Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (41 page)

Once at home, I quickly fell back into my old self, or it fell back into me. At school, where teachers focused on exams, I stayed in the shadows, I skulked around in the breaks and in lessons filled my notebooks with my scribblings. The trip to Switzerland had been a procession of triumphs, and I hoped the
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– school-leaver – celebrations would be the same. At home I wrote the social studies special paper in one night, a twenty-page comparison of the Russian revolution with the Sandanista revolution in Nicaragua, which I had followed with interest for several years, and I wrote a letter to a hotel in Switzerland asking them for the address of a guest, if at all possible, as in my possession I had a purse I would like to return, belonging to an American girl, whose name was Melanie, surname unknown, but she had stayed at the hotel over Easter.

At the end of April I had a party at home. As editor of the
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newspaper, a duty I shared with Hilde, I probably should have been on the
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committee, as had always been the case, but for some reason we were excluded. Perhaps because Hilde and I didn’t really fit in there, or because we hadn’t accepted our posts with the requisite nonchalance, what did I know? Whatever the reason, I invited the whole of the committee, as well as many others, home one Saturday evening. Mum was sleeping at a friend’s and would be home in the afternoon, so I had told everyone that they must not under any circumstances arrive before six. But at three a red
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camper chugged up the hill. In it were Christian and two girls. He wanted to drop off the beer, he said. But I told you six o’clock, I said. Yes, but now we’re here, he said. Where can I leave it?

Ten minutes later there was a stack of beer crates in the kitchen. The stack went from the floor right up to the ceiling. It was fair to say the ceiling was low, but mum, whom Christian barely greeted when he entered the kitchen, was not enamoured of the sight. What’s this? she said after they had gone. Are you going to drink all of this? You’re not going to have some drunken orgy here, are you? I won’t allow it. Relax, I said. This is a
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party. Everyone’s eighteen. There’ll be quite a bit of drinking. But I’ll take responsibility for everything. I promise you. It’ll all be fine. Are you sure? she said, eyeing me closely. There’s enough beer here for a hundred people. How many crates are there actually? Yes, but take it easy. There’s quite a bit of drinking at
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parties. But that’s the whole point. Is it? she said. Not the whole point, I said. But at any rate an important element. I know you don’t like the idea, and I’m sorry it’s here, but everything will be fine, I promise you. Well, anyway, it’s too late to do anything about it now, she said. But had I known what I know now you wouldn’t have had my blessing. Promise me you won’t drink much yourself now. You’re responsible for everything going well, you know. Yeah, yeah, I said.

We had dinner beside the yellow beer-crate tower, mum got in her car and drove to town, I put on a record, grabbed a beer and lounged on the sofa waiting for the others to come.

A few hours later the drive was full of
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vehicles. Everywhere there were screaming girls and boys in red
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outfits, all holding bottles of beer. Music was pounding from several of the cars, and in the living room the stereo was so loud that the music coming from the speakers was distorted. Three or four times more people had come than had been invited.

At one in the morning everything seemed to build up to a climax. Christian screamed and kicked a big hole in the bathroom door. Trond was sitting in the kitchen beating out the rhythm of the music on the edge of the table with two large knives, every beat was a new notch. People were being sick on the doorstep outside the living room, people were being sick on the shingle between the cars, people were being sick in Yngve’s bed. Behind the lilac bush someone was performing a knee-trembler. Others were jumping up and down to the music, roaring for all they were worth. People stood on car bonnets and roofs, one of them naked, swirling his sweater around his head. Even though I had made up my mind not to give a toss, and had succeeded by getting drunk, I carried a constant horror within me which, at various points, would surface in my consciousness, no, oh no, I thought then, only to recede as I became involved in one of the many incidents going on around me.

At three the tempo began to slow. Some people were still dancing, some were sitting and smooching, some were asleep, lying across the table, hunched in corners, outside under bushes. I sat on the sofa in front of the TV snogging a girl, we had hardly exchanged a word, she had been sitting there, I sat down beside her, we started to snog. She was dark-haired, everything about her was dark, even her clothes, she was the only one not dressed in a red outfit but in a black sweater, black skirt and black tights. Want to come with me to the room over there, I whispered, she nodded, I had drunk a lot and was thinking this will make everything different because now I didn’t give a shit about anything, wasn’t nervous about anything, and I took out my keys and unlocked the door to my room, held my arm around her, she pulled off the little handbag she wore diagonally across her chest, lay down on the bed,
my
bed, it reverberated through my brain, I rolled her jumper over her head, kissed her dark nipples, rubbed my face between them, lovingly and lingeringly, here we go, I thought, now I’ve got a girl here, now we’re going to have it, and my legs were trembling as I sat up to pull down her tights, she let me do it, I took off my trousers, this is it, she was naked, her skin shone white in the dark, I put my hand between her legs and felt the curly though still smooth hair, and I was naked, and I squirmed a bit, she said you’re so heavy on top of me, I pushed down with my arms and then my dick was in her pubic hair, I thrust, further down, she said, I moved and there it was, wet and soft and then, no, no, oh bloody hell, no.

Long shudders like electric shocks went through me as she lay there, her eyes wide open, staring up at me.

No, no, no.

I hadn’t even penetrated her. A couple of centimetres maybe, no more. And then it was over. I fell on top of her and kissed her neck. She pushed me away and half sat up. I reached out for her, touched her breasts, but she just got up, pulled on her panties and tights and left the room.

In the morning I woke to a discussion outside my half-open door. I recognised the voices of Espen, Trond and the girl from the night before. No, she said, it wasn’t me. Yes, it was. I saw you. You went into his bedroom. No, it wasn’t, she said. But we saw you. Yes, I went in with him, he was going to sleep, but I came out again
at once
, she said. Nothing happened. Ha ha ha! said Espen. You were shagging in there. No, we weren’t, she said. And where were you going just now? Were you going in? Why would you go in if you hadn’t shagged? You know him, don’t you? No. I was going to collect something I’d left there. What was that? My bag.

I hastily got up, put on a pair of trousers and a T-shirt, grabbed her bag and went out to them.

‘Here you are,’ I said, passing her the bag. ‘You forgot this.’

‘Thank you,’ she said without meeting my eyes, and went downstairs.

‘What a bloody mess the house is in,’ Espen said.

‘I can imagine,’ I said.

‘I’ll help you to tidy up.’

‘Great.’

‘I’ll get Gisle and Trond to give a hand.’ He looked at me. ‘Did you shag Beate then?’

‘Was that her name?’ I said. ‘Yes, I did.’

‘She says you didn’t.’

‘I heard.’

‘Why?’

‘How should I know?’ I said.

Our eyes met.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Better go down and inspect the hell.’

There was nothing that could be done about the door, it would have to be changed. Nor about the slashes to the table. But all the rest? Couldn’t that be scrubbed clean? We tidied up and cleaned the house all morning. Espen, Gisle and Trond went home at one, I continued on my own with a steadily increasing sense of panic in my chest because no matter how much I tidied and cleaned, the place still looked as if a party had hit it.

Mum came at five. I went out to meet her so that it wouldn’t come as a shock. I didn’t want her to see it before I had told her.

‘Hi,’ I said.

‘Hi,’ she said. ‘How did it go?’

‘Not so well, I’m afraid,’ I said.

‘Oh?’ she said. ‘What happened?’

‘It got a bit out of control. Someone kicked in the bathroom door, among other things. And there are quite a few other bits and pieces. You’d better see for yourself. I’m extremely sorry.’

She looked at me.

‘I had a feeling it would be like this,’ she said. ‘We’d better go in and see.’

When the inspection was over, she sat down at the kitchen table, ran both hands over her face and looked up at me.

‘It’s dreadful,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘What shall we do about the door?’ she said. ‘We can’t afford a new one.’

‘Are we so hard up?’

‘I’m afraid so. Who kicked it in?’

‘Someone called Christian. An idiot.’

‘Surely he should replace it?’

‘I can tell him to.’

‘You do that.’

She got up with a sigh.

‘I suppose we’d better eat,’ she said. ‘I think there are some pollock fillets in the fridge. Shall we have those?’

‘OK.’

She went to the hall and hung up her coat, I found the two packs of fish, she started washing some potatoes while I sliced the frozen blocks into pieces.

‘We’ve had this conversation before,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You have to make your own decisions. And if they’re poor ones you have to live with the consequences.’

‘Of course,’ I said, and sprinkled flour, salt and pepper onto a plate, turned the, by now soft, fish in the mixture, put the frying pan on the hob and watched the knob of butter slide across the black surface as the heat took hold, not unlike a house, it struck me, when the clay base it stands on starts slipping. Slow, erect, with a final dignity before it subsides.

‘A year’s wear and tear in one night,’ she said. ‘Or even more.’

‘The house was built in 1880,’ I said. ‘One year’s not so much.’

She ignored me.

‘You’re eighteen years old. I can’t tell you what to do any more. I can’t control you. All I can do is be here for you and hope you will turn to me if you need help.’

‘OK.’

‘I could have tried to stop you, but why should I? You’re an adult and you have to take responsibility for your actions. I trust you. You’re free to do what you want. But you have to trust me too. In other words, treat me like an adult. And what we share is this house. We share the responsibility for it.’

She squirted some soap onto one hand, rubbed both of them together under the running tap and dried them on the kitchen towel.

‘You’re washing your hands of me, I can see,’ I said.

She raised a smile, but it was mirthless.

‘This is serious, Karl Ove. I’m worried about you.’

‘You have no reason to be,’ I said. ‘What happened here, well . . . it was a
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party, no more, no less.’

She didn’t answer, I put the fish fillets into the pan, diced an onion and added the little cubes, poured in a can of tomatoes, sprinkled in spices and sat down with the Saturday newspaper, flicked through to the page where my Prince article, which I had handed in several weeks ago, had finally appeared in print. I held it up for her.

‘Have you read it?’ I said.

On the Monday I went to Christian and told him the door was smashed beyond repair. Oh yes, he said. You kicked it in, I said. Yes, it was me, he said. So you should replace it, I think, I said. No, he said. What do you mean
no
? I said. I mean what I said, he replied. No. It was your party. But it was you who broke the door, I said. Yes, he said. So you won’t replace it? I said. No, he said. And then he turned and left.

When I got back home from school there was a letter with a foreign stamp in the post box. I opened it at once and read it walking up the hill. It was from the manager of the Grand Hotel in Lucerne. He wrote that, unfortunately, all the rooms were registered by surnames and therefore he couldn’t help me with Melanie’s address, but I could try the two travel bureaus involved, whose addresses he added afterwards: one in Philadelphia and one in Lugano.

I put the letter back in the envelope and went in. Bang went my plan to write letters for a year and then make a surprise visit, with the exciting possibility that it was there, in America, that my future lay.

For the rest of the spring I was drunk almost all of the time. The first thing I did when I woke up in the
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van or on a sofa at a friend’s or on a bench in the park was to get my hands on something to drink and continue where I had left off. And there was little that beat starting the day with a beer and walking around drunk in the morning. What a life. Going here, there and everywhere, having a drink, sleeping whenever an opportunity offered itself, eating something maybe and then just carrying on. It was fantastic. I loved being drunk. I came closer to the person I really was and dared to do what I really wanted to do. There were no limits. I only went home for a shower and a change of clothes, and once, when I was sitting in the living room with a six-pack of Carlsberg, which I drank while waiting for the
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van to come and collect me, mum suddenly flew into a rage. She had tolerated so much, but she drew the line here, at this, sitting alone and drinking in the living room, she would not put up with it. I could choose: either I stopped drinking or found myself somewhere else to live. It was a simple choice, I got up, grabbed the beers, said bye and went out, down the road, where I sat on the verge, lit a cigarette and opened a beer while waiting for the van. If she didn’t want me to live at home, well, I wouldn’t live at home.

‘What are you sitting there for?’ Espen said when the van pulled up in front of me.

‘I’ve been chucked out,’ I said. ‘Actually, it makes no odds.’

I got in, we drank what we had on the way to town, bought some more crates of beer at a supermarket, went on towards Vågsbygd, where we were meeting that night, a grass plain by the sea with an ancient deciduous forest sloping upwards, where we sat drinking, where I disappeared into myself and walked around without a thought in my head. It was fantastic, as always. The interpersonal shit I usually got bogged down in meant nothing, I was footloose and free, everything was as cold and clear as glass. I asked after Geir Helge, a lean sociable guy with glasses and a Mandal dialect. He smoked hash, everyone knew that, and now I wanted to do it too. I had been considering it for a long while. Smoking hash was a stigma, if you did you were on the outside, you were no longer a decent person, you were on the way to becoming a junkie. In any case that was how it was in Kristiansand. And the idea of it being the beginning of a road that would lead me to a life as a junkie was incredibly appealing and filled life with destiny and meaning. Being a junkie, just living for drugs, renouncing everything else, for me that was the worst of the worst. Junkies had abandoned their humanity, they were a kind of devil, it was terrible, terrible, the worst, hell. I laughed at those who associated hash with heroin, it was propaganda, nothing else, smoking hash was a bid for freedom for me, but although hash was completely harmless it was in the same category as harmful drugs, in a way smoking it made me a drug addict, and what an immense and exhilarating thought that was.