My Friends

Chapter Nineteen

NINETEEN

“We’d never met anyone like her.”

That’s how Ted starts, with his eyes fixed on the glass of the window. It’s so strange, he thinks, how we choose to tell a story. We hardly ever start at the beginning. Because there were four best friends on the pier that summer when the artist painted the picture, Ali joined the gang last, but if you think that makes her least important, you don’t understand a damn thing. Then you’ve never been addicted to another human. Ted got to know Joar and the artist when he was twelve, Joar and the artist had known each other almost all their lives, but none of them could remember a childhood without Ali. They had just turned fourteen the autumn she crashed into their lives, but the idea that there could even have been a time before her stupid, stupid giggling? Impossible.

“Her laugh sounded like a swarm of insects,” he tells Louisa, because it did: a wild buzzing from her stomach to her lips, that girl was chaos, from her uncombed hair to her unbridled heart. She was their second life.

“When she was in a good mood, she used to sing in French, which was both wonderful and unbearable, because she was great at French but terrible at singing. Joar used to say that she sounded like her fan belt needed replacing. Which may have been true, because Joar didn’t know anything about singing but an awful lot about fan belts…,” Ted reminisces, and then a swarm of insects emerges from Louisa too.

“Obviously it didn’t matter how she sang,” Ted goes on, “because when Ali was happy, she would dance so hard that she left marks on the pier, and you can forgive someone almost anything then.”

He goes on to explain that that was fortunate, because she often needed forgiveness, because she was a wholly unreliable little lunatic. When Ali got an idea, her eyes would look like someone had set fire to a honey badger and let it loose in her brain. Joar had a lot of bad ideas, it has to be said, but only at an amateur level. After a couple of months with Ali, he was a professional idiot. Or “iiidiiiot,” as Joar pronounced it, and then he and Ali laughed so much that Ted can still hear the echo inside him on the train twenty-five years later.

“Those birds there,” Ted says to Louisa, pointing at the picture. “He painted them for Ali, because she loved birds. And that red haze there on the sky, do you see it?”

“Hmm,” Louisa says, wide-eyed, her nose so close to the picture that she’s almost pushing through it.

“I remember reading a load of stuffy art critics in serious newspapers who said that was genius, the way he caught the light with that red. But it wasn’t light, or genius, it was just Ali.”

“What? He caught her light?”

“No, I mean it was Ali. She loved coming up with stupid games, and that summer when we were fourteen she came up with one where we had to put chili sauce in our mouths and lean our heads back, and then we would try to make each other laugh. Joar won. And Ali sprayed chili sauce all over the picture.”

Louisa stares at the painting for a long time, and looks like she’s trying really hard not to reach out one finger and taste the sky.

“So he just painted the three of you, not himself?” she asks, looking at the box of ashes.

“Yes,” Ted says, almost caressing the air above the picture. “He said he was all the rest of it, everything around us, the water and the air.”

“He was the light,” Louisa whispers.

Ted thinks once more that the artist was right. One of us . So he tells her:

“All of the best and worst ideas we ever had came from Ali. She got Joar to do so many stupid things. One time they stole a car together. And another time she got Joar to try drying wet socks in a toaster, and he almost burned down my mom’s house! But it was also her idea that the painting should be of… us. That was her very best one.”

He breaks off. It’s so strange, he thinks, the way we remember things. What we try to remember and what we fight to forget. As the train rolls on toward the town by the sea where he grew up, he tells Louisa the story of his friends, but not all of it. He tells her what he can bear to, but not everything that actually happened. He tells her all his best memories of Ali, that she was the one who gave the artist the idea for the painting. But he doesn’t mention that she was also the one who gave Joar the knife.

“We had just turned fourteen,” he says instead.

It was September, he tells her, the school year had just started when she came around a corner. It was the end of the lunch break, Ted and Joar and the artist had been hiding at the far end of one of the hallways, because they went to a school full of predators where everything was always just a countdown to being chased. You become good at hiding then. But they had heard a furious scream and a loud bang, and then Ali came running, like a blinding light, like a heart attack. They had never met anyone like her, because hardly anyone has that much luck. She had one black eye and blood on her knuckles, and the door she had slammed behind her belonged to the principal’s office. Ted happened to catch her eye and the first thing she yelled at him was: “WHAT ARE YOU STARING AT?”

Was there ever a time before her? Impossible. Ted and the artist stood there like their mouths were full of glue, so obviously it was Joar who plucked up the courage to open his:

“Hey, Ali. Who won?” he asked cheerfully, nodding toward the girl’s bloody knuckles.

Her eyes filled with hatred so fast that Joar backed away, which was an almost exotic occurrence, not even the artist had ever seen him take a single step back in his whole life. The girl was only half a head taller than Joar, but she seemed ten feet tall as she leaned forward and growled: “What did you call me?”

Joar threw his arms out, shocked and affronted and terrified, all at the same time.

“Ali! Like Muhammad Ali! The boxer! I just wondered who the hell you’d been fighting, what the hell’s wrong with you?” he gasped.

The girl stopped midstride. She tilted her head to one side, like a surprised pit bull. Then her face cracked and out came a huge laugh.

“Ali. I like it,” she smiled. “Ali… Ali… Aliii.”

She was trying out the name as she looked at the boys one by one, letting them bounce around in her pupils. The boys had no way of knowing that she was fourteen years old and alone on the planet, it was always incomprehensible that someone like her could be. They didn’t know she had stood on a rooftop and almost jumped a few months before. They knew nothing about her darkness, how much pain she was in, that her thin body was a raging fire inside. They didn’t know that she had just moved to their town and that she had decided that very morning to either die or find a new life. New friends, new jokes, new… everything. Maybe even a new name, if anyone was offering one.

Ali? That would do. The boys? They had no idea of all this, they just happened to be the luckiest boys in the world.

Ali ran her fingers over her black eye and muttered: “I got into a fight with a boy in gym class because he said I threw the ball like a little girl.”

Joar glanced at her knuckles and noted: “You don’t fight like a little girl. Did he notice that, or what?”

“He noticed it quicker than diarrhea,” Ali grinned.

Joar’s laughter thundered through the hallway at that, and from then on, they belonged to each other.

Twenty-five years later, Ted falls silent for a moment on the train. That was in the autumn when they had just turned fourteen, after that came a winter and a spring, and then that summer when they turned fifteen. Their last summer as children. Ali really was Joar’s second life. They only had each other for a little more than a year. Who has time to get to know someone, really know them, in that time? If you so much as ask the question, you weren’t there, you’ve never fallen that madly in love, never been addicted to another person’s breath. It wouldn’t have made any difference if Joar and Ali’s love had lasted eighty years, it was already everything right from the start, bright light and loud bangs and heart attacks.

Ted glances at Louisa, smiles weakly and says:

“You said it looked like we were laughing in the painting, like someone had farted. You said you couldn’t understand how anyone could paint… laughter. That’s because it was Ali’s laugh he painted.”

“And the chili sauce?” Louisa grins.

“And the chili sauce,” Ted laughs.

They were in parallel classes at school, Joar and the artist in one, Ted in another, and Ali in a third. They didn’t look for each other after school, they just floated together in the crowd anyway, as if they were inevitable to each other. They never talked about Ali going with them to the pier, she just did. They lay there on their backs with their heads on their backpacks, with the sea on three sides, on the last hot day of the year. The following day, autumn would tear September out of the exhausted hands of summer. Ali smoked their cigarettes and asked, impressed:

“Where did you steal these?”

Joar, who in all honesty had stolen pretty much everything in his life except cigarettes, blew smoke rings the size of doughnuts and replied happily:

“We bought them.”

“Are you rich, then, or what?” she wondered, because she had met rich kids before, and if these three were rich, she was thinking of throwing them in the sea.

“No. We got the deposit back on Ted’s dad’s beer cans,” Joar informed her.

Then Ali turned to Ted and looked him in the eye so directly that he blushed. They were lying with their cheeks on their backpacks, with the world at a ninety-degree angle and their faces so close that he could feel her breath on his eyelashes.

“My dad drinks a lot of beer too,” she said.

Ted replied the way he always did, so shyly that the first words disappeared down into the water:

“My dad can’t drink it anymore. He’s going to die. But our pantry is still full of beer, so my big brother drinks it.”

That was the first time Ted said it out loud to anyone. Both the bit about the beer, and the bit about dying.

“That’s sad, but also nice,” Ali said.

And Ted had thought then that perhaps it was nice, somehow, that his big brother drank their dad’s beer alone in the kitchen at night, and that Ted secretly got the deposit back on the cans. Slowly, slowly, they emptied the pantry, a silent but shared act of grief between two brothers.

“Thanks,” Ted had whispered, and then she had put her fingers as close to his arm as you can get without actually touching someone.

He can still feel her on his skin, twenty-five years later. He sits on the train and suddenly laughs, happy mist forming on the train window.

“I remember thinking that she was a perfect person. For a while. But then I saw her swim, and it passed. She used to swim like an octopus with a cramp…”

He laughs as he talks about the first time they watched her jump into the sea from the pier in her underwear, and Joar jumped in after her because he thought she was drowning. She got furious, and it was the first time she and Joar had a fight, but definitely not the last.

Ali had moved around her whole childhood, because every time her dad ended up unemployed, they moved to a new town, and her dad could hold on to a hot waffle pan for longer than he could hold on to a job. So no adult had ever really had time to check what Ali could do at a certain age, and what she couldn’t. Now she was full of ridiculous knowledge and incomprehensible gaps. She could make a sound just like a dolphin, but she didn’t know her multiplication tables. She had learned fluent French by watching foreign children’s television programs, but she couldn’t tie her shoes properly. Instead she would make up her own knots, and had invented her own way of swimming, and somehow it worked, because she was a genius idiot. That was why she got on so well with Joar, because he was an idiotic genius. On one of their first days together, she appeared with some fireworks she had stolen from her dad, then she taught Joar the joys of blowing up mailboxes. It was lucky he had taught her to tie her shoelaces properly by then, because they had had to run away from a lot of angry mailbox owners.

Joar’s eyes sparkled as he watched her light the fuses. Her eyes sparkled back when she realized that Joar, no matter how tough he pretended to be, was ridiculously scared of explosions. It turned out that one of Ali’s many unexpected talents, apart from sounding like a dolphin, was being able to shape her lips and make a sound like a burning firework. When they got to the pier, she had fun pretending to put something in Joar’s backpack, and when he heard the noise, he leapt into the sea in a panic. When he climbed out, he chased her like a mongoose after a snake, then they had another fight, and then they were best friends again. They were like two little machines with engines that were far too big. Uncontrollable. One time they ran away from a mailbox so fast that Joar forgot to drop the firework in, he ran off with it in his hand and only realized what was happening at the last moment.

“Iiidiiiot!” Ali yelled as they both threw themselves out of the way of the bang.

“I thought YOU were holding it!” Joar yelled.

“So what did you think YOU were holding, then?” Ali snapped back.

“I… I don’t know!” Joar admitted.

“It’s unbelievable that evolution even gave boys penises, because you can’t be trusted with anything,” Ali muttered.

When they got to the pier, they had a contest to see who could do the ugliest run, and Ali staggered as if she had been shot in the ass with a tranquilizer dart. Joar’s jaw ached from laughing so hard in a way he hadn’t even known he could laugh before her, an all-encompassing laugh that his body seemed to have been keeping in reserve, just in case he met a completely perfect idiot. Every time Ali heard it, she looked like her body had been saving an extra pair of eyes just for him, unused until that day.

That’s how suddenly it happened, falling in love. They stumbled halfway into autumn without realizing, because the only thing the three boys really knew about Ali in those first few months was that she didn’t want to go home.

“Was her home like Joar’s?” Louisa asks on the train when Ted falls silent.

“No, no, hers was… different,” Ted says sadly, then adds, as if the memory has just popped into his mind: “She hated dresses.”

“What?” Louisa says.

“She hated dresses, but she loved the choir,” Ted mumbles.

“The choir?” Louisa repeats.

A small laugh slips out of Ted.

“God, she really couldn’t sing…”

“Can you tell a story like a normal person?” Louisa asks.

Ted blinks at her in surprise. Then he blushes.

“Sorry, I… I was just thinking out loud.”

So he tells her that when the four friends went their separate ways at the crossroads each evening, they would always call “Tomorrow!” to each other. When the weather was too bad to go to the pier they would sit in Ted’s basement, Ted reading comics, the artist drawing, and Joar and Ali watching superhero movies. Joar always kept an eye on the time, because he had to get home in time to eat dinner with his mom, it took several months before the boys realized that Ali was the same, only the other way around. Sometimes weeks would pass without her coming to Ted’s, sometimes she would be there five nights in a row, but the times she stayed really late were because she was counting the hours between the time the people in her home were getting drunk and the time they’d have fallen asleep. The children of addicts always know what the time is.

On those evenings, the artist would often sit on the floor drawing birds for her. She was envious of them, not because they flew south for the winter but because they flew back home again in spring, that they were so confident they knew where their home was. Sometimes when she looked at the time, it was as if she were counting the days until her dad told her they were moving again, she had never lived anywhere on the planet for longer than a year.

Ted often fell asleep to the sound of their breathing in his room, and he had never slept so soundly. One night when the artist was climbing out the window, Ted mumbled in his sleep: “I love you.” It wasn’t intentional, it just slipped out. But the artist replied as if it were the most natural thing in the world: “I love you too.” When Ali crept past, Ted mumbled to her as well: “I love you.” Ali stopped abruptly, shocked, and hesitated for an eternity, because no one had said that to her before. So she leaned forward and whispered: “I… believe in you.”

Autumn turned to winter, and school was approaching the Christmas break. The four friends found a place in the schoolyard, behind an old shed, where they could smoke between classes. Ali and Joar would tease each other, getting into fights almost every day, scrapping wildly and then making up in a moment. When Joar wanted to provoke Ali, he called her “girl,” which she hated, because the only thing she hated more than girls were boys. When she wanted to provoke Joar, on the other hand, she told him he smelled. One morning, when he had stolen some new aftershave that he was very proud of, the first thing Ali asked was: “Is it supposed to smell like that? Sweat?” Joar snapped: “It doesn’t smell like sweat!” Ali sniffed the air: “Well, something smells like sweat.” Joar roared: “In that case, it’s my sweat that smells like sweat! Not the aftershave!” Ali pretended to be surprised, she was good at that: “So what is it that smells like shit, then? Is it the aftershave? Have you gotten ahold of shit aftershave?” Then they fought, but never hard enough for either of them to get hurt.

Ali was usually better at making Joar angry, he had more weak points, but one winter’s day Ali said that she’d applied to join the school choir, which was due to perform at the end-of-term assembly. So Joar replied that her singing voice would be “like a chain saw in a symphony orchestra.” Ali snapped, “Shut up,” as usual, but Joar wasn’t observant enough. He didn’t hear that her voice had become more fragile. So when Ali announced miserably that the choir leader had decided that all the boys should wear white shirts and all the girls dresses, Joar burst out laughing. He didn’t have time to see the tears before she clenched her fists, and when they fought this time, it was different, because she was trying to hurt Joar. She elbowed him across the nose, he staggered back, blood gushing, and she stood there, her whole body shaking, yelling: “You’re GARBAGE, Joar! Did you know that? You’re just mean fucking GARBAGE!” The collar of her shirt was dark with tears. She ran off and didn’t appear at the pier or at Ted’s house for several days.

The morning of the last day of term, the boys saw her standing alone at the other end of the schoolyard. She was shivering in the winter cold, wearing just a thin dress. The boys had never seen anyone hate an item of clothing so much, as if the fabric had nails sewn into it that were scratching her skin. She tugged and pulled at it in embarrassment and tried to cover her knees, and every other second she glanced at the school gate as if she planned to run away, but when an adult voice called out, she followed the rest of the choir inside the school anyway. Only then did the boys realize that someone who hated a dress as much as that must really, really love singing.

“Come on,” Joar grunted.

The boys slipped out of the gate like eels in dark water and ran home. It was the start of Christmas vacation, they were free, no one saw them disappear. Unlike Ali, the boys did everything they could to escape being noticed at that damn school. Attention was lethal, that was how you ended up being bullied and beaten. They would never have dreamed of getting up onstage like her.

Ali spent the whole morning practicing with the choir, the loneliest person on earth. When it was time for the performance, the choir was standing behind a curtain listening to the audience file into their seats, and Ali threw up in a corner. Just as she was thinking about running away, the curtain went up, and it was too late. There she was, standing in the glare of a spotlight in her thin dress, with white knuckles and red cheeks. Terrified and defenseless. She heard the audience start to giggle. Only a faint noise at first, when everyone was trying not to laugh and it was coming out through their noses, but soon it was a roar. Ali tugged and tugged at her dress to cover her knees, panicking that they were laughing at her. But then she heard something else: the rest of the choir. They were also laughing hysterically now. Only then did Ali look out at the first row of the audience. There sat her friends. Joar, Ted, and the artist. Wearing dresses.

They had run home and borrowed them from Joar’s mom’s wardrobe. Obviously all the dresses were too big, because all the boys were too small, and they would be teased about it every day for the rest of their time at school. Joar would get into so many dress-related fights when spring came that the principal might as well have moved Joar’s desk into his office. Joar didn’t care. It was worth every blow if Ali realized she wasn’t so damn alone, at least not all the damn time. Who gets a friend like that? Hardly anyone.

On the way home that day, Ali for the first time told the boys how her mother had died. How she used to sing and laugh and call Ali “my heart.” She had strong opinions about television programs and she loved cheese. She was a whole person, and then suddenly she wasn’t anymore. She had been riding her bike and gotten hit by a car, she had left home one day and never come back, she was alive and the next second she was dead.

“My mom loved the fact that I was in a choir when I was little,” Ali told the boys. “She loved singing, so when I sing it’s like she’s… with me. I know it’s stupid. Typical of a little girl, thinking—”

Behind her, Joar interrupted irritably:

“Do you have to walk so fucking FAST?”

Because it really isn’t easy to walk fast in a dress if you’re not used to it. Especially not if it’s a bit too big, Joar kept tripping over his, and Ted kept having to pull the fabric out of his behind, and the artist’s shoulder strap had come loose. Ali turned and looked at her boys for a long time, then muttered: “You’re all garbage, all three of you. You know that, right?”

They nodded. She wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. Then the artist mumbled to Ted: “You look good in that color.”

“Thanks,” Ted smiled.

“You look nice in that color too!” Ali grinned to Joar.

“Do you want a fucking fight or something?” Joar snapped.

She laughed so hard that she tripped and fell into a bush.

They walked to the pier, it was covered with snow and the sun was already going down, but Joar made a small fire and they sat there until dusk. They pulled their jackets as tightly as they could around the dresses, and huddled so close to each other that they had the same skin. Then Ted suddenly plucked up the courage and whispered into the darkness: “I love you.”

The fire crackled, the waves lapped, the wind crept under their dresses. Then Ali whispered: “I believe in you.”

“I love you and I believe in you!” the artist smiled.

“Garbage,” Joar muttered.

They went home happy. The next day, down at the harbor, Joar’s old man was told that Joar had worn a dress to the end-of-term assembly. The other men laughed at his old man, teasing him, so when he got home that evening, he beat Joar harder than ever. Beat him as if he was dirt, as if he had no pulse. The first days of that Christmas vacation, Joar just lay on the bed in Ted’s basement the whole time. He hurt so badly that he couldn’t even go down to the pier. That was when Ali gave him the knife.