Harbor by John Lindqvist (classic novels for teens txt) 📕

So there were the two of them, Henrik and Björn.

Unlike the rest of the gang, they were the children of parents who lived on the island permanently. Björn’s father was a carpenter who built jetties, and his mother worked in geriatric care. Henrik lived alone with his mother, and it wasn’t clear what she actually did.

Usually the children belonging to the summer visitors and those belonging to the permanent residents were separate tribes who lived in separate camps, but in this case there was a go-between: Anders. His mother had been a summer visitor; she’d met his father and moved to Domarö when Anders was born. It lasted just about a year, and then his mother caught the boat back to the city and took her son with her.

Anders came out to visit his father in the holidays and sometimes at weekends, and thus ended up with a foot in each camp. He had his summer friends on Kattudden, but in the winter he sometimes played with Henrik and Björn, his only contemporaries in the village at the time.

They went sledging on the slope down to the steamboat jetty, played in abandoned barns and called each other ‘dickhead’.

‘Shall we do something, dickhead?’

‘We could do, dickhead. Where’s the other dickhead?’

After a few years Henrik and Björn moved closer to the summer gang via Anders and became part of it, to a certain extent. However, they refrained from calling each other dickhead when the rest of the gang could hear.

There was one summer, just one, when Henrik and Björn were fully fledged members of the gang. In 1983, when Henrik was thirteenand Björn was twelve, they were sought after and desirable in every situation. The reason for their popularity was purely mechanical: Henrik had acquired a platform moped.

Since there were no cars on Domarö, all the children were allowed to ride their bikes as much as they wanted as soon as they had mastered the art, and they would whiz back and forth between houses, along the forest tracks, between the harbour and Kattudden. In the summer of 1983 the bikes suddenly seemed rather childish; after all, there were cooler things out there.

Even though Henrik wasn’t quite old enough, his father had given him the old but well-renovated three-wheel moped for the same reason that six-year-olds were allowed to ride their bikes wherever they liked: if there was an accident, it was because the child had run into something, not because they had been run over. And the moped didn’t go fast. Thirty-five at the most, going downhill with the sun and the wind behind it.

However, the oldest members of the gang were thirteen and next to the often rusty just-for-the-country bikes, the moped was a Lamborghini. It was speed and it was cool and it was status, and since Henrik and Björn were inseparable, Björn got his share of the boom in Henrik’s popularity.

That summer, and only that summer, Henrik manoeuvred skilfully between the desires, disappointments and petty intrigues that exist in every group. His newly won popularity made him bold, and suddenly he was doing everything right. He didn’t give in to Joel’s demands to be allowed to ride the moped when the whole group was together. He did, however, let Joel have a go when there were just the two of them, which gave Henrik points without the loss of status that would have resulted from allowing Joel to take over in front of everyone.

He also made sure he gave Elin a lift when he knew that some of the others could see, since the combination of his own moped and Elin was virtually unbeatable. The hormones were stirring, and Elin had acquired breasts. When Henrik pulled up in front of the shopwith Elin on the platform, her breasts bouncing from the uneven track, he was king. That summer.

Otherwise he and Björn could often be seen riding along the tracks, down to the shore, through the forest. Since Anders was the only member of the gang apart from Henrik and Björn who lived in the old village, he often got a lift home after an evening at Martin’s or Elin’s.

‘Jump on, dickhead.’

In the middle of August they all parted over a period of a few days. Henrik and Björn remained behind, while the rest of the gang disappeared to Stockholm and Uppsala. When Anders came out for a week during the Christmas holidays, the inlet down below his father’s house had frozen, and he, Henrik and Björn amused themselves dragging each other around on skis behind the moped, or just generally slithering about.

The following summer, something had changed. When Henrik tried to impress by riding on two wheels along the entire length of the forest track, no one was particularly interested. Some had been riding mopeds in the city, slick models modified for better performance, and when it came down to it, a platform moped was actually quite…rural.

Henrik and Björn fell from grace, and they fell hard. Perhaps as a reaction to the artificial importance they had enjoyed the previous summer, they now started to attract a certain amount of ridicule. They had the wrong clothes and the wrong hairstyles, they talked funny and they knew nothing about music. It was during that summer someone came up with that business of H and B. Hubba and Bubba. Big bubbles, no troubles.

Both Martin and Joel had let their hair grow during the winter. Anders, somewhere in between as usual, had medium-length hair, as did Johan. Hubba and Bubba had very short hair, and the others decided it was so the fish scales wouldn’t get stuck in it. Or the dung, come to that.

Both Malin and Elin teased their hair up like Madonna, lots of spray, and although Cecilia and Frida, who were a year younger,didn’t go that far—or use that much make-up—they too had started to show an interest in how they looked.

Joel had a T-shirt with ‘Frankie says RELAX’ on