Nul Points Read online

  Agonisingly, every time I try to lighten the tone, change the subject, move things along, something snags and we end up back in Dublin. I imagine he’ll have been wryly amused by Jahn’s and Tor Endresen’s decision to compete in the Melodi once again, but as his face screws up in confused disgust it’s clear both that this news has not previously reached the Gulf of Thailand, and that Finn is anything but happy to hear it.

  ‘Oh, if you’ve been really badly burnt, you don’t try again! When I came fourth at the Melodi in 1987, I got rid of the zeroes and then I was finished with it, once and for all. I was asked this year to do a Eurosong for Sweden but I said no. I would never, ever do Melodi again! Never!’

  Finn frets over the revelation of Jahn and Tor’s Melodi return on and off for the next few hours, muttering about people who never learn, about the contest’s decline in recent years. ‘Last time I saw the Melodi there was a beautiful lady, very sexy, but she cannot sing in tune, not hitting one note … this competition is going to take her nowhere. And I don’t watch Eurovision any more. The orchestra went, everybody is recorded, and then a lady from Russia runs out in a wolf skin and does a war dance. I say: “OK, this is the end for me!’”

  Anyone familiar with the contest’s burgeoning emphasis on glitzy showmanship in recent years is hardly about to disagree with this verdict, but Finn is no longer placated by my increasingly desperate nods and smiles of assent. ‘And what does Europe mean? I’m a world citizen, not a European.’ He’s not sure he’s ever even been to Germany, he says, and would certainly identify more with an American than a Spaniard. His words reedy and rapid, he recounts with great gusto the finer details of his Harley-Davidson odyssey.

  I’m in the middle of articulating an impressed response when he’s off again. ‘I just can’t understand why those two are doing it again! Anyway, I don’t belong there, I don’t believe in people voting for songs. I don’t need these telephoning votes to prove to me how important my songs are. Not to be big-headed, but when you get letters from people saying you gave them the spirit to carry on, that’s better proof for me!’ The world citizen passes a proprietorial hand across his realm as it is laid out in soft white and sparkling blue before us. ‘I have saved lives out there!’

  Just after this memorable pronouncement, it happens. I look down at my MP3-playing voice recorder, lying across the Finn-side arm of my white plastic sunlounger, and notice its little screen is unaccountably blank. I snatch it up, switch the battery, shake it, press buttons. Nothing. ‘Just a minute,’ I blurt, and race back to my chalet to discover, in ratcheting anguish, that random chunks of our day’s conversation, perhaps totalling ninety minutes, have been lost for ever down some silicon vortex. Before the week is up this device will meet furious and repeated heel-shaped retribution on a cold London pavement, but spreadeagled on my bed with those crappy little headphones plugged into my hot ears, all I have the energy for is a long, low moan, as if I’m just waking up with an enormous hangover. Though when I listen through the stop-start recording again, and grasp that the bulk of the missing words cover Finn’s account of a long-ago night in Dublin, I top that with a fairly impressive shriek.

  ‘OK, let’s just do it,’ snaps Finn, cutting short my faltering, apologetic account of the technical fault which will necessitate a return to the events of 4 April 1981. In mind of those recent pronouncements on the inner shittiness engendered by my questioning, I’d expected a request to revisit his blackest day to be met with tears on the sand or a stonewall sulk. Uncomfortable as his brusque opprobrium is, I’m grateful to hear it. So grateful that I re-set the Dublin scene with indelicate haste and precision: ‘Right … you’ve got your nul points, you’re drunk, and Stig Anderson has just punched you in the stomach.’

  In the pause before Finn starts talking, he turns to gaze steadily at me through his mirrored shades. Around those inscrutable lenses I can see his eye sockets narrow, the skin contracting. That hefty jaw juts further out, and I think: It’s the boxer reflex. He’s about to deck me with the old Fåvang one-two, the old elk stopper. Then he puffs out his cheeks, exhales slowly, and says, ‘You know, there are worse things than getting no points in the Eurovision Song Contest.’

  There’s an ominous terminatory tang to this avowal, which I try to ignore even as I swiftly endorse it, emphasising that I’ve come all this way to interview its beach-burnished embodiment. ‘I didn’t worry about the zero points because Aldri i Livet was my best-selling single, from my best-selling album.’ Listening to the recording on the flight home, the flat weariness of Finn’s words has me sagging in aisle-sprawled empathy. He’s running out of juice, drifting off like the computer at the end of 2001.

  ‘Yeah, maybe after that third record things were going slow … I don’t know.’ His answers become incoherent, his voice fuzzy and tranquillised. I remember the other Finn Kalvik I’d blundered across during my early research, a ‘deceased ufologist who was a leading figure and magazine editor for Norsk UFO Center’, and think: This is how he would have spoken. ‘When you’re used to living in one style and you have to take a few steps back, or you were playing in big halls and you have to play in smaller places … I’ve been through all that, I’m a survivor, I’ve balanced all my ups and downs … Time is running fast, but I’m not going to panic.’ He girds himself with the dregs of his most recent Chang. ‘I’m proud that I never gave up. And I’m proud because I always wanted to live like this, and here I am doing it.’

  I’ve been to paradise, but I’ve never been to me. These heartwarming, Finn-affirming words prove to be the epitaph to our intercourse. Immediately afterwards, following a sort of snorted sigh that interrupts some fumbling enquiry of mine, he jumps abruptly to his feet and swiftly covers the short distance to his chalet. By the time he stamps out of it, an hour after sunset, he’s tousled, red-faced and glowering, rasping bitter incoherences as he marches past the under-palm picnic table where Bjørn, Sissel and I are enjoying a brewed aperitif.

  Dispatched at our usual place up the beach, at our usual table, my last supper offers a disjointed and grimly funereal contrast with its convivial, lavishly lagered predecessors. The four of us sip and chew in discomforting silence; at length, Bjørn diplomatically embarks on a round-up of his most memorable journalistic experiences, from being first at the grave of Nicolae Ceauçescu, to a four-week assignment in North Korea. Captivating as these reminiscences are, Finn’s intimidating display of wordless, jaw-rippling rage restricts me to the odd dutiful nod or hum. Even the now traditional Teutonic pyrotechnics that rip through the night sky as the waiter clears away my unfinished red chicken curry fail to defuse the situation. When Finn presses a hand to his ear and winces, the many emotions tangled together in my head are confused further with a knot of sympathy.

  The waters are not unmuddied during our Chang-fuelled after-dinner crisis summit, the two of us squatting side by side on logs in the tepid, breezy dark under Big John’s beach-border palms. Popping open my second can, I rather rashly interrupt a prolonged tirade against media intrusion (and more specifically against me) to suggest that if he really hadn’t wanted this meeting to happen, Finn could have saved us both a lot of heartache by saying so in the traditional manner: beforehand.

  His protracted and vigorous response to this ensures that I don’t say very much more. He punctuates his more heated and less intelligible pronouncements (the majority) by smacking the side of his log, and employs intemperate language. Flecks of Kalvik spittle spatter my bare thighs. The last outward ferry eases towards the unseen mainland, and as Finn rants beside me I track its steady progress in silence, wishing myself aboard, watching as its gay decklights merge into a frail glow. Long after it has vacated the horizon, its feeble wake washes up at our feet.

  In the end, spent and disconsolate, I haul myself upright, heave out a kind of full-body shrug and leave him clenching his face muscles at the sea. It’s in every schoolbook in Norway, I think, squinting through the P11 mosquito mesh as the light flicks on in P
10: Finn Kalvik, go f … find yourself.

  Finn’s curtains are still drawn when I stumble out, ill-kempt and unrested, into another wincing-bright morning. With no appetite for an encounter and not much more for breakfast, I walk through the rush-roofed, hibiscus-walled breakfast hut and ask Gob to phone for a minibus. Half an hour later I’m stepping out into a thick, hot quayside miasma of dog and old prawns at Nathon, the port I’d been watching those rust-weeping mainland ferries steaming to and from across the Big John horizon. For a moment I wonder why I thought coming here might cheer me up. Then I spot a stall flogging pirate DVDs for a quid a pop, and begin to remember.

  Potholed, chaotic and malodorous, Nathon isn’t easy to love, but in four hours I develop an affection for its energetic populace. For the delicate yet piquant chicken and coconut soup they serve me, for the tininess of the bill that follows it, for the Kalvik-banishing commercial distractions that crowd every one of the dusty, teeming streets.

  I plug in my stupid, doomed MP3 player and allow Mil Etter Mil to accompany me through a sportswear bazaar luridly aglow with kaleidoscopic counterfeits, tawny curs yapping underfoot, tongues down, tails up, balls out. More of those winning confluences of east and west: seaweed and lobster flavoured Lays crisps, a hostel advertising ‘continention breakfasts’, a Rolling Stones hits album featuring Get Off My Clown. Desiccated corpse-husks of thumb-sized cockroaches crunching underfoot. A market alive with muscular aromas: roast chicken, alien fruit on the turn, sun-warmed seafood.

  Aldri i Livet is next up on the chronological Eurovision playlist, but as Benny’s keyboard intro plinks into my head I click back to Jahn with almost Pavlovian spontaneity. ‘Krrrrrrrrrroppp!’ he trills anew, as a phalanx of Honda C90s buzzes by, fags dangling from the mouths of the male pilots, wives and mothers – sometimes both – riding side-saddle behind. And not a helmet in sight: it wasn’t difficult to accept Finn’s revelation of the 300 road-deaths with which the country had recently marked New Year’s Eve.

  All around the locals are engaged in frenetic labour, their industry glaringly incompatible with the bone-wilting, back-dampening conditions: men lugging crated washing machines up a fire escape, tiny, flip-flopped women hauling trolleys of giant, stuffed Spidermen and Piglets twice their size. Above Jahn’s approximate final warblings I find myself pondering the words of his one-time fellow punk Johnny Rotten: a cheap holiday in other people’s misery. Sissel had discovered our evening beach waiter was on £25 for a ninety-six-hour week. And he was one of the elite: what about those gardeners?

  Thailand has enjoyed, and endured, long stints as the world’s fastest-growing economy, and the frenzied commercial activity on display in these streets offered an unedifying contrast to the shambling nonchalance displayed by all foreign guests. Young travellers with the swirly tattoos and hoover-hairball dreadlocks of Lonely Planet long-termers shuffling listlessly in and out of the internet cafés; the elephant-centric souvenir emporia disgorging waddlesome Polo-shirted representatives of their parents’ generation, here on day trips from the ritzy, gated holiday compounds that ring the Koh Samui coast. And me, now flumped down on an under-tree dockside bench, a sweaty sack of counterfeit merchandise in the lap of my damp shorts, an umpteenth palliative dose of Jahn in my ears. I’ll keep this up for as long as it takes, I think, watching two floppy-hatted fishermen haul nets up on to the deck of their high-prowed little boat. For mile after mile after mile.

  After spending much of the previous night failing to outflank a furious blond man guarding the Land of Nod, I hardly bother to resist as my chin sags down to my chest. What seems a moment later I’m violently roused by a horrid sensation below the shorts-line. One of the island’s battered maroon and yellow cabs has bumped into a pothole behind my bench, and in doing so diverted much of the fetid fluid collected at its fundament to the back of my bare legs. Dopily exhaling an unintelligible flow of obscenities I realise something else: two floating female voices are serenading me. When a thin, clear masculine soprano joins them, using words that are familiar yet meaningless, I gather my full waking senses together and understand I’m listening to Mr F. Kalvik’s ill-fated magnum opus. But this time I don’t click it off. This time I listen, and keep listening until the three voices and their ringmaster’s keyboard fade into silence.

  ‘You know,’ Finn had said almost exactly twenty-four hours before, ‘Aldri i Livet is now more popular than ever, for a whole new generation, because they just used it for the music on a big TV commercial in Norway.’ Well, that’s fantastic, I’d replied. What was the advertisement for? I remember thinking how snidely apposite it would be if he’d said ‘cheese’, until he actually did. ‘It’s one of the big highlights of my concerts, and when I play it at weddings the bride always cries. And it’s twenty-three years old … amazing! This song has really … I am in lack of words – I don’t know how you say this in English.’

  ‘Stood the test of time?’

  ‘That’s it! It really has stood a test in time.’ And he smiled as he said it, and remembering that so did I.

  Aldri i Livet was such a sweet, simple, carefree composition, yet the fate brutally bestowed on it one distant night in Dublin had curdled those bright, pure notes into a discordant dirge that haunted its creator’s life. The song’s Eurovision meltdown had initiated the shockingly abrupt collapse of Finn Kalvik’s burgeoning commercial success; no nul-pointer had further to fall. His wearying schizophrenic switches from braggadocio to conciliation, sometimes in the same sentence, mirrored the bewildering bipolarity of his biggest-selling single – Aldri i Livet was at once the triumphant zenith of his pop career and its kiss of death. That, as he himself accepted, was what had inspired the Åpen Post writers. As twelve year olds they’d cheered expectantly at the telly as Norway’s hottest star sat on his stool in Dublin and waited for Sigurd Jansen to count him in. Yet by the time they were teenagers, he’d somehow disappeared off the face of the earth.

  I flicked the player back, and gave myself another hit of Finn. The innocent sincerity of both song and singer had never struck me quite like this, as hard as a pissed-up Stig Anderson. It all suddenly seemed so random, so unfair. I remembered Finn’s open and expectant demeanour as he’d walked across that windy Dublin dockside, hands in pockets, hope in heart. The boyish smile hadn’t been wiped off his face so much as battered from it, with such ferocity that it was still too scared to return. Aldri i Livet hadn’t deserved to get nothing, and nobody deserved the poisoned fallout that a quarter of a century later was still settling on its composer’s bowed head.

  With my gaze ranging blankly across Koh Samui’s gently steaming green hills, body brine blotting through my T-shirt, legs speckled with an unthinkable distillate of diesel and crab piss, I feel Finn’s pain. If I’d spent two decades putting a demon to rest, you wouldn’t have caught me chortling indulgently when two blokes started digging it up on national TV. Or when, a couple of years after that, I looked up from my sun lounger and saw a third walking up the sand towards me with it sitting on his shoulders.

  Far from being the most enviable emblem of his triumph over nul-points adversity, Finn’s beach-bum lifestyle was in fact the consequence of its stubbornly enduring curse. He lived for half a year in paradise, but not to escape his homeland’s inclement weather so much as its inclement inhabitants. The face that sustained him throughout the bucolic summer festivals was a liability in Norway’s urban winter, when those taunting drunks lay in wait at bus stops. It wasn’t just lazy journalism that persuaded interviewers to keep on asking if Finn Kalvik had finally found himself: despite all the restless roaming, he patently hadn’t.

  An hour later I’m back for a farewell loll on the Big John beach, collating my pirate DVDs into their sleeves and cases by way of occupational therapy. Finn has flown: P10 is being serviced by an energetic surfeit of cleaners, and his sunbed has been conspicuously commandeered by a topless Russian grand-mother. The palm trees are side-lit by another of those almost vulgar, Malibu-bottle sunset
s, the garishly tiger-striped sky blotted by a smudge of barbecue smoke from somewhere down the beach. A fisherman poles his punt-like craft across the bay, off towards the port that now disgorges the last of the many, many ferries I have followed towards the unseen mainland in the past seventy-two hours.

  Bjørn and Sissel amble up to say their goodbyes, and though none of us refers to the previous night’s histrionics or their instigator, there’s an odd, sombre fraternity to our conversation. It’s as if we’re at a wake, mourning a mutual friend who hadn’t been easy to know. My phone warbles its need for a recharge, and when I check the screen I see the clock is still set to Oslo time. The nauseating jolt of jet lag this elicits is sharpened by another of misgiving and regret.

  ‘I don’t really need a watch here,’ Bjørn smiles lazily, when I request a time-check. He inclines his red-brown head at the ferries converging distantly before us. ‘They cross on the half hour.’ What a wonderful insight into a protracted and definitively aimless holiday, I thought. Precisely the sort of holiday, indeed, that I hoped poor Finn might enjoy now I was leaving him in peace. For three days he’d never even seen those ferries, his mind’s eye focused inwards, ranging restlessly over the rusty hulks of his past.

  ‘You av chewdrer?’

  The Big John receptionist is gamely bullying her delicate mouth into making Western noises, but so impenetrable is the Thai pattern of speech, its surprised, staccato yelps apparently forced from the stomach with a series of painful kicks, that it takes three repetitions and some jolly mimework before I realise she’s asking if I have children. Three, I tell her, inducing a squeal that intriguingly blends fathomless admiration with coquettish sauce.