’ He would sit curled up on her lap for hours while he was being read to. He calmed down there. And seemed to forget everything around him.
    *   *   *
    When Eva started school, Anders was in Year 3. He would not acknowledge her any longer. Not at school, that is.
    The blue garden, the park and the forest were separate from school – like different continents.Their friendship only belonged in one of them.
    This gave the little girl the space she needed to find her own friends. One of them was the girl who lived on the ground floor of their block of flats. She was scared of Anders too. Every time she went out of the door, she was afraid he was going to spit on her from the second floor. It had only happened once, but that was enough to make a horrorof gobs of spit dog her entire childhood.
    Eva finally got her own group of friends. She was now tough enough to say no to Anders when he wanted her to come out and play.
    *   *   *
    Anders was on his own again.
    But one day he latched onto some classmates. It proved not to be so hard, after all. He just said hello, and they said hello back.
    In his primary-school years, there was nothing veryremarkable about Anders. He was there, but did not draw attention to himself. He joined the Scouts, he played football and rode round on his bike with his friends.
    What marked him out from the others was that his parents were never there for him. The football team relied on parents to take turns driving the players to matches and tournaments. He always had to get a lift with others, mostly withKristian, who lived close by. Team sports were never really Anders’s thing. He had poor ball control and often misjudged passes, but he was there.
    Anders was average at most things: average height, average at school, an average sort of bully. He was far from the worst, and also capable of showing a kind of concern, like helping a bullied child who’d been hit in the face with a snowball look forhis glasses. If the glasses were covered in snow he would brush them clean before handing them back.
    One boy in the class was a particular target. Ahmed was