Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (3 page)

He didn’t nod back.

Hadn’t he seen it? Had my nod been so slight that it had been perceived as an adjustment of the way I held my head, or a twitch?

Their presence felt like daggers in me. A metre away from the door I threw the cigarette to the ground, stopped and trod on it.

Could I leave it there? Litter the pavement? Or should I pick it up?

No, that would look just a bit
too
pedantic, wouldn’t it?

To hell with it, I’ll leave it, they’re fishermen, I’m sure they chuck their bloody cigarette ends away when they’ve finished with them!

I placed my hand on the door and pushed, took one of the red shopping baskets and began to move down the aisle between the various shelves. A rotund lady in her mid-thirties was holding a packet of sausages in her hand and saying something to a girl who must have been her daughter. Thin and gangly, she stood there with a sullen, obstinate expression on her face. On the other side of the woman there was a boy of around ten leaning over a rack and rummaging. I put a wholewheat loaf in the basket, a packet of Ali coffee and a box of Earl Grey tea bags. The woman glanced at me, put the sausages in her basket and continued to the other end of the shop with the boy and girl in tow. I took my time, wandered around looking at all the food items, added a brown goat’s cheese from a cabinet, a tin of liver paste and a tube of mayonnaise. Then I picked up a carton of milk and a packet of margarine and went over to the counter, where the woman was now packing her items into a bag while her daughter stood reading a noticeboard by the door.

The assistant nodded to me.

‘Hello,’ I said and started to empty the basket in front of him.

He was small and stocky, his face was broad, his nose curved and his powerful chin covered with a mass of grizzled bristles.

‘Are you the new teacher?’ he said as he was entering the prices on the till beside him. Over by the noticeboard, the girl had turned to look at me.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Arrived yesterday.’

The boy was tugging at her arm; she yanked it free and went out of the door. The boy followed her, and a moment later so did the mother.

I needed oranges. And apples.

I hurried over to the modest fruit counter, filled a bag with some oranges, grabbed a couple of apples and went back to the till, where the assistant was cashing up the last item.

‘And a pouch of Eventyr tobacco and roll-up papers. And
Dagbladet
.’

‘You’re from the south?’ he said.

I nodded. ‘Kristiansand.’

An elderly man wearing a cloth cap entered the shop.

‘Good morning, Bertil!’ he shouted.

‘Oh, it’s you, is it!’ the assistant said, giving me a wink. I squeezed a smile, paid, put my purchases in a bag and left. One of the people standing outside nodded, I nodded back and then I was out of their range.

Up the hill, I gazed at the mountain rising from the end of the village. It was completely green, all the way to the top, and that was perhaps the most surprising feature of the countryside here, I had expected something bleaker, with less colour, not this green which seemed to resonate everywhere, drowned out only by the greys and blues of the vast sea.

It was a good feeling going back into my flat. It was the first place I had ever been able to call mine, and I enjoyed even the most trivial activities, like hanging up my jacket or putting the milk in the fridge. Admittedly, I had lived for a month in a small flat next to Eg Psychiatric Hospital earlier in the summer, that was where mum had driven me when I moved from the house we had occupied for the last five years, but it wasn’t a proper flat, only a room off a corridor with other rooms where in the old days the unmarried nurses had lived, hence its name the Henhouse, in the same way that the job I had there wasn’t a proper job either, just a short summer temping vacancy without any real responsibility. And then it was in Kristiansand. For me it was impossible to feel free in Kristiansand, there were too many ties with too many people, real and imagined, for me ever to do what I wanted in that town.

But here! I thought, lifting a slice of bread to my mouth while looking out of the window. The reflection of the mountains across the fjord was broken kaleidoscopically by the ripples in the water below. Here no one knew who I was, here there were no ties, no fixed patterns, here I could do as I liked. Hide away for a year and write, create something in secret. Or I could just take it easy and save up some money. It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that I was here.

I poured some milk into a glass and drank it in long swigs, placed the glass next to the plate and the knife on the worktop, returned the food to the fridge and went into the sitting room, plugged the typewriter in, put on my headset, turned the volume up full, inserted a sheet of paper into the typewriter, centred it and typed a figure 1 at the top. Looked down at the caretaker’s house. A pair of green wellies stood on the doorstep. A broom with red bristles leaned against the wall. There were some toy cars lying in the mixture of gravel and sand covering the area in front of the door. Between the two houses grew moss, lichen, some grass and a few slender trees. I tapped my forefinger against the table edge to the rhythm of the music. I wrote one sentence: ‘Gabriel stood at the top of the hill looking over the housing estate with an expression of disapproval on his face.’

I smoked a cigarette, brewed a jug of coffee and looked out across the village and fjord and up at the mountains beyond. I wrote another sentence: ‘Gordon appeared behind him.’ Sang along to the chorus. Wrote. ‘He grinned like a wolf.’ Pushed back my chair, put my feet on the table and lit another cigarette.

That was pretty good, wasn’t it?

I picked up
The Garden of Eden
by Hemingway and browsed through it to get a feel for the language. I had been given it by Hilde as a leaving present two days before, at Kristiansand railway station when I was about to leave for Oslo to catch a plane to Tromsø. Lars was there too, and Eirik, who went out with Hilde. Not forgetting Line. She was going to travel with me to Oslo and say goodbye there.

It was only now that I saw there was a dedication on the copyright page. She had written that I meant something special to her.

I lit a cigarette and sat looking out of the window while I chewed that over.

What could I mean to her?

She saw something in me, I felt that, but I didn’t know what she saw. To be friends with her was to be taken care of. But the care that resides in understanding always makes the recipient smaller too. It wasn’t a problem, but I was aware of it.

I wasn’t worth it. I pretended I was, and the strange thing was that she rose to it, because there was nothing wrong with her intelligence in such matters. Hilde was the only person I knew who read decent books, and the only person I knew who herself wrote. We had been in the same class for two years and at once she caught my attention, she had an ironic, sometimes also rebellious, attitude to what was said in the classroom, which I had never seen in a girl before. She despised the other girls’ mania for make-up, the way they always did their best to be proper, their often affected childishness, but not in any aggressive or bitter manner, she was not like that, she was kind and caring, she had a fundamentally gentle nature, but there was a sharpness to it too, an unusual stubbornness, which made me look in her direction more and more often. She was pale, she had pale freckles on her cheeks, her hair was a reddish-blonde colour, she was thin and there was something physically fragile about her, fragile in the sense of the opposite of robust, which in another, less sharp, less independent soul would perhaps evoke a need in those she met to take her under their wing, but there was definitely no need for this, quite the contrary, it was Hilde who took whoever crossed her path under her wing. She often went around in a green military jacket and plain blue jeans, which signalled politically that she was on the left, but culturally she was on the right, because what she was against was materialism, while what she was for was the mind. In other words, the internal in preference to the external. That was why she scorned writers like Solstad and Faldbakken, or Phallusbakken as she called him, and liked Bjørneboe and Kaj Skagen and even André Bjerke.

Hilde had become my closest confidante. Actually she was my best friend. I was in and out of the house where she lived, I got to know her parents, sometimes I stayed the night and had dinner with them. What Hilde and I did, occasionally with Eirik, occasionally on our own, was talk. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of her cellar flat, with a bottle of wine between us, the night pressing against the windows, we talked about books we had read, about political issues that interested us, about what awaited us in life, what we wanted to do and what we could do. She was very serious about life, she was the only acquaintance of my age who was, and she probably saw the same in me, while at the same time she laughed a lot and irony was never far away. There was little I liked better than being there, in their house, with her and Eirik and sometimes Lars; however, there were other things happening in my life which were irreconcilable, and this caused me to have a permanent guilty conscience: if I was out drinking at discos and trying to chat up girls I felt bad about Hilde and what I stood for when I was with her; if I was at Hilde’s place and talked about freedom or beauty or the meaning of everything I could feel pangs of guilt towards those I went out with, or towards the person I was when I was with them, because the duplicity and hypocrisy that Hilde, Eirik and I talked so much about was also present in my own heart. Politically, I was way out on the left, bordering on anarchy, I hated conformity and conventionality, and like all the other alternative young people growing up in Kristiansand, including her, I despised Christianity and all the idiots who believed in it and went to meetings with their stupid charismatic priests.

But I didn’t despise the Christian girls. No, for some strange reason it was precisely them I fell for. How could I explain that to Hilde? And although I, like her, always tried to see beneath the surface, on the basis of a fundamental yet unstated tenet that what lay beneath was the truth or the reality, and, like her, always sought meaning, even if it were only to be found in an acknowledgement of meaninglessness, it was actually on the glittering and alluring surface that I wanted to live, and the chalice of meaninglessness I wanted to drain – in short I was attracted by all the town’s discos and nightspots, where I wanted nothing more than to drink myself senseless and stagger around chasing girls I could fuck, or at least snog. How could I explain that to Hilde?

I couldn’t, and I didn’t. Instead I opened a new subdivision in my life. ‘Booze and hopes of fornication’ it was called, and it was right next to ‘insight and sincerity’, separated only by a minor garden-fence-like change of personality.

Line was a Christian. Not ostentatiously so, but she was, and her presence at the railway station, close to me, somehow made me feel ill at ease.

She had curly black hair, pronounced eyebrows and clear blue eyes. She moved with grace and was independent in that rare way that does not impinge on others. She liked drawing and did it a lot, perhaps she was gifted in that direction; after she had said goodbye to me she was going to study creative arts at a folk high school. I wasn’t in love with her, but she was good-looking, I was incredibly fond of her, and occasionally, after we had shared some white wine, passionate feelings for her could rise inside me nonetheless. The problem was that she had clear boundaries as to how far she would go. During the weeks we had been together I had asked her twice, begged her, to let me as we lay there, semi-naked, smooching in bed at her house or in my room at the Henhouse. But no, it wasn’t me she was saving herself for.

‘Can’t I do it from behind then!’ I once burst out in my desperation, without quite knowing what that involved. Line snuggled up to me with her supple body and smothered me in kisses. Not many seconds later I felt the hated spasm from down below as my underpants filled with semen and I discreetly moved away from her; fired still by a driving passion, she didn’t realise that my mood had changed completely from one moment to the next.

On the station platform she stood beside me, hands in her rear pockets and a little rucksack on her back. There were six minutes to go before the train was due to leave. People were still getting on board.

‘I’m just going to nip over to the kiosk,’ she said, eyeing me. ‘Anything you need?’

I shook my head.

‘Oh, yes, a Coke.’

She dashed over to the Narvesen kiosk. Hilde looked at me and smiled. Lars’s eyes were wandering. Eirik was gazing in the direction of the harbour.

‘Now that you’re venturing out into the big wide world, I’ll give you a piece of advice,’ he said, turning to me.

‘Oh yes?’ I said.

‘Think before you act. Make sure you’re never caught with your pants down. And you’ll survive. If, for example, you want some of your pupils to suck you off, for God’s sake do it
behind
the teacher’s desk. Not in front. OK?’

‘Isn’t that double standards?’ I said.

He laughed.

‘And if, while you’re up north, you’ve got to slap a girlfriend around, do it so the bruises don’t show,’ Hilde said. ‘Never the face, however much you might feel like it.’

‘Do you think I should have two, then? One down here and one up there?’

‘Why not?’ she said.

‘One you hit and one you don’t,’ Eirik said. ‘Can’t get a better balance than that.’

‘Any more advice?’ I said.

‘I saw an interview with an old actor on TV once,’ Lars said. ‘He was asked whether there was anything he’d learned over the course of a long life he’d like to pass on to the viewers. He said yes, there was. The shower curtain. Make sure it was inside the bath, not outside. Otherwise when you turned the water on it would go all over the floor.’

We laughed. Lars, pleased with himself, looked around.

Behind him, Line came back empty-handed.

‘The queue was too long,’ she said. ‘But I suppose they’ll have a bar on board.’