Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 (24 page)

Perhaps you think I’m stupid to make so much of the short time we had together? That’s probably because you’re the only boy I’ve ever fallen in love with. So, don’t disappoint me, write to me now.

A girl who loves you,

Lisbeth

I pushed the letter aside. My chest was riven with despair. I
could
have slept with her. She had been willing! She wrote that she was in love with me, that she loved me, of course she would have said yes.

She knew where we were heading and what I was thinking, of that I was sure.

Bloody Jøgge!

Those
fucking
dickheads!

A sudden inspiration made me pick up the envelope and look inside.

There was a photo.

I took it out. It was Lisbeth. She wasn’t smiling, she was looking into the camera with her head tilted. She was wearing a yellow sweatshirt with
NIKE
emblazoned across it in big red letters. Her fringe hung over her forehead on one side, covering one eye. A stray lock of hair hung down behind one ear on the other.

Her neck was bare. She had a nice long neck.

Her lips were also beautiful, full, almost disproportionately full compared with her narrow face.

Oh, she looked seriously displeased.

But I could remember what it was like to hold her. How she had laughed when she put her hand up my shirt, against my chest and I straightened up and took a deep breath.

‘You’re pumping yourself up!’ she said. ‘Relax. I like you as you are. You’re fantastic.’

And she was Danish.

I put the picture and the letter back in the envelope, tucked it into the diary that I kept in the drawer and got to my feet.

Mum was washing the dishes when I went to the kitchen.

‘Karl Ove,’ she said. ‘I’ve just had a thought. Dad had a typewriter once. It’s probably still around. I can’t imagine he would have taken it with him. Have a look up in the barn, in the cardboard boxes.’

‘He
had
a typewriter?’

‘Yes, he did. He used it to write letters for a few years.’

She rinsed a glass in cold water and placed it upside down on the grooves in the drainer.

‘During the first few years we were together he wrote poems as well.’

‘
Dad?
’

‘Yes, he was very taken by poetry. Obstfelder was his favourite. He liked Vilhelm Krag as well, I remember. The Romantics.’

‘
Dad?
’ I repeated.

Mum smiled.

‘They weren’t very good though.’

‘I can believe that,’ I said, and went into the hall, put on my shoes and walked up to the back of the barn, which actually was the front because this was where the great barn door was, and inside was where the hay was stacked. The floor beneath, which dad had used, consisted of small rooms which had been converted into a flat in the 1970s. But here nothing had been done.

I went in and thought, as I had done so many times before, it was strange that we owned such a large room. And that we didn’t use it for anything.

Well, except for storage, that is.

All the old farming implements hung on the wall: cartwheels, harnesses, rusty scythes, mucking-out forks and hoes. In some places dad had written the nicknames he had used for me, in chalk, he did that when we moved in and when he was so happy about everything.

They were still there.

Kaklove

Loffe

Love

Klove

Kykkeliklove

Boxes were stacked against the wall facing me. I had never looked inside them. That would have been inconceivable when dad lived here, he often sat in the flat beneath the old floorboards and would definitely have come up to check if anyone had been walking around. And then I would have had to have an
extremely
good reason for being here, let alone rummaging through our old possessions.

I found clothes I remembered mum and dad wearing when I was smaller: flared trousers they must have bought the winter they had been in London together because you couldn’t get such big bell-bottoms in Norway, even in the 1970s, mum’s white coat, dad’s large orange jacket with the brown lining he had worn to go fishing, shawls and skirts and scarves, sunglasses, belts, boots and shoes. Then there was a box of pictures we used to have on the walls. A couple of boxes containing old kitchen utensils.

But no typewriter!

I opened a couple more boxes, flicked through them. Came to one containing what looked like magazines in plastic bags.

Comics I had forgotten I had?

I opened the top one.

They were porn mags.

I opened the next.

Also porn mags.

A whole removal chest full of pornographic magazines?

Whose were they?

I laid some of them on the floor and began to leaf through. Most were from the 60s and 70s. The centrefolds had bikini marks; all the breasts and bottoms were white. Many of the women were posing outdoors. Standing behind trees, lying in fields, all the colours of the 70s, big breasts, some sagging, with big nipples.

I sat there with an erection, turning the pages. A couple of the magazines were from the 80s and there was nothing strange about them. The ones from the 60s had no shots of girls with their legs open.

Had he had these magazines at home during all that time? Down in his office?

And, not least, had he actually bought them?

I put them in a pile and stood musing. I ought to hide them. First of all this wasn’t anything mum should see. Second I would like to go through them again.

Or would I?

He
had read them.
He
had pored over them.

I couldn’t do that. It was too disgusting.

I decided to put them all back as they had been. Mum would never go through these boxes anyway.

I couldn’t make this add up. All the years when I had been small, indeed, oh God, from the time before I was born until last year, he had been buying porn mags and keeping them at home.

Shit.

I opened the other boxes, and in the penultimate one I found the typewriter. It was an old manual model, I should have known, and if I had seen it before the magazines I would have been disappointed, I might even have rejected it and insisted on mum or dad buying me another one, but now, after finding his magazines, it didn’t matter.

I carried it back and showed it to mum, who was resting on the sofa.

‘That’s good enough, isn’t it?’ she said, her eyes half-closed.

‘Yes, it’ll have to do,’ I said. ‘Are you going to sleep?’

‘I’ll just have forty winks. Can you wake me in half an hour if I’m not up?’

‘OK,’ I said and went up to my room, where I read Lisbeth’s letter once again.

She had written unequivocally that she loved me.

No one had ever done that before.

Was that how it was with Hanne? When I said I loved her? Because I didn’t love Lisbeth. I liked her writing that she loved me, but it meant no more than that. It was nice, and I was happy that she had written it, but it existed outside me, she existed outside me. Not like Hanne.

Was that how Hanne felt about me?

That was what she said.

Was she playing with me?

Why didn’t she want me? Want to be with me?

Oh, how I wanted her!

That was all I wanted. She was all I wanted!

Really.

But if she didn’t want me I wasn’t going to get any further. So it didn’t matter.

I decided to give her a taste of her own medicine. It wouldn’t matter anyway.

I stood up, went downstairs to the telephone, lifted the receiver and dialled all the numbers except the last. Gazed out of the window. Two blackbirds were in the bush across the drive, pecking at the small red berries growing on it. Mefisto watched from a crouch position, his tail wagging to and fro.

I dialled the last number.

‘Yes, hello,’ Hanne’s father said.

I hated it when he answered because his daughter was going out with someone else, not me, and he knew what I was trying to do. Sometimes we chatted for more than an hour on the phone. So he probably didn’t like me phoning.

‘Hello, Karl Ove here,’ I said. ‘Is Hanne in?’

‘Just a moment, Karl Ove, and I’ll have a look.’

I heard his footsteps going down the stairs and watched Mefisto creep closer to the two birds, which continued to jerk their heads and peck at the red berries undeterred. Then came the sound of light steps and I knew it was Hanne, and my heart beat faster.

‘Hi!’ she said. ‘Funny you should ring. I was just thinking about you!’

‘What were you thinking?’ I said.

‘About you, that was all.’

‘What are you doing this evening?’

‘I’m studying. French. It’s a level up from last year. Quite difficult. How’s it going with your French?’

‘Same as last year. I knew nothing then, and I know nothing now. Do you remember the test I got a Good in?’

‘Yes, I do. You were proud of that.’

‘Was I? Well, usually I got Poor. So, of course I was pleased. But what I did was incredibly simple. The text was long, right, with lots of French words in it. So I just used them in my answer, adapted them a bit and added a few of my own. And, hey presto, a Good.’

‘You’re so smart!’

‘Yes, aren’t I.’

‘What are you doing?’

‘Well, nothing special actually. I’ve received a letter I’ve read a few times.’

‘Oh? Who from?’

‘A girl I met in Denmark.’

‘Oh? You didn’t tell me about her!’

‘No. So much happened I thought . . . well, it wouldn’t be of any interest to you.’

‘It certainly is!’

‘Right.’

‘What does she say?’

‘She says she loves me.’

‘But you were only there a week!’

‘A lot happened in that week, as I said. We slept together.’

‘Did you?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

Silence.

‘Why are you telling me this, Karl Ove?’

I didn’t reply at first. Then I said, ‘I told you this wouldn’t interest you. Then you said it would. So I thought I may as well tell you.’

‘Mm,’ she said.

‘And then . . . Well, when it was happening I thought a lot about us. That perhaps it wasn’t . . . well, you know. Perhaps I don’t feel all the things I have said I do. For you, I mean. The letters this summer . . . I think somehow I was in love with love. Do you know what I mean? When I met Lisbeth . . .’ I said, and paused to let the name achieve maximum impact ‘. . . it was somehow real. Flesh and blood. Not just thoughts. Then I got her letter and I realised I was in love with her. And it’s fantastic! There wasn’t anything between you and me anyway. And there’s nothing now. So, yes, just thought I had to say that.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It’s good you told me. It’s good to know.’

‘But we’re still friends.’

‘Of course we are,’ she said. ‘You can fall in love with whoever you like. We’re not in a relationship.’

‘No.’

‘But I am a bit sad nevertheless. It was so wonderful in the cabin. With you.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘It was.’

‘Yes.’

‘Well, you’d better get back to your French.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Bye. Thanks for ringing.’

‘Bye.’

I rang off.

Now it was ruined. That was what I wanted. And now it had happened.

In the first break the next day I jogged up to the petrol station over the E18 to buy the latest
Nye Sørlandet
. Grabbed a copy from the stand and thumbed through the pages at the back.

My cheeks burned when I spotted a photo of myself.

There was a big spread, almost a page, and the photo took up two-thirds of the space. I was sitting and looking straight at the reader with three records fanned out in front of me.

I skimmed through the text. It said I was a young man who was passionate about music and that I was critical about society’s marginalisation of rock. Personally, I liked British indie bands best, but I promised to be open to all genres, even the Top Twenty.

I hadn’t said that, not in so many words, well, I probably hadn’t said it at all, now that I thought about it, but I had
meant
it and Steinar Vindsland had understood.

The photo was brilliant.

I paid, folded the newspaper and walked back down to the school with it in my hand. In the classroom, which was filling up, I placed it on my desk, leaned back in my chair, tipping it against the wall as I usually did, and watched the others.

I doubted any of them read
Nye Sørlandet
, except on rare occasions, hardly anyone did. The only newspaper that was any good was
Fædrelandsvennen
. So having it there spread out on my desk might therefore cause a few eyebrows to be raised. Why have you brought
Nye Sørlandet
with you to school?

They would imagine I had brought it from home! To show off!

I rocked forward again and folded the newspaper. No, I hadn’t brought it from home to show off. I had bought it at the petrol station and where else would you go with it? That was why I had it with me.

But what the hell. Shouldn’t I just say?

Straight out?

As long as it didn’t seem as if I was bragging?

But it wasn’t bragging, it was true, I was a record reviewer now, and today there was an interview with me in the newspaper I had bought at the petrol station opposite the school.

There was no point hiding it either.

‘Hi, Lars,’ I said. He was the least dangerous boy in the class. He turned to me. I held up the newspaper.

‘I’m the record reviewer,’ I said. ‘Do you want to see?’

He got up and came over; I opened it at the right page.

‘Not bloody bad,’ he said, straightening up. ‘Hey! Karl Ove’s in the paper!’ he shouted across the room.

It was more than I could have hoped for, the very next moment he was standing with a crowd around him, all staring at the photo of me and reading the article.

In the evening I browsed through my old music magazines and studied the record reviews and articles. There were three kinds of writer, I concluded. There were the witty, smart, often malicious writers like Kjetil Rolness, Torgrim Eggen, Finn Bjelke and Herman Willis. There were the serious, ponderous types like Øivind Hånes, Jan Arne Handorff, Arvid Skancke-Knutsen and Ivar Orvedal. And then there were the knowledgeable, clear-headed writers who went straight to the point, like Tore Olsen, Tom Skjeklesæther, Geir Rakvaag, Gerd Johansen and Willy B.