Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (48 page)

Nils Erik, who was sitting reading the local paper, glanced across at me.

‘Coming up to the pool later today?’ he said.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Drop by my place.’

In front of us Torill opened the fridge door, leaned forward and took out a yoghurt. She removed the lid and licked it before throwing it in the bin under the sink, found a spoon in the drawer and started to eat. She looked at us and smiled with a streak of pink yoghurt on her lower lip.

‘I get so hungry at this time,’ she said.

‘You don’t have to apologise,’ I said. ‘We snack as well.’

Beside me Nils Erik folded the newspaper, got up and went to the toilet. I drank a mouthful of coffee and turned to Jane, who came out of the photocopy room at that moment with a pile of papers in her hand. The corners of her mouth drooped as always, her eyes were bored and introspective, leaving you with no real desire to find out what went on inside her.

‘Did you make the coffee, Jane?’ I said.

She scrutinised me. ‘Yes, I’m on kitchen duty today. Why?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Except that this is the worst coffee I’ve ever tasted.’

She grinned.

‘You’ve been spoilt then,’ she said. ‘But I can put a fresh pot on if you like.’

‘Not at all. I was only joking! It’s good enough for me.’

She went to her desk, and I got up and stood by the window. A lamp post was encircled by light, thick with tiny white snowflakes whirring around like a swarm of insects. Some children were fighting in the snow below, four of them on top of one another in a drift, and my hand twitched when I saw them, so strong was my impulse to knock the top ones off, for I couldn’t imagine anything more claustrophobic than lying underneath them, face down into the snow.

I stepped to the side and scanned the playground.

Where was the teacher?

Oh when would I get it into my head? This was my playground duty!

I hurried towards the line of hooks in the vestibule.

‘Three minutes left of the break,’ Sture said. ‘No point going out now. You can catch up after school.’

He smirked at his own joke. I looked at him without smiling, pulled my hat down over my head, grabbed my gloves. Even though he was right that there was no point going out now, I had an additional reason: the impression of regret and energy I would leave behind me as I jogged out and came into the view of those standing behind the window. The last thing I wanted to give was an impression of slackness. The last thing I wanted was for people to think I was a shirker.

Out of the wet-weather shelter came a small plump figure. I dashed over to the boys who had been wrestling in the snow and were now brushing it off their jeans. The denim material was almost black from where it had melted.

‘Karl Ove!’ he said from behind me, and tugged at my jacket.

He must have run after me.

I turned. ‘What’s up, Jo?’ I said.

He smiled.

‘Can I throw a snowball at you?’

Last week I had given them permission to throw snowballs at me. It had been a big mistake because they thought it was such great fun, especially when they hit my thighs with a couple of stingers, that they refused to stop when I told them. They had reached a kind of amnesty, what had not been allowed was suddenly allowed, and they had a sense of how difficult it would be to punish them if it wasn’t allowed any longer.

‘No, not today,’ I said. ‘Besides, the bell’s about to ring.’

The four boys scowled up at me from under dark woollen hats pulled down over their faces.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘Of course,’ Reidar said. ‘Why wouldn’t we be all right?’

‘Less of that cheek now,’ I said. ‘You should show respect for adults.’

‘You’re not an adult,’ he said. ‘You haven’t even got a driving licence!’

‘No, that’s true,’ I said. ‘But at least I know my times tables. That’s more than you know. And I’m big enough to paddle your bottom three times a day if I have to.’

‘My dad would beat you up if you did,’ he said.

‘Karl Ove, come on,’ Jo said, pulling at my jacket again.

‘I’ve got a dad too, you know,’ I said. ‘He’s much stronger and taller than me. On top of that, he’s got a driving licence.’

I looked down at Jo. ‘Where do you want to go?’

‘There’s something I want to show you. It’s something I’ve made.’

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a secret. No one else must know.’

I looked across. The girls in the seventh class were standing by the wall of the wet-weather shelter. Behind, on the fringes of the football pitch, a group of children were chasing after each other in the dark.

‘The bell’s about to ring, you know,’ I told him.

He took my hand. Didn’t he understand how this looked to his classmates?

‘It’ll be quick,’ he said.

He’d hardly uttered the words before the bell rang.

‘Next break then,’ he said. ‘Will you come with me?’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Off you go now.’

The children on the football pitch had either not heard the bell or they were ignoring it. I walked over to the pitch. Cupped my hands around my mouth and shouted that the bell had rung. They stopped and looked at me. The snow covering the pitch drew it into the surrounding terrain, it was a flat surface in the middle of a slope which, further up, became a mountain, and in all this whiteness, which the sky’s all-pervasive darkness muted to a blue, the pupils resembled tiny animals, rodents of some kind perhaps, it seemed to me, romping around outside the entrances to their ingenious networks of galleries and tunnels in the snow.

I waved to them. They set off at a lope towards me.

‘Didn’t you hear the bell?’ I said.

They shook their heads.

‘Didn’t you think it was time for the bell to ring?’

They shook their heads again.

‘Hurry up now,’ I said. ‘You’re very late.’

They ran past me. As I rounded the corner of the wet-weather shelter the door slammed after the last straggler. I kicked the snow off my shoes against the wall and followed. Opened the door to the staffroom, hung my coat and hat on the hook and went for my books for the lesson. Behind me the toilet door opened. I turned. It was Nils Erik.

‘Have you been in there all this time?’ I said.

‘What kind of question is that?’ he said.

‘I was just surprised,’ I said, scanning the book spines. ‘You were in there a long time. I wasn’t making any insinuations.’

I looked at him and smiled. Picked out a natural science booklet.

‘That’s good to hear,’ he said. ‘Insinuations are such crap. No, it was Torill. She’s so sexy it’s unbelievable. And when she bent forward . . . I just had to go in and relieve the emergency that had arisen.’

‘Emergency?’ I said.

‘Yes.’ He laughed. ‘You know. Man sees woman. Man is attracted. Man runs to the loo and tosses himself off.’

‘Oh, that emergency,’ I said, smiled and went to the class.

In the next break Jo ran over to me the second I stepped into the playground.

‘Come with me now!’ he said, taking my hand and dragging me off.

‘Take it easy,’ I said. ‘What are you going to show me?’

‘Something I’ve made with Endre,’ he said.

‘Where’s Endre?’

‘I think he’s over there.’

Endre was in the third class, Jo was in the fourth. When they were together they usually kept away from the others.

‘There,’ he said, pointing to a large snowdrift behind the building, out of sight of the rest of the school. ‘We’ve made a snow cave. It’s really big. Do you want to have a look inside?’

Endre saw us coming, crawled in the entrance and disappeared from sight.

‘That’s fantastic,’ I said, and stopped. ‘I think it’s probably too small for me. But you go in.’

He smiled up at me. Then he lay down on his stomach and wriggled in. I took a few steps back and looked across at the other children. Two fourth-year boys came round the corner and headed towards us. Jo stuck his head out of the cave.

‘There’s room for you too, Karl Ove. It’s really big.’

‘I have to keep an eye on everyone, you know,’ I said.

He spotted the two boys.

‘This is our snow cave,’ he said, looking at me. ‘We made it.’

‘Yes, you did,’ I said.

‘Have you made a cave?’ Reidar shouted.

‘It’s ours,’ Jo said. ‘You can’t come in.’

They stopped by the entrance.

‘Let’s have a look,’ Stig said, and tried to crawl past Jo.

‘It’s ours,’ Jo said, looking at me again. ‘Isn’t it, Karl Ove?’

‘You made it,’ I said. ‘But you can’t refuse to let others in. You’d have to stand guard day and night if you did.’

‘But it’s ours!’ he said.

‘It’s on school premises,’ I said. ‘You can’t stop anyone going in.’

Reidar smiled and pushed past Jo. Soon the cave was full of kids. They immediately started planning how they could make it bigger and began to dig a tunnel from the end. Jo tried to take charge, but they ignored him, he had to find his place, which was and would always be at the bottom of the pecking order. I turned and went. I did have a bit of a bad conscience, Jo was as unhappy now as he had been happy a few minutes before, but there was nothing I could do about it, he would have to work out the social game for himself. He would have to learn he would get nowhere by whining or telling tales.

‘Are you hanging around here again?’ I said to the gumchewing seventh-year girls standing inside the wet-weather shelter.

‘It’s snowing and it’s windy,’ Vivian said. ‘Surely you don’t think it’s right we should have to stand outside in this weather, do you?’

‘You don’t have to stand, do you?’ I said. ‘You could run like the other kids.’

‘We’re not
kids
,’ Andrea said. ‘And it’s not fair. The eighth and ninth years can be indoors.’

‘Only kids say something is unfair,’ I said. ‘Besides, the eighth and ninth years have a double slot, so they’re in class now.’

‘That’s what we want. Working indoors is better than being out in this weather,’ Andrea said and looked up at me. Her cheeks had reddened with the cold. Her eyes were narrow and beautiful.

I laughed.

‘So all of a sudden you want to work, do you? That’s a new tune,’ I said.

‘You just laugh at us,’ Vivian said. ‘You don’t have any respect for us.’

‘I treat you how you deserve to be treated,’ I said, eyeing the clock on the wall between the entrance to the main school building and the large wing where the swimming pool and gymnasium were. Four minutes left of the break.

I went to the other side to see how the fourth years were doing. No sooner had I rounded the corner than I saw Jo and Endre trudging along, heads bowed into the wind, feet stamping on the snow.

‘How’s the cave?’ I said.

‘It’s ruined!’ Jo said. ‘Reidar put his head through the roof. The whole blooming cave collapsed.’

His eyes were moist.

‘Don’t swear,’ I said.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘It can happen,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.’

‘But it was
our
cave!
We
built it! And now it’s ruined.’

‘Build one with them next time,’ I said. ‘Then they won’t ruin it.’

‘We don’t want to,’ he said. ‘Come on, Endre.’

They walked past me.

‘I can help you make a new one, if you want,’ I said. ‘In the next break.’

‘Can you?’

‘We can make a start at any rate. But the others might join in.’

‘Yes, but then
you’re
there,’ he said. ‘They won’t dare smash it up.’

It had been a stupid offer to make, I thought as I went back into the staffroom a few minutes later. Now I would have to dig in the snow with the tenth years for the rest of the breaks. On the other hand, Jo’s face had lit up, I remembered, and I closed the toilet door behind me, unzipped and began to pee. I aimed the jet at the porcelain so that the teachers who were still in the toilet wouldn’t hear the splashing sound. While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries their hands on the towel and examines their soul in the mirror.

I was in the sitting room eating when Nils Erik rang at the door. Snow from the drift beside the porch swirled in the air around him. The gusting wind hung like an invisible cupola above the village.

‘I’m eating,’ I said. ‘But I’ll soon have finished. Come in.’

‘But you won’t want to go swimming after eating,’ he said.

‘I’m eating fish,’ I said. ‘They’re used to swimming.’

‘That’s true,’ he said.

‘Do you want some? Fish roe and potatoes?’

He shook his head, untied his boots and came into the sitting room.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’

I shrugged, swallowed and took a long drink of water.

‘How’s what going?’ I said.

‘Everything,’ he said. ‘Writing, for example.’

‘It’s going fine.’

‘Teaching?’

‘Fine.’

‘Sex life?’

‘Erm . . . what shall I say? Not very well. What about you?’

‘Well, you saw yourself today,’ he said. ‘That’s about all there is.’

‘Right,’ I said, scraping up the last roe, butter and some crumbly potato with the knife, offloading it onto the fork and lifting it to my mouth. My lips became greasy with the fat.

‘And my prospects in that direction are not particularly rosy either,’ he continued. ‘All the girls over sixteen have moved out. All that’s left is school pupils and their mothers. The age ranges in between have been wiped out.’

‘Completely wiped out,’ I said, got up, put the cutlery on the plate, took them in one hand and the glass in the other and went to the kitchen. ‘But you make it sound as though they’ve been hunted to destruction or something.’