My Friends

Chapter Twelve

TWELVE

Twenty-five years ago Ted and his friends lived outside every day, all through summer vacation, inseparable until the sun went down. There is a particular way of missing someone, the way you can only miss your best humans when you’re fourteen years old, when you go your separate ways outside your houses and your skin feels cold when they turn away.

“Tomorrow!” one of them always called out.

“Tomorrow!” the others always promised back, before they disappeared into the darkness.

At night the teenagers lived in different realities, but at daybreak they belonged to each other again, at the crossroads between the houses. Every morning Joar was there early, waiting at the junction, and every morning Ted was already sitting on the grass waiting for Joar.

Joar never knew why Ted did that, the two of them were never best friends, the only thing they had in common was the artist. Ted hardly ever spoke, Joar talked almost all the time, Ted was never angry and Joar was never anything else. Joar left home early every morning, at the same time his mother snuck out to go to work, before his old man woke up, hungover and dangerous. Ted? He could have slept all day if he wanted, no one would have noticed.

“Why are you always so damn early?” Joar asked one morning in June.

Ted just shrugged his shoulders timidly, staring down at the grass. It was still only the start of summer vacation, Joar had just found that competition for the artist to enter, the picture wasn’t painted yet. All the best still lay ahead of them, all the worst too.

“If I lived in your house I’d sleep until lunchtime,” Joar mumbled, and lay back on the grass.

You could tell from his breathing that he regretted saying it at once. Ted’s house was quiet for a reason, and Joar knew that. The world is extremely inventive, it has plenty of ways of breaking children.

“Did you bring anything to eat?” Joar therefore asked in a gentler tone of voice.

Ted nodded and pulled cookies out of his backpack. Joar took them, but didn’t eat any.

“Good, he likes these,” he said quietly, before awkwardly coughing away the weakness in his voice and quickly changing the subject: “What do you think is the best invention in the world?”

Ted shrugged his shoulders again.

“Do you know what my mom said when I asked her?” Joar suddenly grinned, because no one could make him laugh like his mom. “Pockets, she said. POCKETS! What an idiot, right?”

Then Ted smiled, because no one could say “iiidiiiot” with such boundless love in each “i” as Joar, because no teenage boy protected his mother the way he did. His mom was kind, but she wasn’t always smart, and Joar was smart, but not always kind, but in this particular instance Ted actually agreed with Joar’s mom. Silently, of course, but still. Pockets were actually an awesome invention.

“Pockets!?” Joar repeated accusingly, as if he were a mind reader. “Not planes or medicine or fire or anything? Do you agree with that? In that case, you’re both totally stupid! Do you know what my mom said about fire? That it wasn’t an invention, just something cavemen discovered. I mean… what? You know what I said? I said that if fire was a discovery, then pockets were also a discovery, because pockets are like the ass cracks of pants, some caveman put his hand between his buttocks and decided, ‘Hey! I can keep my keys here! We should have these in our clothes!’?”

Ted laughed at that, because Joar was good at that, he could fight and play soccer, but most of all he was funny. All his best ideas came from his sense of humor. The only thing he wasn’t much good at was being alone, because he hated silence, that was when he got all his worst ideas. That was why Ted always made sure he got to the crossroads before him every morning.

When the artist finally walked over from his house, Joar called out, “Good afternoon!” even though it was still so early that no other kids in the entire town were awake yet. At least not the happy, safe kids, the ones who didn’t hate every minute they had to be at school. They didn’t long for summer vacation the way Joar did, they were in no rush to get out into the world to do absolutely nothing all day.

“Have you had breakfast? Have a cookie! They’re the ones you like!” he commanded the artist, then, without even taking a breath: “Have you started painting the picture of the sea yet? Damn it, you’ve got to start painting if you’re going to win that fucking competition!”

The artist looked like he hadn’t slept all night, and ate the cookies in such small pieces that they hardly even counted as crumbs. He didn’t answer, because he didn’t know how to explain that he already regretted promising he’d paint the sea. Obviously he couldn’t do it. He wasn’t that good. Joar just wanted him to finish it, and the problem was that Joar thought you needed to start if you were ever going to finish, but that wasn’t how it worked. Art isn’t chronological. Everything the artist drew came from a place in his head that he could only get to if he wasn’t looking for it. If he was told to draw, it was like waking from a dream and trying to dream it again. A lack of self-confidence is a devastating virus. There’s no cure.

Ted sat alongside them in silence and wished he were funny, because laughter heals all wounds, but he just sat there, jokeless. Joar looked down at the ground and really did try not to say anything else, but the ultimate expression of love is nagging, we don’t nag anyone the way we nag the people we love. All parents know that, and so do all best friends.

“How fucking hard can it be to just start painting?” he therefore repeated at least five times on the way to the sea, but was met with nothing but silence.

Once they reached the pier he kept nagging the artist to eat all the cookies before they went swimming, and the artist didn’t protest, because he was used to it. But when Joar took his clothes off and all the bruises became visible, Ted could see the artist’s heart break in his eyes, because he never got used to seeing those.

Joar was great at soccer, everyone wanted him on their team at school, because he always threw himself headfirst into every tackle. He had learned that this stopped people from asking where all the bruises came from. Sometimes, many years later, Ted wondered if perhaps that was why it took the artist such a long time to paint the picture of them by the sea: he didn’t have all the colors he needed to paint Joar’s body.

A lot of children run to the door when they hear their old man come home, but none as quickly as Joar. He would lie in bed at night and count the number of times the metal of the key scraped against the metal of the lock before his old man managed to get it in. The more scrapes, the more his old man had drunk, the most dangerous nights were when he just gave up and rang the doorbell instead. Then Joar would rush to the door so his mother wouldn’t have to take the first blow. His old man hit them as if they weren’t people.

Sometimes his old man regretted it the next day, promised not to do it again, the way men like him always do. But sometimes he didn’t even remember what had happened, he would wake up with blood on his knuckles and go sit in the kitchen without even knowing who he had beaten to pieces the night before.

The fact that Joar was capable of loving anyone at all after that was incredible. That he could love anyone the way he loved the artist? A miracle.

They would be turning fifteen that summer, and everyone who met Ted probably thought he had had his humans all his life, they were such an obvious extension of each other, like the tail on a dog. We never get that age back again, when every friend is a childhood friend, we measure all infatuations throughout our lives against that. But in fact Ted had only had the artist and Joar for a few years, whereas those two had always had each other. Ted felt deeply ashamed that he was jealous of that. Twenty-five years later, he will still feel ashamed.

When they emerged from the water that day in June, Ted carefully took one of the artist’s sketch pads out of his backpack and wrote something in it. A short while later, when Joar was lying on his back on the pier and his thin body was drying in the sun, he asked, predictably enough: “What do you think the best invention in the world is?” The artist glanced at his pad and read out loud: “Pockets!”

Joar’s eyes widened, and at first he shouted: “How the hell did you…?” before glaring at Ted and the sketch pad, then at the artist again, and muttering: “Idiots! You’re all fucking idiots!”

Joar might have been furious with Ted if he hadn’t loved the artist’s laughter so much, but oh, how the artist laughed, and that was the only thing Ted and Joar needed to have in common. When they all laughed, they belonged together.

Ted had never felt funnier in his entire life.

The artist needed their laughter too, perhaps more than anyone understood, he had laughed less and less that spring, and hardly drawn anything at all. But he tried to draw that day, he really, really tried, because he hated disappointing Joar. Sometimes when the artist got nervous his skin itched, and sometimes one of his shoulders started to twitch, sort of bouncing up and down beneath his T-shirt, and often he felt so ashamed of it that he cried. There was something wrong with him, he knew that, his brain absorbed information in the wrong order. He had never wanted to play with other children when he was little, he had just wanted to sit alone in a corner drawing, his parents were often told their child wasn’t normal. They believed that, sadly, which is why they missed out on the incredible joy of having a child who was special.

Adults often think that self-confidence is something a child learns, but little kids are by their nature always invincible, it’s self-doubt that needs to be taught. And oh, how the artist was taught, because the world has spent thousands of years practicing how to puncture the lungs of children who are different. In preschool it had taken a long time for adults to realize that the artist didn’t like it when anyone touched him, but of course the other children had realized this at once, so they would creep up on him and prod him until he screamed. Sometimes he would flail about himself in panic and couldn’t be calmed down, and then his parents would be summoned to talk to the teachers that afternoon. Even as a five-year-old, he had learned to recognize the shame in their eyes.

Soon the other children discovered that he was afraid of confined spaces, so one day they forced him into a storage trunk in the schoolyard and sat on the lid. He lay curled up in there, crying, for so long he thought he was dying. In the end the other children weren’t even holding down the lid anymore, but he still didn’t dare try to open it.

Then there was a single long howl, followed by another one, and then the sun was suddenly blinding the artist. It was Joar, also five years old, who had thrown open the lid of the trunk while the other kids ran to the teachers crying because their noses and lips were bleeding. That was Joar’s first day at preschool, and the last day of loneliness for the boy in the trunk. You do whatever you can to not disappoint a friend after that.

They were twelve years old when they met Ted, when Joar rode his bicycle into him, because Joar was good at a lot of things, but bad at braking. “Meet” is probably the wrong word, no one met Joar, because you don’t “meet” a natural disaster, you get hit by it. Joar and the artist had been bored, and Joar had come up with the idea of riding their bikes down the steepest hill in town, through a gap in the fence surrounding the abandoned old harbor, then out onto a pier at full speed and on into the water. The pier was their secret place, forgotten by the world, no one else knew it existed. But on that particular day, there was a strange little boy standing at the end of it. “WATCH OUT!” Joar had yelled, but it was too late. The bicycle hit Ted and he and Joar both ended up in the water, Joar surfaced at once but the other boy was gone, and the artist had stood on the pier and for almost a minute thought they had just murdered someone. Then suddenly Joar yelled, “THERE!” and the artist dived into the water without hesitation. They pulled Ted up onto the pier and he coughed up enough water to drown a small horse. He blinked at the artist in terror and the artist smiled back and said his first words to him: “Nicely watched out!”

Then Ted smiled. That’s how long it takes to become best friends. A whole lifetime, a single second. But then he suddenly looked aghast.

“Your bike!” he whimpered to Joar, and looked out at the water where it had sunk, as if it were Ted’s fault it was gone now.

“No worries, it was a disposable bike,” Joar said, shrugging his shoulders.

It took several minutes for Ted to realize that meant Joar had stolen it. Joar explained very slowly and patiently that you should never ride your own bike out in this fucking town, surely he understood that? Someone might steal it!

A few days later Joar and the artist went home with Ted after school, it was the first time they had ever known anyone who lived in a detached house. Admittedly, it was probably the cheapest and most ramshackle house in town, but that didn’t matter, because Ted had a room of his own in the basement.

“Who the hell is this kid?” Joar muttered. “Some sort of prince?”

The room was cold and smelled of damp, but for twelve-year-olds, having a space of their own is the height of luxury, a staircase dividing them from the adult world is like a moat around a castle. Joar walked around the room, bowing to all the furniture and saying solemnly: “Your Royal Highness the Wardrobe, pleased to meet you! Your Majesty the Wallpaper, delighted!” He thought it was typical of the upper class to have wallpaper, and as he walked through the room he pretended to get lost because it was so big. “Hello?” he called from the bookcase, because that was also typical of the upper class, to have books instead of bottles on their shelves. “Hello? Can you hear me? I’m in the library!” he cried, and the artist laughed out loud. The infatuation was instant, Ted’s heart reached out to the pair of them like a plant reaching for the sun.

That evening they went home for dinner, because the artist didn’t dare have dinner with someone else’s family, and Joar didn’t want to leave his mother alone with his old man. On the evenings when his old man was out, Joar still stayed at home, because then he and his mom would watch television shows with celebrities in them, his mom loved those because the celebrities always looked so happy. But the artist went back to Ted’s after dinner that first evening, and soon he was doing that almost every evening, always knocking carefully on the basement window, making a sound like lizard’s feet on the glass. He never rang the doorbell upstairs and he avoided Ted’s parents the way he avoided all adults, because he knew he made them uncomfortable. The artist had been told all his life what he was and what he wasn’t: he was a strange boy, not like other boys, not enough of a boy at all. But in Ted’s basement, he sat on the floor drawing all the things he didn’t dare draw anywhere else, first superheroes and terrible monsters, because Ted liked those. Then, as the night got later, he drew bodies. First with clothes on, then without. Sometimes, when he was really sad, he gave the naked men angels’ wings.

Ted got used to falling asleep to the scratching sound of a pencil and his friend’s breathing, he always woke to an empty room with a gentle breeze blowing through the open basement window. Then Ted would often sneak upstairs to his parents’ bathroom and count the pills in the cabinet. Ted’s dad had cancer, that was why the house was so quiet and why Ted was allowed to live in the basement, so his dad wouldn’t be disturbed. The bathroom cabinet was full of painkillers, the artist only stole a few pills at a time, it was pure chance that Ted had noticed. The artist kept them in a box in his backpack, as if he were building a bomb. Ted never said that he knew, but a few weeks before that summer vacation when they were about to turn fifteen, the artist stopped drawing, then he stopped eating, and then Ted told Joar. That was why Joar had decided to enter him into that competition, and also why he always wanted Ted to bring cookies each morning.

It’s hard to say “I love you” when you’re fourteen years old. And completely impossible to dare to whisper: “Don’t hurt yourself, because you’d be hurting me too.”

The artist’s parents were divorced. His father was a bitter man, never violent, just incapable of warmth. His expressions of paternal tenderness extended, at most, to telling his son in a low voice: “Try to behave… you know… normally.” The artist never knew what that meant, just that he always did it wrong. His dad worked at the harbor, sometimes the men he worked with came to the house and sat in the kitchen. They were often drunk and always angry—at their bosses and the politicians and the economy. But late one evening when his lips were lubricated with beer, his dad had slurred: “You know, sometimes I wonder what I did wrong. If it’s my fault that the boy is like he is.” The other men all told him it wasn’t his fault. They all agreed that there was something wrong with the boy, of course, they just objected to the part about who was to blame.

It was a small apartment with thin walls, the artist had been sitting on the other side, knowing that it would have been better if he didn’t exist at all.

Ted hated loud noises, he always had, he used to panic at the sound of metal cutlery on plates, or of Styrofoam or cardboard bending. But he would never find a noise he hated more than the sound of paper being balled up.

That day on the pier twenty-five years ago, when Joar had gone off for a pee, the artist had turned to Ted and whispered with moist eyes: “I can’t do it, Ted. I can’t draw the way Joar thinks I can draw! And they don’t even want a drawing for that competition, they want a painting . I don’t have any paint, I don’t even have any brushes… I don’t know how to do it. I can’t, I just can’t…”

His shoulder twitched, he scratched himself all over, then he balled up the sheet of paper and Ted would never forget how it sounded. The artist threw it in the water, the sea swallowed the drawing, and Ted would spend the next twenty-five years wishing he hadn’t just sat there silently.

When Joar came back, the artist stood up and left, muttering that he was going to pee but mostly he probably didn’t want them to see how hard he was crying.

Joar sank down next to Ted and sat for a long time in silence before he said, seriously, with his eyes fixed on the horizon: “We have to get him to paint that picture, Ted, you understand that, right? He’s going to die if he stays in this fucking town. But if he wins that competition, he’ll be famous and rich and… happy. Like the celebrities on TV. Okay? We just have to…”

Joar’s fingers toyed with a cigarette lighter he’d found on the ground, his arms were covered in bruises and scars. Ted didn’t say anything, he just nodded, and Joar nodded back. That was their oath.

On the way home that evening, the teenagers who were going to become a painting walked close to each other, but the artist walked closest to Joar. Ted did his very best not to be jealous, but failed miserably. When you’re fourteen years old, friendship and infatuation are the same feeling, light from the same star, so perhaps there ought to be a better word for it. But how do I explain that I’m freezing to death if I’m not seen by you?

When the teenagers went their separate ways at the crossroads between the houses, they called out “Tomorrow!” to each other, and each promised back into the darkness: “Tomorrow!”

Ted looked over his shoulder, his skin feeling cold. None of the teenagers could explain what was going on, they just carried each other in silence. Joar had made it his responsibility to make the artist world-famous, the artist had made it his responsibility not to disappoint Joar. Ted? He had made it his responsibility that none of the people he loved would die. That’s a terrible burden for a person. Your shoulders creak, your skeleton shrinks, in the end you can hardly walk.