Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (14 page)

‘Yes. See, now you’re saying it.’

He laughed, hitched up the knees of his trousers and sat down beside Nils Erik.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Have you done a round-up of the week?’

‘That’s what we were doing,’ Nils Erik said.

‘They seem to be a good bunch,’ Tor Einar said.

‘Are you thinking about the teachers?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘In fact, I already know them all, apart from you two.’

‘But you’re not from here?’ Nils Erik said.

‘My grandmother lives here. I’ve been up every summer and Christmas since I was small.’

‘You’ve just finished
gymnas
as well, haven’t you?’ I said. ‘In Finnsnes?’

He nodded.

‘You don’t know someone there called Irene, do you?’ I said. ‘From Hellevika?’

‘Irene, yes,’ he said, brightening up. ‘Not as well as I’d like, I must admit. How come? Do
you
know her?’

‘That would be saying too much,’ I said. ‘But I met her on the bus on my way here. She seemed nice.’

‘Are you meeting her this evening? Is that the plan?’

I shrugged. ‘She’s coming anyway,’ I said.

Half an hour later we were walking up the hill from the flat. I was drunk in that pure merry way you can be from white wine, when your thoughts collide with one another like bubbles and what emerges when they burst is pleasure.

We had been at my place, I thought, and this filled me with pleasure.

We were colleagues and on our way to becoming friends, I reflected.

And I had written a damn good short story.

Pleasure, pleasure, pleasure.

And then there was this light, dim down among humans and things human, attended by a kind of finely honed darkness which became diffused in the light though did not possess or control it, only muted or softened it, high up in the sky it was gleamingly clean and clear.

Pleasure.

And there was this silence. The murmur of the sea, our footsteps on the gravel, the occasional noise coming from somewhere, a door being opened or a shout, all embraced by silence, which seemed to rise from the ground, rise from objects and surround us in a way which I didn’t formulate as primordial, though I sensed it was, for I thought of the silence in Sørbøvåg on summer mornings when I was a child there, the silence above the fjord beneath the immense Lihesten mountain, half-hidden by mist. The silence of the world. It was here too, as I walked uphill, drunk, with my new friends, and although neither it nor the light we walked in was the main event of the evening it played its part.

Pleasure.

Eighteen years old and on my way to a party.

‘That’s where she lives,’ Tor Einar said, pointing to the house I had strolled past one evening a few days ago.

‘Big house,’ Nils Erik said.

‘Yes, she lives with someone,’ Tor Einar said. ‘His name’s Vidar and he’s a fisherman.’

‘What else!’ I said, stopping at the door and raising my arm to ring the bell.

‘Here everyone just walks in,’ Tor Einar said. ‘We’re in Northern Norway now!’

I opened the door and went in. From upstairs came the sound of voices and music. Smoke hung in the air above the stairs. We quietly removed our shoes and went up. The floor above was open plan with the kitchen straight ahead, a living room at the back to the left, presumably the bedroom was at the back on the right.

There was a group of perhaps ten people in the living room chatting and laughing, squeezed around a table covered with bottles and glasses, cigarette packets and ashtrays. They were all stocky, many had moustaches, age-wise they ranged between twenty and forty.

‘Here come the teachers,’ one of them said.

‘Perhaps we’ll be given detention this evening,’ another said.

Everyone laughed.

‘Hi, folks,’ said Tor Einar.

‘Hi,’ said Nils Erik.

Hege, the only woman there, got up and fetched some chairs from the dining-room table by the window.

‘Sit yourselves down, boys,’ she said. ‘If you need glasses you’ll find them in the kitchen.’

I went in and stood alone staring up at the mountainside behind the house while mixing myself a screwdriver. For a moment I lingered in the doorway observing the people around the table, thinking they looked like trolls sitting there with their variously coloured drinks, depending on what they mixed with their vodka – a variety of juices, Sprite, Coke – with their pouches of tobacco from which they made endless roll-ups and with their moustaches, their dark eyes and the succession of stories, thinking how they came from the four corners of the earth to meet here once a year and act out their exotic natures among their own kind.

However, it was the other way round. They were the rule and I was the exception, the teacher among fishermen. So what was I doing here? Shouldn’t I be at home writing rather than here?

It had been a mistake to go into the kitchen alone. Nils Erik and Tor Einar had already been through the introductory rites, they were now comfortably ensconced alongside the fishermen, and I could have done that too, tagged along behind my colleagues and slipped in without being noticed.

I took a swig and went in.

‘And here we have the writer!’ one of them said. I recognised him at once, he was the fisherman who had dropped by to see me on the first day, Remi.

‘Hi, Remi,’ I said, proffering my hand.

‘Have you been on a name-learning course or what?’ he said, grasping it. Shook it up and down in a way that had not been done since the 1950s.

‘You’re the first fisherman I’ve ever met,’ I said. ‘So of course I remember your name.’

He laughed. I was pleased I’d had a drink before we left. If I hadn’t I would have stood tongue-tied in front of him.

‘The writer?’ Hege said.

‘Yes, he writes, this guy does. I’ve seen it with my own eyes!’

‘I didn’t know that,’ she said. ‘Do
you
have such fancy ideas?’

I sat down and nodded to her while smiling semi-apologetically and taking the tobacco pouch from my shirt pocket.

For the next hour I said nothing. I rolled cigarettes, smoked, drank, smiled when the others smiled, laughed when they laughed. Looked at Nils Erik, who was pretty drunk and seemed to be in on
the jokey tone but wasn’t, he was different, there was something light and Østlandish about him, always on the outside. Not that they rejected him, because they didn’t, it was just that his jokes were of a fundamentally different character, which in this context seemed to expose him. He made puns, they didn’t, adopted a variety of roles, made faces and raised and lowered his voice, they didn’t. When he burst into laughter it was somehow unrestrained, bordering on the hysterical, it struck me; that too was completely different from them.

Tor Einar was more on their level, he knew the appropriate tone and was on nodding terms with everyone there, although he was not one of them either, I could see; he was not an insider, he was more like an ethnological researcher who knows his stuff well enough to be able to mimic it because he likes it so much, and perhaps that was the nub, he
liked
the tone, whereas for them the tone just came naturally to them. They had never thought about whether they liked it or not.

Tor Einar slapped his thighs when he laughed, which I had only ever seen in films. He would occasionally also rub his hands up and down his thighs when he talked.

The pre-party, as they called it here, pre-loading, excluded discussion. Issues regarding politics, women, music or football were not on the agenda. What they did was tell stories. One story gave way to the next, laughter billowed across the table, and the tales they came up with, they being the trolls they were, all had their origins in the village and the people who lived there, which despite its modest proportions appeared to be an inexhaustible treasure trove of stories. There was the fisherman in his sixties who had been seasick all his life and who only needed to jump on board his trawler to start feeling ill. There was the gang of fishermen who after a good season had hired the suite at the SAS hotel in Tromsø and spent ver-tiginous sums of money in the course of a few intense days of abandon there. One man called Frank, with the fleshy face of a child, was said to have burned his way through twenty thousand kroner, and it took me a while to realise that ‘burned’ meant exactly that, he had set fire to it. Then someone had been drunk shitless in a lift, they said, and again it took me a while to twig that this had to be interpreted literally: he had been so drunk that he had shat himself. Judging by the conversation it had indeed happened in the lift. Frank in particular got so drunk that waking up in his own shit was not an unusual occurrence, from what I could glean. His mother, who was the older teacher at the school, had a hard time, it seemed, because he still lived at home. Hege’s stories were different, but no less bizarre, such as the one about the girlfriend who had been terrified before an exam and whom she had taken into the forest and hit on the head with a bat so that she would have a justifiable reason for being absent. I stared at her. Was she pulling our legs? It didn’t seem like it. She met my gaze and grinned, and then narrowed her eyes to a slit and frowned, opened them again, smiled and looked away. What did that mean? Was it the equivalent of a wink? Or did it mean that I shouldn’t believe everything I heard?

They not only knew one another well, they knew one another inside out.

They had grown up and gone to school together, they worked together, they partied together. They saw one another virtually every day and had done so virtually all their lives. They knew one another’s parents and grandparents, many of them were first or second cousins. One might conclude this was boring, indeed intolerably boring in the long run, because nothing new ever entered their lives, everything that happened, happened among the two hundred and fifty people who lived here and who knew everyone else’s most intimate secrets and quirks. But such did not appear to be the case; quite the contrary, they seemed to be having a whale of a time and if there was anything that marked the atmosphere among them it was their carefree attitude and their joy.

While sitting there I was formulating what I was going to write in the letters I would send south, such as: ‘They all had moustaches! It’s absolutely true! All of them!’ Or: ‘And the music they listened to, do you know what it was? Bonnie Tyler! And Dr Hook! How long ago is it since that music was heard anywhere in the world? What is this godforsaken place I have ended up in?’ And: ‘Here, my friend, the expression “to drink yourself shitless” means just that. Say no more . . .’

When at last I got up to go to the toilet I had drunk just over a third of my bottle of vodka and I knocked against the man sitting next to me, who was holding a glass in his hand and spilled some of the contents.

‘So . . . rry,’ I said, straightening up and stepping across the living-room floor.

‘One does the talking and the other does the drinking!’ he said behind me and laughed.

He must have been referring to Nils Erik and me.

As soon as I got some speed up my balance was fine.

But where was the loo?

I opened a door. It was a bedroom. Hege’s bedroom, I presumed, and closed the door as fast as possible. If there was one thing I didn’t like, it was seeing other people’s bedrooms.

‘The bathroom’s on the other side,’ a voice behind me said from the kitchen.

I turned.

A man with brown eyes, thick collar-length dark hair and a moustache which hung down on either side of his mouth looked at me. It had to be Vidar, Hege’s partner. There was something about the self-assured way he stood there that told me this.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

‘No problem,’ he said. ‘Just don’t piss on the floor, that’s all.’

‘I’ll try not to,’ I said, going into the bathroom. I leaned against the wall while peeing. Smiled to myself. He had looked like a bass player from a 1970s band. Smokie or someone like them. And incredibly muscular.

What was she doing with such a macho?

I flushed the toilet and stood swaying in front of the mirror. Smiled at myself again.

When I emerged from the bathroom they had decided to leave. They were talking about a bus.

‘Do buses run at this time?’ I said.

Remi turned to me. ‘It’s our band bus.’

‘Is there a band here? Are you in it?’

‘Yes, I am. We call ourselves Autopilot. We play at dances in the community centres round here.’

I followed him down the stairs. This was getting better and better.

‘What instrument do you play then?’ I said, putting on my coat in the hall.

‘Drums,’ he said.

I put my arm round his shoulder.

‘Me too. Or I did. Two years ago.’

‘You don’t say,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said, retracting my arm, leaning forward and trying to put on one shoe. Bumped into someone. Vidar again.

‘Sorry,’ I said.

‘That’s fine,’ he said. ‘Have you remembered your bottle?’

‘Oh, no, shit,’ I said.

‘It’s this one, isn’t it?’ he said, holding up a bottle of vodka.

‘Yes, that’s the one,’ I said. ‘Thank you very much! Thanks!’

He smiled but his eyes were cold and impassive. That was not my problem though. I put the bottle on the floor and concentrated on my shoes. When they were on I staggered out under the light night sky, down to the road, where the rest were waiting. The bus was parked in a drive a hundred metres away. One of them opened the door and got into the driver’s seat, we clambered aboard and moved towards the back of the big old vehicle. It was furnished with sofas and tables and a bar, all in plywood and plush, it seemed. We sat down, the engine started with a growl and it was out with the bottles and off down the road. As we jolted along following the bank of the fjord we had a drink in one hand and a cigarette in the other.

What an adventure.

I sang
Pølsemaker, pølsemaker, hvor har du gjort av deg
– Sausage maker, sausage maker, where have you gone, at the top of my voice while swinging my arms and trying to get the others to join in. The bus had conjured up memories of the old film in which Leif Juster was a bus driver, and Leif Juster had made me think of the film
The Missing Sausage Maker
.