Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (15 page)

An hour or so later the bus pulled up in front of the community centre, I jumped out and was swallowed up in the overcrowded room.

When I woke, at first I couldn’t remember a thing.

Everything was a complete blank.

I didn’t know who I was or where I was. All I knew was that I had woken up from something.

But the room was familiar, it was the bedroom in my flat.

How had I got here?

I sat up and could feel that I was still drunk.

What time was it?

What had happened?

I held my face in my hands. I had to have something to drink. Now. But I was too wiped out to go into the kitchen and slumped back on the bed.

I had been to the pre-party and on a bus. And had sung. Sung!

Oh no, oh no.

And I had put my hand on his shoulder. As if we were pals. But we weren’t. I wasn’t even a man. Only a stupid Sørlander who couldn’t even tie a knot. With arms as thin as drinking straws.

No, now I
had
to have something to drink.

I sat up. My body was as heavy as lead and totally uncooperative, but I forced my feet onto the floor, braced myself mentally and pushed myself onto my legs.

Oh God.

The yearning for my bed was so strong that I had to mobilise all the willpower I had not to go back. The few paces to the kitchen exhausted me, I had to hang over the worktop for a while before I could summon the energy to run the tap, fill a glass and drink. One more, and one more. And the distance to my bedroom seemed so immense that I stopped halfway and lay down on the sofa instead.

I hadn’t done anything stupid, had I?

I’d danced. Yes, I’d danced with all and sundry.

Hadn’t there been a woman in her sixties as well? Whom I had smiled at and danced with? And pressed myself against?

Yes, there had.

Oh my God. Oh my God.

Oh bloody hell.

Then it was as though the pressure inside me was ratcheted up, although there was no particular place that hurt, everything was painful, and the pain grew and grew, it was unbearable, and then my stomach muscles went into a spasm. I swallowed, dragged myself to my feet and tried to hold it back as I stumbled towards the bathroom, the pressure mounting and mounting, that was all that existed, and then I snatched at the toilet seat, flung it up, knelt down, wrapped my arms around the bowl and spewed a cascade of yellow and green vomit into the water with such force that it splashed back into my face, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered any more, it was so wonderful to feel the relief, so fantastically wonderful.

I slumped to the floor.

Oh God, how good it was.

But then it came back. The muscles in my stomach writhed like snakes. Oh shit. I leaned over the bowl again, caught a glimpse of a pubic hair next to my forearm resting on the porcelain as the cramps tore through my empty stomach, and I opened my mouth and groaned ooooh, ooooooh, ooooooh, and nothing came out.

But then, without warning, a gob of yellow bile was expelled. It slid down the white porcelain, a sliver still hung from my mouth and I wiped it away, and I lay down on the bathroom floor. Was that the last? Was it over now?

Yes.

Suddenly everything was as serene as in church. I lay in a foetal position on the bathroom floor enjoying to the full the calm that had settled over my body.

What had I done with Irene?

Everything inside me tensed up.

Irene.

We had danced.

I had pressed myself against her, hard, rubbed my erect dick against her stomach.

And then?

Anything else?

It was as if this one scene was surrounded by darkness on all sides. I remembered it but nothing of what came before or after.

Anything bad?

I imagined her in a ditch, strangled with torn clothes.

No, no, what rubbish.

But the image returned. Irene in a ditch, strangled, her clothes torn.

How could the image be so clear? Her blue trousers, with those wonderfully full thighs beneath, a white blouse ripped open, part of a naked breast exposed, her eyes lifeless. The mud in the ditch, between the scattered blades of grass, yellow and green, the insane light, late in the night.

No, no, what rubbish.

How had I got home?

Hadn’t I been standing by the bus when the band stopped playing and the car park outside the community centre was packed with people laughing and screaming?

Yes.

And Irene was there!

We were kissing!

Me with a bottle of booze in one hand, drinking straight from it. She grabbed my lapel, she was the type of girl who grabbed lapels, and then she looked up at me, and then she said . . .?

What did she say?

Oh hell, no.

Out of nowhere the snakes in my stomach entwined themselves again, and since there was nothing left below they were furious and squeezed so hard that I groaned. OOOOOHH I went. OOOHHHH. I wrapped my arms around the toilet bowl and hung my head over the hole, but nothing came, I was empty.

CHRIST ALMIGHTY! I shouted. STOP THIS! NOW!

Then came a mouthful of unbelievably thick bile, I spat it out and reckoned that was it, but it wasn’t, my stomach continued to churn, and I tried to alleviate it by hawking, from the bottom of my throat, for if only a little came up surely the vomiting would stop.

OOOHH. OOOHH. OOOHH.

Some phlegm came up.

There. That’s the way.

Finished now?

Yes.

Ah.

Oh.

I grabbed the edge of the sink with one hand and pulled myself up. Rinsed my face with cold water and staggered into the sitting room, not too difficult, fine, lay back down on the sofa, thought I should find out what the time was but didn’t have the energy, all that counted now was to wait for my body to recover and then the day could begin. After all, I was going to write another short story.

I had experienced blackouts like this, after which I remembered only fragments of what I had done, ever since I first started drinking. That was the summer I finished the ninth class, at the Norway Cup, when I just laughed and laughed, a momentous experience; being drunk took me to places where I was free and did what I wanted while it raised me aloft and rendered everything around me wonderful. Only recalling bits and pieces afterwards, isolated scenes brightly illuminated against a wall of darkness from which I emerged and disappeared back into, was the norm. And so it went on. The following spring I went to the carnival with Jan Vidar, mum had made me up as Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, the town was heaving with people wearing curly black wigs, hot pants and sequins, everywhere there was the throb of samba drums, but the air was cold, people were stiff, there was a huge amount of embarrassment to be overcome all the time, and this was visible in the processions, people were squirming rather than dancing, they wanted to feel emancipated, that was what this was about, they were not, they wanted to be, this was the 1980s, this was the new liberated and forward-looking era in which everything Norwegian was pathetic and everything Mediterranean was alive and free, when the sole TV channel which had informed the Norwegian population for twenty years about what one small circle of educated people in Oslo considered important for them to know was suddenly joined by new very different TV channels which took a lighter approach, they wanted to entertain, and they wanted to sell, and from then on these two entities fused: entertainment and sales became two sides of the same coin and subsumed everything else, which also became entertainment and sales, from music to politics, literature, news, health, in fact everything. The carnival marked this transition, a nation moving away from the seriousness of the 1970s to the levity of the 1990s, and this transition was visible in the awkward movements, in the nervous eyes and the wild triumphant looks of those who had overcome this awkwardness and nervousness and were now wiggling their lean bottoms on the backs of the lorries that crawled through Kristiansand’s streets on this cold spring morning with a light drizzle in the air. That was how it was in Kristiansand and that was how it was in all the other towns in Norway of any size and any self-respect. Carnival was the rage and would become a tradition, they said, every year these stiff white men and women would affirm their emancipation to the best of their ability on lorries, decked out as Mediterraneans, dancing and laughing to the drums that former school brass band musicians played with such a seductive hypnotic beat.

Even two sixteen-year-olds like Jan Vidar and me understood that this was sad. Of course there was nothing we wanted more than a Mediterranean-style explosion in our day-to-day reality, for there was nothing we yearned for more than inviting breasts and bums, music and loads of fun, and if there was anything we wanted to be it was dark-skinned confident men who took these women at will. We were against meanness and all for generosity, we were against constraints and for openness and freedom. Nevertheless we saw these processions and were overcome by sadness on behalf of our town and country because there was an unbelievable lack of pride about all this, indeed it was as if the whole town was making a fool of itself, without realising. But we did realise and we were sad as we strolled around, each with half a bottle of spirits in an inside pocket, becoming more and more drunk and cursing our town and the idiotic people in it while always keeping an eye open for faces we knew and could perhaps get together with. That is, girls’ faces, or at a pinch boys’ faces we knew who were with girls’ faces we didn’t know. Our project was doomed, we were never going to meet girls this way, but we didn’t give up as long as there was a glimmer of hope, we strolled on, getting drunker and drunker, more and more depressed. And then, at some point, I disappeared from myself. Not from Jan Vidar, he could see me of course, and when he said something to me he received an answer so he imagined that everything was as it should be, but it wasn’t, I had disappeared, I was empty, I was in the void of my soul, there was no other way for me to describe it.

Who are you when you don’t know you exist? Who were you when you didn’t remember that you existed? When I woke up in the bedsit in Elvegaten the following day and knew nothing about anything it felt as if I had been
let loose
in the town. I could have done anything because when I was as drunk as I was there were no longer any limits in me, I did everything that entered my head, and indeed what would not enter a person’s head?

I rang Jan Vidar. He was in bed asleep, but his father summoned him to the phone.

‘What happened?’ I said.

‘We-ell,’ he said, keeping me on tenterhooks. ‘Strictly speaking nothing happened. That’s what was such crap.’

‘I don’t remember any of the last bit,’ I said. ‘Somewhere on the way to Silokaia, that’s the last thing I remember.’

‘Don’t you? Nothing?’

‘No.’

‘Don’t you remember standing on the back of a lorry and mooning at everyone?’

‘Did I do that?’

He laughed.

‘No, of course not. No, relax, man. Nothing happened. Or rather, yes, something did happen when we were walking home. You bent all the wing mirrors along one street. Someone shouted, “Hey!” at us and so we ran for it. I didn’t notice any difference in you. Were you that drunk?’

‘Yes, it was the spirits.’

‘I fall asleep when I get that drunk. Jesus, though, what a crap evening. You won’t get me to go to carnival again, that’s for sure.’

‘Do you know what I think?’

‘What?’

‘When they have the carnival next year we’ll be there again. We can’t afford not to be. Not much happens in this shite town after all.’

‘True.’

We rang off and I went to wash the Aladdin Sane lightning off my face.

The next time it happened was on Midsummer Night, also with Jan Vidar. We had dragged ourselves, each carrying a bag of beers, down to a place on the coast, to some sea-smoothed rocks below the forest in Hånes, where we wandered around drinking and freezing in the pouring summer rain, surrounded by Øyvind’s many pals and a few people we knew from Hamresanden. Øyvind had chosen this evening of all evenings to finish with his girlfriend, Lene, so she sat crying on a rock, away from the others. I went over to console her, sat beside her and stroked her back while telling her there were other boys, she would get over it, she was so young and beautiful, and she looked at me with gratitude in her eyes and sniffled, I thought it was a shame we were outdoors and not somewhere indoors, where there were beds, and that it was raining now we were outdoors. Suddenly she looked at her jacket and screamed, the shoulder was covered in blood and, as it turned out, her back too. It came from me, I’d cut my hand without noticing and it was bleeding profusely. You prat, she said and stood up. This jacket’s brand new. Do you know how much it cost? Sorry, I said, it wasn’t intentional, I just wanted to cheer you up a bit. Go to hell, she said and headed towards the others, where in the course of the evening she found herself back in favour with Øyvind, while I sat drinking alone staring across the grey surface of the water which the falling rain continued to dot with small evocative rings until Jan Vidar came over and sat down next to me and we could pursue the years-long conversation we had about which girls were pretty or not and who we most fancied sleeping with, all as we slowly but surely got drunker until in the end everything disintegrated and I drifted into a kind of ghost world.

The ghost world: when I was inside it went straight through me, and when I woke up from it there was little I could remember, a face here, a body there, a room, a staircase, a backyard, pale and shimmering, surrounded by an ocean of darkness.

It was nothing less than a horror film. Now and then I would remember the most peculiar details, like a rock at the bottom of a stream or a bottle of olive oil on a kitchen shelf, everyday items in themselves but as symbols of a whole night’s mental activity, in fact all that was left of it, which was bizarre. What was it about that rock? What was it about that bottle? The first two times it happened I hadn’t been afraid, I registered it simply as a kind of objective fact. Then, when it happened again, there began to be something eerie about it because I was so out of control. No, nothing had happened and probably nothing was going to happen either, but the fact was, I had no control over my actions at all. If I was basically a nice person, that was how I would be then as well, but
was
I?
Actually?