Chapter Thirty-Two
THIRTY-TWO
Ted is dreaming a lovely dream, about a day without a name. Because a really good summer vacation should only really have two days: the first, and the last. All the ones in between should be nameless, it shouldn’t matter if it’s Tuesday or Sunday. In a good summer, everything is all just bicycles and comic books and salt water, time being wasted with the sun on your face. One or two small farts, one or two little giggles.
“Aren’t you going to color it in?” Joar wondered early one morning on the pier, when he saw the artist’s first sketches of what was going to become the painting.
“I don’t have any paints,” the artist confessed unhappily.
In the dream all the others are fourteen years old, but Ted is grown-up, perhaps because he already felt like that back then. He’s the one who asked:
“What does paint cost?”
“Too much,” the artist said.
“How fucking much can some paint cost?” Joar snorted, and started feeling the pockets of his shorts with an optimism that really was admirable, because there were kangaroos that had money in their pouches more often than he did.
So the artist took a deep breath and told them exactly what it cost, because there was a shop that sold art supplies in town and he had memorized every single price tag in the window. Then his three friends looked like they were having at least six heart attacks.
“For PAINT?” Ali shouted.
“Are all damn artists damn millionaires, or what?” Joar marveled.
“Forget it, just forget it,” the artist whispered unhappily, and that’s how close the painting came to not existing at all.
“And then you need one of those damn cloths too, right? The thing you paint on? How much does that cost?” Joar asked.
“You mean canvas?” Ali mocked.
“?‘You mean caaanvaaas?’?” Joar mimicked sullenly.
“Why are you even asking how much it costs? You can’t actually count, anyway,” she grinned.
Joar held up his middle finger and told her to count that. Ali replied that she’d seen bigger matches than that cute little finger. Joar didn’t actually know why he got so angry about that.
“Just forget it,” the artist repeated quietly, but no one heard, because Ali threw a small stone at Joar.
It wasn’t really that hard of a throw, but it hit him on the ear, and Joar had sensitive ears. So he chased her into the water. When they were lying beside each other on the pier again ten minutes later, exhausted and soaking wet, Ali suggested:
“Maybe we could try getting a job?”
“What sort of job? Robbing wishing wells?” Joar suggested.
It was, astonishingly enough, Ted who had an idea at that point. And it was, astonishingly enough, not a bad idea at all.
In the dream they are suddenly just there, in the big parking lot outside the supermarket. But in real life they must have walked all the way. Or cycled? In that case, was it Joar who stole the bikes? Ted’s memory lets him down, but dreams don’t care. In real life they were all full of fears and sorrows, and soon there would be another funeral, but that summer they are still happy.
“There! Ask that old lady!” Joar said, pushing Ali forward.
“Okay, okay!” Ali snapped, then she told Ted and the artist to hide, but instructed Joar: “You just stay exactly where you are!”
Joar did as he was told, which was a minor miracle even in a dream. The supermarket kept all its carts chained together like an iron centipede, and to free a cart you had to insert a coin, which was where Ted had gotten his idea from. Ali walked up to the old woman, smiled her most childish smile, and said:
“Excuse me, I only have bills on me, could you possibly lend me a coin for a cart?”
The woman looked skeptical, so Ali quickly nodded toward Joar and said:
“Our mom sent me and my little brother to do the shopping. But she forgot to give us a coin. She has trouble remembering things since the accident…”
Credit where credit’s due, Ali was a great actor, both in the dream and in real life, with real tears in her eyes and everything. The woman gave her a coin and when Ali came back Joar just stared at it as if it were unicorn poop
“What the hell is this? Free money? Why didn’t you think of this before, Ted?”
He patted Ted gently on the back and Ted swung in confusion between compliment and accusation. Then Ali said eagerly:
“There! Go ask her!”
So Joar went up to the next woman, and it went well. A little too well, actually. The woman thought Joar was so cute that she pinched his cheek and offered to go with him into the store and do his shopping for him, but Joar got the distinct impression that she really wanted to take him home and lock him in her cellar. Then there was an old man, so Ali approached him, and if the man’s wife hadn’t appeared she would probably have gotten his whole wallet. As it was, the old man got yelled at instead. Ted had roughly the same lack of success with both old men and women. The artist only asked one man, who was on his own in a car, and the man had smiled and started to look in the glove box. He said he had cash at home, and asked if the artist wanted to go with him. He reached out his hand through the car window and stroked the artist’s cheek, and the boy froze to ice. Ali was standing sixty feet away but she could recognize that sort of man a mile off, so she yelled: “WATCH OUT!”
It doesn’t matter where you are, those are magic words, they stop time for a moment. Every single person in the parking lot stopped and looked around, and the man let go of the artist in horror, and the artist took his chance and ran.
The teenagers took a break after that. A security guard came out into the parking lot looking suspicious, so they decided that the least suspicious thing they could do was to go into the supermarket. It was Ted who pointed out that they ought to take a cart, seeing as all the old ladies they had asked for coins would see them in there.
“Sometimes you’re damn smart,” Ali smiled.
It was a miracle that Ted didn’t hit his head on the top of the door, given how tall he walked after that.
Joar sat in the cart, the artist steered it, Ali pointed at things on the shelves and Ted ran and got them. They spent some of the coins so the guard wouldn’t think anything was wrong, put a small packet of cookies and some cans of soda in the cart, but even more in their backpacks. They turned a corner and the artist asked tentatively if they could buy some pastries, and it was the first time in months they had heard him say he was hungry. Ted would love Danish pastries for the rest of his life.
Joar stopped at one shelf to smell all the different deodorants he liked, then they passed an entirely different shelf and he suddenly asked:
“Hey, Ali, how do these work?”
Ali stared at the small packs of tampons he was pointing at.
“Are you kidding? How do they work ?”
Joar blushed, but his curiosity overcame his embarrassment and he grunted:
“Yes! Is that a really stupid damn question or something? I mean… do you just shove them in… I mean, all the way up?”
For a moment Ali probably felt something like sympathy for his almost admirable stupidity, so she said, not entirely patronizingly:
“How else do you think they would work? That you would swallow them and wait for them to make their way down?”
Joar muttered:
“But… don’t they fall out? Like, when you walk? I was thinking maybe they have little hooks or something?”
Ali blinked so slowly that her eyelashes looked like they were about to brush her socks.
“What sort of… hooks? Are you completely stupid? What the hell would the hooks even be attached to? Why would the tampon fall OUT?”
By now Ted and the artist had caught up with her, obviously they hadn’t heard any of the conversation, but Joar didn’t think that a complete lack of context ought to stop anyone from having a firmly held opinion, so he said:
“Ted! How do you think tampons stay in?”
Ted looked so uncomfortable that he almost melted and ran down a drain by sheer effort of will. Then he mumbled:
“They… squeeze, maybe?”
Ali looked so disappointed that Ted ducked instinctively.
“You think girls go round squeezing the WHOLE TIME while we’re having a period? Is this your first day on Earth or something? Your balls must be bigger than your brains!” she snapped.
All three boys looked very confused by this, the way you do when you’re not entirely sure if you’ve been insulted or not. She muttered that she hoped none of them would ever have children, because they would be the stupidest children in the history of the world. Joar peered at her as if he was trying to work out if she was joking. Then he said, in the tone of a very patient teacher:
“Are you stupid or what? Boys can’t have children.”
Ted nodded helpfully:
“Only girls can have children. I think that’s why you have periods.”
Ali sighed so deeply that the shelves swayed.
“I-diii-ots.”
Then she threw a pack of tampons fairly hard at Joar’s head, and he got angry and threw a deodorant at her. Then they had a fight.
“Typical of a girl to be so sensitive,” Joar said when they eventually made their way to the checkout.
Ted looked like he was about to say “Yeah, really,” but the artist took hold of his arm warily and shook his head. So Ted didn’t say anything and Ali let him live.
When they reached the checkout, the security guard was standing by the door looking suspiciously at their backpacks. The cashier, on the other hand, glanced cheerfully into their cart.
“Oh, I wish I could eat Danish pastries for breakfast! How do you stay so slim?” she chirruped.
In the meantime, the guard was talking to one of the women who had given the teenagers a coin, she was pointing angrily in their direction, and the teenagers didn’t even wait for the guard to yell.
“How do we stay so slim? We run a lot!” Joar said simply.
And then they ran, with the cart and everything, out into the parking lot. To confuse the guard, Joar rushed off in one direction and Ali in another. When the guard had almost caught up with her she yelled, “WATCH OUT!” which gained her a second, and she darted sideways, and when the guard tried to grab hold of her he lost his footing and fell. By the time he got back on his feet she had already caught up with the other teenagers on the far side of the parking lot, with the artist pushing the cart and Joar clinging to the front like a pirate captain. He threw a Danish pastry at the guard like a Frisbee and yelled: “You look very pale! You should eat something!”
They ran straight across a busy road, almost getting run over by a truck, and they didn’t see the hill until they were already on their way down it. Ali and Ted tried to slow the cart by jumping up onto it, which might not have come very high on the list of the smartest things they could have done, and soon the cart was moving so fast that the only thing the artist could do was either let go or go with them. That was how four idiots ended up riding a shopping cart down the steepest hill in town.
Ted dreams of the blind terror, metal rattling beneath their backsides, cars blowing their horns, the wind roaring in one ear and Ali shrieking with joy in the other. At the bottom of the hill the cart tipped over and the pavement scraped their elbows and cheeks, but it didn’t matter, they just lay there in a happy heap, giggling, until Joar swore:
“Goddamn it. Now I’ve got dirt in my pastry.”
When autumn came that year, the supermarket would replace its shopping carts with a type that didn’t take coins, just a sort of token you had to get from the checkout. A few years later, adults hardly ever carried cash at all. Yet more evidence that society hates teenagers, if you were to ask the teenagers.
They took the cart with them to the pier, all joining in to push it, then all jumping into it as it flew over the end straight into the sea. Perhaps that is Ted’s moment, he dreams, his “now” that Louisa was talking about. When they were in midair. He has probably never felt better than he did then.
The shopping cart hit the water so hard and sank so quickly that everything went black for all four of them. There is a certain point down there in the darkness when panic sets in, the water stops being transparent and suddenly you just feel the whole weight of it. You try to turn upward but are just forced down, your pulse is pounding in your ears, your eyes hurt like they are bursting. When you finally manage to get your bearings and feel that you’re floating up, you think you’re never going to reach the light. When you break the surface that first breath is nothing but pain. It took several seconds before Ali managed to gasp: “Here!”
“Here!” Ted panted.
“Here!” the artist called.
Then: nothing. Just silence.
“HERE!” Ali yelled again.
“Here! Here!” Ted and the artist replied.
Silence.
“Here!”
“Here!”
“Here!”
“HELP!”
The other three had already started climbing up onto the pier when they saw Joar out in the water.
“HELP!” he screamed once more.
His nose was barely above the surface, he was taking two strokes forward and one back, as if something was pulling him down. The first time he disappeared below the surface, his friends laughed as if he were joking, but the second time they immediately jumped in after him.
Ted will never understand how they managed to get hold of Joar, but it wasn’t until they started to pull him through the water that they realized what had happened: his foot was caught in the chain of the cart, where you insert the coin, it was wound around his ankle, and in the water the cart weighed as much as an elephant. The more Joar had panicked and tried to free himself, the more trapped he had become. They only managed to drag him halfway to the steps up to the pier, with the cart lurking beneath the surface like some lethal sea monster.
“GET IT OFF ME!” Joar yelled desperately.
Ali was splashing alongside, and looked thoughtfully first at the chain, then at Joar, before asking: “How did you even get your foot caught in there? Just how small are your feet?”
Ted was sitting on the steps holding on to Joar, and he gasped: “You got your foot in but can’t get it out? You’re like a tampon!”
Joar just grabbed him by his shirt and tried to strangle him.
“GET IT OFF ME!”
Ali was paddling alongside him with all the sympathy she could muster as she looked at him, then called out very, very seriously: “Sure. Have you got a coin?”
That laugh? A tsunami.
They eventually managed to free their friend. Joar was so relieved that he wasn’t even angry. That day? Perfect. No one needs more moments than that. They lay on the pier drying out in the sun, and as they walked home that evening with pastry crumbs around their mouths and laughter in their stomachs, everything was still possible, everyone was still alive.
“Tomorrow!” they called to each other as they went their separate ways at the crossroads.
What Ted remembers most of all is the sound when he got home and opened the front door. A small creak, a withheld sob. At first he didn’t understand what it was, then he peered into the gloom of the living room and saw the outline of his big brother, sitting on the stool by the old piano. Ted couldn’t remember anyone in the family sitting there in several years. His big brother wasn’t playing anything, he was just staring down at the keys, and there were empty beer cans on top of the piano. He didn’t say anything, he didn’t need to. Ted understood at once that their father was dead.