Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (21 page)

‘I don’t,’ I said. ‘A lot happened, but it doesn’t matter any more.’

His head shot up.

‘YES, IT DOES!’ he said. ‘Don’t say that!’

Then he noticed the cigarette between his fingers. Took the lighter from the table, lit it and sat back.

‘But now we’re having a cosy time anyway,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was a wonderful meal.’

‘Unni’s got a son as well, you know,’ dad said. ‘He’s almost as old as you.’

‘Let’s not talk about him now,’ Unni said. ‘We’ve got Karl Ove here.’

‘But I’m sure Karl Ove would like to hear,’ dad said. ‘They’ll be like brothers. Won’t they. Don’t you agree, Karl Ove?’

I nodded.

‘He’s a fine lad. I met him here a week ago,’ he said.

I filled my glass as inconspicuously as I could.

The telephone in the living room rang. Dad got up to answer it.

‘Whoops!’ he said, almost losing his balance, and then to the phone, ‘Yes, yes, I’m coming.’

He lifted the receiver.

‘Hi, Arne!’ he said.

He spoke loudly, I could have listened to every word if I had wanted to.

‘He’s been under enormous strain recently,’ Unni whispered. ‘He needs to let off some steam.’

‘I see,’ I said.

‘It’s a shame Yngve couldn’t come,’ she said.

Yngve?

‘He had to go back to Bergen,’ I said.

‘Yes, my dear friend, I’m sure you understand!’ dad said.

‘Who’s Arne?’ I said.

‘A relative of mine,’ she said. ‘We met them in the summer. They’re so nice. You’re bound to meet them.’

‘OK,’ I said.

Dad came back in and saw the bottle was nearly empty.

‘Let’s have a little brandy, shall we?’ he said. ‘A digestif?’

‘You don’t drink brandy, do you?’ Unni asked, looking at me.

‘No, the boy can’t have spirits,’ dad said.

‘I’ve had brandy before,’ I said. ‘In the summer. At the football training camp.’

Dad eyed me. ‘Does mum know?’ he said.

‘Mum?’ Unni said.

‘You can have one glass, but no more,’ dad said, staring straight at Unni. ‘Is that all right?’

‘Yes, it is,’ she said.

He fetched the brandy and a glass, poured and leaned back in the deep white sofa under the windows facing the road, where the dusk now hung like a veil over the white walls of the houses opposite.

Unni put her arm round him and one hand on his chest. Dad smiled.

‘See how lucky I am, Karl Ove,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said and shuddered as the brandy met my tongue. My shoulders trembled.

‘But she’s got temperament too, you know,’ he said. ‘Isn’t that true?’

‘Certainly is,’ she said with a smile.

‘Once she threw the alarm clock against this wall,’ he said.

‘I like to get things off my chest straight away,’ Unni said.

‘Not like your mother,’ he said.

‘Do you have to talk about her the whole time?’ Unni said.

‘No, no, no, not at all,’ dad said. ‘Don’t be so touchy. After all, I had him with her,’ he said, nodding towards me. ‘This is my son. We have to be able to talk as well.’

‘OK,’ Unni said. ‘You just talk. I’m going to bed.’ She got up.

‘But, Unni . . .’ dad said.

She went into the next room. He stood up and slowly followed her without a further look.

I heard their voices, muted and angry. Finished the brandy, refilled my glass and carefully put the bottle back in exactly the same place.

Oh dear.

He yelled.

Immediately afterwards he returned.

‘When did the last bus go, did you say?’ he said.

‘Ten past eleven,’ I said.

‘It’s almost that now,’ he said. ‘Perhaps it’s best if you go now. You don’t want to miss it.’

‘OK,’ I said and got up. Had to place one foot well apart from the other so as not to sway. I smiled. ‘Thanks for everything.’

‘Let’s keep in touch,’ he said. ‘Even though we don’t live together any more nothing must change between us. That’s important.’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Do you understand?’

‘Yes. It’s important we keep in touch,’ I said.

‘You’re not being flippant with me, are you?’ he said.

‘No, no, of course not,’ I said. ‘It’s important now that you’re divorced.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ll ring. Just drop by when you’re in town. All right?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

While putting on my shoes I almost toppled over and had to hold on to the wall. Dad sat on the sofa drinking and noticed nothing.

‘Bye!’ I shouted as I opened the door.

‘Bye, Karl Ove,’ dad said from inside, and then I went out into the darkness and headed for the bus stop.

I waited for about a quarter of an hour until the bus arrived, sitting on a step smoking and watching the stars while thinking about Hanne.

I could see her face in front of me.

She was laughing; her eyes were gleaming.

I could hear her laughter.

She was almost always laughing. And when she wasn’t, laughter bubbled in her voice.

Brilliant!
she would say when something was absurd or comical.

I thought about what she was like when she turned serious. Then it was as if she was on my home ground, and I felt I was an enormous black cloud wrapped around her, always greater than her. But only when she was serious, not otherwise.

When I was with Hanne I laughed almost all the time.

Her little nose!

She was more girl than woman in the same way that I was more boy than man. I used to say she was like a cat. And it was true there was something feline about her, in her movements, but also a kind of softness that wanted to be close to you.

I could hear her laughter, and I smoked and peered up at the stars. Then I heard the deep growl of the bus approaching between the houses, flicked the cigarette into the road, stood up, counted the coins in my pocket and handed them to the driver when I stepped on board.

Oh, the muted lights in buses at night and the muted sounds. The few passengers, all in their own worlds. The countryside gliding past in the darkness. The drone of the engine. Sitting there and thinking about the best that you know, that which is dearest to your heart, wanting only to be there, out of this world as it were, in transit from one place to another, isn’t it only then you are really present in this world? Isn’t it only then you really experience the world?

Oh, this is the song about the young man who loves a young woman. Has he the right to use such a word as ‘love’? He knows nothing about life, he knows nothing about her, he knows nothing about himself. All he knows is that he has never felt anything with such force and clarity before. Everything hurts, but nothing is as good. Oh, this is the song about being sixteen years old and sitting on a bus and thinking about her, the one, not knowing that feelings will slowly, slowly, weaken and fade, that life, that which is now so vast and so all-embracing, will inexorably dwindle and shrink until it is a manageable entity which doesn’t hurt so much, but nor is it as good.

Only a forty-year-old man could have written that. I am forty now, as old as my father was then, I’m sitting in our flat in Malmö, my family is asleep in the rooms around me. Linda and Vanja in our bedroom, Heidi and John in the children’s room, Ingrid, the children’s grandmother, on a bed in the living room. It is 25 November 2009. The mid-1980s are as far away as the 1950s were then. But most of the people in this story are still out there. Hanne is out there, Jan Vidar is out there, Jøgge is out there. My mother and my brother, Yngve – he spoke to me on the phone two hours ago, about a trip we are planning to Corsica in the summer, he with his children, Linda and I with ours – they are out there. But dad is dead, his parents are dead.

Among the items dad left behind were three notebooks and one diary. For three years he wrote down the names of everyone he met during the day, everyone he phoned, all the times he slept with Unni and how much he drank. Now and then there was a brief report, mostly there wasn’t.

‘K.O. visited’ appeared often.

That was me.

Sometimes it said ‘K.O. cheerful’ after I had been there.

Sometimes ‘good conversation’.

Sometimes ‘decent atmosphere’.

Sometimes nothing.

I understand why he noted down the names of everyone he met and spoke to in the course of a day, why he registered all the quarrels and all the reconciliations, but I don’t understand why he documented how much he drank. It is as if he was logging his own demise.

Starting school again after the holidays was like being sent back to Go: it turned out that everything was as it had been when I started
gymnas
the previous year. The class was new, the pupils and teachers unknown. The sole difference was that there had been twenty-six girls in the first class while there were only twenty-four in the second.

I sat on the same seat, in the left-hand corner at the back, seen from the front, and I behaved in the same way: spoke up during lessons, discussed what teachers said, got into fights with other pupils over political or religious issues. When the breaks came everyone in the class joined the crowd they belonged to or the friends they had from before, and I invested all the physical and mental strength I possessed into avoiding the humiliation it was to be left standing somewhere on your own.

I went up to the library and read books such as
The Falcon Tower
by the twenty-year-old writer Erik Fosnes Hansen, only four years to go until I am twenty, I thought, perhaps my name will be on the front of a book then? I sat in the classroom on my chair pretending I was doing homework. I walked up to the petrol station opposite the school premises and bought something, anything, more often than not an Oslo newspaper because I couldn’t read it with others around and so that was a plausible reason for sitting alone in the canteen during the endlessly long lunch break. Or I acted as if I was searching for someone. Up and down the stairs, through the long corridors, sometimes to Gimlehallen or over to the business school, in pursuit of a fictional person for whom I searched high and low. But usually I stood smoking by the entrance, because that act by its very nature determined where I should be, where I was entitled to be, where there were also others, my ‘friends’ to those who wondered.

My fear of being seen as friendless was not without some justification. One day there was a new note on the noticeboard. A student who had recently moved to the town and didn’t know anyone at the school wanted someone to be friends with, if anyone was interested they could meet him by the flagpole at twelve the next day.

The area around the flagpole at twelve the next day was packed with pupils. Everyone wanted to observe this friendless creature, who naturally enough didn’t show up.

Had it been a hoax? Or had this friendless creature got cold feet when he saw the crowd?

I suffered with him, whoever he was.

One day I went to
Nye Sørlandet
and asked to speak to the person responsible for the newspaper’s music section. I was shown into the office of someone called Steinar Vindsland. He was young with dark big hair which was cut short at the back and on the sides, much in the style of the bass player in Simple Minds, and had a bristly chin and a gleam in his eye. I said who I was and what I wanted.

‘Well, we don’t have a regular record reviewer,’ he said. ‘I usually do the reviews, but I’ve got so many bloody other jobs to do it would be great if someone else could do that.’

He studied me.

I had dressed for the occasion, put on my black and white checked shirt, which was like the one The Edge wore, studded belt and black trousers.

‘Who do you like then?’

I said, and he nodded.

‘We’ll give you a spin. Look,’ he said, rummaging through the piles of records spread across the desk. ‘Take these with you and write about them. If it’s good, you’re our new record reviewer.’

I sat down and wrote all weekend, draft after draft, and when Monday came round I walked down to the newspaper after school and delivered six handwritten pages. He read them standing up in his office, at a disconcertingly fast tempo. Then he fixed me with his gaze.

‘I’m looking at our new record reviewer,’ he said.

‘Did you like it?’

‘It’s good. Have you got a few minutes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’ll take a few shots of you and make a little file. Ask you a couple of questions. Are you at Katedralskolen?’

I nodded. He grabbed a camera from the table, lifted it to his face and pointed it at me.

‘Sit down there,’ he said, indicating the corner of the room.

My spine ran cold as I heard the clicks of the camera.

‘Here,’ he said. ‘Grab these records and hold them up facing me.’

He passed me three LPs and I held them up while staring into the lens with as serious an expression as I could muster.

‘You like U2, you said. Who else?’

‘Big Country. Simple Minds. David Bowie. And Iggy, of course. Talking Heads. R.E.M. Chronic Town, have you heard them? Shit hot. Really great.’

‘Oh yes. Have you got a mission statement?’

I could feel my cheeks burning.

‘Nooo,’ I said.

‘Any particular axes to grind? Musically speaking? The gigs we get in town? Music programmes on NRK? Any views on that?’

‘Yes, well, it’s shocking that there’s only one good music programme on the radio and nothing on TV.’

‘Great!’ he said. ‘You’re still sixteen, are you?’

‘Yes.’

‘That’s it then. We’ll run it tomorrow. You start next week. Is that all right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Pop in on . . . erm Thursday and we can discuss the nitty-gritty.’

He shook my hand.

‘And by the way,’ he said on the way out.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You can’t write in longhand. That’s no good. If you haven’t got a typewriter, get one!’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

Then I was outside on the street.

It was too good to be true. I was
the
record reviewer for a
newspaper
! Sixteen years old! I lit a cigarette and set off. The dry tarmac, the windows darkened in places with exhaust fumes, all the cars made me think I was in a city. I was a music journalist on my way through the streets of London. Coming hotfoot from a hectic editorial office.