Johnny Solheim. I hadn’t had any contact with him for fifteen to twenty years. In the last few days I had met him twice. And now he was dead.

I didn’t know him now. The time I’d known him was long gone, but I had a feeling I was going to get to know him again. I felt I was being pulled backwards in time, through a dark tunnel, only to be disgorged onto the street at some point more than thirty years ago.

Once again we were leaving school, Pelle and I, Paul and Jan Petter. Past the Catering College, where the boxer dog, Lasse, as old as Methuselah, always lay, keeping guard over the steps to the street. We turned down Nordnesveien and had a clear view of the Swiss-chalet-style Troyebygget, the customs office, Skoltegrunn quay and the Norwegian America liners. On the right-hand side were the first new-builds, which were known as the Red Cross houses because they were intended to be replacement housing for those who had lost their homes during the war; however, it was mostly people from other districts who had moved in. On the left, Haugeveien showed us its rear: high-walled, cramped backyards where sheets hung to dry like white flags hoisted in a plea for safe passage. In the middle of the street was the sailmaker’s house with its grey end-wall, and behind it everything was as it had always been. It was a densely populated 136district with joined wooden houses, alleys full of nooks and crannies, criss-crossing paths and openings, surprise stairways and the occasional fenced-in courtyard. Down there, in a green house, was where I lived. And in a grey house towards Fritznersmauet was where Johnny Solheim lived.

He had been a year older than us, and many years stronger, and we had always had great respect for him, not least because the brutality he had experienced at home had made him an unpredictable beast on the street. He could blow in like a tornado down the alley, kicking and lashing out in all directions, punching and swearing like a trooper.

After the 17^th May celebrations, when his father had hurled their furniture out of the window while Johnny and his mother stood in Nordnesveien waiting for a taxi and Johnny shook his fist at his father muttering ‘I’ll kill you. I’ll kill you, I will,’ his father took the hint, packed his bags and left for good. We never saw him again. But Johnny enjoyed greater respect than ever.

From then on he became the man in the house, and there was something grown-up about him, which set him even further apart from us. He reappeared in our lives in the late fifties as a singer and The Harpers’ front man, a local mixture of Elvis and Ricky Nelson, with footwork he had learned from the stalls in the Forum and Logen cinemas, an acceptable vibrato and a wicked glint in his eye the devil would have envied. And of course it was him who went off with Anita, our street’s most voluptuous trophy.