Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (17 page)

‘Don’t laugh,’ I said. ‘I mean it. In all seriousness. We can get married. We can move to a house on an island and stay there, just you and me. We
can
do that!
No one
can stop us if that’s what we decide to do.’

She laughed again, that wonderful trilled laugh of hers.

‘Karl Ove!’ she said. ‘We’re only sixteen!’

I got up.

‘I know you don’t want to,’ I said. ‘But I mean it. Do you understand? You’re the only girl I think about. You’re the only girl I want to be with. Should I act as if this didn’t exist?’

‘But I’m going out with someone else. You know that very well!’

‘Yes, I do,’ I said.

I didn’t need reminding. She only went on these walks with me because she felt flattered and because I was so different from the other boys she knew. Any hope that one day I would be going out with her, that was gone, nevertheless I didn’t give up, I never would. So, standing on the deck of the Danish ferry, with the wind blowing in my hair, squinting into the low afternoon sun, surrounded by blue sea on all sides, I was thinking about Hanne and not Lisbeth.

In fact I wasn’t going to go home when we arrived in Kristiansand, I was off to a class party in a cabin on an island, and Hanne would probably be there too. I had written a few letters to her over the summer, two of them from Sørbøvåg, where I walked along the river, alone with my Walkman, without a soul in sight, thinking only of her, and where I got up in the night and went outside, under the starry sky, walked up the river valley to the waterfall, climbed up alongside to sit high on a plateau beneath the stars and think of her.

She had answered my letters with a postcard.

But after Lisbeth my confidence was high, and even the sight of the vast sea could not dent it, or the urges in me, which were so vast that I was driven outside at night and tears formed in my eyes at all the beauty that existed in the world, but I couldn’t turn these urges to any use and nor could I sublimate them.

‘Hi, Elk,’ Jøgge said behind me. ‘Would you like a last beer?’

I nodded, and he passed me a can of Tuborg and stood next to me.

I opened it, foam squirted over the shiny lid. I slurped it up. Then I tipped my head back and took a proper swig.

‘There’s nothing like drinking for four days in a row!’ I said.

He laughed in that strange manner of his, it was almost ingressive, which was so easy to imitate and indeed everyone did.

‘Quite a girl, that Lisbeth,’ he said. ‘How did you nobble her?’

‘Nobble? I’ve never nobbled a girl in my life,’ I said. ‘You’re asking the wrong man.’

‘You were snogging for a week. She went back home with you. If that’s not nobbling, I don’t know what is.’

‘But that wasn’t me! It was her! She just came up to me! Then she put her hand on my chest. Like this.’

I placed my hand flat against his chest.

‘Hey, stop that!’ he shouted.

We laughed.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, looking at me. ‘Do you think I’ll ever get a girl? Honestly?’

‘
Ev
er?
Hon
estly?’

‘Cut the crap. Do you think there’s someone who will have me?’

Jøgge was the only person I knew who could ask questions like that and really mean them. He could be completely open. He was as honest as the day was long. But good-looking? Maybe not many would call him that. Nor elegant. Robust, that was perhaps the word. Solid. A hundred per cent reliable. Intelligent. A good person. A sense of humour. But he was no male model.

‘There’s got to be someone,’ I said. ‘You aim far too high. That’s your problem. You want . . . well, who do you want?’

‘Cindy Crawford,’ he said.

‘Now you cut the crap,’ I said. ‘Come on. Which girls do you usually talk about?’

‘Kristin. Inger. Merethe. Wenche. Therese.’

I spread out my arms.

‘There you are. The cream! You’ll never get any of them! You’ve got to understand that!’

‘But those are the ones I want,’ he said with his broadest grin.

‘Same here,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ he said, turning his head towards me. ‘Thought it was just Hanne with you?’

‘That’s something else.’

‘What’s that then?’

‘Love.’

‘Oh my God,’ he said. ‘Think I’ll join the others.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

They were playing cards around a table in the café, drinking Coke now; we were approaching land. I sat down with them. Harald, his protegé Ekse, Helge and Tor Erling were there. They didn’t like me, I had no real relationship with any of them, except on occasions like this. I was tolerated, but no more than that. A sarcastic comment was never far away. It didn’t matter though, I couldn’t give a shit about them.

Jøgge was different. We had been in the same class for two years, discussed politics until smoke came out of our ears, he was a Fremskrittsparti man, a right-winger of all things, I was a Sosialistisk Venstreparti supporter, the left. He liked good music, strangely enough, out there in farming country he was the only person I knew who had an ounce of good taste. He had lost his father when he was small, lived at home with his mother and younger brother, he had always had big responsibilities. Now and then people tried to tease him, he was an easy target, but he just laughed and so they gave up. The crowd we were sitting with used to bait him in a good-natured way and if he reacted they would just imitate his laugh, then he went quiet or laughed along with them.

Yes, he was a good man. He went to the business
gymnas
, as a couple of others in the team did, the rest went to the technical school, and I had written a few essays for him and been paid for it, he had been concerned that they shouldn’t be too good, the teachers would never swallow that. Once, when he had been in the danger zone, I had written a poem for him to hand in and his teacher considered that way out of character for Jøgge. But he scraped through; he had been obliged to interpret this poem, which he did satisfactorily and was awarded a pass grade.

I had been a little disappointed because I had put my heart and soul into that poem and I’d had a top grade in mind. But this was the business
gymnas
, so what could you expect?

In town, in one of the cafés, I would have probably looked in a different direction if Jøgge had walked in, he was a different breed, the wrong breed, but he may have known that himself. At any rate, I never saw him in such surroundings.

‘Hey, Casanova, want another beer?’ he said now.

‘Why not,’ I said. ‘But who are you then? Anti-Casanova?’

‘My name is Bøhn, Jørgen Bøhn,’ he said and laughed.

An hour and a half later I walked ashore in Kristiansand with my big seaman’s kitbag over my shoulder. The others were going up to Tveit, I was going to a party with Bassen, who was waiting for me when I came out of customs.

‘Hi,’ he said.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Had a good summer?’

‘So-so. And you?’

‘Good.’

‘Any women?’ I said.

‘Of course. A couple, I suppose.’

He laughed, and we headed for the bus station to catch a bus to the ferry quay. We had a kind of competition running that year, to see who could make out with most girls in our class, we chatted about that as we sat drinking beer and waiting for Siv to come in her boat and collect us. The approaching night was the last chance to change the score, which was heavily weighted in Bassen’s favour: he had snogged seven; I had snogged only four.

Occasionally I wondered what school would be like in the autumn. He was going down the science route, I was doing social subjects, until now we had been in the same class, which meant it was natural to hang out together.

In one of the first lessons we had sat next to each other, and after the form teacher had handed out slips of paper for us to write down three personal qualities we had Bassen had looked at my answer.
Sombre, torpid and serious
, I had written.

‘Are you a complete idiot?’ he had said. ‘You should add
lacking in self-knowledge
! I’ve never seen anything like it. You aren’t bloody sombre or torpid, are you. And there’s no way you’re serious, either. Who’s put these ideas in your head?’

‘What did you write then?’

He showed me.

Down to earth, honest, randy as hell
.

‘Chuck your piece of paper away. You can’t write that!’ Bassen said.

I did as he said. Then on a new piece I wrote,
intelligent, shy, but not really
.

‘That’s better,’ he said. ‘Jesus!
Sombre and torpid
!’

The first time I went to his house, late that autumn, I was filled with respect, I could hardly believe it, he was all I wanted to be, and even later, when we saw more of each other, that thought was never far away. Also now. His presence pervaded every part of me, I admired everything he did, I noticed every look he cast, even across the sea in boredom, and reflected on it.

Why did he want to meet me? I had nothing that was of any use to him.

When we were together I always left early so that he would not discover how boring I really was. There was a kind of fever in me, two conflicting emotions, such as on the spring morning when we skived off school and went by moped back to his and listened to records on the lawn. It was fantastic, yet I had to bring it to a close, something told me I wasn’t worthy or couldn’t fulfil his expectations. So I lay on his lawn with my eyes closed, like a cat on hot bricks, listening to Talk Talk, whom we had discovered at the same time. ‘It’s my life,’ they sang, and everything should have been great, it was spring, I was sixteen years old, had skived off school for the first time and was lying on the grass with my new friend. But it wasn’t great, it was unbearable.

He probably thought I feared a reprimand for skipping school and that was why I got up to go. How could he have known that it was because it was much too good? Because I liked him too much.

Now we hadn’t said anything for perhaps five minutes.

I rolled a cigarette to fill the silence with a normal activity. He glanced at me. Took a packet of Prince Mild from his shirt pocket, poked a filter tip in his mouth.

‘Got a light?’ he said.

I passed him a yellow Bic lighter. He lit up and blew out a cloud of smoke, which hung in the air for a few seconds in front of him before dissolving.

‘How’s it going with your mum and dad?’ he said, passing me the lighter. I took it, lit my roll-up, crushed the empty can with my free hand and threw it down into the rocks by the water.

Dusk fell over the islands in front of us, heavy with the low pressure system. The sea was calm and grey. The can clattered against the rocks below.

‘It’s going OK, I think,’ I said. ‘Dad’s living in Tveit now with his new partner. Mum’s in Vestland. She’ll be home in a few days.’

‘Is it still the two of you living up there?’

‘Yes.’

Around the headland came a boat. The person at the helm had long blonde hair that shone against all the grey, and when we got up and lifted our rucksacks she waved and screamed something which was reduced to a faint squeal across the hundred metres between us.

It was Siv.

We loaded our rucksacks on board, sat down and ten minutes later we moored beneath her cabin.

‘You’re the last,’ she said. ‘So now finally we can eat.’

Hanne was there. She was sitting at the table. Dressed in a white shirt and blue jeans. Her fringe had grown, I noticed.

She smiled, a touch embarrassed.

Probably caused by the letters I had sent.

We ate shrimps. I drank beer, and the intoxicating effect on me was greater and more deeply seated than I had ever experienced before, presumably because of all the drinking over the previous days. It affected not only my head and my thoughts, it started in the depths of my body and slowly spread, and I knew that the wave that was coming would be long-lasting.

And so it was. We cleared the sitting room and danced as night fell over the skerries, we went outside and swam in the darkness, gingerly I walked along the diving board, above me the sky was black, below me the sea was black, and when I dived it felt as if I would never reach the water, I fell and fell and fell and then suddenly I was enveloped by cold salty water, I saw nothing, everything was black, but it was not dangerous, a few strokes and I broke the surface and could see the others standing on land like small pale trees in the darkness.

Hanne was waiting for me with a towel, which she wrapped around my shoulders. We sat high up the mountainside. Some of the girls below were swimming naked.

‘They’re skinny-dipping,’ I said.

‘I can see,’ Hanne said.

‘Don’t you want to join them?’

‘Me? No! That’s the last thing I would do.’

Silence.

She looked at me.

‘Would you like me to?’

‘Yes.’

‘Thought so!’ she said with a laugh. ‘What about you?’

‘The water’s so cold. It’d disappear.’

‘It?’ she said and smiled at me.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You’re a strange boy,’ she said.

There was another silence. I gazed at all the islets, a touch blacker than the sky above. A ribbon of light hung over the horizon. Surely day couldn’t be coming already?

‘It’s great sitting here with you,’ I said. ‘I love you.’

She shot me a rapid glance. ‘I’m not so sure about that.’

‘How can’t you be? I don’t think about anyone else apart from you. When I was in Vestland – oh, by the way, it was fantastic, even though you weren’t there – I was full of you, in a way. Absolutely drunk.’

‘You drink too much,’ she said. ‘Couldn’t you be a bit more careful? For my sake?’

‘Drunk with you,’ I said.

‘I know that! But seriously. You don’t have to drink so much, do you?’

‘Happy clappy Christian? Intoxicated by Jesus?’

‘No, don’t make jokes. I
am
a bit worried about you. Is that a problem?’

‘No.’

We fell quiet. On the diving board there were two figures fighting. One was Bassen, I guessed.

Both fell in the water. Those watching on land screamed and clapped.

Somewhere in the distance a lighthouse flashed. Music blared out from an open door in the cabin behind us.