One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway (3 page)

She was quick, clever and considerate, her colleagues thought, even quite funny.

When she was twenty-six she got pregnant.
The baby’s Swedish father asked her to have an abortion. She insisted on keeping the child and gave birth to a daughter, Elisabeth, in 1973.

Many years were to pass before Wenche made a short visit to her home town. By then, her mother was seriously ill. According to her case notes, she increasingly suffered paranoid delusions attended by persecution mania and hallucinations. Wenche’s mother
did not leave her sickbed again and died alone in a nursing home in Kragerø. Her daughter did not attend the funeral.

*   *   *

The art of concealing anything painful or ugly had become second nature to Wenche, and would stay with her for the rest of her life. Dulling the ache beneath a polished surface.

Every time she moved, Wenche chose to live in one of the nicer districts of Oslo, even
if she could not afford it, even if as an auxiliary nurse she did not ‘fit in’. Her attractive appearance was her own glossy façade. She was always smartly dressed and freshly coiffed when she was out and about, favouring high-heeled shoes and fitted dresses and suits from the capital’s more exclusive clothes shops.

When she got home from London her life started to unravel. She was now in her
mid-thirties and living in Jens’s flat in Fritzners gate, but did not know many people. She had no one to help her and was initially tired, then exhausted, and before long completely shattered. She felt powerless and isolated.

There must be something wrong with Anders, she decided. From being a calm baby and a fairly placid one-year-old, he turned into a clingy, whining child. Moody and violent.
She felt like peeling him off her, she complained.

At night, she often left the children alone. A neighbour with a daughter the same age as Elisabeth remarked to her that this was not the done thing. ‘They’re asleep when I leave and asleep when I get back,’ Wenche replied. She added that she had to take whatever night shifts she could get.

‘At Elisabeth’s they never have dinner,’ the neighbour’s
daughter said to her mother. Economies were made on everything that could be hidden behind the front door.

As soon as they had returned from London in August 1980, Wenche applied for, and was granted, financial assistance from the social services office in Oslo’s Vika district. The following year, in May 1981, she rang the office and asked if it would be possible to have a support worker or some
respite care for the children. In July she applied for weekend respite care for both children. She told social services that she thought a male support worker would be a good idea for her daughter, perhaps a youngish student, according to the office log. But it was from Anders that she felt the most pressing need for relief, she told the office on that occasion. She could no longer cope with him,
she said.

At that point, Anders had passed his second birthday and Elisabeth was eight. Elisabeth was following in Wenche’s footsteps, turning into a ‘spare mother’ for Anders and for her mother.

In October 1981, weekend respite care was approved for Anders twice a month. Anders was allocated to a newly married couple in their twenties. When Wenche brought the boy to them for the first time,
they found her rather odd. The second time, they thought she was nuts. She asked if Anders could occasionally touch his weekend dad’s penis. It was important for the boy’s sexuality. He had no father figure in his life and Wenche wanted the young man to assume that role. Anders had no one to identify with in terms of his appearance, Wenche stressed, because ‘he only saw girls’ crotches’ and did not
know how the male body worked.

The young couple were speechless. But they were too embarrassed to report what she had said. They took Anders out on trips to the forest and countryside, and to parks and playgrounds around the city. He liked being with them and they thought he was a nice little boy.

One weekend, Wenche did not turn up with Anders. She had decided it was not a suitable weekend
home for her son. ‘Mother difficult to please, keeps demanding more,’ the social services office recorded in May 1982. She applied for a different weekend home for her son. ‘The daughter, aged nine, has started wetting herself,’ wrote the social services.

The month before, Wenche had gone to the foster-home section at the child welfare office. She was looking into the possibility of having both
children fostered. She wanted them to ‘go to the devil’, she told the child welfare office.

Autumn arrived and life got even darker. In October, Wenche called in to the Frogner Medical Centre. ‘Mother seemed severely depressed,’ they noted. ‘Thinking of just walking out on the children and leaving them to society, to live her own life.’

Wenche and the children had now been living in Fritzners
gate for just over two years. The period she and Jens had agreed to was over and Jens wanted his apartment back. But Wenche put off the move. She did not feel up to it.

A nervous wreck, was how she described herself. As Christmas approached, she hit rock bottom. It was simply beyond her to create any kind of festive mood.

She was going to pieces.

She had to keep a permanent eye on Anders to
avoid what she called minor disasters. He would hit her and Elisabeth. If she told him off, he would merely smirk. If she shook him, he would just shout ‘It doesn’t hurt, it doesn’t hurt.’

He never gave her any peace. At night he would lie in her bed, clinging to her, pressed up against her. She said it felt as if he was forcing himself on her.

Swirls of Light

But the greatest of these is love.

First letter of Paul to the Corinthians

Darkness had descended on the north of the country, above the Arctic Circle.

It was pitch black when you woke up, dark when you went out, barely light at midday and black again when you went to bed. The cold bit into your cheeks. People had cut loads of logs, and were quick to shut the door to keep
snowstorms and winter out.

In the mountains the bear had retired to her lair. Even the cod in the sea were more sluggish. It was a matter of conserving energy for the spring and the light. Humans and nature had begun their annual hibernation. Everyone slept more and moved less. The lucky ones warmed each other.

People were less happy than in the summer. The pain of winter had arrived.

But then
there were the moments when the dark sky burst into flames.

‘She wants to dance,’ people said, staring out of their windows.

For Aurora Borealis – the northern lights – are never still. They swirl across the sky in ribbons and flashes, in arcs and loops, they curl up and meander, recede, fade almost to nothing, and then flare into life again, trembling.

You never can tell with the Aurora Borealis,
the flaring lights that have taken their name from the Roman goddess of dawn – Aurora – and the Greek word for the north wind – Borealis. When the sun goes into hiding in winter, it sometimes flings particles toward the earth that collide with gases, creating flickers that can be observed near the pole. The flickers can shine quietly and scarcely move, and then suddenly there is a lightning
flash, and once again they explode into chains and spirals.

You never can tell with people, either. They can lie there under their duvets, weighed down by melancholy, and suddenly flare into glimmering life.

They dress up and go out. And sparkle like any other natural phenomenon.

*   *   *

It was one of those nights, the evening of St Lucia’s day, in Lavangen in 1980.

The young people were
wiggling and twisting on the dance floor. They wore tight trousers, some with flares. The girls were in tight tops with puffed sleeves. The boys wore shirts. The dance band on stage was playing cover versions of Smokie, Elton John and Boney M. They were from the villages scattered round the arms of the fjord that extended into the interior of the northern county of Troms. It was the annual pre-Christmas
party, it was hope and expectation, it was getting drunk and messing about.

Tone came in. She was a rosy-cheeked beauty of fifteen. Right after her came Gunnar. He was a tearaway of eighteen.

Out of my league, they both thought when they saw each other in the dim lighting that night.

Tone had flicked her fringe out and over with curling tongs, just like the blonde one in
Charlie’s Angels
. Gunnar
had a mullet hairstyle: short at the sides, long and slightly wavy at the back. She still had a bit of puppy fat, he was thin and wiry.

They lived on the shores of different fjords, she in Lavangen, he in Salangen. Tone had seen him once before. She had to go to Salangen for her dental check-ups, because there was no dentist in her village. After her appointment she generally popped into the
baker’s, another amenity they did not have where she lived. There she was, standing in the window in the low, white wooden building on the sloping street down to the fjord, buying pastries. Three boys were walking past the shop. The one in the middle shone so brightly between the other two.

That’s the best-looking boy I’ve seen in my whole life, she thought.

And here he was now. The boy from
the baker’s. Standing in front of her. And the band on stage was playing the Bellamy Brothers.

If I said you had a beautiful body, would you hold it against me?

If I swore you were an angel, would you treat me like the devil tonight?

Of course she said yes.

A girl approached Tone on the dance floor.

‘You friend’s in the queue outside, but she hasn’t got enough money to get in.’ Tone gave
a start. ‘She asked me to come and get you, so she could borrow some money.’

‘Hmm,’ mumbled Tone, but she did not go out, then or later. Just imagine if her friend were to steal the boy who was holding her round the waist right this minute.

No, now she wanted to dance.

*   *   *

They met as often as they could. They went to and fro by bus, or got friends to drive them. An hour each way. Once
Gunnar passed his test it was easier, he would borrow his father’s car and race over to see Tone, floating home later. They celebrated the return of the sun as winter drew to a close. In April, Gunnar was sent to do his military service much further south, in Jørstadsmoen outside Lillehammer. Tone wrote long love letters. Gunnar tried his hand at poetry. He usually crumpled his attempts into a
ball and threw them away, but every now and then he would send one.

A place, one night in December, two lovers stand close together, and they will always remember, they want each other for ever
, ran the words on the pale blue sheet of paper.

The love of their life was what they found, in each other’s arms that day, and they wanted it always to be around, never change or fade away.

We’re the boy and girl in my poem you see, and I’m so sad when you’re not near, it’s the emptiest time of all for me, so comfort me and write to me.

Tone started at a boarding high school in Harstad, a couple of hours’ drive from Lavangen.

Yesterday I just stayed in my room crying all day. A friend from my class came in and asked what was the matter. I couldn’t talk, just showed her your picture. Then she understood,
Tone wrote, and went on:
You bet I was relieved to get my period on Sunday.

At the appointed time she would sit ready on the steps by the telephone box, guarding it, afraid someone would come along and want to use it just then, just as he picked up the phone at the camp two thousand kilometres away and dialled the number. The rings came once a week, at the exact same time.

Once
Gunnar had completed his military service he started at the teacher training college in Tromsø. Gunnar, nineteen, almost twenty, was specialising in the new subject of Computing and Information Technology. He also took some PE teaching options, in case computers did not turn out to be the future.

Tone, now seventeen and in her last year of secondary school, moved in with him. They rented a tiny
place of their own. Finally they could be together all the time.

‘Like winning the pools,’ was how Gunnar described meeting Tone. ‘Sheer luck.’

There was nothing better than her.

The happiness almost hurt.

In the dark season they hid under the duvet. They only glanced up to look when the northern lights were dancing.

As teenagers they were already dreaming of the children they would have.

Changes in the Country

The old Prime Minister was worn down by recurring migraines. The doctor had ordered him to take sick leave, to rest and get his strength back, but the modest man did not feel he could. The son of a working-class family with a strong work ethic, he was not comfortable taking time off. But he did drop hints to those closest to him about the illness that sometimes paralysed
him.

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Norway’s oil income had grown vigorously, and the ailing man born in the woods by the railway lines was the first Prime Minister to make serious use of the new money. Over a long career in politics, Odvar Nordli had helped expand Norway’s generous welfare provisions and public health system. During his time as Prime Minister, from 1976 to 1981, the trade union
movement consolidated its power, and people gained more time off and more money to spend during it. Under Nordli, all workers were given the right to full pay from the first day they went off sick.

The global economy, meanwhile, experienced a sharp downturn. Norway tackled the recession of the mid-1970s with a policy of its own, freezing wages and prices to keep unemployment down. Nordli was
to be the last Norwegian Prime Minister with an unshakeable faith in strong state control of the economy and in the political regulation of interest rates, the property market and the financial sector. But the wind from the right in the USA and Britain was now reaching Norway. The railway worker’s son was to be one of its first victims.