Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (11 page)

In the shop they had only racks, they weren’t the best, but I could buy a decent stereo later, I reckoned, and looked around for an assistant.

A man was standing behind the counter with his back to us, opening a large cardboard box with a small paperknife. I walked over.

‘I need some help,’ I said.

He turned to face me.

‘Just a moment,’ he said.

I went back to the wall of stereo racks. Waved to Nils Erik, who was flicking through a stand full of records.

‘Which one would you buy?’ I said.

‘None of them,’ he said. ‘Racks are shit.’

‘Agreed,’ I said. ‘But this is probably all they’ve got. And I only want it for while I’m up here.’

He looked at me.

‘Are you shitting money? Or is Knausgaard a family of shipowners? You never told me!’

‘You can get one on HP. Look, 3,499 kroner for that one. That’s only a few hundred a month.’

The assistant straightened up and looked around for me. A thin man with a bit of a gut, metal-rimmed glasses and a comb-over.

I pointed to the Hitachi rack.

‘I’d like that one,’ I said. ‘I can buy it on HP, can’t I?’

‘As long as you’ve got a job, you can,’ he said.

‘I’m working as a teacher in Håfjord,’ I said.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘Then you’ll have to fill in a few forms, so if you come over to the counter with me . . .’

While I stood writing he went to the storeroom and fetched the stereo system.

‘Is this such a good idea?’ Nils Erik said. ‘With HP you pay almost double in the end. And the monthly instalments are painful. Our salary isn’t
that
good, either.’

I glared at him. ‘Are you my mum or what?’

‘OK, OK, it’s your business,’ he said and went back to the records.

‘Yes, it is.’

At that moment the assistant returned from the storeroom with a large cardboard box in his arms. He handed it to me, I held it while he checked the papers and my ID, and when he was satisfied, I carried it to the car and placed it on the rear seat.

The next and final item on the agenda was the supermarket. Each trundling a trolley in front of us, we walked around plucking goods that weren’t available in the village shop from the shelves. My first target was two packets of cigarettes. At the back of the shop, next to the fruit counter, while Nils Erik was over by the pasta, I put the packets in my jacket, one in each pocket, then went on filling the trolley with food as normal. I always stole cigarettes when I shopped in supermarkets, and it was completely foolproof, I had never been caught. Stealing was closely related to freedom for me, about not giving a shit, doing what you wanted, not what you were supposed to do. It was a rebellious, nonconformist act while, as it were, pushing my personality towards one of the places where I wanted it to be. I stole, I was someone who stole.

It always went well, nevertheless I was nervous as I pushed my trolley towards the little island where the cashier sat. But there was nothing unusual about her expression and there were no men discreetly approaching from any direction, so I placed the items on the conveyor belt one by one with my sweaty hands, paid, packed them into a bag and walked, quickly but not conspicuously so, out of the shop, then I stopped, lit up and waited for Nils Erik, who arrived at my side a minute later carrying two bulging plastic bags.

The first kilometres were driven in silence. I was still annoyed with him for his moralising tone in the shop where I had bought the stereo. I hated it when people interfered in what I was doing, regardless of whether it was my mother, my brother, my teacher or my best friend: I didn’t want to know. No one had any business telling me what to do.

He cast intermittent glances at me as he drove. The countryside around us had levelled out. Low trees, heather, moss, brooks, shallow, completely black tracts of water and, in the distance, chains of tall rugged peaks. He had filled the tank just outside Finnsnes, there was still a smell of petrol in the car, it made me feel slightly nauseous.

He glanced at me again.

‘Could you put some music on? There are some cassettes in the glove compartment.’

I opened it and transferred the pile of cassettes to my lap.

Sam Cooke. Otis Redding. James Brown. Prince. Marvin Gaye. UB40. Smokey Robinson. Stevie Wonder. Terence Trent D’Arby.

‘You’re a soul man, are you?’ I said.

‘Soul and funk.’

I inserted the only cassette I had heard before: Prince,
Parade
. Leaned back in the seat and gazed up at the mountains, which, at the bottom, were covered with a green tangled carpet of bushes and small trees, further up with moss and heather, also green.

‘By the way, why did you steal the cigarettes?’ Nils Erik said. ‘It’s got nothing to do with me. You can do what you like as far as I’m concerned. I’m just curious, that’s all.’

‘Did you see?’ I said.

He nodded.

‘You
have
got the money, after all,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t as if you took them out of sheer deprivation, was it.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘What if you’d been caught? How would that have looked? As a teacher, I mean.’

‘Was I caught?’

‘No.’

‘No? So then it’s purely hypothetical,’ I said.

‘We don’t have to talk about it,’ he said.

‘I don’t mind talking about it,’ I said. ‘Talk away.’

He gave a short laugh.

The ensuing silence was long but not unpleasant, the road was straight, the mountains were beautiful, the music was good, Nils Erik an outdoor type I didn’t much care for.

But then my attitude changed. It was as though I had gone so far in one direction and now I was beginning to return because there was something unresolved here. Nils Erik, he hadn’t done anything to me, didn’t wish me any harm, he was curious, that was all, and perhaps a bit pushy, and out here, where I didn’t know anyone, perhaps that wasn’t such a bad thing.

I hummed along to ‘Sometimes it Snows in April’.

‘Have you heard Prince’s latest?’ I said. ‘
Lovesexy
.’

He shook his head.

‘But if he comes to Norway or Sweden in the summer I’ll go and see him. His concerts are fantastic these days. I talked to someone who had seen him on the Sign o’ the Times tour. They said it was the best concert they’d ever seen.’

‘I fancy it too,’ I said. ‘But it’s good, the new one, that is. Not as good as
Sign o’ the Times
but . . . As a matter of fact I reviewed it when it came out for
Fædrelandsvennen
and almost made a huge blunder.’

I looked at him.

‘I’d read in some English music mag that he was illiterate, and I was going to write that, you know. I was on the point of pitching the whole article that way, that Prince couldn’t read, but luckily it struck me as a bit odd and I dropped the idea. Afterwards I realised it was probably music that he couldn’t read. But I don’t know. And it’s not good, all the vague information you accumulate, the stuff you carry around with you that’s not remotely true. If you say anything, it’s a bit embarrassing, but if you actually write it and it’s in the newspaper the day after, that’s worse.’

‘I thought that was what newspapers were all about,’ Nils Erik said, smiling, his eyes on the road.

‘You can say that again,’ I said.

Further ahead lay the road to Håfjord, a thin grey line leading to a small black gap in the mountain.

‘By the way, I got a long letter from my girlfriend on Tuesday,’ I said.

‘Oh yes?’ he said.

‘Yes. Well, girlfriend may be stretching it. We were together during the summer. Her name was Line. . .’

‘
Was
? Did she die this week?’

‘For me, yes. That was the point. She finished it. Wrote that I was a nice person blah blah blah, but she’d never been in love with me and it was the right time to finish now because I was moving up here.’

‘So you’re footloose and fancy free,’ Nils Erik said.

‘Exactly,’ I said. ‘That’s what I was about to say.’

A car emerged from the tunnel, it was small and black like a dung beetle, but soon it grew in size, it was going at a considerable speed.

The driver raised a hand as he passed, Nils Erik responded, slowed down and turned into the last short stretch before the village.

‘It’s strange, isn’t it,’ I said. ‘Everyone knows who we are while we don’t know anyone.’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘We’ve ended up in an incredibly intimidating place.’

He twisted one of the levers by the steering wheel for full beam and flicked the other up to activate the windscreen wipers. Drops of water splashed on the bonnet, windscreen and roof. The drone of the engine rebounded off the rock face, it surrounded us like a kind of shell, which vanished the moment we exited the tunnel, and the blue fjord spread out before us.

‘Are you a free man then?’ I said.

‘Oh yes,’ he said. ‘I’m very free in fact. I haven’t had a girlfriend for several years.’

Was he gay?

Oh, no, don’t say he was one of them?!

He was in fact a bit odd. And those rosy cheeks . . .

‘There’s not much of a selection up here,’ he said. ‘But nor is there much competition. So I reckon they cancel each other out.’

He laughed.

Not much of a selection
. What was that supposed to mean? There weren’t many other gays here?

My insides chilled as I stared across the matt blue surface of the sea.

‘Torill is a cheery type,’ he said.

Torill!

False alarm!

I looked at him again. Even though his eyes were on the road some of his attention was on me.

‘But she’s old,’ I said.

‘Old? Not at all!’ he said. ‘If I had to guess I would say twenty-eight. Maybe thirty. It’s possible. But, first off, she’s not old! And, second off, she’s sexy. Yes,
very
sexy.’

‘Well, you could have fooled me,’ I said.

‘I’m not eighteen years old, Karl Ove. I’m twenty-four. So twenty-eight is not old. Or unattainable.’ He chuckled. ‘The fact that she may be unattainable
for me
is quite a different matter.’

We drove slowly down the narrow road squeezed under the mountainside. The local motorists drove just as fast here as anywhere else, but not Nils Erik, he was the cautious sensible type, I had begun to realise.

‘And you?’ he said. ‘Have you got your eye on anyone?’

I smiled. ‘In fact, there was a girl on the bus when I was coming here. She’s at the
gymnas
in Finnsnes. Lives in Hellevika.’

‘Aha!’

‘We’ll have to see. Nothing else I’m aware of.’

‘Vibeke’s a jolly girl,’ he said.

‘Do you mean fat?’

‘No, but you know . . . she’s nice, she is. Bit chubby maybe, but what does that matter? And Hege, she’s . . . well, high maintenance, I reckon. But attractive. Isn’t she?’

‘You’re game for anything, are you?’ I said.

‘Women are women, that’s my motto.’

Then the village lay beneath us. Nils Erik pulled up outside my flat, carried in the shopping bags while I took the big cardboard box containing the stereo, then he said bye and drove off to his place. I set up the stereo, put on
Sulk
by the Associates, an utterly insane LP I listened to stretched out on the sofa. After a while I began to write some letters, kept them brief as I had a lot of them to do, what was important right now was not what I wrote but the short story I enclosed with all of them.

In one of the breaks next day Sture came over to me.

‘Can I have a word with you?’ he said, scratching his bald pate.

‘Of course,’ I said.

‘I’d just like to give you a bit of advice,’ he said. ‘About the third and fourth years. I heard you covered the whole cosmos with them yesterday . . .’

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘They’re very small, you know. It might not be a bad idea to start at the other end. Make a map of the school here, for example. And then one of the village. And then one of the island. Do you see what I mean? Start with the known and work outwards, to Norway, Europe and the world. And
then
you can tackle the cosmos. If you’re still here, of course!’

He grinned and winked at me so as to appear more of a friend and less of an authority figure. But this was not advice; this was a rebuke. When I met his eyes, my blood was boiling.

‘I’ll give that some thought,’ I said, then turned and went.

I was furious while being embarrassed at the same time because I could see he was right. They were so small, probably they hadn’t understood a thing, and what had been exciting for me when I was ten was not necessarily exciting for them.

In the staffroom I didn’t want to talk to anyone, so I sat down at my workstation and pretended I was reading until the bell rang and I could go out to my pupils.

It was strange, I thought, standing by the desk and waiting for them to saunter in, it was strange that I should feel more at home among the pupils than among the teachers in the staffroom.

But where were they?

I walked over to the window. There wasn’t a soul in the area between the two buildings. Were they on the football pitch perhaps?

I looked up at the clock. It was already five minutes since the bell had rung. Something must have happened, I thought, and walked down the corridor to the door. Sture came striding along from the other end. He opened the door and went out, I followed and saw him break into a run.

There was a fight. Two of the boys had their arms wrapped round each other, one was thrown to the ground, he got back to his feet. Around them stood a cluster of pupils watching. They were completely silent. Behind them lay the village, behind that the mountains and the sea.

I broke into a run as well, mostly for appearance’s sake because I knew Sture would sort this out and I was glad.

The two boys fighting were Stian and Kai Roald. Stian was stronger, it was him who had thrown Kai Roald to the ground, but Kai Roald wouldn’t give in and flew at him again.

Both stopped the moment Sture reached them. He grabbed Stian by the back of his jacket and held him at arm’s length while he bawled him out. Stian hung his head like a dog. He wouldn’t have done that with me, that was for certain.