Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (42 page)

I wanted to steal, drink, smoke hash and experiment with other drugs – cocaine, amphetamines, mescaline – to freak out and live the great rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, to feel to the last drop of my blood that I couldn’t give a flying fuck about anything. Oh, what appeal there was in that! But then there was all the rest of me inside that wanted to be a clever student, a decent son, a good person. If only I could blow that to smithereens!

This was an attempt to do that. The thought of smoking hash, the thought that I could actually do it, that I could actually become a junkie, if I ever dared, it was only a question of
doing
it, making the move, this simply made my insides explode with happiness and excitement as I walked up the slope under the leafy trees to where Geir Helge hung out. I asked if he had anything to smoke, I said I had never done it before, he would have to show me, which he was more than happy to do. After we had finished I walked slowly down the slope and into the crowd. At first I didn’t notice anything in particular, perhaps I was too drunk, Geir Helge had said something about this, that it didn’t always work the first time and it didn’t always work if you were too drunk. But when I got into the back of the
russ
van, which was empty, something happened. I moved my shoulder and it was as though the joint had been lubricated with oil, indeed as though the whole of me was full of oil. A tiny, tiny movement anywhere was enough to fill my body with sensual pleasure. So I sat there wagging a finger, lifting one shoulder, shaking a hip, and wave after wave of pure sensuality washed through my body.

Espen stuck his head in.

‘What are you up to? Are you ill?’

I opened my eyes and straightened up. The movement was so vigorous that a jolt of pleasure rippled through me.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m having an absolutely fantastic time. But I want to be alone. I’ll be out afterwards.’

I wasn’t, I fell asleep, and in the following days I smoked as much hash as I could, as well as drinking. The last nights before Constitution Day, 17 May, I was so stoned and drunk that I didn’t know where I had been, and when I woke up that morning I was in a
russ
van, we were parked in some square, and outside the windows the streets were lined deep with people. Vaguely I remembered we had been to Tresse and that at some point we had been sitting under a tarpaulin in a double-ender moored to the pontoons, together with some uncommunicative and inert man, and that Espen had later run over and dragged Sjur and me away, the man was dead, he said, but when we stood by the boat it was empty. Espen desperately ran up and down, and then I remembered nothing else. How many minutes of the long night were left? Ten maybe?

Once we came across a tramp, he was sitting on a bench in the park, we stood around him chatting. He said he had sailed with Leif Larsen during the war, running refugees and agents between the Shetlands and Norway. From then on I called him the Shetland Shit. Laughed and repeated it as often as I could. Hi, Shetland Shit! After a while I went behind him to have a piss, and then I pissed on him, up and down his back. Then we drifted on through the night, settling here, settling there, there was always someone with a beer or a bottle of spirits. I laughed, danced, drank and smooched with whoever was there. I could go over to a girl in the class and tell her she had always been on my mind, I had always stolen furtive glances at her, it was a lie, but it did the trick, everything had opened up. Everything was open.

When I woke up in the
russ
van on 17 May and saw I was surrounded by festively dressed people on all sides I was frightened. But not even that mattered, I just had to drink a couple more beers and the fear was gone, and we would go out and sell more
russ
newspapers so that we had the money for more beer, and when it was midnight I was as free as could be after several days’ drinking, running through the streets and shouting, chatting to strangers, joking with some, harassing others, happy but also extremely tired, and it was in this state, racing back and forth through the procession, streets on both sides packed with people, all wearing their best clothes, suits and national costumes and Norwegian flags everywhere, that I suddenly heard someone shout my name.

It was grandma and grandad.

I pulled up in front of them with a grin on my face. Gunnar’s son was there too, and it wouldn’t have surprised me if I was the first drunk he had ever seen. They stared at me through icy eyes, but it didn’t matter, I laughed and carried on, there were two days left to the exams and I didn’t want them to end. The final party was held at the Fun Senter, and the atmosphere was on the wane, however much I tried to resist it, and I and two others caught a taxi to Bassen’s late at night. He wasn’t at home, the house was empty, and we leaned a ladder against the first floor where there was a window ajar. Once inside we sat on the living-room carpet and smoked hash from perforated Coke cans. When Bassen turned up the following morning, he was furious, naturally enough, but not so much so that we couldn’t catch a couple of hours of shut-eye, but we all knew that the fun was definitively over. I was still drunk when I woke up, but this time there was no hair of the dog, and I was already beginning to sink deeper and deeper into myself on the bus home, it was terrible, everything was terrible. Mum said nothing about having thrown me out, we barely spoke, I lay in the bath with a layer of scum on the surface of the water. I was tired and went to bed early, we had the Norwegian exam the following day, but I couldn’t sleep. My hands were trembling, but that wasn’t all that trembled, the flex on the lamp writhed back and forth like a snake whenever I looked at it. The floor sloped, the walls leaned, I sweated and tossed and turned with my head full of extraneous images. It was dreadful, a night of hell, but then morning came and I got up, dressed and caught the bus to school. I was unable to concentrate, every twenty minutes I signalled to the invigilator, who accompanied me to the toilet, where I washed my face.

Of all the things I had done and that would come back to haunt me during these days the encounter with my grandparents was the worst. But surely they couldn’t know that I had drunk
so
much, could they? Surely they couldn’t know that I had not only been drinking but also smoking hash, could they? No, they couldn’t. And in my diary for the beginning of June that year I wrote that the months I had been a
russ
, celebrating the end of school, were the happiest in my life. I used those words: the happiest in my life.

Why did I write that?

Oh, I was so happy. I laughed and was free and friends with everyone.

At the end of June I left home, mum drove me to a flat at the hospital, I worked there for a month, was together with Line, drank wine in the evenings and at the weekends, smoked hash whenever I could get my hands on it. Espen rejected it point blank, it was filth, he said, and he continued to insist the story about the man he had found dead on the night before 17 May was true. One afternoon he rang up to say there had been an article in the newspaper about a man discovered floating in the harbour. ‘That’s him!’ Espen said. I didn’t know if he really meant it or was just trying to get as much mileage from the joke as he could. He said he had a vague memory, as if in a dream, of him dumping the body overboard. Why would you have done that? I said. I was drunk, he answered. No one else but you saw any dead man. It’s just a fantasy. No, he said, it’s true. What about the man sitting with us in the boat? Don’t you remember him? Yes, I do. You saw him then? Yes. He was dead. Now, come on, Espen, if he’d been dead why would you have heaved him over the side and then run to get us? I don’t know.

The month had been packed with such incidents, I wasn’t sure whether they had happened or not, and this combined with the feeling I had that everything was possible, that there were no limits and the enormous tracts of time of which I remembered nothing caused me to begin to lose sight of myself. It was as though I had disappeared. In part I liked this, in part I didn’t. The routines at the hospital, where I was mostly responsible for setting and clearing the tables at mealtimes and otherwise helping with anything of a practical nature, neutralised this feeling but didn’t erase it because in the evening I always went out, drank with the people I met, it was summer and there was always someone around I knew. One evening we were refused admission to Kjelleren, so Bjørn and I climbed up on the roof of the block behind, ran all the way across the rooftops, found a skylight, crawled in, went down to Kjelleren, which was absolutely empty, it must have taken us an hour. We went up a few floors, entered a flat, someone woke up and shouted at us, we said we had gone in the wrong door, walked amid gales of laughter to Tresse, a square in the centre of town where Bjørn’s dad had a flat and we could sleep. In the morning I rang the hospital and said I was ill, they probably didn’t believe me, but what could they do?

That night I drank with a radio technician, Paul, who had driven us to an Imperium concert in Oslo, and on the way home, in the middle of the night in Telemark, at twenty degrees below, the car skidded, left the road doing a hundred kilometres an hour, brushed against a lamp post, flew through the air and landed in a ditch. We’re going to die, I thought, and the idea of it didn’t bother me in the slightest. We didn’t die, the car was a write-off but we were in good shape. It was a great story, one we could tell others, also the sequel, the old house where we knocked on the door, the rifle standing in the hallway, the feeling of being in another, nastier world than our own, and the incredible cold outside as we hitched for more than two hours wearing trainers and suit jackets. We sat talking about that at Kjelleren, Paul and I and his girlfriend, she was wonderful, perhaps twenty-three, twenty-four, I had secretly had my eye on her for ages, and when she suggested taking a taxi back to hers to smoke some dope, of course I said yes, we smoked, and when I smoked I sometimes became so unbelievably horny, and sitting next to her on the sofa it hit me at once, I grabbed her, she laughed and wriggled away, saying she loved Paul, and then she put her hand between my legs and laughed even more and said you’ve grown up. Downstairs in Kjelleren she had been quiet most of the time, Paul had smiled at us, he trusted her, which he was right to do.

At work the next day they said nothing, but I noticed of course, I wasn’t someone they were interested in keeping however much effort I made to mollify them. I was employed for only a month, and when the time was up, I went back to our house, which was no longer ours, mum had sold it, for the next two days we packed everything into boxes, and then a big removal van came and took the lot.

Except for one thing, and that was the cat.

What should we do with the cat?

Mefisto?

Mum couldn’t have the cat where she was going to live, and I definitely couldn’t take him to Northern Norway.

We would have to have him put down.

He wound around our legs, mum put a tin of liver paste in his carrier, he ran in, mum closed the door, put the carrier on the passenger seat and drove to the vet in town.

That afternoon I lay on the rocks beneath the waterfall and swam. On my return, mum’s car was in the garage. She was sitting in the kitchen drinking coffee. She got up when I entered, walked past me without saying a word, her eyes downcast.

‘Is Mefisto dead now then?’ I asked.

Mum didn’t answer, just shot me a glance, then opened the door and went out. Her eyes were brimming.

That was the first time I had seen mum cry.

Eight days later, in a foetal position on the sofa in Håfjord, I lay asleep after emptying the contents of my stomach into the toilet, so wonderful. My sleep was light, the revving of a car engine somewhere was all it required for me to open my eyes. But I didn’t have anything to do, I had no duties, I could lie in bed and sleep all Saturday and Sunday. Monday was an eternity away, I mused as I lay there feeling sleep steal over me again.

There was a ring at the door.

I went to answer it, surprised at how light my body felt.

It was Sture.

‘It’s football training,’ he said. ‘In fifteen minutes. Had you forgotten? Or are you too muzzy after yesterday?’

‘I’m a bit fuzzy,’ I said with a smile. ‘But not muzzy.’

I ran my hand through my hair.

‘I haven’t brought any boots with me. I was thinking of buying some but I forgot. So I suppose that’s me out.’

Sture brought his arm forward from behind his back. Two pairs of boots hung from his hand.

’Forty-five?’ he said. ‘Or forty-six?’

’Forty-five,’ I said, taking them.

‘See you up there then?’

‘OK, see you there.’

I hadn’t played football for a couple of months, and it felt strange to run around on a pitch again, not least on this pitch, for there was something about the location, squeezed in under the gleaming green mountain slopes, the sea straight ahead, which went against everything I associated with football. It didn’t improve matters that the team I was playing in were all fishermen, the whole bunch of them. A couple of them were good, particularly one called Arnfinn, who resembled one of the English midfield players we used to see on Saturday afternoon TV in the 1970s, balding and red-haired, relatively short, stocky with a paunch, not the quickest in the world, but he made things happen around him as soon as he had the ball, whether he was flicking it on, hitting a cross or threading a forward through, without even raising his head, as though he didn’t have to see, he could sense everything. He tackled me a few times, it was like running into a tree. He was good. Their striker was good, a tall thin guy who was surprisingly fast, and their goalie, Hugo, was also decent. The rest were like me, perhaps a bit worse, with the exception of Nils Erik, who could hardly have played before and warmed up by doing the kind of knee-bends that had probably last been witnessed in the 1950s.

After the game we went to the changing rooms by the swimming pool, showered and sat in the sauna. Everyone apart from Nils Erik and me was as white as snow. Many had freckles on their shoulders and backs, many were very hairy and when they walked around, strutting naked and teasing one another, I had the impression they almost belonged to a different race. I still had a tan after the summer, with a white patch where my trunks had been, I didn’t have a single hair on my arms or chest or shoulders, just some barely visible down, and my back was as straight as a pillar, not broad and bulging like theirs. Not to mention my biceps, which were as thin as twigs while their arms were the width of tree trunks. And as for my chest, it was as flat as could be, like a board, and looked nothing like the kegs they walked around with. Not that their bodies were magnificent specimens, they weren’t, many had spare tyres and flab, no one had a chest arched into two well-defined halves from muscle training, no one had six-pack abs, that was another world for them. What they respected, I could see, was strength. So it made no difference to them if a belly hung over a belt or the odd double chin rolled over a collar.