Free Beatles by Lars Saabye Christensen

turned, legged it up to the restaurant and banged on the door, but it was closed. No one opened up. We jumped on our bikes and cycled furiously to the car park and stopped by the telephone box. We squeezed in and found the police number on the first page of the directory. I picked up the receiver, Gunnar inserted the coin and Seb dialled the number. I was put through at once and went weak at the knees.
    ‘A man has drowned himself,’ my mouth said.
    ‘Who am I talking to, please?’ I heard.
    ‘Kim. Kim Karlsen.’
    ‘Where are you ringing from?’
    ‘From a telephone box. In Huk.’
    ‘Repeat what has happened.’
    ‘A man has drowned himself. His clothes are lying on the beach and he’s left a written note.’
    ‘Stay where you are
and don’t touch anything
. We’re on our way.’
    We cycled back and ran over to the cliff again. The clothes were still there, neatly folded, just like at night when you go to bed. We satdown at a secure distance, kept a lookout across the fjord, but it gave nothing away. I shuddered at the thought of water quickly closing in and hair floating like seaweed as waves broke onto the shore.
    ‘Hope they don’t find the b-b-badges,’ Ola whispered.
    ‘I’m not gonna swim here any more, anyway,’ Gunnar said with a shiver. Soon afterwards the cops arrived. They came in two cars and there was also an ambulance. The constables jogged towards us. Two examined the clothes and two talked to us.
    ‘Was it you who called us?’
    ‘Yes,’ I said.
    ‘When did you spot the clothes?’
    ‘Half an hour ago. At least.’
    ‘How long had you been here before?’
    ‘Quarter of an hour or something like that.’
    ‘And you didn’t hear anything or see anything?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘What were you doing here?’
    The others began to fidget. Ola’s left thigh twitched. I looked up at the policeman.
    ‘We were looking for shells,’ I said.
    Then something else happened. A big police boat arrived on the shoreline. On the deck there were two divers. The uniformed officers strolled down to the water’s edge. We followed them, stopped a good way behind.
    It didn’t take them long to find him. He was close to the shore. They emerged from the water with a blue naked body, as though the colour of the water had rubbed off. It was all stiff and the mouth was large and open. He can’t have been so old, younger than my father. They laid him on a stretcher – had to force him into position – covered him with a blanket and pushed him into the ambulance.
    It was the first time I had seen a dead person.
    Gunnar threw up as we were cycling home. None of us said a word, we just kept ourselves to ourselves. That night I lay wide awake in bed, thinking about death, I was a long way behind my eyes staring into a huge dark void, and I realised, without actually understanding it, that I was already beginning to die, it was a repugnant thought and I cried.
     
    It was spring and we were waiting. We were waiting for Frogner Lido to open. They had already started cleaning the pools. This year I would dive from the ten-metre board, that was a cert, I had the jump in me now. But I had competitors. I cut out a picture of the Russian, Alexei Leonov, hanging in space, a murky, ghost-like photo I didn’t quite believe at first. It looked a bit like the first photographs Dad took before he learned how to focus. He floated like that for ten minutes, in the endless blue abyss, tied to his space vehicle by a thin thread, an umbilical cord. And not long after it was the Americans’ turn. This time the picture was sharper, more credible, because you could see the earth in the background. Edward White hung outside his capsule for twenty-one minutes. Afterwards he said he hadn’t felt at all giddy, it had almost been like swimming. And then I visualised the enormous ocean, I was standing at the bottom of a colossal sea, and far above me, at night, swam goldfish ten times bigger than us, large, golden ships sailing slowly