Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (27 page)

At school I made a few new acquaintances. Bassen hung out with someone called Espen Olsen from the second class, an arrogant kid from Hånes with self-confidence that bordered on the insufferable and knew everyone it was worth knowing. I was aware of his existence, he was one of those you noticed, the way he mounted the speaker’s platform without a second thought when it was election time and spoke to a packed canteen, the self-assurance he had as chairman of Idun, the
gymnas
association. I stood next to him one break. ‘See you review records for
Nye Sørlandet
,’ he said. ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I saw you once in the first class and I had to laugh,’ he said. ‘You were wearing a Paul Young badge next to one of Echo and the Bunnymen! How is that
possible
? Paul fuckin’
Young
?’ ‘He’s underrated,’ I said. He scoffed, loudly. ‘R.E.M. are good though,’ he said. ‘Have you heard Green on Red?’ ‘Of course.’ Had he heard Wall of Voodoo? Are you joking? Stan Ridgway is the king!

A few weeks later, out of the blue, he invited me to a pre-loading session at his house. Why had he invited me? I wondered. I had nothing to offer; there was nothing he could conceivably need. But I said yes anyway. He would get in the beer, don’t worry about it, he said, you can pay for it when you’re there, and I caught the bus early one Saturday evening, jumped off at the ‘Rebel Yell’ stop and plodded up the hill to Hånes, where he lived, not so far from the shopping centre where we’d had the catastrophic gig the year before.

It turned out he lived in a terraced house. A man who must have been his father opened the door.

‘Is Espen in?’ I said.

‘Yes,’ he said, stepping aside. ‘Come in. He’s upstairs.’

A woman who must have been his mother was a bit further back in the hall, bending over, putting on her shoes.

‘I don’t think we’ve met, have we?’ the father said.

‘No,’ I said, shaking his hand. ‘Karl Ove.’

‘So you’re Karl Ove,’ he said.

The mother smiled and shook my hand as well.

‘We’re going out, as you can see,’ she said. ‘Have a nice evening!’

They left and I went up the stairs with some hesitation, this wasn’t a house I knew.

‘Espen?’ I called loudly.

‘In here!’ his voice answered, and I opened the door to where I had heard it.

He was lying in the bath, his arms down by his sides, with a broad grin on his face. The second I saw him there, naked, I mustered the utmost concentration to look him in the eyes. I couldn’t – not for anything in the world – look down at his dick, which was floating on the surface of the water, even though that was my first impulse. Do not look at his dick. Do not look at his dick. And I steeled my gaze, looked him straight in the eye, thinking as I stood there, I had never looked anyone in the eye for such a long time before.

‘Found your way here then?’ he said with a smile. Lying totally at ease in the bath, as though he owned the whole world.

‘Yes, it was easy enough,’ I said.

‘You seem ill at ease,’ he said, laughing. ‘Is there something wrong?’

‘No,’ I said.

He laughed again.

‘You’re looking at me strangely.’

‘No, I’m not,’ I said, staring him in the eye.

‘Have you never seen a cock before? Is that what it is?’

‘When are the others coming?’ I persisted.

‘At eight, of course. That’s what I told you. But you would come so bloody early.’

‘You told me seven.’

‘Eight.’

‘Seven.’

‘Listen, you pig head. Chuck me the towel, will you?’

I grabbed the towel and threw it to him. Before he had a chance to stand up I turned and went out. My forehead was covered in sweat.

‘Is it all right if I wait downstairs until you’re ready?’ I said.

‘Be my guest,’ he said from inside. ‘Don’t sit down anywhere though!’

I knew he was teasing, but I still didn’t sit down anywhere, just strolled around carefully examining everything.

He
had
said seven, hadn’t he?

There were pictures of him on one wall, as a baby and a teenager, with another boy who must have been his brother.

When he came down, wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, no socks on his feet, he went straight to the stereo and put on a record. Sent me an arch glance as the first chords resounded in the room.

‘Do you know who that is?’ he said.

‘Naturally,’ I said.

‘Who is it then?’ he said.

‘Violent Femmes.’

He nodded and straightened up.

‘Isn’t it bloody brilliant?’ he said.

‘It is.’

‘Beer?’

‘Yep, sounds good.’

I didn’t know any of the others who came, although I had heard about them at Katedralskolen. Trond, tall, thin, fair-haired with a triangular face, an impressively large mouth and equally impressive verbal skills, he knew how to express himself and was never, as far as I could ascertain, tongue-tied. Gisle was his polar opposite, small, black-haired with dark clever eyes, he didn’t say much but what he did say was direct rather than eloquent. Then there were the twins, Tore and Erling, whom it took me several months to tell apart. They were obsessed by music and were always happy, always keen, talking over each other and looking at people around them with warmth in their eyes. They had seen me on the train to Drammen the winter before, they said, on the way to the U2 concert. They said nothing about me going on my own, standing on my own watching U2 or that it was quite strange. Bassen already knew everyone and belonged to the same group, but something had happened between Espen and him, they barely tolerated each other, although I never found out the cause of their disagreement.

Tonight Bassen wasn’t there, and as I didn’t know the others and had barely spoken to Espen I sat silent for a long time.

Espen was full of jibes, trying to rouse me into action, I understood that, but the sole result was that I became aware of my silence, which lay like a low pressure system over my thoughts.

I drank though, and the more I drank the more it eased my discomfort. When at last I was drunk I was
there
, in the room with them, babbling away, singing along to the songs at the top of my voice, groaning aloud, oh that one’s great! Oh shit, what a terrific song! That is one fantastic band!

This was where I wanted to be, this was how I wanted to be, getting drunk and singing, staggering out to a bus stop, staggering into a discotheque or a bar, drinking, chatting, laughing.

The next day I woke up at twelve. I couldn’t remember a thing about what had happened after we caught the bus from Espen’s, apart from a few fragments which fortunately were long and specific enough for me to be able to place them, if not in time then at least in space.

But how had I got home?

Tell me I hadn’t taken a taxi! It cost 250 kroner, in which case I would have spent all the money I possessed.

No, no, I hadn’t, I had been on the night bus because I had been looking at the light on the little slalom slope beneath the school in Ve.

The alcohol was still in my body, and, feeling equal amounts of distaste and delight, which I recognised from previous occasions when I had been drunk, I went down to the kitchen. Breakfast was still on the table and mum was preparing her lessons at the desk in the living room.

‘Did you have a nice time yesterday?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, put some water on for tea, found some rissoles in the fridge, which I fried, fetched the previous day’s paper and sat at the table eating, reading and gazing out on the almost completely yellow and orange countryside for two hours. Waking up still drunk wasn’t quite as good as getting drunk, but it wasn’t far off, I reflected, because that feeling of catching up with yourself, of your body slowly regaining its energy, dynamic energy at that, could have its exultant moments.

The sky above the yellow deciduous trees and the green conifers was dense and grey. The greyness, and the fact that all visibility stopped there, just a few metres above, increased the intensity of the colours; the yellow, the green and the black were hurled into space, as it were, yet blocked by the grey sky, and that must have been why the colours shone with such abandon. They had the power to lift off and disappear into eternity but couldn’t, and so the energy was burned up where they were.

The telephone rang.

It was Espen.

I was happy, he had never called me before.

‘Did you get home OK?’ he said.

‘Yes, but don’t ask me how.’

He laughed. ‘I won’t. Christ, we were drunk.’

‘Yes, that’s for sure. How did you get home?’

‘Taxi. I haven’t got the bloody money for taxis, but it was still worth it.’

‘Right.’

‘What are you doing up there in farming country?’

‘Nothing. Have to write a record review afterwards, so I’m staying at home.’

‘Oh? Which band?’

‘Tuxedomoon.’

‘Them, oh yes. That’s just European avant-garde crap, isn’t it?’

‘It’s pretty good actually. Very atmospheric.’

‘Atmospheric?’ he sneered. ‘You can give them a panning then. See you on Monday.’

At around four, as darkness was drawing in, I sat down at the living-room desk and worked on the review until eight, when I got up and sat beside mum on the sofa and watched TV for a couple of hours. I shouldn’t have done, as one of the characters in the British series we were following was a homosexual, and when this was mentioned or referred to I blushed. Not because I was homosexual and unable to tell her, but because she might have thought I was. And that was ironic because if I blushed whenever the word ‘homosexual’ was mentioned she would definitely have thought I was, and the idea of that made me blush even more.

In my absolutely worst hours I used to imagine that I really was homosexual.

Sometimes, just before I fell asleep, I would begin to wonder whether I was a boy or a girl. I didn’t know! My consciousness struggled furiously to clear this matter up, but the walls of my mind were slippery, I didn’t know, I could equally well have been a girl as a boy, until finally it found firm ground and, eyes wide open, fear deep in my chest, I knew for certain I was not a girl but a boy.

And if that could happen, if such doubts could appear, who knew what else might be there? What else could be hidden inside me?

So strong was this fear that I seemed to be watching over myself when I dreamed, it was as though there were something in me that was present in the dream to see what I was dreaming about, to see whether it was a boy or a girl I was lusting after while I slept. But it was never a boy, it was always girls I dreamed about when I was asleep and when I was awake.

I wasn’t homosexual, I was fairly sure about that. The doubt was minuscule, a tiny fly buzzing in the vast landscapes of my consciousness, but its existence was enough. Great therefore was the torment when homosexuality was mentioned at school. If I had reddened then, it would indeed have been a catastrophe so terrible that I didn’t even dare consider it. The trick was to do something, anything at all really, even if only to rub an eye or scratch your head. Anything that could distract attention from reddened cheeks or explain them.

In football, ‘homo’ was one of the most common terms, are you a homo or what, or you bloody homo, but this did not present a threat and because everyone used it constantly, no one would have ever dreamed that someone actually was one.

And of course I wasn’t one either.

When the programme was over mum made some tea and brought two cups into the living room, where we sat chatting about this and that. Mostly about family matters. She had phoned her sisters – Kjellaug and Ingunn – in the course of the day and now she was telling me what they had said about their jobs, the jobs of their husbands and everything their children were doing. She had also phoned Kjartan, her brother. We spent most of the time talking about him, he’d had four poems accepted by a literary journal, they would be published in the spring, and he was still thinking of moving to Bergen and studying philosophy. But grandma was poorly, grandad could not possibly manage on his own and Kjellaug lived too far away to help much more than at the weekends, she had her own family and farm to take care of, as well as a job.

‘But he’s studying philosophy at home anyway now,’ mum said. ‘Perhaps that’s not such a bad idea. Kjartan’s not twenty any more. I’m not sure university life is as easy as he imagines.’

‘No,’ I said. ‘But you’ve just studied for a year, haven’t you? And you’re not twenty any more either.’

‘I suppose so.’ She laughed. ‘But I’ve got family. I’ve got you. My identity isn’t dependent on student life, if you know what I mean. Kjartan has such immense expectations.’

‘Have you read his poems?’

‘Yes, he sent them to me.’

‘Did you understand anything?’

‘Think so, a bit.’

‘He showed me one this summer. I understood
nothing
. Someone was walking on the edge of heaven. What does that mean?’

She looked at me and smiled. ‘Well, what could it mean?’

‘Haven’t got the foggiest,’ I said. ‘Something philosophical?’

‘Yes, but the philosophy he reads is about life. And everyone knows something about that.’

‘Why can’t he just write it as it is, straight?’

‘Some do,’ she said. ‘But there are things you can’t say straight.’

‘Such as?’

She sighed and stroked the cat on the head, which he immediately raised, his eyes closed in ecstasy.

‘When I was a student I studied a Danish philosopher called Løgstrup. He’s very taken by the philosopher who means so much to Kjartan: Heidegger.’

‘Yes, I remember the name,’ I said with a laugh.

‘He uses a concept Heidegger writes about,’ mum continued. ‘
Fürsorge
. Care. It’s at the heart of nursing science of course. Nursing is about caring for people. But what actually is care? And how do we provide care? It’s about being human with another human. But what is it to be human?’

‘I suppose that will depend on who you ask,’ I said.

‘Yes, exactly,’ she said with a nod. ‘But is there a feature which is common to us all? It’s a philosophical question. And it’s important for the job I do too.’