Chapter Forty-Six
FORTY-SIX
Of course it had been Ali’s idea, Ted explains on the sleeper train, that they should steal bicycles and sell them. Joar was already something of an expert at that, he had sold his first stolen bikes in the schoolyard when he was just eleven years old. Unfortunately, the police had appeared and really didn’t think that was a suitable business idea, because the police were really bad at encouraging young enterprise, if you asked Joar. The only reason he’d gotten away with it was that he was so small they didn’t think he was capable of a crime like that, which had annoyed him so much that he had almost confessed just for the sake of it. The artist had stopped him, of course, and after that he let Joar steal the occasional bicycle, but never let him sell them again. It was too dangerous.
But that summer before they turned fifteen, Ali thought it was definitely worth another attempt.
“What are they going to do? Throw us in prison? We’re like… still kids!” she groaned.
That was the day after they set the bird free.
“I think they have prisons for young people,” Ted said.
“Ha! How would they even keep Joar locked up? He could squeeze out between the bars!” Ali grinned.
Under normal circumstances they would have had a fight after that, the pair of them, but Joar was so covered in bruises and swelling that Ali didn’t want to make it worse. So she just stuck her tongue out and he gave her the finger and she laughed. Then the artist said shyly:
“No. Please. If you steal bicycles to buy paint, then it will sort of… be felt in the painting. I don’t want you to become thieves for my sake.”
So that was the end of the discussion. They spent the rest of the day watching superhero movies in Ted’s room, it was raining outside and they didn’t have any more ideas. Ted and the artist glanced at Ali’s backpack from time to time, but she just mimed “wait” to them. They had to wait several hours until Joar went to the bathroom before they could bring out what they had been hiding. When he came back down the basement stairs, Ali sang “Happy Birthday” at the top of her lungs, and when he covered his ears she threatened to do it again. He tried to look like he was bothered, even a little irritated, but the truth was that he had never believed they would remember his birthday. So he didn’t tell them that it was actually tomorrow.
Ted held out a bottle of aftershave. It had belonged to his dad, but had been sitting in a cupboard unopened. Ted had carefully wiped the dust off and tied a little ribbon around it, and the artist had written a card.
“Hope you think it smells good,” Ted said.
“Yeah, really, because you smell like a pile of garbage,” Ali said, but in a way that if you had heard the words in a language you didn’t understand, you would have sworn she was saying “I love you.”
Joar held the bottle as if it were a bird. The artist reached down into his backpack and took out a small bunch of flowers he had stolen from an old lady’s garden.
“They’re not stolen,” he said. “They’re adopted.”
Ali and Ted laughed. Joar smelled the flowers and muttered: “You’re all garbage.”
He wiped his eyes angrily with the back of his hand. He couldn’t use the aftershave yet, because he had so many cuts on his body that it stung too much, but he would sleep with the bottle in his arms that night.
The next morning his friends would wait for him at the crossroads until the sun was high in the sky, but he wouldn’t come.
It was a dazzlingly beautiful day, cloud-free and windless, all the colors of the sky and earth seemed sharper than the day before. Unless that was just how the friends would remember it. Sometimes we remember the last moments before a great catastrophe as more beautiful than they actually were.
Ali got worried and walked toward Joar’s house. She saw his parents set off to work, his old man stumbling out to a workmate’s car to go to the harbor, his mom hurrying off in the other direction in full makeup. She looked so happy, Ali thought, she looked like she had a real bounce in her step. That was the last time any of the friends saw Joar’s mom like that. When Ali rang the doorbell to their apartment, no one answered. Joar was gone.
So Ali went back to the crossroads, lay down on the grass beside Ted and the artist, and they did the only thing they could do: wait. They lay on the grass until they ran out of both cookies and jokes, but he still didn’t appear. Half the morning disappeared. To pass the time, Ali eventually asked, in that perfectly unconcerned way that only she had mastered, why boys had two testicles. She had evidently been thinking about this for a long time, but neither the artist nor Ted had a particularly good answer. Ted said instead that once when he was little, his big brother had tricked him into believing that men should really have three. Several anxious months followed for Ted before he found out the truth.
“But why do you have two, then?” Ali repeated.
“Typically smart of men to have their own spare parts,” Ted smiled.
“Typical of men to need spare parts,” Ali pointed out.
“COME ON!” a voice behind them called out.
They spun around on the grass and caught sight of Joar. He was coming from the wrong direction, not from his house but from town. His bruises were glinting in the sunlight, but he looked so proud that you hardly noticed them. It looked like he was a foot taller than yesterday.
“Come on!” he repeated, and set off ahead of them.
“Where to?” the others wondered, but he didn’t answer, so they just hurried after him.
Ali talked all the way, about things no one would remember afterward but which were very funny at the time. Ted would remember that everything smelled of sun, and that he didn’t know if there was a special word for that.
“What… what are we doing here?” the artist eventually said, anxiously.
Only then did Ted and Ali look up and realize where Joar had led them. They were standing outside the little shop in town that sold art supplies. Joar never explained his plan to any of them, it hadn’t occurred to him that it might be a problem, so of course it immediately became a pretty big problem. If anyone had asked Ali, she would probably have said that it was typical of a boy to believe that everyone could read his thoughts simply because he had so few, but in Joar’s defense, she probably wouldn’t have listened if he had explained what he was thinking in advance anyway.
He took the artist into the shop while Ted and Ali stood guard, somewhat confused, outside, not that Joar had asked them to, but because they realized it might be needed. Once the artist realized what Joar was actually planning to do in there, he panicked and tried to persuade him not to, because he refused to let Joar become a thief for his sake, but Joar had had enough of discussion by then.
“Just show me what you need! The summer’s almost over, damn it! That picture needs to get painted!” he demanded impatiently.
So the artist nervously looked around the shop and pointed. His face got redder and redder as Joar picked up more and more things, and when they approached the shop assistant behind the counter, the artist’s whole body was shaking so badly that if he had been holding milk, it would have been butter. Ali and Ted were standing outside, feeling more and more nervous, knowing damn well from experience that a security guard or police officer would show up at any moment. So when Joar and the artist finally came out the door with their arms full of paints, brushes, and canvases, their friends quickly grabbed everything from their hands and ran.
Seeing as they were geniuses, of course they both ran off in different directions, but unfortunately, the geniuses chose the opposite directions and ran into each other. Ali leapt to her feet, so panic-stricken that she didn’t look where she was going, and ran straight into a lamppost. Ted staggered to his feet, still dizzy from colliding with Ali, and managed to get halfway down the street before he realized no one was chasing him. Then he stopped so abruptly that his body was caught by surprise and he fell over again.
Joar was still standing calmly outside the shop, yelling: “What the hell are you idiots doing?”
It had been a good day. Early, early that morning Joar had been woken up by his mom, one hand gently on his shoulder and the other holding a finger to her lips.
“Shhh,” she had whispered, and nodded for him to follow her.
They had snuck out of the apartment while Joar’s old man lay snoring, hungover, on the sofa. Joar and his mom hurried down to the basement and over to a small storage compartment. Right at the back, where his old man never went, his mom had hidden her birthday present for Joar. She didn’t own anything of any value except her ice skates, which she had been given by her own mother. So she had sold them to buy a bicycle.
Joar had had many bicycles in his life, but that morning was the first time he had one of his own. In the light of dawn he had ridden it around, around, around the whole block. He had never felt so free, so big, so full of possibilities. That was why he hadn’t shown up at the crossroads to meet his friends all morning. He had cycled so fast that the wind tugged at his hair, he had let go of the handlebars and ridden with his arms outstretched toward the horizon, he had pedaled all the way into town before stopping. There he had sat on a bench and waited until the sporting goods store opened, and then he lifted the bike onto his shoulder and carried it inside, because if you left a bicycle out in the street in this town, any old thief might steal it. Joar argued with the man in the shop for a long time before they came to an agreement, then Joar had run all the way home to the crossroads, calling breathlessly to his friends: “COME ON!”
Some time later he was standing outside the art supplies shop and shaking his head in disbelief. Only when Ted and Ali got up from the ground and realized that no one was chasing them did they see that the artist was standing next to Joar holding something in his hand: a store receipt.
Joar grinned and exclaimed:
“What do you think I am? A THIEF or something?”
Joar had sold many bicycles in his life, but that day was the first time he had sold his own. And that was the money they used to buy the canvas and paint that would change the world.
“Good ending, that, too,” Louisa whispers in the darkness of the train carriage.
“Yes,” Ted says.
She doesn’t ask him to tell her anything more, so he doesn’t. They just lie in their bunks, one of them on his way home, the other on her way farther away than she has ever been.
“Good night, ghosts,” Louisa whispers.
“Good night, good night,” Ted replies.