Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

I had caught this bus almost every day for three years, but it felt like a whole life. I knew every bend, indeed every tree on the route, and I was on such familiar terms with many of the people who got off or on that we nodded to one another even though we had never exchanged a word.

It had been good on the island. Perhaps I’d never had such a good time.

On the other hand, it was only a class party.

Then there was Hanne.

Each in our own sleeping bag, we had lain face to face, whispering for maybe an hour before we fell asleep. She had also tried to whisper when she was laughing, and when she did I had thought, I can die now, it won’t matter.

‘Can I give you a goodnight kiss?’ I said as we were about to go to sleep.

‘On the cheek!’ she said.

I levered my way forward a few centimetres on my elbows, she half-turned her cheek to me, I moved my head slowly towards it, changed direction at the last minute and gave her a juicy kiss on the mouth.

‘You cheat!’ she said with a laugh.

‘Goodnight,’ I said.

‘Goodnight,’ she said.

That was how it had been.

And surely it is impossible for that whole evening and night not to mean something?

She had to feel something for me.

She had to feel something.

She had said several times that she wasn’t in love with me. She liked me, she said, very much even, but it was no more than that.

Now she was going to change school and start at Vågsbygd Gymnas, where she lived.

At least that would release me from the torment of seeing her every day!

The bus indicated it was going to Kjevik, and at that moment a plane flying low thundered over us, touched down and screamed along the runway at a speed that made it seem as if we were standing still.

Flashing lights, roaring engine. We were living in the future.

I might bump into her now and then in town, we could have lunch together, go to the cinema, I could take her swimming with me on Saturday mornings. Gradually she would realise she was in love with me. She would finish the other business, tell me with a glow in her eyes that now there was nothing to stop us any more.

But then?

When we were together?

Visit each other in the evenings, kiss and eat pizza? Go to the cinema with her friends?

That was not enough.

I wanted her. Not as part of a gymnas existence, a gymnas girlfriend, she meant more than that. I wanted to move in with her. Be with her day and night, share everything with her. Not in town, with everything that went on there constantly around us, but in the skerries or perhaps in the forest, no matter where, as long as it was a place where we could be completely alone.

Or in Oslo, a large town where no one knew us.

Then I could go shopping after returning from lectures because I would study, and make dinner for her, there in our own flat.

Then we could have a child.

The bus stopped in front of the tiny terminal building, and a man wearing a cap and carrying a little suitcase got on board, paid and walked down the bus whistling as he went. He sat down in the seat in front of me.

I threw my arms in the air. The whole bus was empty! And he has to sit right there!

He smelled of sweet aftershave. His neck was covered in a scattering of thin hairs. His ear lobes were fat and red. A farmer from Birkeland.

Child?

I didn’t want one, I didn’t want to work from nine to four, that was a trap I would steer clear of, but it was different with Hanne, that was about something else.

Jesus, no, of course we wouldn’t get married, of course we wouldn’t live in the skerries, of course we wouldn’t have children!

I smiled. It had to be the wildest idea I’d ever had.

On the other side of the runway, across the road, was Jøgge’s house. There was light in the windows, and I leaned forward to see if I could catch a glimpse of him. But, if I knew Jøgge, he would be lying on his waterbed listening to Peter Gabriel.

I woke up next morning to the drone of a Hoover in the room underneath. I didn’t move. The hoovering stopped and other sounds became more prominent: the clink of bottles, the hum of the dishwasher, water running into a bucket. They had been having a party when I arrived. The last I had seen of them before sneaking up to my room the night before had been his contorted face and her laying a hand on his shoulder. That was the first time I had seen him drunk and the first time I had seen him cry. After a while the door was opened, footsteps crunched on the gravel outside and then I heard their voices just under my window.

There was a bench with a table where dad used to sit in the summer in that characteristic way of his, one leg crossed over the other, his back bent slightly forwards, often holding a newspaper in his hands and a smoking cigarette between his fingers.

They laughed. Her voice was high-pitched, his deeper.

I got up and tiptoed over to the window.

The sky was a little misty, it softened a tone, but the sun shone and the air in the garden was perfectly still and quivered.

I opened the window.

And they were indeed sitting on the bench beneath, leaning against the wall with their eyes closed to the sun. Both tipped their heads back and looked up at me.

‘Well, isn’t that our Kaklove?’ dad said.

‘Good morning, early bird!’ Unni said.

‘Good morning,’ I said, securing the window with the latch. I didn’t like the way their voices seemed to embrace me, as though it was us three now. It wasn’t true; it was the two of them and me.

But I liked the role of the rebellious teenager even less. The last thing in the world I wanted was to give them any reason at all to blame me for anything.

I ate a few slices of bread in the kitchen, carefully tidied up afterwards, brushed the crumbs on the plate and table into the rubbish bin under the sink, fetched the Walkman from my room, tied my shoes up and went down to see them.

‘I’m off for a walk,’ I said.

‘You do that,’ dad said. ‘Are you going to visit a pal?’

He didn’t know the name of a single one of my pals, not even Jan Vidar, whom I had been friends with for three years. But now he was sitting beside Unni and wanted to show that he was a good father who knew his son’s habits.

‘Yes, reckon so,’ I said.

‘Tomorrow I’ll start moving my stuff down. It would be handy if you were here. I might need a bit of help carrying.’

‘Of course,’ I said. ‘OK, bye.’

I wasn’t going to a friend’s; Jan Vidar was working at a bakery in town this summer, Bassen was on his way to England, Per was probably grafting at the floor factory, and what Jøgge was doing I had no idea, but it wasn’t, and never had been, natural for me to get on my bike without a specific aim. It suited me to be alone though, and I put on my headset, pressed play and allowed myself to be engulfed in music as I walked downhill. The countryside lay serene before me, and the few clouds, above the ridges on the other side of the river valley, were motionless. I followed the road down, it was quiet too, because, apart from a farm a kilometre further up, there was barely a house on this side for some distance. Only forest and water.

The green of the spruce needles shone brightly in the sunshine, it was almost black in the shadows, but there was something light about all the trees, it was the summer that did that, they weren’t brooding or turned into themselves as in winter, no, they let the warm air filter through and stretched towards the sun, like everything else living.

I walked along the old forest path. Even though it was only a couple of hundred metres above our house I hadn’t been there more than two or three times, and then only in winter, wearing skis. Nothing happened there, it was deserted and none of the kids up here gravitated towards that path: down at the bottom was where it all happened, that was where people lived.