Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

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.