Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (8 page)

He stole away as soundlessly as he had come. I didn’t know which was worse,
pour it in the Thermos
or
will you
. It was patronising whichever way you looked at it. Because I was only eighteen didn’t mean he could treat me like a schoolboy! I was an employee here, no different from him.

Straight afterwards the bell rang and the teachers came in one by one, some silent, others with chirpy one-liners for everyone. I had put the Thermos on the table and was standing by the window with a full cup in my hand. The pupils were already running around outside. I tried to put names to the faces, but the only one I could remember was Kai Roald, the boy in the seventh class, perhaps because I had sympathised with him, the reluctance I had sensed in his body occasionally countermanded by an interested, perhaps even an enthusiastic, glint in his eyes. And then Liv, the stunner in the ninth, of course. She was standing up against the wall, her hands in her back pockets, wearing a beige anorak, blue jeans and worn grey trainers, chewing gum and stroking away some strands of hair that the wind had blown into her face. And Stian, over there, standing legs apart, hands in his pockets, chatting to his beanpole of a friend.

I turned back to the room. Nils Erik smiled at me.

‘Where do you live?’ he said.

‘Down the hill from here,’ I said. ‘A basement flat.’

‘Under me,’ Torill said.

‘Where did you end up?’ I said.

‘At the top of the village. Also a basement flat.’

‘Yes, under me!’ Sture said.

‘So that’s how they’ve organised it,’ I said. ‘The trained teachers get the flats with the view and everything while the temps get the cellars?’

‘You may as well learn that right from the start,’ Sture said. ‘All privileges have to be earned. I grafted for three years at a teacher training college. There has to be some bloody payback.’

He laughed.

‘Shall we carry your bags for you too, then?’ I said.

‘No, that’s too much responsibility for the likes of you. But every Saturday morning you’re expected to come and clean for us,’ he said with a wink.

‘I’ve heard there’s a party in Hellevika this weekend,’ I said. ‘Anyone here going?’

‘You’ve settled in fast, I have to say,’ Nils Erik said.

‘Who told you?’ Hege said.

‘Heard it on the grapevine,’ I said. ‘I was wondering whether to go or not. But it’s not much fun going alone.’

‘You’re never alone at a party up here,’ Sture said. ‘This is Northern Norway.’

‘Are you going?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘I’ve got a family to take care of,’ he said. ‘But I’ll give you some tips. If you want.’ He laughed.

‘I was thinking of going,’ Jane said.

‘Me too,’ Vibeke said.

‘What about you?’ I said, looking at Nils Erik.

He shrugged.

‘Maybe. Is it on Friday or Saturday?’

‘Friday, I think,’ I said.

‘Maybe not such a bad idea,’ he said.

The bell rang.

‘We can talk about it later,’ he said and stood up.

‘OK,’ I said, put my cup down on the worktop, fetched my books from my workstation, went to the classroom, sat on the teacher’s desk and waited for the pupils to arrive.

When I walked down to my flat after school, my removal boxes were waiting in the porch. They contained everything I owned, which wasn’t much: a box of records, another with an old stereo in, one full of kitchen utensils and one with the odds and ends that had accumulated in my old room, plus some of mum’s books. It still felt as though I had been given a huge present as I carried them into the sitting room. I assembled the stereo, stacked the records against the wall, flicked through them, selected
My Life in the Bush of Ghosts
by Brian Eno and David Byrne, one of my all-time favourites, and with it resounding through the room I started to organise the other items. Everything I had brought with me from home when we moved – pans, plates, cups and glasses – I’d had around me ever since I was small and we lived in Tybakken. Brown plates, green glasses, a large pot with only one handle, blackened underneath and some way up the sides. I’d had the picture of John Lennon in my room all the time I was at
gymnas
and proceeded to hang it on the wall behind the typewriter. I’d had the enormous poster of Liverpool FC, the 1979/80 season, since I was eleven, and it was now given a position on the wall behind the sofa. It was perhaps their best team ever: Kenny Dalglish, Ray Clemence, Alan Hansen, Emlyn Hughes, Graeme Souness and John Toshack. I had grown tired of the Paul McCartney poster, so I put it in the bedroom cupboard, rolled up. When everything was tidy, I flicked through the records again imagining I was someone else, someone who had never seen them before, and wondered what they would have made of the collection, or rather of the person who owned this collection, in other words me. There were more than 150 LPs, most from the last two years, when I had been reviewing records for the local paper and spent almost all the money I had on new ones, often the complete back catalogue of bands I liked. Every single one of these records embraced an entire little world of its own. All of them expressed quite definite attitudes, sentiments and moods. But none of the records was an island, there were connections between them which spread outwards: Brian Eno, for example, started in Roxy Music, released solo records, produced U2 and worked with Jon Hassell, David Byrne, David Bowie and Robert Fripp; Robert Fripp played on Bowie’s
Scary Monsters
; Bowie produced Lou Reed, who came from Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop, who came from the Stooges, while David Byrne was in Talking Heads, who on their best record,
Remain in Light
, used the guitarist Adrian Belew, who in turn played on several of Bowie’s records and was his favourite live guitarist for years. But the ramifications and connections didn’t only exist between the records, they extended right into my own life. The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the last five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position.

But this wasn’t its most important aspect, which was the music itself. When, for example, I played
Remain in Light
, which I had done regularly since the eighth class and never tired of, and the third track started, ‘The Great Curve’, with its fantastic rolling, multilayered accompaniment, brimful of energy, and the horns joined in, and afterwards the voices, it was impossible not to move, impossible, it ignited every part of my body, me, the world’s least rhythmic eighteen-year-old, sitting there squirming like a snake, to and fro, and I had to have it louder, I turned it up full blast, and then, already up on my feet, yes, then I had to dance, at that moment, even if I was alone. And, towards the end, on top of all this, like a bloody fighter plane above a tiny dancing village, comes Adrian Belew’s overriding guitar, and oh, oh God, I am dancing and happiness fills me to my fingertips and I only wish it could last, that the solo would go on and on, the plane would never land, the sun would never set, life would never end.

Or
Heaven Up Here
with Echo and the Bunnymen, the diametric opposite of Talking Heads, because here the essence is not rhythm or drive but sounds and moods, this tremendous wailing that springs from them, all longing and beauty and gloom, which swells and subsides in the music, no, which
is
the music. And even though I understand a lot of what he is singing about, even though I have read piles of interviews with him, as is the case with most of the bands whose records I own, this knowledge is obliterated by the music; the music doesn’t want to know about it, because in music there is no meaning, there is no explanation, there are no people, only voices, each with its own special distinctive quality, as though this is its essential quality, its essence, unadulterated, no body, no personality, yes, a kind of personality without a person, and on every record there is an infinity of such characteristics, from another world, which you meet whenever you play the music. I never worked out what it was that possessed me when music possessed me, other than that I always wanted it.

Furthermore, it made me someone, of course. Thanks to music I became someone who was at the forefront, someone you had to admire, not as much as you had to admire those who made the music, admittedly, but as a listener I was in the vanguard. Up here in the north probably no one would see that, as hardly anyone in Kristiansand had been aware of it, but there were circles where it was seen and appreciated. And that was where I was heading.

I spent some time arranging my records in such a way that the impression made by each one would be enhanced and perhaps lead to surprising new associations for whoever thumbed through them, then I walked down to the shop and bought some beer and a ready-made frozen meal, pasta carbonara. In addition, I bought a swede, a cauliflower, some apples, some plums and a bunch of grapes, which I intended to use in the science class with the third and fourth years the following day in a grand illustration of the cosmos, an idea that had occurred to me while skimming through their syllabus the day before.

When I arrived home I put the ready meal in the microwave and ate it straight from the aluminium tray on the kitchen table while drinking a beer and reading
Dagbladet
. Well sated, I lay on my bed for an hour’s rest. Images of teachers and pupils and the school interior flickered through my consciousness for a long time before at last I was gone. An hour and a half later I was roused by someone ringing the doorbell. I no longer knew what to expect, all sorts of people rang, so it was with a mixture of sleepiness and nervousness that I hurried across the floor to the door.

Three of the girls in my class stood outside. One, Andrea, smiled brazenly and asked if they could come in; the second, Vivian, giggled and blushed; the third, Live, stared shamelessly at me from behind her large thick glasses.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Come in, all of you!’

They did what other visitors had done, looked around as they stepped into the sitting room. Huddling close to each other, they pushed and shoved and sniggered and blushed.

‘Come on, take a seat!’ I said, nodding in the direction of the sofa.

They did as they were told.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘What brings you here?’

‘We wanted to see how you were. We were bored, you see,’ Andrea said.

Was she some kind of leader? She hadn’t exactly given that impression at school.

‘There’s nothing to do here,’ Vivian said.

‘Nothing,’ Live said.

‘No, doesn’t seem like there is much,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid there’s not a lot going on here either.’

‘No, it’s a hole,’ Andrea said.

‘My flat is a hole?’ I said.

She flushed to the roots.

‘No, silly. The village!’ she said.

‘I’m going to move away the second I finish the ninth class,’ Vivian said.

‘Me too,’ Live said.

‘You always copy what I do,’ Vivian said.

‘Oh yes? So?’

‘Oh yes? So?’ Vivian said in a perfect imitation. It even included Live’s little tic: two wrinkles of the nose under her glasses, in rapid succession.

‘Ooohh!’ Live said.

‘You can’t have a monopoly on leaving the village when you’re sixteen,’ I said, looking at Vivian, who smiled and lowered her eyes.

‘You speak so
weirdly
, Karl Ove,’ Andrea said. ‘What does
monopoly
mean?’

The use of my name caught me off guard, so much so that, while looking at Andrea, as it was she who was talking, I reddened and bowed my head.

‘Someone who is the only person to do something,’ I said, looking up.

‘Oh, yeees,’ she said, pretending to keel over with boredom. The other two girls laughed. I smiled.

‘I can see that you kids have a lot to learn,’ I said. ‘Good job for you that I came here.’

‘Not me,’ Andrea said. ‘I know all I need to know.’

‘Apart from how to drive a car,’ Vivian said.

‘I can drive a car!’ Andrea said.

‘Yes, but you’re not
allowed
to drive. That’s what I meant.’

There was a pause. I smiled at them, obviously failing to conceal a patronising air because Andrea narrowed her eyes and said: ‘We’re thirteen years old, by the way. We’re not tiny tots, if that was what you were thinking.’

I laughed.

‘Why should I think that? You’re all in the seventh class, I know that. I can even remember how it felt.’

‘How what felt?’

‘Starting at a new school. It’s your first day at the
ungdomskole
today.’

‘And don’t we know it,’ Vivian said. ‘It was even more boring than the sixth class, I reckon.’

The bell shrilled. The three girls exchanged glances. I got up to open the door.

It was Nils Erik.

‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Are you going to offer an old colleague a cup of coffee?’

‘Wouldn’t you rather have a beer?’

He raised his eyebrows and put on a quizzical, or perhaps it was a sceptical, look.

‘No thanks. I’m going for a drive afterwards. Better safe than sorry.’

‘Anyway, come in,’ I said.

The three girls stared at him as he stopped in the middle of the sitting room.

‘So this is where you hang out in the evenings,’ he said.

‘Haven’t they been to yours yet?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘But some fourth years came over this afternoon. While I was frying fishcakes.’

‘We’re just so bored,’ Live said.

The two others sent her an angry glare. Then they got up.

‘Well,’ said Andrea. ‘We’d better be going.’

‘Bye,’ I said. ‘And feel free to come another day!’

‘Bye!’ Vivian said from the hall, before the door was slammed shut.

Nils Erik smiled. Shortly afterwards we saw them trudging down the hill towards the shop.

‘Poor kids,’ I said. ‘They must be pretty desperate if all they have to do in their free time is visit teachers.’