Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (25 page)

It was as though I knew them all. I really liked Jan Arne Handorff. I understood virtually nothing of what he wrote but sensed his passion, somewhere deep in the wilderness of all those foreign-sounding words, while every second reader’s letter accused him of being incomprehensible, although he didn’t seem to care, he steered a straight line, further and further into the impenetrable night. I also had huge respect for those who could puncture opponents with a killer comment. I adopted it, to deal with my opponents. Its sole importance was that it worked. And many reviewers were vicious. When a band changed direction and became more commercial, such as Simple Minds was doing for example, taking the easy route, they didn’t think twice about confronting the band and asking for an explanation. Why? You were so good, you had everything, so why sell out? Playing at stadiums? What are you doing? What is in your heads? And if the band wouldn’t respond, often they didn’t, Norway was not exactly the most important country for groups on the up, they still peppered them with caustic remarks.

I had written only three record reviews, the ones Steinar Vindsland had read. In them I had tried to be impartial while also being hard, and I had dismissed one record with a couple of sarcastic comments at the end. That was the new Stones’ single, I had never liked them, they were terrible, apart from the
Some Girls
LP, which wasn’t bad. Now they were over forty and as pathetic as it was possible to be.

I had it in me. I just had to let it out.

Outside it was dark, autumn was wrapping its hand around the world, and I loved it. The darkness, the rain, the sudden cracks in the past that opened when the smell of damp grass and soil rose up at me from a ditch somewhere or when car headlights illuminated a house, all somehow caught and enhanced by the music in the Walkman I always carried with me. I listened to This Mortal Coil and thought about when we used to play in the dark in Tybakken, a feeling of happiness grew in me, but not a happiness of the bright weightless carefree kind, this happiness was rooted in something else, and when it met the melancholic beauty of the music and the world that was dying around me, it was like sorrow, beautiful sorrow, romantic sorrow, beauty and pain in one impossible mix, and from there sprang a wild longing to live more. To leave this, to find life where it was really lived, in the streets of cities, beneath skyscrapers, at glittering parties with beautiful people in unfamiliar apartments. To find the one great love and all the restlessness that involved, and then the acceptance, the relief, the ecstasy.

Discard her, find a new one, discard her. Rise and be ruthless, a seducer of women, a man they all wanted but none could have. I put the music magazines in a heap on the bottom of my bookshelves and went downstairs. Mum was sitting and talking on the telephone in the clothes room, the door was open, she smiled at me. I stood still for a few seconds to hear who she was talking to.

One of her sisters.

In the kitchen I took a slice of bread, ate it leaning against the worktop and drank a glass of milk. Went back upstairs and started a letter to Hanne. I wrote that I thought it was best if we never saw each other again.

It felt good to write that, for some reason I wanted to avenge myself on her, to hurt her, to make her think of me as someone she had lost.

I put the letter into an envelope and dropped it into my school bag, where it lay until I bought some stamps after school the following day.

I posted it before catching the bus, convinced this was the right course of action.

In the evening, lying on the sofa and reading a book I had borrowed from the school library – Bjørneboe’s
Ere the Cock Crows
– it suddenly struck me what I had done.

I loved her, why would I say I never wanted to meet her again?

Regret exploded inside me.

I had to get it back.

I rested the book on the sofa arm and sat up. Should I write another letter and say I didn’t mean what I had written in the previous one? That I wanted to see her despite what I had written.

It would look absolutely idiotic.

I had to ring her.

Before I had time to change my mind, I went into the room where the telephone was and dialled her number.

She answered.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to apologise for the last time I called. I didn’t mean to behave as I did.’

‘You’ve got nothing to apologise for.’

‘Yes, I have. But there’s something else. To cut a long story short, I sent you a letter today.’

‘Did you?’

‘Yes. But I didn’t mean what I wrote. I don’t know why I wrote it. Anyway, it’s rubbish. So now I’m wondering if you could do me a favour. Don’t read it. Just throw it away.’

She laughed.

‘Now you’ve really whetted my appetite! Not read it? Do you really imagine I could do that? What did you write?’

‘I can’t say. That’s the whole point!’

She laughed again.

‘You’re strange,’ she said. ‘But why did you write whatever it was you wrote if you didn’t mean it?’

‘I don’t know. I was in a funny mood. But, Hanne, please promise me you won’t read it. Throw it away and pretend it doesn’t exist. Actually it doesn’t really exist anyway, because I don’t mean any of what I wrote.’

‘I’ll see what I can do,’ she said. ‘But it is addressed to me. It’s me who decides what to do with it, right?’

‘Yes, of course. I’m just asking you to be extra nice to me.’

‘Is there anything that’s not nice in the letter? Yes, there must be of course.’

‘Now you know at any rate,’ I said. ‘But if you’d like me to go down on my knees and beg, I will. I’m doing it now. I’m on my knees now. Please throw the letter away!’

She laughed.

‘Up on your feet, boy!’ she said.

‘What are you wearing?’ I said.

Seconds passed before she answered.

‘A T-shirt and jogging pants. I didn’t know you would ring. What are you wearing?’

‘Me? A black shirt, black trousers and black socks.’

‘I don’t know why I asked,’ she said and laughed. ‘I’m going to give you such a brightly coloured bobble hat for Christmas that you’ll be embarrassed to walk down the street wearing it, but you’ll have to because I gave it to you. When you see me anyway.’

‘That’s pure evil,’ I said.

‘Yes, you don’t have a monopoly on it,’ she said.

‘What do you mean by that? Surely I’m not evil just because I don’t believe in God?’

‘I’m just teasing you. No, you’re not evil at all. But now they’re calling me. I think they’ve cooked something they want me to taste.’

‘So you’ll throw the letter away?’

She laughed.

‘Bye!’

‘Hanne!’

But by then she had rung off.

The meeting with Steinar Vindsland was brief and was basically him showing me how to write the reviews, there were special forms they used at the newspaper, some boxes at the top had to be filled out in a special way and I was given a stack of them. Then he said I should choose three new releases a week from a record shop with whom they had an arrangement. I could keep the records, that was my fee, OK? Of course, I said. You deliver the reviews to me, he said, and I’ll fix the rest.

He winked and shook my hand. Then he turned and started to read some papers on the desk, and I went into the street, still with the tension from the meeting in my body. It was only half past three and I went to see if dad was at home. I stopped outside the door and rang, nothing happened, I stepped to the side and looked through the window, the house looked empty and I was about to head for the bus stop when his car, a light green Ascona, appeared.

He pulled in by the kerb.

Even before he got out of the car I could see he was the way he used to be. Rigid, severe, controlled. He undid his seat belt, grabbed a bag beside him and placed a foot on the tarmac. He didn’t look at me as he crossed the road.

‘Waiting for me, were you,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Thought I’d pop by.’

‘You should ring in advance, you know,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘But I was in the vicinity, so I . . .’ I shrugged.

‘There’s nothing happening here,’ he said. ‘So you may as well catch the bus home.’

‘OK,’ I said.

‘Ring next time, OK?’

‘All right,’ I said.

He turned his back on me and inserted the key in the lock. I started to trudge towards the bus. It was right what he had said: I may as well go. I hadn’t visited him for my sake but for his, and if it wasn’t convenient I wasn’t bothered. Quite the contrary.

He rang at half past ten in the evening. He sounded drunk.

‘Hi, Dad here,’ he said. ‘You haven’t gone to bed?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I like sitting up late.’

‘You dropped by at an inconvenient moment, I’m afraid. But it’s very nice of you to come and visit us. It isn’t that. Do you understand?’

‘Yes, of course.’

‘Don’t give me
yes, of course
. It’s important we understand each other.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I know it’s important.’

‘I’m sitting here making a few calls to hear how people are, you know. And I’m relaxing with a . . .’

Then he used an Østland expression,
pjall
, an alcoholic drink, which he had recently started to say. Another was
slakk
, off colour. He had it from Unni. I’m feeling a bit
slakk
, he had said once, and I had looked at him because it was as though it wasn’t him who had used the word but someone else.

‘We’re having people round for dinner tomorrow evening, a few colleagues, well, you met them up in Sannes, and it would be nice if you had time.’

‘Yes, I’ll come,’ I said. ‘What time?’

‘Six, half past, we thought.’

‘Fine,’ I said.

‘Yes, but we don’t have to ring off already. Or do you want to?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘I believe you do. You don’t want to talk to your old dad.’

‘I do.’

There was a brief pause. He took a swig.

‘I heard you visited grandma and grandad,’ he then said.

‘Yes.’

‘Did they say anything about Unni and me?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘At any rate nothing special.’

‘Now you have to be more precise than that. They said something, but it was nothing special?’

‘They said you’d been there the day before, and then they said they’d met Unni and she was nice.’

‘Oh, so that was what they said, was it?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you thought about where you want to spend Christmas? Here with us or with your mother?’

‘No, haven’t given it any thought. It’s not for a while yet.’

‘Yes, that’s true. But we have to make plans, you know. We were wondering whether to go south to the sun or celebrate it here. If you come we’ll stay here. But we have to know soon.’

‘I’ll give it some thought,’ I said. ‘Might have a word with Yngve.’

‘You can come on your own, you know.’

‘Yes, I could. Can we wait and see? I haven’t given it any thought at all.’

‘By all means,’ he said. ‘You need time to think. But you’d probably prefer to be with mum, wouldn’t you?’

‘Not necessarily,’ I said.

‘All right,’ he said. ‘Well, see you tomorrow then.’

He rang off and I went into the kitchen and boiled some water.

‘Do you want some tea?’ I shouted to mum, who was sitting in the living room, her legs tucked up underneath her, the cat on her lap and knitting while listening to classical music on the radio.

It was almost pitch black outside.

‘Yes, please!’ she replied.

When I went in five minutes later, with a cup in each hand, she put her knitting on the arm of the sofa and the cat down beside her. Mefisto placed his paws in front of him, extended his claws and stretched. Mum swung her legs down onto the floor and rubbed her hands a couple of times, which she often did after she had been sitting still for any length of time.

‘I think dad might be on the booze,’ I said, sitting on the wicker chair under the window. It creaked under my weight. I blew on the tea, took a sip and glanced at mum. Mefisto stood in front of me and a moment later jumped onto my lap.

‘Was that who you were talking to just now?’ mum said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Was he drunk?’

‘Mm, a bit. And he was pretty drunk when I was there for dinner the last time.’

‘How do you feel about that?’ she said.

I shrugged. ‘I don’t know. Feels a bit strange maybe. When I went to the party they had here that was the first time I’d seen him drunk. Now it’s happened twice in a very short space of time.’

‘That’s perhaps not so strange,’ mum said. ‘There have been such big changes in his life.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘That’s true. But he’s becoming very hard work. He keeps asking me if he did things wrong when we were growing up, then he goes all sentimental and talks about the time he massaged my leg when I was very small.’

Mum laughed.

It was such a rare occurrence. I looked at her and smiled.

‘Is that what he says?’ she said. ‘He might have massaged you once. But he did feel a lot of tenderness for you. He did.’

‘But not later?’

‘Yes, of course. Of course he did, Karl Ove.’

She looked at me. I lifted Mefisto and stood up.

‘Anything you want to listen to?’ I said, kneeling in front of the small record collection I had stacked against the wall. Mefisto walked slowly, the way he did when he was offended, into the kitchen.

‘No, play whatever you want,’ mum said.

I switched off the radio and put on Sade, which was the only I record I possessed that there was the remotest chance she would like.

‘Did you like it?’ I said after the music had filled the room for a few minutes.

‘Yes, it was very nice,’ she said, putting her cup down on the table beside the sofa and resuming her knitting.

After school next day I went to Platebørsen, spoke to the assistant, said I had an arrangement with Steinar Vindsland at
Nye Sørlandet
to pick up three records, he nodded, I spent half an hour choosing the ones I would write about, the trick was to choose someone I already knew, preferably someone who had been reviewed elsewhere, so that I had a pattern to follow.