Back on our street he had been a cheeky little devil, a couple of years younger than me, with quick legs and a mouth on him big enough to pick a fight with boys five years older than him. His mother had named him after a Swedish revue star she had heard on the radio when she was young, but there hadn’t been much glamour about the life she had given him.

Looking down into his unshaven, alcoholic face, his eyes bobbing like empty beer bottles in brackish water, I could barely glimpse anything of the boy he had once been.

‘Va-arg … ha’ you go’ a tenner for me? I’m so thirsty.’153

Lisbeth kept her distance. Perhaps she still didn’t recognise me. I had last met her two or three years before, at the house of a dwarf they called Hercules Olsen; she hadn’t recognised me then, either. She had passed as a sensual spring dream through the lives of so many boys that it was too much to expect that she would remember us all. In those days she had been a precocious thirteen-year-old who had been known to bathe naked with another girl in Nordnes park one very hot summer..

Even then there had been a fatigue in her expression when she cast knowing, and slightly contemptuous, eyes at us. She’d had too many ‘uncles’ in her past. Later I had occasionally spotted her in town, surprisingly well-dressed, coiffured and elegantly made up, and I had thought to myself, not without some incredulity, that she was definitely thriving. But then she suddenly reappeared, twenty years later, ravaged after years of living away, with holes in her stockings, smudged lipstick, a small child with filthy trousers hanging from one hand and a face that was much too grey. Later Lisbeth became, fatefully, a firm fixture in the ever-changing circle around Kaggen. If any man had been willing to spend fifty kroner, they could have taken her to the nearest gateway and picked the last wizened berries from her bush, but she would have got no pleasure from it, and nor would they. So we left it at the semi-nervous, semi-familiar looks we exchanged while I found my last three ten-krone coins and gave them to Kaggen.

‘Three Bergen dollars, Kaggen. Is that alright?’

He gratefully patted my arm. ‘You’s a good ol’ boy, Varg. I’ve allus said that. A good ol’ boy.’

Then he hobbled back to the others, as proud as a junior after his first goal in a proper match.

I walked on. Such is life. When you walk around your home 154town, you meet your own past everywhere. Childhood is a wound that never heals; your youth a poster someone has tried in vain to tear down. All the years you have lived are here, like dirty footprints in the snow behind you. You have left your own chalk-marks on most of the walls in this town and no charlady has bleach strong enough to wash them off completely. And the child you once were, you will never be again.