Dancing in the Dark

~ ~ ~

English was my worst subject, and I was only two years older than the oldest pupils, so while I was walking over to the other building, where the eighth and ninth forms had their classroom, my stomach was churning again.

I put my pile of books down on the raised table. The pupils were scattered across their desks as if they had just been hurled out of a spin dryer. No one paid any attention to me.

‘Hello, class!’ I said. ‘My name is Karl Ove Knausgaard, and I’m going to be your English teacher this year. How do you do?’

No one said anything. The class consisted of four boys and five girls. A couple of them watched me, the others sat scribbling something, one was knitting. I recognised the boy from the snack bar stand: he was wearing a baseball cap and rocking back and forth on his chair while eyeing me with a smirk on his face. He had to be Stian.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘Now I would like you to introduce yourselves in English.’

‘Snakk norsk!’ Stian said in Norwegian. The boy behind him, a conspicuously tall, thin figure, taller than me, and I was one metre ninety-four, guffawed. Some of the girls tittered.

‘If you are going to learn a language, then you have to talk it,’ I said.

One of the girls, dark-haired and white-skinned, with regular, slightly chubby facial features and blue eyes, put up her hand.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘Isn’t your English a bit too bad? I mean, for teaching?’

I could feel my cheeks burning, I stepped forward with a smile to hide my embarrassment.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘I have to admit that my English isn’t exactly perfect. But that isn’t the most important thing. The most important is to be understood. And you do understand me?’

‘Sort of,’ she said.

‘So,’ I said. ‘What’s your name then?’

She rolled her eyes. ‘Camilla.’

‘Full sentences, please.’

‘Oh, my name is Camilla. Happy?’

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘You do mean yes?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said, blushing again.

‘So, what’s your name?’ I said to the girl sitting behind Camilla. She raised her head and looked at me.

Ay-yay-yay.

What a beauty!

Gentle blue eyes that narrowed when she smiled. Large mouth. High cheekbones.

‘My name is Liv,’ she said with a chuckle.

‘Camilla, Liv. And you?’ I said, motioning with my head to Stian.

‘Æ heitte Stian,’ he said.

‘Well,’ I said. ‘What will that be in English?’

‘Stian!’ he said.

Everyone laughed.

When the bell rang and I left the room I was absolutely exhausted. So much had to be parried, so much had to be tolerated, so much had to be ignored, so much had to be repressed. The girl called Camilla had yawned and stretched her arms above her head while staring straight at me. She was wearing only a T-shirt, and her breasts, which were large and round, were delineated in unmistakable clarity against the white material. I had an erection, it was impossible to avoid, no matter how hard I tried to concentrate on other matters. How glad I was that I was sitting behind the teacher’s desk! And as if that weren’t enough, the girl called Liv was as winsome as she was beautiful, somehow shy and outgoing at the same time, apart from the vague wildness there was about her — which above all was embodied in her big dark blonde hair and wide selection of jangling bracelets, but also in the contrast between her reserved body language and the sparkle in her eyes — which made it impossible for me not to think about her when she was in the room. Then there was Stian, who kept fidgeting with a penknife while taking every opportunity to taunt me and who refused to do anything I told the class to do, and his friend Ivar, who laughed at everything Stian said, a hollow, slightly inane laugh that was always followed by sweeping glances around the room. But his gaze was ingenuous, sometimes even towards me, I could win him over, he had even grinned once or twice at something I had said.

In the staffroom I slumped down onto the sofa. The teacher called Vibeke stopped and smiled at me. She was nineteen, had a large full body and a round soft face, happy blue eyes, curly permed blonde hair.

‘How’s it going?’ she said.

‘It’s going fine,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

‘Fine too,’ she said. ‘There’s not so much that’s new here for me as there is for you, I imagine. I attended this school when I was growing up.’

I couldn’t think of a response, and she smiled again before going into the workroom. Beside me sat Jane, she was also from the village, in her early twenties, also large: her upper arms were perhaps twice the size of mine. She had a long straight, almost Roman nose, flat cheeks, thin lips that often sagged at the corners as though she wouldn’t touch what she saw before her with a bargepole. Her eyes were grumpy, indeed her whole bearing was grumpy. But a couple of times I had seen her laugh, and then all of her brightened up, the transformation was total, she could hardly stop laughing once she had started, and it was a pleasure to see her struggling to regain her composure.

In addition to all the young temporary teachers, there was an older lady on the staff, Eva, she was in her late forties, but looked older, she taught needlework and home economy, was small, lean, with a pointed face, thin fair hair and a piercing voice, and at this moment she was sitting in the chair on the other side of the table, knitting. She was sceptical about me, I could see that from the way she looked at and didn’t look at me. And with absolute justification, for what was I doing here actually? What did I want from this job?

When I came in after the English lesson she glanced up at me and I think she knew what feelings were coursing through me.

Of course that was impossible, but it was what I thought anyway.

In the lunch break I went down to the post office at the other end of the village. The mountainsides were bright green in the sunshine. The sea was deep blue. Something about the light or perhaps the cool draught I felt in the air, somehow beneath what the sun heated up, so typical of August, evoked the atmospheres I recognised from when I started school after the holidays: the excitement, the anticipation, the perhaps-something-fantastic-is-going-to-happen-this-year?

On the slope behind the last row of houses there was already a hint of yellow in the green. Of course autumn came earlier here. I nodded to a car driving past. The driver, who looked like a mother, nodded back, and I walked down the gravelled incline to the post office, which was housed in the basement of a block of flats. In the hall were the PO boxes, inside was the office with counters, posters on the walls, stands of postcards and envelopes.

The woman behind the counter was probably about fifty. Permed thinning reddish hair, glasses, a delicate gold necklace. A man with a rollator stood by the small table under the window scraping a scratch card with a coin.

‘Hello,’ I said to the assistant and placed the envelopes on the counter. ‘I just wanted to post these.’

‘Yes, of course,’ she said. ‘By the way, there’s some mail for you already.’

‘Is there?’ I said. ‘Not bad!’

While she weighed the letters and selected the appropriate stamps I unlocked my box. It was a letter from Line.

I went in and paid, opened the letter and started to read while walking up the gravel road.

She wrote that she was in her room and thinking about me. She liked me a lot, she said, we’d had so much fun together, but she had never actually been in love with me, so now, with us living in two different places, she thought the best and most honest thing to do would be to finish it. She hoped everything would go well for me in my life, urged me to take writing seriously, as she would with her drawing, and also hoped that I would not be angry with her, for our new lives were starting now, we were far apart, tomorrow she would be travelling to the folk high school and by now I had probably arrived in the village where I was going to work, and as long as this felt the way it did and she didn’t love me, anything else but finishing the relationship would be a betrayal of herself. But I was a wonderful person, I should know that, that was not the reason, you can’t control feelings, they are how they are.

I stuffed the letter in my coat pocket.

I hadn’t been in love with Line either, everything she said about me I could have said about her, yet still I felt sad and also a bit angry with her when I read what she had written. I wanted her to love me! And even though I didn’t want to be with her, and was glad it was over, it should have been me who finished it. Now it was her who had the high ground, who said no to me and who would also probably go through life convinced that I had loved her and had been crushed by her letter.

Oh well.

There was great activity down at the fish-processing plant. Several boats had docked, forklift trucks were plying back and forth across the concrete and into what looked like a dark hall. Men in high rubber boots bustled hither and thither, a group of women wearing open white coats and white caps stood smoking outside the end of the hall, and the air above them was full of flapping, screaming seagulls. I went into the shop and bought some rolls, some mild cheese, a packet of margarine and a litre of milk, said hello to the assistant, who asked whether I had settled in all right, fine, I said, everything was great.

I didn’t have a class in the next slot, so after eating two rolls and putting the rest in the tiny staffroom fridge, I sat down at my workstation to plan the next few days’ teaching. The temporary teachers had been allocated a mentor, who would come to see us once a week so that we could discuss any problems or difficulties we had in our classes. We were also going on a course next week, in Finnsnes, with all the other temporary teachers in the district. For there were many of them; the locals who trained as teachers seldom moved back when the training was over. All sorts of measures had been implemented to remedy this, it was a big problem, of course. Where dad lived now there were huge tax incentives, and that was one of the reasons that he and Unni had moved north. They both worked at a gymnas or, to be more precise, at present only dad was working because Unni was expecting a child. The last time I saw them, a few weeks ago in the terraced house they had bought in Sørland, which was waiting for them after they had completed their contract in the north, her belly had been enormous.

That was where I had got the idea to come up here. We had been sitting on the veranda, dad bare-chested, as brown as a nut, with a beer in one hand and a cigarette in the other, me with a crucifix dangling from one ear and wearing sunglasses, when he had asked me what I was going to do in the autumn. His gaze was anywhere else but on me, also when he asked, his voice was tired and apathetic, a touch slurred from all the beers he had drunk since I arrived, and so I answered in a sort of lackadaisical way, although it hurt me. I shrugged and said I definitely wasn’t going to study or do military service. Work somewhere, I said. In a hospital or something.

He straightened up and stubbed out his cigarette in the large ashtray on the table between us. The air was heavy with pollen, everywhere there was the buzz of bees and wasps in the air. Why don’t you do some teaching, then? he said and slumped back in the chair, perhaps twenty kilos heavier now than the last time I had seen him. You can get a job in Northern Norway any day of the week, you know. As long as you’ve been to gymnas they’ll welcome you with open arms. Maybe, I said. I’ll think about it. You do that, he said. If you want another beer you know where the crate is. OK, why not, I said and went into the living room, which was pitch black after the bright light outside, and into the kitchen, where Unni was reading the paper. She smiled at me. She was wearing khaki shorts and a baggy grey top. I’m going to have another beer, I said. You do that, she said. It’s your summer holiday after all. True, I said. Is there an opener anywhere? Yes, there’s one on the table over there, she said. Are you hungry? Not particularly, I said. It’s so hot, isn’t it. But you’re going to stay the night, aren’t you? she asked. Yes, I said. So we can eat later, she said. I leaned back and took a long swig. I should be doing some work in the garden, she said. But it’s simply too hot. Yes, I said. And my stomach’s beginning to get in the way. Yes, I said. I can see. Don’t you want to go for a swim in the lake? Sounds like there are lots of people down there today. I shook my head. She smiled, I smiled, and then I went back out to dad. You got yourself one, I see, he said. Yes, I said and sat down again. In the old days he would have been working in the garden now. And if not he would have been keenly watching everything going on around him, even if it was only a car stopping and a young man leaning over to a window that was being wound down. But all that had gone. In his eyes was only indifference, apathy. However, the situation was not so black and white because when I observed him, and his eye caught mine, I could sense he was still there, the hardness, the coldness I had grown up with and still feared.

He swayed forward and put the empty bottle on the floor, took another and flipped the top off with the opener on his key ring. He always fetched three or four bottles at once so that he wouldn’t have to keep running into the kitchen, as he put it. Lifted it to his lips, glugged down a few mouthfuls. Mm, he said. Sun’s nice. Yes, I said. I’ve got a tan anyway! he said. Yes, I said. Me too. Know what?! he said, blowing out his cheeks. We’ve bought ourselves a solarium up north, you know. Have to in all that darkness. Yes, I said. I saw it when I was up there. Yes, you may have done, he said. Took another long swig, put the empty bottle down by the previous one, rolled a cigarette, lit it, opened another bottle. When do you want dinner? he asked. Makes no odds, I said. You two decide. Yeah, I don’t get hungry in this weather, he said, snatching the section of the newspaper that lay on the table. I rested my arm on the balustrade and looked down. The grass beneath the veranda was scorched, more yellow and brown than green. The grey road was deserted. This side of it was a dusty gravel area, beyond it some trees, behind them the walls and roofs of houses. They knew no one here, neither in the immediate vicinity nor in town. A small propeller plane flew past high in the blue sky. From the living room I heard Unni’s heavy footsteps on the floor. Another head-on collision on the E18, dad said. A car and an articulated lorry. Oh? I said. Almost all these accidents are disguised suicides, he said. They drive straight into a lorry or into a mountainside. No one can possibly know whether it was intentional or not. So they’re spared the shame. Do you really believe that? I said. Indeed I do, he said. And it’s effective too. A little swing to the side and seconds later they’re dead. He lifted the paper to show me. Not much chance of surviving that, is there, he said. The photo showed a car that had been completely crushed. No, I said, and got up, went downstairs and into the toilet. Sat down on the seat. I was slightly drunk. Got up again and splashed some cold water over my face. Flushed the loo in case anyone noticed such details. When I reappeared on the veranda he had discarded the newspaper and was sitting with his elbow over the balustrade, and I remembered he used to sit like that when he was driving the car in the summer, with his elbow sticking out of the open window. How old was he actually? I wondered and counted. Forty-three this May. Then I thought about his birthdays, how we had always bought him the same green Mennen aftershave and how I had always puzzled over what he did with it as he had a beard. I smiled. He rose to his feet unsteadily, paused for a second to find his balance. Then he walked into the living room, taking his usual long strides and hitching his shorts up from behind.

The idea he had sown, to work as a teacher in Northern Norway, had grown and grown afterwards. In fact, there were only advantages: 1) I would be far away, far from everyone and everything I knew, and totally free. 2) I would be earning my own money doing a respectable job. 3) I would be able to write.

And now here I was, I thought, looking down at the book in front of me again. At the end of the little vestibule just outside the staffroom, where our two toilets were, Torill hove into sight. She smiled but said nothing, bent forward and took out a thin file from her shelf.

‘Great being a teacher!’ I said.

‘Give it time. .!’ she said, flashing me a smile, and was off again. Outside, Nils Erik was crossing the playground with my pupils around him.

Five years ago I had been the same age as them. And in five years I would be the same age as him.

Oh, by then I would have made my debut. By then I would be living in a city somewhere, writing and drinking and living the life. I would have a beautiful slim lissom girlfriend with dark eyes and big breasts.

I got up and went into the staffroom, lifted the coffee Thermos and shook it. It was empty, I filled the jug with water, poured it into the machine, popped a filter paper into the funnel, measured five spoonfuls and started the whole shebang, lots of spluttering and gurgling, the slow rise of black liquid in the jug and the bright red eye.

‘All going OK so far?’ a voice worryingly close to me said. I turned. It was Richard, he was staring at me with those intense eyes of his and a broad smile. What was this? Could he move through the school without making a sound?

‘Yes, I reckon so,’ I said. ‘It’s exciting.’

‘It is,’ he said. ‘Being a teacher is a very special, a fine profession. And, not least, a responsible one.’

Why did he say that? Did he feel I needed to hear it, that it was a great responsibility, and if so, why? Did I give off an aura of irresponsibility perhaps?

‘Mm,’ I said. ‘My father’s a teacher actually. Bit further north.’

‘You don’t say!’ Richard said. ‘Is he from Nordland?’

‘No. It was the tax incentives that brought him up here.’

Richard laughed.

‘Would you like a cup?’ I said. ‘It’ll be ready any second.’

‘Pour it in the Thermos, will you, and I’ll have some later.’

He stole away as soundlessly as he had come. I didn’t know which was worse, pour it in the Thermos or will you. It was patronising whichever way you looked at it. Because I was only eighteen didn’t mean he could treat me like a schoolboy! I was an employee here, no different from him.

Straight afterwards the bell rang and the teachers came in one by one, some silent, others with chirpy one-liners for everyone. I had put the Thermos on the table and was standing by the window with a full cup in my hand. The pupils were already running around outside. I tried to put names to the faces, but the only one I could remember was Kai Roald, the boy in the seventh class, perhaps because I had sympathised with him, the reluctance I had sensed in his body occasionally countermanded by an interested, perhaps even an enthusiastic, glint in his eyes. And then Liv, the stunner in the ninth, of course. She was standing up against the wall, her hands in her back pockets, wearing a beige anorak, blue jeans and worn grey trainers, chewing gum and stroking away some strands of hair that the wind had blown into her face. And Stian, over there, standing legs apart, hands in his pockets, chatting to his beanpole of a friend.

I turned back to the room. Nils Erik smiled at me.

‘Where do you live?’ he said.

‘Down the hill from here,’ I said. ‘A basement flat.’

‘Under me,’ Torill said.

‘Where did you end up?’ I said.

‘At the top of the village. Also a basement flat.’

‘Yes, under me!’ Sture said.

‘So that’s how they’ve organised it,’ I said. ‘The trained teachers get the flats with the view and everything while the temps get the cellars?’

‘You may as well learn that right from the start,’ Sture said. ‘All privileges have to be earned. I grafted for three years at a teacher training college. There has to be some bloody payback.’

He laughed.

‘Shall we carry your bags for you too, then?’ I said.

‘No, that’s too much responsibility for the likes of you. But every Saturday morning you’re expected to come and clean for us,’ he said with a wink.

‘I’ve heard there’s a party in Hellevika this weekend,’ I said. ‘Anyone here going?’

‘You’ve settled in fast, I have to say,’ Nils Erik said.

‘Who told you?’ Hege said.

‘Heard it on the grapevine,’ I said. ‘I was wondering whether to go or not. But it’s not much fun going alone.’

‘You’re never alone at a party up here,’ Sture said. ‘This is Northern Norway.’

‘Are you going?’ I said.

He shook his head.

‘I’ve got a family to take care of,’ he said. ‘But I’ll give you some tips. If you want.’ He laughed.

‘I was thinking of going,’ Jane said.

‘Me too,’ Vibeke said.

‘What about you?’ I said, looking at Nils Erik.

He shrugged.

‘Maybe. Is it on Friday or Saturday?’

‘Friday, I think,’ I said.

‘Maybe not such a bad idea,’ he said.

The bell rang.

‘We can talk about it later,’ he said and stood up.

‘OK,’ I said, put my cup down on the worktop, fetched my books from my workstation, went to the classroom, sat on the teacher’s desk and waited for the pupils to arrive.

When I walked down to my flat after school, my removal boxes were waiting in the porch. They contained everything I owned, which wasn’t much: a box of records, another with an old stereo in, one full of kitchen utensils and one with the odds and ends that had accumulated in my old room, plus some of mum’s books. It still felt as though I had been given a huge present as I carried them into the sitting room. I assembled the stereo, stacked the records against the wall, flicked through them, selected My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, one of my all-time favourites, and with it resounding through the room I started to organise the other items. Everything I had brought with me from home when we moved — pans, plates, cups and glasses — I’d had around me ever since I was small and we lived in Tybakken. Brown plates, green glasses, a large pot with only one handle, blackened underneath and some way up the sides. I’d had the picture of John Lennon in my room all the time I was at gymnas and proceeded to hang it on the wall behind the typewriter. I’d had the enormous poster of Liverpool FC, the 1979/80 season, since I was eleven, and it was now given a position on the wall behind the sofa. It was perhaps their best team ever: Kenny Dalglish, Ray Clemence, Alan Hansen, Emlyn Hughes, Graeme Souness and John Toshack. I had grown tired of the Paul McCartney poster, so I put it in the bedroom cupboard, rolled up. When everything was tidy, I flicked through the records again imagining I was someone else, someone who had never seen them before, and wondered what they would have made of the collection, or rather of the person who owned this collection, in other words me. There were more than 150 LPs, most from the last two years, when I had been reviewing records for the local paper and spent almost all the money I had on new ones, often the complete back catalogue of bands I liked. Every single one of these records embraced an entire little world of its own. All of them expressed quite definite attitudes, sentiments and moods. But none of the records was an island, there were connections between them which spread outwards: Brian Eno, for example, started in Roxy Music, released solo records, produced U2 and worked with Jon Hassell, David Byrne, David Bowie and Robert Fripp; Robert Fripp played on Bowie’s Scary Monsters; Bowie produced Lou Reed, who came from Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop, who came from the Stooges, while David Byrne was in Talking Heads, who on their best record, Remain in Light, used the guitarist Adrian Belew, who in turn played on several of Bowie’s records and was his favourite live guitarist for years. But the ramifications and connections didn’t only exist between the records, they extended right into my own life. The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the last five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position.

But this wasn’t its most important aspect, which was the music itself. When, for example, I played Remain in Light, which I had done regularly since the eighth class and never tired of, and the third track started, ‘The Great Curve’, with its fantastic rolling, multilayered accompaniment, brimful of energy, and the horns joined in, and afterwards the voices, it was impossible not to move, impossible, it ignited every part of my body, me, the world’s least rhythmic eighteen-year-old, sitting there squirming like a snake, to and fro, and I had to have it louder, I turned it up full blast, and then, already up on my feet, yes, then I had to dance, at that moment, even if I was alone. And, towards the end, on top of all this, like a bloody fighter plane above a tiny dancing village, comes Adrian Belew’s overriding guitar, and oh, oh God, I am dancing and happiness fills me to my fingertips and I only wish it could last, that the solo would go on and on, the plane would never land, the sun would never set, life would never end.

Or Heaven Up Here with Echo and the Bunnymen, the diametric opposite of Talking Heads, because here the essence is not rhythm or drive but sounds and moods, this tremendous wailing that springs from them, all longing and beauty and gloom, which swells and subsides in the music, no, which is the music. And even though I understand a lot of what he is singing about, even though I have read piles of interviews with him, as is the case with most of the bands whose records I own, this knowledge is obliterated by the music; the music doesn’t want to know about it, because in music there is no meaning, there is no explanation, there are no people, only voices, each with its own special distinctive quality, as though this is its essential quality, its essence, unadulterated, no body, no personality, yes, a kind of personality without a person, and on every record there is an infinity of such characteristics, from another world, which you meet whenever you play the music. I never worked out what it was that possessed me when music possessed me, other than that I always wanted it.

Furthermore, it made me someone, of course. Thanks to music I became someone who was at the forefront, someone you had to admire, not as much as you had to admire those who made the music, admittedly, but as a listener I was in the vanguard. Up here in the north probably no one would see that, as hardly anyone in Kristiansand had been aware of it, but there were circles where it was seen and appreciated. And that was where I was heading.

I spent some time arranging my records in such a way that the impression made by each one would be enhanced and perhaps lead to surprising new associations for whoever thumbed through them, then I walked down to the shop and bought some beer and a ready-made frozen meal, pasta carbonara. In addition, I bought a swede, a cauliflower, some apples, some plums and a bunch of grapes, which I intended to use in the science class with the third and fourth years the following day in a grand illustration of the cosmos, an idea that had occurred to me while skimming through their syllabus the day before.

When I arrived home I put the ready meal in the microwave and ate it straight from the aluminium tray on the kitchen table while drinking a beer and reading Dagbladet. Well sated, I lay on my bed for an hour’s rest. Images of teachers and pupils and the school interior flickered through my consciousness for a long time before at last I was gone. An hour and a half later I was roused by someone ringing the doorbell. I no longer knew what to expect, all sorts of people rang, so it was with a mixture of sleepiness and nervousness that I hurried across the floor to the door.

Three of the girls in my class stood outside. One, Andrea, smiled brazenly and asked if they could come in; the second, Vivian, giggled and blushed; the third, Live, stared shamelessly at me from behind her large thick glasses.

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘Come in, all of you!’

They did what other visitors had done, looked around as they stepped into the sitting room. Huddling close to each other, they pushed and shoved and sniggered and blushed.

‘Come on, take a seat!’ I said, nodding in the direction of the sofa.

They did as they were told.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘What brings you here?’

‘We wanted to see how you were. We were bored, you see,’ Andrea said.

Was she some kind of leader? She hadn’t exactly given that impression at school.

‘There’s nothing to do here,’ Vivian said.

‘Nothing,’ Live said.

‘No, doesn’t seem like there is much,’ I said. ‘But I’m afraid there’s not a lot going on here either.’

‘No, it’s a hole,’ Andrea said.

‘My flat is a hole?’ I said.

She flushed to the roots.

‘No, silly. The village!’ she said.

‘I’m going to move away the second I finish the ninth class,’ Vivian said.

‘Me too,’ Live said.

‘You always copy what I do,’ Vivian said.

‘Oh yes? So?’

‘Oh yes? So?’ Vivian said in a perfect imitation. It even included Live’s little tic: two wrinkles of the nose under her glasses, in rapid succession.

‘Ooohh!’ Live said.

‘You can’t have a monopoly on leaving the village when you’re sixteen,’ I said, looking at Vivian, who smiled and lowered her eyes.

‘You speak so weirdly, Karl Ove,’ Andrea said. ‘What does monopoly mean?’

The use of my name caught me off guard, so much so that, while looking at Andrea, as it was she who was talking, I reddened and bowed my head.

‘Someone who is the only person to do something,’ I said, looking up.

‘Oh, yeees,’ she said, pretending to keel over with boredom. The other two girls laughed. I smiled.

‘I can see that you kids have a lot to learn,’ I said. ‘Good job for you that I came here.’

‘Not me,’ Andrea said. ‘I know all I need to know.’

‘Apart from how to drive a car,’ Vivian said.

‘I can drive a car!’ Andrea said.

‘Yes, but you’re not allowed to drive. That’s what I meant.’

There was a pause. I smiled at them, obviously failing to conceal a patronising air because Andrea narrowed her eyes and said: ‘We’re thirteen years old, by the way. We’re not tiny tots, if that was what you were thinking.’

I laughed.

‘Why should I think that? You’re all in the seventh class, I know that. I can even remember how it felt.’

‘How what felt?’

‘Starting at a new school. It’s your first day at the ungdomskole today.’

‘And don’t we know it,’ Vivian said. ‘It was even more boring than the sixth class, I reckon.’

The bell shrilled. The three girls exchanged glances. I got up to open the door.

It was Nils Erik.

‘Hello there,’ he said. ‘Are you going to offer an old colleague a cup of coffee?’

‘Wouldn’t you rather have a beer?’

He raised his eyebrows and put on a quizzical, or perhaps it was a sceptical, look.

‘No thanks. I’m going for a drive afterwards. Better safe than sorry.’

‘Anyway, come in,’ I said.

The three girls stared at him as he stopped in the middle of the sitting room.

‘So this is where you hang out in the evenings,’ he said.

‘Haven’t they been to yours yet?’ I said.

He shook his head. ‘But some fourth years came over this afternoon. While I was frying fishcakes.’

‘We’re just so bored,’ Live said.

The two others sent her an angry glare. Then they got up.

‘Well,’ said Andrea. ‘We’d better be going.’

‘Bye,’ I said. ‘And feel free to come another day!’

‘Bye!’ Vivian said from the hall, before the door was slammed shut.

Nils Erik smiled. Shortly afterwards we saw them trudging down the hill towards the shop.

‘Poor kids,’ I said. ‘They must be pretty desperate if all they have to do in their free time is visit teachers.’

‘Perhaps to them you’re exciting?’ Nils Erik said.

‘And you’re not, I suppose?’ I said.

‘No, I’m not,’ he snorted. ‘I was thinking of going for a drive, Karl Ove. Fancy coming?’

‘Where to?’

He shrugged.

‘Other side of the fjord perhaps? Or Hellevika?’

‘I wouldn’t mind going to Hellevika,’ I said. ‘After all, we can see the other side of the fjord from here.’

It transpired that Nils Erik was the outdoor type. He had applied for a job up here because of the natural beauty, he said, he had brought a tent and a sleeping bag with him, intending to go on hikes every weekend. Did I want to join him?

‘Not every weekend,’ he added with a smile as we drove at a snail’s pace alongside the fjord in his yellow car.

‘It’s not exactly my style,’ I said. ‘Think I’ll give that a miss.’

He nodded.

‘Thought so,’ he said. ‘But what makes a sophisticated city slicker like you move up here?’

‘I want to write,’ I said.

‘Write?’ he said. ‘What? Fill in forms? Job applications? Quick reminders to yourself? Letters? Limericks for radio shows? Letters to the editor?’

‘I’m working on a collection of short stories,’ I said.

‘Short stories!’ he said. ‘The Formula One of literature!’

‘Is that what they call them?’ I said.

‘No,’ he said with a laugh. ‘Not really. Think that’s what they call poems. The Stunt Poets, you know. One of them said something like that.’

I didn’t know but said nothing.

‘But you can still come with me on walks, can’t you? A couple of weekends anyway. There’s a fantastic nature reserve only an hour away from here.’

‘I don’t think so. If anything’s going to come of my writing I have to work.’

‘But the nature, man! God’s wondrous creation! All the colours! All the plants! That’s what you have to write about!’

I laughed in derision.

‘I don’t believe in nature,’ I said. ‘It’s a cliché.’

‘What do you write about then?’

I shrugged. ‘I’ve just started. But you can read it if you want.’

‘Love to!’

‘I’ll bring it in with me tomorrow.’

We returned to the village at around eight in the evening. It was as light as day. The sky above the sea was so magnificent that I stood by the porch staring for several minutes before going in. It was empty, there was nothing there, yet it seemed gentle and friendly and as if it wished those who lived beneath it well. Perhaps because the mountains for their part were so hard and barren?

I had some supper, lit a cigarette and drank tea as I went through the exercise my pupils had done.

My name’s Vivian an I’m thirteen years old. I live in a village called Håfjord. I’m happy here. I have a sis called Liv. Dad’s a fisherman ‘n’ mam’s a housewife. My best freind is Andrea. We do a lotta things together. School is boring. Sometimes we work at the fish factory. We cut the tungs off cod. With the money I’m gonna buy a stereo.

So Vivian and Liv were sisters!

For some reason this gave me a lift. There was also something about the awkwardness she showed that touched me. Or perhaps it was her openness?

I decided not to correct the words. That would be far too demoralising, so instead I wrote a little comment in red underneath: ‘Well done, Vivian! But remember it’s “and” not “‘n’”, “a lot of” not “lotta” and “going to” not “gonna”.’

Then I leafed through the next exercise book.

My name is Andrea. I’m a thirteen-year-old girl and I live on the far side of an island in northern norway. I have a brother who is ten and a sister who is five. Dad goes fishing and mum is at home with Camilla. I like listening to music and watching films. My favourite is Champ. And I like moochin’ round the village with my friends, Vivian and Hildegunn and Live. It’s a bit boring here, but it will be better when we’re old enough to go to partys!

I had thought of Andrea and Vivian as two of a kind — I had barely been able to tell them apart on the two occasions I had seen them — but from their answers I could see there was quite a difference, or was it just that one of them was more used to expressing herself in written form?

I wrote a similar comment in Andrea’s book, read the three last ones, which all fell somewhere between the first two, made a comment in each, slipped the pile in my bag, put on ‘My Bag’ by Lloyd Cole and gazed across the village as the music made the hairs on my arms stand on end. Slowly I began to move to the beat, a shoulder here, a foot there at first, then, after switching off the light so that no one below could see me, I danced away with my eyes closed and sang from the bottom of my heart.

That night I came in my sleep. A wave of pleasure washed through me, carried me up towards the surface, where I did not want to go at any price, and nor did I, for just before I reached consciousness and the vague notion of who I was, how happy I was, became a reality, I sank back down into dark, heavy slumber, where I stayed until the alarm clock rang and I opened my eyes to a room full of light and to underpants that were sticky with semen.

At first I had feelings of guilt. God knows what I had been dreaming about. Then, when I remembered where I was and what I was doing, the pressure in the pit of my stomach returned. I got up and went into the bathroom telling myself there was nothing to be nervous about, the class was small, the pupils children, but it didn’t help, it felt as if I had to walk out onto a stage without any lines to deliver. I tried to recapture the wonderful mood I had been in previously, when I had been enjoying marking the presentations and the new sensation the role of teacher gave me, seeing pupils, planning what could be done to help them, but as I stood there, surrounded by steam, drying myself, all of that was gone, for I was not a teacher, I wasn’t even an adult, I was just a ridiculous teenager who knew nothing about anything.

‘Oh, hell!’ I shouted. Wiped the condensation from the mirror with the towel and studied my face in the few seconds it took before the glass was covered with moisture again.

I looked damned good, I did.

That was something after all.

I’d had the long hair at the back of my neck cut just before I left. Now my hair stood in a thick, maybe three-centimetre-high carpet across my skull, layered down to my temples and neck. From my left ear hung a cross.

I smiled.

My teeth were white and even. There was a glint in my eyes that I liked to see, until the incredible indignity of the situation, a person smiling and what was tantamount to winking at himself in the mirror, made my stomach constrict again.

For Christ’s sake.

I put on my Dream of the Blue Turtles T-shirt, my black Levi’s, a pair of white tube socks, stood in front of the mirror wearing alternately the thin green military jacket and the blue denim jacket, choosing in the end the former, tried on the beret, it didn’t go, and two minutes later trotted bare-headed up to the school with a white Ali coffee bag full of books and materials hanging from my hand.

The third and fourth years, who had been put together in one class for all their lessons, numbered twelve pupils: five girls and seven boys. It seemed like more, they were always roaming around, running and shouting, and would never sit still. Once they had finally sat down on their chairs, there were legs twisting and turning here, arms twisting and turning there, their minds, like agitated dogs, were forever on the move.

They hadn’t had me before, they had only heard about me and seen me from a distance, so when I loomed up in their part of the school all eyes were fixed on me.

I smiled and put my bag down on the teacher’s desk.

‘What have you got in there?’ one of them said. ‘What’s in your bag?’

I looked at him. White puppy-dog skin, brown eyes, extremely short hair.

‘What’s your name?’ I said.

‘Reidar,’ he said.

‘My name’s Karl Ove,’ I said. ‘And there’s one thing you may as well learn right from the start. You have to put up your hand before you say anything.’

Reidar put up his hand.

A smart-arse.

‘Yes?’ I said.

‘What have you got in your bag, Karl Ove?’

‘It’s a secret,’ I said. ‘But you’ll soon find out. First of all, though, I have to know what your names are.’

The boy behind Reidar, a little squirt with fair hair and hard — for his age — pale blue eyes put up his hand.

‘What’s your name?’ I said.

‘Stig,’ he said. ‘Are you strict?’

‘Strict? No!’ I said.

‘My mum says you’re too young to be a teacher!’ he said, looking around for a reaction.

They laughed, all of them.

‘I’m older than you at any rate!’ I said. ‘So I think everything will be fine.’

‘Why have you got a cross in your ear?’ Reidar said. ‘Are you a Christian?’

‘What did I just say about putting up your hand?’

‘Whoops!’ He laughed and put up his hand.

‘No, I’m not a Christian,’ I said. ‘I’m an atheist.’

‘What’s that?’ Reidar said.

‘Your hand? Where is it?’

‘Oh!’

‘An atheist is someone who doesn’t believe in God,’ I said. ‘But now you have to tell me your names. Let’s start at the end there.’

One after one they called out their names.

Vibeke

Kenneth

Susanne

Stig

Reidar

Lovisa

Melanie

Steve

Endre

Stein-Inge

Helene

Jo

I connected with some of them at once and would remember them easily from now on — the girl who was so unbelievably pretty and doll-like in everything from her facial features to her body and her dress, the boy with the round face, the little squirt who seemed angry, the boy with the big head and the warm eyes, the loudmouth, the blonde-haired girl with pigtails who gave the impression of being so rational and sensible — others were more nebulous and revealed too little for me to get a handle on them.

‘So you’re the third and fourth years!’ I said. ‘What’s the name of the place where you live?’

‘Håfjord, isn’t it!’ Reidar said.

I said nothing, just looked at them. Then two or three of them realised what I was getting at and put up their hands. I nominated the little doll-like creature.

‘Lovisa?’ I said.

‘Håfjord,’ she said.

‘What’s the name of the county Håfjord is in?’

‘Troms.’

‘And the country?’

Now everyone had a hand in the air. I nominated the fatty.

‘Norway,’ he said.

‘And the continent?’

‘Europe,’ he said.

‘Good!’ I said and he smiled.

‘But what’s the name of the planet we’re on? Does anyone know? Yes, Reidar?’

‘The world?’

‘Yes, it is. But there’s another name?’

I turned and wrote the whole address on the board: HÅFJORD, TROMS, NORWAY, EUROPE, EARTH. Turned back to them.

‘And where is the earth?’

‘In the cosmos,’ said Stein-Inge.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It’s in the solar system, in a galaxy called. .?’

On the board I wrote, THE MILKY WAY.

‘Have you heard of that?’

‘Yes!’ several of them shouted.

‘For us this galaxy is enormous. But in comparison with the rest of the cosmos it’s teeny weeny.’

I observed them.

‘What do you think is outside the cosmos then?’

They stared at me with mouths agape.

‘Have you never thought about that? Endre?’

Endre shook his head.

‘Is there anything outside then?’

‘Well, no one knows,’ I said. ‘But there can’t just be nothing, can there? There has to be something, don’t you think?’

‘What does it say in the textbooks?’ Reidar asked.

‘It doesn’t say anything,’ I answered. ‘As I said, no one knows.’

‘No one?’

‘No.’

‘Why should we learn that then?’ he said.

I smiled.

‘You have to learn about where we live. And that is, of course, the universe. Well, if we take a broader view of it, the cosmos. What you see above us every night. Or what you don’t see because you’re such tiny tots you’d have gone to bed.’

‘He-ey, we’re not tiny tots!’

‘Just joking,’ I said. ‘But the stars you can see when it’s dark. And the moon and the planets. You have to learn about them.’

I turned and wrote THE UNIVERSE on the board.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Can anyone in the class name any of the planets in our solar system?’

‘The earth!’ Reidar said.

Scattered laughter.

‘Any more?’

‘Pluto!’

‘Mars!’

‘Good!’ I said. When no more suggestions were forthcoming I drew the whole solar system on the board.

SUN

MERCURY

VENUS

EARTH

MARS

JUPITER

SATURN

URANUS

NEPTUNE

PLUTO

‘Here on the board it looks as if they’re right next to each other. But there’s an incredible distance between the planets. It would take many, many years to travel to Jupiter, for example. I’d like to give you an idea of the distances. So put on your coats and we’ll go out onto the football pitch.’

‘Are we going out? During the lesson?’

‘Yes, get weaving. Put your coats on and we’ll be going.’

They jumped up from their seats and converged on the line of coat hooks. I stood waiting by the door with the bag hanging from my hand.

They flocked closely around me as we walked across the pitch. I felt a bit like a shepherd, so different from these small frisky creatures.

‘Right, we’ll stop here!’ I said and took a ball from the bag. Placed it on the ground. ‘This is the sun, OK?’

They looked at me somewhat sceptically.

‘Come on. Now let’s walk a bit further!’

We walked for another twenty metres or so before I stopped and placed the plum on the ground.

‘This is Mercury, the planet that is closest to the sun. Can you see the sun over there?’

Everyone stared over at the ball, which cast a light shadow over the shale, and nodded.

Next I placed two apples, two oranges, the swede, the cauliflower and, last of all, right up by the door of the community centre, the grape, which was supposed to represent Pluto.

‘Do you all understand now how far it is between the planets?’ I said. ‘The tiny sun so far away, and Mercury, which is like a plum, we can’t even see it from here, can we. And all this,’ I said, looking at them as they stared blankly across the football pitch, ‘is just a tiny, weeny, weeny, weeny bit of the cosmos! Tinsy winsy! Isn’t it funny that the earth we live on is millions of miles away from the other planets?’

Some of them were thinking so hard you could see the smoke. Others were gazing across the village and the fjord.

‘Let’s go back in now,’ I said. ‘Come on. Run, run, run!’

In the staffroom I took out a copy of my short story, stapled the pages together and passed it to Nils Erik, who was sitting on the sofa and reading Troms Folkeblad.

‘Here’s the short story I was telling you about,’ I said.

‘Interesting!’ he said.

‘When do you think you’ll have read it? By tonight?’

‘Urgent, is it?’ He looked at me and smiled. ‘I was planning to go to Finnsnes this afternoon actually. Would you like to come, by the way?’

‘Love to. Good idea.’

‘Then I can read your short story by tomorrow, and we can have a little seminar afterwards?’

Seminar, which to me meant universities and academia, studies, girls and parties.

‘Great,’ I said and went to get a cup of coffee.

‘What actually were you doing outside with them?’ Nils Erik said to my back.

‘Nothing special,’ I said. ‘I was just trying to help them visualise the cosmos.’

When I entered the classroom for the next lesson three of the girls were standing in a huddle by the window and whispering excitedly. My entrance hadn’t made the slightest impression on them.

‘You can’t stand there nattering!’ I said. ‘The lesson has started! Who do you think you are? You’re pupils. You have to obey the rules and do what the teachers tell you!’

They spun round. On seeing I was smiling they just continued.

‘Hello there!’ I said. ‘Come and sit down!’

Then, with a dilatoriness I would later that day consider exquisite, because their movements became so strikingly sophisticated and their ungainliness suddenly transformed into feminine poise, they went to their seats.

‘I’ve read your presentations now,’ I said, handing out their books. ‘They were very good. But there are a couple of things we can sort out straight away since they apply to all of you.’

They opened their books to see what I had written.

‘Don’t we get grades?’ Hildegunn said.

‘Not for such a small exercise,’ I said. ‘I gave you the exercise mostly so that I could get an impression of you.’

Andrea and Vivian compared their comments.

‘You’ve written almost the same for both of us!’ Vivian said. ‘Are you so feeble?’

‘Feeble?’ I said with a smile. ‘You’ll get grades which will show you all where you stand soon enough. I’m not sure that’s much to look forward to.’

Behind me, the door opened. I turned. It was Richard. He went over and sat down at a table by the wall while motioning me to carry on.

What was this? Was he going to observe me?

‘The first thing we have to get to grips with is your dialect,’ I said. ‘You can’t write like you speak. That’s no good at all. You have to write jeg and not æ. Er and not e. Hvordan and not koss.’

‘But that’s what we say!’ Vivian said and twisted round in her chair to glance at Richard, who sat with his arms crossed and face impassive. ‘Why should we write jeg when we say æ, eh?’

‘And Harrison said we could write like that last year,’ Hildegunn said.

‘He said it was better to write something than to write correctly,’ Live said.

‘Last year you were at a school for children,’ I said. ‘This year you’re in a higher school. Where your language has to be standardised, as it’s known. This is how it is up and down the country. We can talk as we like, but when we write, it has to be standard Norwegian. There is nothing to discuss. Unless you want your essays covered in red ink and low grades, you have to do this.’

‘Oh!’ Andrea said, looking first at me, then Richard. The others giggled. I asked them to get out their books and then, when they had all turned to the same page, I asked Hildegunn to start reading. Richard got up, nodded briefly to me and left the room.

In the break I went to his office and knocked on the door.

He looked up from his desk as I walked in.

‘Hi, Karl Ove,’ he said.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering why you came into my lesson.’

The gaze he sent me was partly probing, partly curious. Then he smiled and chewed his lower lip, this was a quirk of his, I had realised, his bearded chin jutted forward and made him resemble a goat.

‘I just wanted to see how you were getting on in the class,’ he said. ‘I will be doing that now and again. There are quite a few of you who have no training. I need to get an idea of how you are coping. Teaching is not easy, you know.’

‘I promise to tell you if I have any problems,’ I said. ‘You can trust me.’

He laughed.

‘I know that. That’s not the issue. Go and have yourself a break now!’

He looked down at the papers in front of him. That was a rank-pulling number, and for a few seconds I refused to yield to it; however there was nothing else I could do, I had nothing else to say and there was nothing unreasonable about what he had said, so in the end I turned and went into the staffroom.

There were three letters in my PO box when I went to the post office after school. One from Bassen, who had started university in Stavanger, one from Lars, who had moved in with his girlfriend in Kristiansand, and one from Eirik, who was now studying at the Institute of Technology in Trondheim.

Bassen told me about an incident that had taken place just before he moved. He had gone home with a girl, or rather a woman, because she was twenty-five, and while they were on the job, as he put it, she had suddenly had some kind of fit. He had been scared out of his wits. It was as though she was being convulsed by electric shocks, he wrote, her body was quivering and shaking, he thought it was epilepsy, he withdrew and stood up.

I was terrified, Karl Ove! I didn’t know whether to ring for an ambulance or what. What if she died! In fact that’s what I thought she was going to do. But then she opened her eyes and pulled me back down and asked me what I was doing. Keep going! she shouted. Can you imagine? She’d only been having an orgasm! That’s mature women for you!

Walking along, I laughed as I read his letter, but I also felt a stab of something else because I had never slept with a girl, I’d never had sex, in other words I was a virgin, and was not only ashamed that for two years I had been lying about the amount of sexual experience I’d had, which Bassen and several others were presumably taken in by, but I was also desperate for it, to sleep with a girl, any girl actually, and to experience what Bassen and my other pals experienced on such a regular basis. Whenever I heard about their escapades it was as though equal portions of enervation and desire spread through me, equal portions of powerlessness and power, for the longer I went without sleeping with a girl the more afraid of it I became. I could talk to others about almost any other problem I had, to ease my mind, but I couldn’t reveal this, not to anyone, not ever, not under any circumstances, and whenever I thought about it, which was not seldom, it must have been several times an hour, I was overcome by a kind of black gloom, a gloom of hopelessness, sometimes only fleetingly, like a cloud drifting past the sun, sometimes for longer periods, and whatever form the hopelessness took I could not surmount it, there was so much doubt and torment associated with it. Could I? Could I? If, against all the odds, I succeeded in manoeuvring myself into a suitable situation and was in a room alone with a naked girl, would I be able to make love to her? Would I be able to go through with it?

All the secrecy and pretence surrounding this didn’t make it any easier for me.

‘Do you know what it says on the teat of condoms?’ Trond once said, in a break that spring, as he fixed me with his eye. We were standing in a group on the grass outside the school and jabbering away.

It was me he singled out.

Why? Did he suspect that I was lying about the girls, about the sex I’d had?

I blushed.

What should I say? No, and give myself away? Or yes, and then invite the natural follow-up question, what then?

‘No, what does it say?’ I said.

‘Have you got such a little prick?’ he said.

They laughed.

I laughed too, unutterably relieved.

But Espen was staring at me, wasn’t he? Kind of knowingly, and semi-revelling in it as a result?

Two days later he drove me home at night. We had been at Gisle’s together.

‘How many have you actually shagged, Karl Ove?’ he said as we drove up the gentle gradient by Krageboen, flanked on both sides of the road by crumbling old houses.

‘Why do you ask?’ I said.

‘I was just wondering,’ he said, sending me a glance before returning his eyes to the road ahead. The smile playing on his lips was furtive.

I frowned and pretended to concentrate.

‘Erm,’ I said. ‘Six. No, hang on, five.’

‘Who were they?’

‘Is this the Inquisition or what?’

‘Noo. Surely you can answer me that?’

‘Cecilie, you know, the girl I went out with from Arendal,’ I said.

Outside, the shop where I had pinched so many sweets drifted past. It had closed down ages ago. Espen indicated.

‘And?’ he said.

‘And Marianne,’ I said.

‘Did you fuck Marianne?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know that. Why didn’t you say?’

I shrugged. ‘You’ve got to keep some things private.’

‘You devil! Of all the people I know, you’re the one I know least about. But that’s just two.’

The big man with the enormous gut and the ever-open mouth stood by the fence watching us as we went past.

‘Quite a family, they are,’ I said.

‘Now, don’t you wriggle out of it,’ Espen said. ‘There are three left. I’ll list mine afterwards, if you’re interested.’

‘OK. There was an Icelandic girl working at an ice cream stand next to mine in the summer. When I was flogging cassettes on the street in Arendal. I went back to hers one night.’

‘Icelandic!’ Espen said. ‘Sounds great.’

‘Yes, it was as well,’ I said. ‘And then there were two one-night stands in town. I don’t even know their names.’

We drove down the last hill. The deciduous trees were as compact as a wall along the river. At the bottom the countryside opened out and I looked across the field to the small football pitch, where three tiny figures were shooting at a fourth in goal.

‘And yours?’ I said.

‘There’s no time for that now. We’re here.’

‘Come on,’ I said.

He laughed and stopped the car.

‘See you tomorrow!’ he said.

‘You bastard,’ I said, opened the door and walked up to the house. As I listened to the sound of his car hammering down the hill and soon disappearing, I reflected that I had given him too much information, it would have been better if I had just said it was none of his business. That is what he would have said.

How come he could do it and I couldn’t?

He didn’t rate girls as highly as I did, that was one thing. Not that he liked them any less than me, far from it, but perhaps he didn’t consider them better than him, put them on such a high pedestal that you couldn’t chat to them or do normal things with them; for him they were on the same level or perhaps he was even higher than them, for if there was one thing he had it was self-confidence. That meant he didn’t care, and when they saw that, he was someone they wanted to conquer. I looked upon them as completely unapproachable creatures, indeed, as angels of a sort, I loved everything about them, from the veins in the skin over their wrists to the curves of their ears, and if I saw a breast under a T-shirt or a naked thigh under a summer dress, it was as though everything in my insides was let loose, as though everything began to swirl around and the immense desire that then arose was as light as light itself, as light as air, and in it there was a notion that everything was possible, not only here but everywhere and not only now but for ever. At the same time as all this arose inside me, a consciousness shot up from below, like a water spout, it was heavy and dark, there was abandon, resignation, impotence, the world closing in on me. There was the awkwardness, the silence, the scared eyes. There were the flushed cheeks and the great unease.

But there were other reasons too. There was something I couldn’t do and something I didn’t understand. There were secrets and there was darkness, there were shady dealings and there was laughter that jeered at everything. Oh, I sensed it, but I knew nothing about it. Nothing.

I stuffed Bassen’s letter in my pocket and hurried up the hill. Nils Erik was supposed to be picking me up in half an hour and before that I had to have something to eat.

A couple of hours later we were driving along the main street of Finnsnes. Coming here from Oslo and Tromsø, I had regarded Finnsnes as a crummy little hole, but now, only five days later, coming from Håfjord it seemed like a large, complex, almost sophisticated place, rich with possibilities.

Nils Erik parked in the supermarket car park and then we walked off to find a Vinmonopol. I bought a bottle of Koskenkorva vodka for the party, four bottles of white wine and half a bottle of whisky to take home with me; Nils Erik bought three bottles of red wine, which came as no surprise, he was the red-wine type, not a beer and spirits man. After we had stowed the bottles in the boot I took him along to an electrical goods shop that also sold stereos. Mine wasn’t good enough, I had thought that for quite a while, and now that I had a steady job I decided to do something about it.

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.

I came to a halt in front of them.

Kai Roald was looking at the ground. The knees and tops of his trousers were filthy. His eyes were wet with tears.

‘What are you doing?’ I said. ‘Are you fighting?’

‘Oh, shut up,’ he said.

I placed my hand on his shoulder. He wrenched himself away.

‘Come on, let’s go in,’ I said, then looked at the others in the class. ‘And you lot! What are you doing out here? You haven’t even been fighting!’

Kai Roald peered up at me as if he had been expecting a punishment but now he could see there wasn’t going to be one.

‘Come on,’ I said. ‘Let’s go. Kai Roald, you go to the washroom and clean yourself up. You look a sight.’

Sture’s class was already by the door.

‘Any blood?’ he asked me.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Just snot and dirt.’