The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness Read online

  “Heck,” he said, and looked as if he was about to cry.

  “Maybe I’ll come back,” I stammered. “After I’ve seen it.”

  Jan Erik shook his head.

  “I think you are like a bird,” he said. “A bird you cannot catch.”

  I tried not to imagine Jack bent double with laughter.

  It was still raining in Bergen. As I sloshed around the wet streets looking for a pitch that wasn’t waterlogged, the looming gray sky felt like the lid of a coffin and I couldn’t stop thinking about Andrew.

  Dead.

  How could Andrew be dead?

  I remembered that awful moment when Ben had opened the door and told me. He was actually crying.

  Dead?

  The days and weeks immediately after it happened were the strangest of my life. Ben said we were in shock. For me it was more like vertigo. Like being stuck halfway up a cliff. Like the time Jack tried to take me climbing and I couldn’t look down or up but had to stare straight ahead at the rock, flattened against it like a cartoon animal that had just been shot out of a catapult, until he came and rescued me. Only this time there was nobody to rescue me. Jack wasn’t there. And even Jack couldn’t rescue me from death.

  Everything looked different. It was as if I was looking at life through a different lens, and the odd thing was, it shone more brightly. The sky seemed bigger than it had been, and more blue. The birds sang more loudly. Sleep was out of the question. Instead I lay in bed for hours, my head throbbing with incomprehensible words like nowhere, never, and nothing. I spent hours on the beach staring at the waves. Andrew is nowhere. Andrew is never coming back. Andrew is nothing. And no matter what I did or didn’t do, one day I would also be nothing. Which is possibly why I woke up one day and bought a one-way ticket to Norway. And why I spent the sum total of my very meager savings on a rattling old van that used to belong to Ben’s motorcross mates.

  It was raining so much I decided to try busking in a public toilet. It smelled of piss, but at least it was dry. I took my cello out of its case and played “Summertime” very badly. I stopped and opened my eyes. Three women were staring at me. Only when they left did I realize I had forgotten to put out the hat.

  The next day I found some old wooden tunnels that ran between expensive craft shops in Bryggen, Bergen’s answer to Gamle Stavanger. They were near the fish market. Right opposite the bus stop where I left my van that first day and came back to find it surrounded by uniformed officials. The tunnels in Bryggen were very old, and very crooked, and very empty. But they had roofs, and every half hour or so a Japanese tourist would poke his head in, bow apologetically as if he had interrupted me, and throw ten or twenty kroner in the hat. Which could have been worse, frankly. Until a fat woman in an apron came along and started shouting at me.

  “Stop! Stop! Are you Russian?” she asked.

  “No.”

  “Well. Stop anyway. Nobody is buying anything.”

  She drew her hand across her neck. “If you do not stop I will call the police.”

  Which wasn’t exactly encouraging.

  On the third day I got lucky. I found a subway. It was a long subway that led to the train station. It was dry and full of people. The only downside was that Tommy was already in there, strumming a guitar and singing a Bob Dylan song. Tommy looked about fifty but was actually thirty-four. What remained of his wispy hair grew on the very edges of a shiny red scalp. He wore black leather and cowboy boots, came from Newcastle, and had a dog on a piece of string. Tommy had seen it all. Except for a young girl on her own, busking with a cello. He let out a huge guffaw.

  “That’s a bloody big guitar.”

  I nodded and squelched closer. My ancient hiking boots, which were all I had apart from flip-flops, were so wet it was like having a small paddling pool attached to each foot. Tommy said I could have the spot while he went for lunch.

  In sharp contrast to the noisy streets I had become accustomed to, where I had to saw away with the bow just to be able to hear myself, the tunnel was like a giant microphone crossed with an echo chamber. In that tunnel, everyone was going to hear it. I took a deep breath and launched into “Autumn Leaves.” To my great surprise it actually sounded good. And because it sounded good I closed my eyes and really listened, and then it sounded even better. Through my half-closed eyes I could see people grinning as they walked past. More excitingly, I could hear the steady clang of coins dropping into the hat.

  Tommy came back with two polystyrene cups of instant coffee. He handed me one of the cups.

  “Thanks. That’s kind of you.”

  “Got to stick together. What with this bloody cashless society.”

  A nice-looking man in a brown duffel coat came over, winked, and handed me a fifty-kroner note.

  A fifty-kroner note!

  “What?” I said to Tommy, staring at the note.

  Tommy’s eyes glinted.

  “They hate music. Hate it. Scared, you see. Of crying.”

  I pushed the fifty-kroner note right down to the bottom of the back pocket of my jeans, so I would be in absolutely no danger of losing it. I noticed that Aase Gjerdrum’s telephone number was still in there. I took a slurp of coffee, which was so sweet I spat it out again. Tommy had already finished his. He screwed up the cup and chucked it on the ground. I began to scoop up the coins in the hat and stuff them into my other back pocket.

  “Do all right?”

  “Looks like it.”

  I couldn’t stop grinning. In the hat was what looked like more money than I had ever seen in my entire life. Probably because it was all in denominations of about one pence. But still. Tommy looked me up and down.

  “You can’t half play.”

  I flushed.

  “What are doing on the street?”

  I lifted my chin.

  “I’m going to Nordkapp to see the midnight sun.”

  Tommy let out another huge and heart-wrenching guffaw.

  “Did that once.”

  “Really?”

  “Got as far as Tromsø.”

  “The Paris of the north,” I said, still high on the fifty-kroner note.

  “More like Lima. So many panpipes half of ’em could go and have lunch and the other half wouldn’t even notice. Never stopped. Only place I’ve ever played and made nothing. Nada.”

  “How did you eat?”

  “Sold helium balloons.”

  I swallowed.

  “I’d better go.”

  “Come back later if you like. After five.”

  He beckoned me close.

  “It was like this,” he whispered, spitting slightly in my ear. “Chap called George Burns got it right. Sometimes they throw something in the hats. Sometimes they take something out of the hats. Sometimes they take the hats.”

  11

  After a week in Bergen, playing in the subway whenever Tommy had a break, there were enough kroner in the biscuit tin to start heading north. This was no mean feat. According to Aase’s map the next town of any size was Trondheim, 435 miles away. Taking into account all the ferries, I calculated that it would take me at least three days to get to Trondheim. Three days of not having to busk.

  I was in high spirits. When the ring of seven mountains was behind me, the rain stopped and the summer sun lit up the achingly beautiful scenery. I could see everything, being much higher up in the van than I would have been in a car, and what I saw was a magical land of drifting fjords, clapboard houses and gnarled apple trees, hay barns on stilts, ancient tractors, and trestle tables groaning with strawberries. I spent that night at the foot of Europe’s largest mountain plateau, the Hardangervidda, in a village called Kinsarvik, where happy hikers sat outside a wooden pub drinking cold beers, and the sun didn’t go down until long after eleven.

  The next day started out much the same. I was on the Highway 55, following the north bank of the endless Sognefjorden, the longest and most famous fjord of all. Several times I had to stop and dive in to cool off. I studied
the map. If I stuck to the Highway 55, I would soon be on the E6. The E6 went to Trondheim. In fact, it went all the way to Russia.

  I was listening to Billie Holiday singing “There Is No Greater Love” on Jan Erik’s tape when the Highway 55 left the north bank of the Sognefjorden to join the Lustrafjord. And when the Highway 55 morphed into the Sognefjellsvegen I rewound the tape and listened to it again, singing along, not paying a great deal of attention to the road. I didn’t know that the Sognefjellsvegen is closed for most of the year, because of snow. I knew that the Jotunheimen National Park stood between me and the E6, but I didn’t know that it consisted of 250 peaks that rise above more than 6,200 feet. Or that two of these peaks are Galdhøpiggen and Glittertind, also known as the two tallest mountains in Northern Europe. Or that after the road has climbed at a gradient of one in two for a little less than one mile, it officially becomes the highest mountain pass in Northern Europe.

  The Sognefjellsvegen climbed and climbed and climbed. Gone were the clapboard houses and trestle tables groaning with strawberries. Gone was the Sognefjorden. Instead there was the unmistakable smell of burning rubber. I opened the window, hoping someone was burning a mattress in a nearby field. The sunshine had given way to a wet mist and the temperature outside had dropped about ten degrees. The temperature gauge on the dashboard, on the other hand, had risen about a hundred degrees. Come to think of it, that stuff coming out from under the hood looked more like smoke than fog. I turned the tape off. The road had narrowed to a small lane. It was a while before I found somewhere I could pull over, a lay-by overlooking a deep valley that kept disappearing behind thick, damp clouds.

  I climbed down from the cab, opened the hood, and looked at the engine. Unfortunately I didn’t know much about engines, although thanks to Ben I had learned where you put water in. I unscrewed the radiator cap and a jet of steam nearly took my eye out. There didn’t seem to be much I could do until it cooled down, so I left the hood up and sat on the bed.

  The silence was deafening.

  I had finished all my books. I couldn’t take a hot bath, or even a shower. I had nothing to smoke and nothing to drink. I had nothing to watch or listen to (I couldn’t play tapes when I wasn’t driving in case I drained the battery). In the end I pulled my cello out of the cupboard. There was just enough room to play it inside the van if I sat sideways, facing the cooker, and didn’t do any long bow strokes.

  When I woke in the morning the mist had gone. I poured water into the radiator and started the engine. I left the hood up and stared at it for a while. Everything looked normal. There was no smell of burning rubber. I climbed into the driver’s seat and resumed my vertical ascent.

  I made it to the top. To the point where the Sognefjellsvegen finally stops climbing and prepares to cross the Jotunheimen National Park. It was incredible. The road was a narrow strip of tarmac carved out of snowdrifts twelve feet high. Everything else was so white I could hardly tell which way was up anymore. To the east, rising out of the snow, were the jagged, ice-covered peaks of Glittertind and Galdhøpiggen. I felt a stab of longing to go further in, to hike all day like the people who were gathering with maps and boots and backpacks, and then drink beer in the sun and wash my tired feet in an ice-cold river. But the midnight sun wouldn’t wait for me, and the diesel warning light was on. All that climbing had emptied my fuel tank. I consulted Aase’s map. There was a small town called Lom on the other side of the Jotunheimen. I pulled out the biscuit tin and counted my money. I still had two hundred kroner. I prayed that Lom had a gas station.

  Lom did have a gas station. Unfortunately, by the time I got there, it was closed. I decided to press on. There had to be another town soon.

  There wasn’t.

  I was on the E6 and halfway across another national park, called the Dovrefjell, when the van spluttered, coughed, and died. I managed to roll off the road and onto a patch of dirt next to some deserted barns. The barns seemed to belong to the national park authority. On all the doors were big signs warning about musk oxen, which looked like overgrown sheep with long straggly fringes like aging rock stars and huge tusks like woolly mammoths. According to the signs musk oxen were vegetarian but neurotic. They wouldn’t eat you, but they might accidentally gore you to death.

  I made a cup of tea and sat by the road with it so I could flag down a car. Not that I had seen a car yet on the E6. I unpacked my cello and tried to work out how to play “There Is No Greater Love.” Then I made another cup of tea. I had drunk four cups of tea and played “There Is No Greater Love” twelve times when a Land Rover finally appeared. I didn’t have to flag it down in the end. It pulled over anyway. The man who got out was wearing khaki shorts.

  “There is no parking here,” he said, looking at my cello.

  I cleared my throat.

  “Actually I’ve run out of diesel.”

  The man hauled a rusty jerry can out of the back of the Land Rover.

  “You’re in luck,” he said. “Where are you going?”

  “Trondheim. Well, Nordkapp. But Trondheim first.”

  He splashed diesel liberally into my tank.

  “I’ve only got two hundred kroner,” I said, anxiously.

  “You will need more than two hundred kroner to get to Nordkapp.”

  “I know that.”

  I picked up my cello and started packing it into the case.

  “Why do you have a cello?”

  “I am a busker,” I said. “I play music on the street for money. That’s how I’m going to get to Nordkapp.”

  “Then play for me and keep your two hundred kroner.”

  “Oh no. I don’t mind paying.”

  “I would rather hear you play the cello. It’s not often that I hear somebody playing the cello on the side of the E6. I love the Bach Suites.”

  Because of this I tried to play the Minuet, but I’d forgotten it, and halfway through it accidentally morphed into “There Is No Greater Love,” then it came unstuck altogether and I stopped. I could feel myself blushing.

  “That was awful,” I said.

  The man didn’t disagree. He laughed and told me I could keep the diesel anyway, because it was the Norwegian equivalent of red diesel and I’d probably get arrested. I put the cello in the cupboard.

  “I don’t suppose you know where I can get any water.”

  “There is a river over there,” he said.

  “I mean drinking water.”

  “This isn’t England. You can drink from the rivers in Norway.”

  Trondheim was a disaster, too.

  There were so many buskers I thought I was seeing double. All of them were foreign, from distant corners of Europe, where kroner are worth sleeping on the street for. Tough-looking teenagers with battered guitars hissed and spat at me. Naked men in silver paint pretended to be statues. Other men in gold paint pretended to be birds. A girl who was definitely under ten played a mandolin and tried not to cry. To top it all off, a boy of about twelve sat on the edge of Torvet, the main square, and played the Haydn Cello Concerto in C. Not only that, but he had a pickup and was plugged into a portable amp. I pushed my way to the front of the crowd that had gathered around him and watched his fingers zipping up and down the strings like Yo-Yo Ma. He finished the first movement and went straight to the third and most difficult, missing out the melancholy adagio in the middle.

  I went back to the van, put the cello in the cupboard, closed all the doors, lit a candle, and studied the guidebook. The guidebook said there were no towns worth mentioning until Mo i Rana, 310 miles away, on the edge of the Arctic Circle. Apart from a small and ugly place that grew up around a noisy rail junction on the far side of the Trondheimsfjorden. Called Hell.

  I slept in Hell that night. Or rather, I slept just outside it, in a narrow lay-by right next to the busiest stretch of road I had come across since I left England. I was woken in the middle of the night by someone knocking on the side of the van. I sat up. They knocked again. I pulled on some clothes and peered
through the hole in the bulkhead. Two policemen stood outside shining torches at my tires. I opened the door, trying not to think about the red diesel.

  “What are you doing?”

  They shone their torches into the van.

  “Sleeping.”

  “You cannot sleep here.”

  They led me to a car park, where I lay wide awake through the rest of the long, light night.

  Hell has to be the worst town in the world for busking. There are no squares. No cafés. Just freight trains and car parks and run-down shops with no customers. Eventually I set up right outside the freight depot, which was the only place with any people. I tried “Summertime” and “Autumn Leaves.” Nothing. I tried Haydn and Bach. Nothing. I tried “There Is No Greater Love.” Two men in greasy overalls walked over from the freight depot, laughed, and put twenty kroner in the hat. It was a start. Then the policemen I had met in the night arrived. There clearly wasn’t much crime in Hell.

  “You cannot play music here.”

  I was desperate.

  “Not even for charity?”

  “What charity?”

  “Homeless people,” I said, staring him straight in the eye. “And dead people.”

  The policemen took me to a shopping center I hadn’t noticed because it looked more like a multi-story car park. They persuaded the security guards to let me play inside it for three days. Which was just long enough for a tank of diesel and a postcard for Ben that had a picture of the freight depot with “Hell, God’s Ekspedisjon” scrawled across it.

  The journey from Hell to Mo i Rana took another two days and two nights. I didn’t care. Quite the reverse. Away from the towns, driving was the easy bit. This time, instead of fjords, there were the wooded valleys of Trøndelag, eventually giving way to Nordland, which was wild and bleak and full of empty plateaus and endless snaking rivers. Even if I had been able to afford to stay in campsites I couldn’t have done because there weren’t any. There didn’t need to be. With Trondheim and Hell 60 miles behind me, and Mo i Rana 310 miles in front of me, there was nobody to care about some yellow van driven a few hundred meters across the scrub from the E6 and parked with its back doors looking out over one of the endless snaking rivers. There was nobody to see it.