Midnight Sun Read Online Free PDF Page A

Ulf.’
    â€˜Okay.’
    â€˜Go on, then!’
    â€˜What for?’
    â€˜To get it over with. There’s nothing worse than not knowing when the bullet’s coming.’
    â€˜Bang.’
    â€˜Did you get teased at school, Ulf?’
    â€˜Why do you ask?’
    â€˜You’ve got a weird way of talking.’
    â€˜Everyone talks like this where I grew up.’
    â€˜Wow. Did they all get teased, then?’
    I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Okay, I got teased a
bit
. When I was ten years old my parents died, and I moved from the east side of Oslo to the west, to live with my grandfather, Basse. The other kids called me Oliver Twist and east-end trash.’
    â€˜But you’re not.’
    â€˜Thanks.’
    â€˜You’re south-side trash.’ He laughed. ‘That was a joke! That’s three you owe me now.’
    â€˜I wish I knew where you got them all from, Knut.’
    He screwed one eye shut and squinted at me. ‘Can I carry the rifle?’
    â€˜No.’
    â€˜It’s my dad’s.’
    â€˜I said no.’
    He groaned, and drooped his head and arms for a few seconds, then straightened again. We sped up. He sang quietly to himself. I couldn’t swear to it, but it sounded like a hymn. I thought about asking him what his mother’s name was – it might be useful to know when I needed to go back to the village. If I couldn’t remember where the house was, for instance. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to ask.
    â€˜There’s the cabin,’ Knut said, and pointed.
    I got the binoculars out and adjusted the focus, which you have to do with both lenses on a B 8 . Behind the dancing midges lay something that looked more like a small woodshed than a cabin. No windows, from what I could see, just a collection of unpainted, grey, dried-out planks gathered around a thin, black chimney pipe.
    We carried on walking, and my mind must have been on something else entirely when my eyes registered a movement, something much bigger than the midges, something a hundred metres ahead of us, something suddenly emerging from the monotonous landscape. My heart felt as though it stopped for a moment. There was an odd clicking sound as the heavy-antlered creature ran off through the heather.
    â€˜A buck,’ Knut declared.
    My pulse slowly calmed down. ‘How do you know it’s not a . . . er, one of the other sort?’
    He gave me that funny look again.
    â€˜We don’t get many reindeer in Oslo,’ I said.
    â€˜A doe. Because bucks have bigger horns, don’t they? See, it’s rubbing them against that tree.’
    The reindeer had stopped in a cluster of trees behind the cabin and was rubbing its antlers against a birch trunk.
    â€˜Is it scraping off bark to eat?’
    He laughed. ‘Reindeer eat lichen.’
    Of course, reindeer eat lichen. We’d learned about the types of moss that grow up here close to the North Pole in school. That a
joik
was a sort of improvised shouting in Sámi, that a
lavvo
was a form of Indian teepee, and that Finnmark was further away from Oslo than London or Paris. We also learned a way of remembering the names of the fjords, although I doubt anyone could recall what it was now. Not me, anyway – I’d made it through fifteen years of education, two of them at university, even, by half-remembering things.
    â€˜They rub their horns to clean them,’ Knut said. ‘They do that in August. When I was little, Grandpa said it was because their horns itched so badly.’
    He smacked his lips like an old man, as if to lament how naive he had once been. I could have told him that some of us never stop being naive.
    The cabin stood on four large rocks. It wasn’t locked, but I had to tug the door handle hard to loosen it from the frame. Inside were a pair of bunk beds with woollen blankets, and a wood-burning stove with a dented kettle and a casserole dish sitting on