‘Meet me in the shimmer of the morning – Baby – Meet me when the sun is coming up – Baby…’

Oh, yes! We would meet her in the hot glow of the morning 37sun and there wouldn’t be a stitch of clothing – not a fibre – between her skin and ours and the sun itself would turn to hide its face when it saw what we were doing.

A waitress with broad hips and dark-brown, curler-rolled hair took our order while Bella’s performance was still pulsating in our blood, but the food went cold before we could taste it and the atmosphere around us made the beer steam in our glasses.

We almost felt liberated when Bella took a break, allowing the banks of fog to dissipate and the band to run through a sequence of more subdued dance numbers. Hundreds of eyes followed her through the door behind the stage, hundreds of wild fantasies even further.

I nodded to Jakob as though he had just said something. ‘That was quite a … performance. You lot didn’t do that kind of stuff.’

He smiled. ‘No. We didn’t do that kind of stuff.’ After a pause he added: ‘I’m afraid Johnny’s bought a ticket for the season’s biggest anticlimax.’

I agreed. Even Bette Midler would have been an anticlimax after Bella.

And, as if on cue, one of the musicians in the band came to the microphone stand at the left of the stage and said: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, we have the pleasure of presenting to you this evening’s golden oldie. One of the town’s most popular artistes for – he won’t let me tell you how many – years. Put your hands together for Johnny Solheim.’

And we all politely applauded Johnny as he bounced as youthfully as he could onto the stage, twenty years too late and twenty kilos heavier than I had last seen him, wearing tight black trousers, a black leather jacket with big, shiny zips, white socks and black shoes, his thick, dark hair combed up and back in a 38genuine Elvis quiff and a determined expression on his face. He grabbed the mike, made a few tentative wiggles with his hips, mumbled ‘Uh-huh-huh…’ and began to sing.

Johnny Solheim was a year older than us and had lived in a grey house somewhere along the border between Fritznersmauet and the ruins of buildings burned down after the war. He had inherited his heavy physique from his father, a giant of a man who drank hard and knocked Johnny and his mother about whenever he was the worse for wear. It was not unusual for his mother – a ravaged beauty who wore her life like a botched pancake on her face – to escape from the house wearing a flowery dressing gown and dragging Johnny behind her like a rag doll while his father hung out of a first-floor window, shaking his fists after them and hurling abuse. As if it were yesterday I remembered a 17^th May with a cold northerly wind and scattered hailstorms when we came home after the main Independence Day procession, and Johnny and his mother had fled right up Nordnesveien while the father threw their furniture out of the ground-floor sitting-room window. Johnny stood there, his face pale and angry, shaking his clenched fists at his father and muttering between his teeth: ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you, I will.’ Later his father disappeared from their lives. Johnny and his mother continued to live in the little house and Johnny vented most of his pent-up anger on stage: ‘You ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog, crying all the time…’