The Ribbons Are for Fearlessness Read online

  I tried to focus but my eyes kept crossing.

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Where are you staying?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The stags roared with laughter. I thought I might be sick. Henrik put both his hands on my shoulders and massaged them gently, digging his thumbs into the bits that were aching from where the case was too heavy.

  “Perhaps you can join us later in chaos,” he said, when he finally stopped.

  Kaos was a nightclub on the Storgata, just behind the newsagent where I had been busking all week. It was full of couples groping each other and sticking their tongues down each other’s throats. There was no sign of the stags. I bought a double rum and Coke for one hundred and twenty kroner (yes, twelve pounds for one double rum and Coke) and went outside with it to sit on a wall by the fjord. I was wearing the sunglasses. The pink mountains looked yellow and so did the blue fjord. Maybe if I never took them off and never sobered up I would slip into a parallel universe where everything was yellow and nothing hurt anymore.

  I looked at the houses, the shops, the snogging couples, the lives that surrounded me, and I nearly choked on my rum and Coke. How did they do it? How did they get up, go to work, have babies and dinner parties, buy flat-screen televisions and gym memberships, when underneath everything was just this emptiness? This dreadful, blank, incomprehensible emptiness.

  I had just finished the rum and Coke, and was contemplating going inside to buy another, when someone sat down next to me and slung an arm across my shoulders. It was Henrik. He wiped a tear off my cheek with his thumb.

  “Why are you always crying?”

  I cast around for an answer that didn’t involve the messy, complicated truth.

  “Bloody midnight sun,” I muttered, eventually.

  “Don’t you like it?”

  “It’s crap,” I said, waving an arm in what I thought was a westerly direction. “I can’t believe I came all this way just to look at a normal day. I mean, it might be night, but it’s just a normal day. At night.”

  I could see that Henrik was trying not to smile. I hated him.

  “It’s fucking crap.”

  “You need to go on to the fucking Tromsdalstinden.”

  He pointed to the tallest mountain, the one behind the white cathedral. He looked at his watch.

  “But actually you are too late.”

  “I know. Thanks.”

  I could hear people shrieking behind me.

  “If you want to see the midnight sun like that you must go to fucking Nordkapp.”

  “Fuck Nordkapp.”

  “Ja. It is very beautiful. There you see the fucking midnight sun over the Barents Sea.”

  “Like you said, it’s too late.”

  Henrik checked his watch again.

  “No. At Nordkapp you have two more fucking nights after this one.”

  “Fuck that.”

  “Actually you need to go to Knivskjellodden. It is before Nordkapp on the road but actually further north. Not many people know this. Ja. There is no road to Knivskjellodden. Just a hike that is about four hours.”

  “Have you been?”

  “Ja. But it was misty. It is always misty. Fucking mist.”

  “Why do you keep saying fucking?”

  “I am trying to learn the English swearwords.”

  I stood up.

  “Fuck. Bugger. Fucking fuckety crap piss face.”

  “Fuck. Bugger. Fucking. Fuckty. Crapissfay,” repeated Henrik.

  He stood up, too. He grabbed my arm.

  “Time to fucking dance.”

  The stags were lurching unsteadily around the club like zombies on speed. Henrik bought me another double rum and Coke and dragged me on to the dance floor. The DJ was playing Abba, but Henrik pulled me toward him and made me do a slow dance. Everyone else jumped around and bounced off the walls, knocking into things and smashing glasses and falling over. Eventually, thankfully, we were kicked out.

  It was strange emerging from a dark, sweaty nightclub at three in the morning into the bright sunshine of the perpetual Arctic day. We walked in an unruly and drunken fashion along the fjord in the opposite direction to my van. Henrik picked a yellow rose, which smelled of England, and tucked it into my hair. I stumbled and he caught me and left his arm draped over my shoulder.

  We fetched up in a penthouse at the top of a smart-looking apartment block near the bridge. The apartment belonged to a man called Knut, who went straight into the kitchen and brought out a tray of coffees and a bottle of whiskey that he said had cost two hundred pounds. Everyone shouted loudly in Viking.

  “Takk takk. Tusen takk.”

  Maybe we never really know ourselves until we’ve drunk the best part of a bottle of whiskey.

  It’s certainly true that I had never been so drunk in my life as I was that night. We finished the first bottle and started on another, and then another. By the time everyone had finally passed out in Knut’s various bedrooms and left me and Henrik sitting side by side on a posh leather sofa, I could barely remember my own name, let alone the fact that I didn’t go in for one-night stands with strangers. Henrik lifted my legs up and put them across his knee. Then he leaned over and started snogging me, and before I knew it I was snogging him right back, and when he moved his tongue downward to my nipples, instead of telling him not to I moaned with pleasure, and when he unzipped my jeans and pulled them off along with my knickers and spread my legs and groaned and stuck his tongue down there too I pushed against it, arching my back. He moved back up to my mouth. I fumbled with the buckle on his jeans. He stopped to take them off himself. I watched him.

  “You have to go to Knivskjellodden,” he said, as he finally lay on top of me on the floor.

  “What?” I gasped.

  “You can’t travel all this way to see the midnight sun and not go to Knivskjellodden.”

  He pushed himself inside me, rendering me unable to answer.

  “Fucking,” said Henrik.

  14

  I left the apartment before anybody woke up. I can’t say that I felt good in any way. But I wasn’t crying anymore. When I finally made it back to the van and sobered up enough to read, I looked at Aase’s map and saw that Henrik had been dead right. There was a place called Knivskjellodden that clearly stuck out further than Nordkapp. Both were on the end of an island called Magerøya. I put the map away and slept until the early evening, then I went for a swim in the fjord and counted my money. With what Henrik had given me I had close to three thousand kroner, about three hundred pounds. I sat on the bed for ages, trying to talk myself out of it. Eventually I gave up, took some acetaminophen, packed up the van, put on the yellow sunglasses, and drove around until I found a garage that was open. I filled the tank with diesel, and I bought two jerry cans and filled them, too. I bought a cheese sandwich and a big bottle of Coke for the journey. There would be no time to stop and sleep. I had less than twenty-four hours to drive the equivalent of Land’s End to London on a single-track road full of potholes (according to Knut) that passed through only one town. I was apprehensive, to say the least.

  To the east and north of Tromsø is a region called Finnmark, which is larger than Denmark but has a population of just 72,000. This makes it the largest and least populated region in one of the least populated countries on earth. To the south is Finland, to the east Russia, and to the north the Barents Sea, otherwise known as the Arctic Ocean. The most easterly town in Finnmark, a place called Vardø, is further east than St. Petersburg and Istanbul. It was Europe, but not as I knew it. It was Europe with bears and tepees and herds of reindeer with huge antlers, standing in the middle of the road and looking at me disdainfully when I tried to inch past them. Jan Erik did his national service in Finnmark. He said it went down to minus fifty in winter. He actually shuddered when he told me. Finnmark, like Tromsø, is part of the sub-Arctic, the region immediately south of the true Arctic. Depending on local climates, the sub-Arctic is usually defined as the b
it between fifty and seventy degrees north. Knivskjellodden was seventy-one.

  It was Yoghurt, the one with the Sami ancestors, who told me about an Act of Parliament that had been passed on exactly the same day I disembarked from the ferry in Bergen. The Finnmark Act transferred 46,000 square kilometers, about 95 per cent of the land in Finnmark, to the inhabitants of Finnmark, Yoghurt’s Sami ancestors, to be managed by a board of elected directors. The Finnmark Act was set up to formalize the unwritten knowledge of borders and rights that lived, according to Yoghurt (who, like me, had drunk quite a bit of Knut’s expensive whiskey), in the heart of every nomad. Except the land does not belong to the people, he said, eyes crossing. The people belong to the land.

  I gazed at it through the windscreen. I felt as though I was looking at the road through a fisheye lens, watching it get smaller and smaller while the landscape around it got bigger and bigger. I could see what Yoghurt was getting at now. This was not a land of fences and boundaries and neat little hedgerows dividing it up. This was a different type of land.

  After a place called Nordkjosbotn, where it connects with the road that goes to Tromsø, the E6 follows the edge of the coastal fjords in a northerly direction until it reaches a town called Alta. Even though I still had more than half a tank I stopped to fill up again in Alta. On the map it looked like pretty much the only town that side of Russia.

  After Alta the road headed east over a plateau called the Finnmarksvidda, all of which is above the tree line. Day turned into night. Not that you’d know it, unless you’d grown used to the way the colors changed ever so slightly. I felt about six thousand years old. Or perhaps I didn’t even exist. There was nothing to measure myself against. No settlements, vehicles, people, or trees. Just the road, carrying me onward. Just me and my yellow van rattling through the wilderness.

  It was morning by the time I turned off the E6 and onto the E69 and began traveling north again, alongside the coves and inlets of the Porsangerfjorden. I stopped to make coffee and wash in the frigid water. Cut grass was laid out to dry on huge homemade driftwood racks. Old ladies in colorful clothes sold reindeer skins from trestle tables to the occasional loaded motor home heading the other way.

  A man in a booth charged me three hundred kroner to cross over to Magerøya. The old ferry had recently been replaced by the deepest tunnel in Norway, he said, reaching two kilometers below sea level.

  “Two kilometers?”

  “Ja.”

  I survived the tunnel, plunging down below the sea and then grinding back up again. The tunnel was gray, and there was no light at the end of it. Instead, when I finally popped out onto the island, the fog was so thick I’d have been lucky to see my own finger if I stuck it out three inches in front of my face. The man in the booth had told me there was a car park at the start of the hike to Knivskjellodden. I crawled across the island at 30 mph, missed the car park, ended up at Nordkapp, and had to do a thirty-six-point turn to avoid another man in a booth, who was selling tickets for something that looked disturbingly like Land’s End. I found the car park eventually. Not that you’d have ever known it was a car park. There were no cars for a start, just a small patch of gravel on the edge of the emptiness, which you couldn’t actually see because of the fog. Maybe, I thought hopefully, this wasn’t the right car park. I got out of the van, checked that my legs were still working, and hobbled over to a tiny notice board on a wooden stand. It was the right car park.

  The notice board informed me that humans have been on Magerøya for some time. It said that the island is mentioned in the Viking sagas, although apparently the colonies of razorbill and other seabirds feature rather more prominently than people. The coastline is barren and windswept. The interior is tundra: lakes, marshes, and willow scrub. I remembered tundra from school geography lessons. As far as I could recall, it was associated with glaciers and desolation. It looked like there was a whole lot of tundra between that car park and the midnight sun.

  There were big piles of stones to mark the path. Unfortunately, the fog was so thick I could only see them when I was already standing on them. I carried a small rucksack with some food and water and a spare jumper. My boots were not technical boots. Within minutes they were sopping wet and oozing mud from landing in bogs.

  The path to Nordkapp is well trodden in summer, and probably the path to Knivskjellodden too, but although it was still a few days shy of August, summer was quite clearly over. I felt utterly alone. I imagined my own funeral. Cause of death: hypothermia and insanity brought on from walking in Arctic circles for three weeks. I supposed my body would be flown back to Broadsands, although I didn’t know how, as I had no insurance. Maybe Ben and Jack would club together. Only the sweet, petite surfer would probably kick up a fuss, and Jack would say it was my fault anyway for not telling anyone where I was going. I realized, too late, that I should at least have left a note in the windshield of the van, explaining what I was up to, so that when it was still there in two weeks they would know where to look. The fog was getting to me. The fog and the fact that I hadn’t slept in twenty-four hours, or spoken to anyone apart from the man in the booth since I left Knut’s apartment two days ago.

  I eventually reached the sea. I couldn’t see it, but I could hear it, and I could smell it, and I was relieved to find myself on a rocky beach strewn with what looked like telegraph poles. The beach was at the bottom of a steepish slope. I fell over going down it and landed hard on the rocks at the bottom. I picked myself up gingerly. This would not be a good time to break a leg. I carefully made my way over the boulders and telegraph poles to a headland on the far side of the beach. I hauled myself up onto it, grabbing handfuls of tufty grass, and made for something that looked like a flagpole stuck into a piece of wood about ten feet away. There was a gold plaque nailed to the piece of wood.

  Knivskjellodden, it said, 71 degrees north.

  The most northerly point on mainland Europe.

  15

  I climbed to the top of the headland. The atmosphere was surreal. Reindeer with huge antlers loomed out of the fog, trailing tiny calves that stared at me with wide eyes as they picked their way through hundreds and hundreds of carefully built cairns, as if for centuries every single person who had hiked out to Knivskjellodden had felt bound to mark their existence with a pile of stones. I was no exception. I knelt down, selected some stones from the ground, and carefully built a cairn of my own. It seemed like the right thing to do. And when I had finished and I stood up again, I noticed that the fog had begun to lift. I could see the outline of the horizon, appearing and disappearing, and I stood and watched until the fog had dissolved completely, and I could actually see the sun.

  I wish I could describe what everything looked like without the fog, but all I can find are clichés, and there was nothing clichéd about that landscape. The ocean had pressed itself to the earth, flat and still, as if it was holding its breath. The horizon was the usual band of gold and the sky right above it was the usual thick dark red of a sunset. But other parts of the same sky were light blue, shot with pink, like dawn. Nordkapp, the place I had dreamed of for so long, looked nothing like I imagined; instead it resembled a giant red alligator striking out for the North Pole. The sky was not full of stars, but the sun was bobbing around on the horizon, taking bow after bow like a pantomime actor who refuses to leave the stage. And it didn’t leave. Instead, the band of gold, which had narrowed to a whisper, widened again, and the sun started rising before my eyes and the birds started up a crazy singing behind me and the sky lightened and it was day again. A fresh new perfect day popped straight out of the sunset.

  I lay on the wet grass and stared up at unfeasibly fluffy pink clouds. Fleetingly, I was overcome by a sense of something I had never felt before. It was like the end of a long jazz solo, when the drums kick back in and everybody suddenly knows where they are again. I pressed my ear to the ground, and listened to the reindeer munching, and then I sat up and listened to the faint murmur of the flat sea, and then I foun
d myself murmuring a quote by Kafka that I’d heard once and never forgotten, because it sounded so beautiful. It was about learning to be calm and quiet and alone, because when you are calm and quiet and alone for long enough, that’s when you get to see the world properly: “It has no choice; it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.”

  And then I turned my face into the earth and I cried. Because I’d made it. Because the midnight sun was everything it was cracked up to be. But Andrew was still dead. And Andrew would always be dead. And he would never know I had actually busked my way to Nordkapp, and he would never know about Jan Erik and Henrik and running out of diesel in the middle of the Dovrefjell. And I cried because I wanted to go home. And I cried because Jack was having sex with a sweet, petite surfer in my shed, and I cried because life was beautiful and I cried because life was a terrifying roller coaster that wouldn’t stop and wouldn’t let me off, even though I knew it was going to kill me in the end, and kill everyone I loved. And I cried because once people are dead, no matter how many of their crazy dreams you live out for them, they’re not coming back.

  Never.

  Not ever.

  Even though I could hear Andrew’s voice, as clearly as if he were standing right there beside me.

  “Hello?”

  I let out a huge wail.

  “Hello?” the voice said again.

  I sat up.

  “Hello?” the voice said a third time, only it didn’t sound like Andrew anymore. It sounded like it belonged to the girl who was standing two feet away from me, holding a camera.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to surprise you. I’m Hanna.”

  Apart from her hair, which looked like she’d shaved it off herself with a cheap disposable razor and no access to a mirror, Hanna looked fairly normal. About my height, maybe a bit thinner, with a pretty face made beautiful by these huge, yellowy brown eyes. Like me, she wore jeans and a sweatshirt and carried a small backpack. But Hanna was not normal. Hanna was one of those people you meet once in a lifetime—so different from everybody else you’re going to think I made her up. But I promise you I didn’t.