Karl Knausgaard - Dancing in the Dark

She squirted some soap onto one hand, rubbed both of them together under the running tap and dried them on the kitchen towel.

‘You’re washing your hands of me, I can see,’ I said.

She raised a smile, but it was mirthless.

‘This is serious, Karl Ove. I’m worried about you.’

‘You have no reason to be,’ I said. ‘What happened here, well. . it was a russ party, no more, no less.’

She didn’t answer, I put the fish fillets into the pan, diced an onion and added the little cubes, poured in a can of tomatoes, sprinkled in spices and sat down with the Saturday newspaper, flicked through to the page where my Prince article, which I had handed in several weeks ago, had finally appeared in print. I held it up for her.

‘Have you read it?’ I said.

On the Monday I went to Christian and told him the door was smashed beyond repair. Oh yes, he said. You kicked it in, I said. Yes, it was me, he said. So you should replace it, I think, I said. No, he said. What do you mean no ? I said. I mean what I said, he replied. No. It was your party. But it was you who broke the door, I said. Yes, he said. So you won’t replace it? I said. No, he said. And then he turned and left.

When I got back home from school there was a letter with a foreign stamp in the post box. I opened it at once and read it walking up the hill. It was from the manager of the Grand Hotel in Lucerne. He wrote that, unfortunately, all the rooms were registered by surnames and therefore he couldn’t help me with Melanie’s address, but I could try the two travel bureaus involved, whose addresses he added afterwards: one in Philadelphia and one in Lugano.

I put the letter back in the envelope and went in. Bang went my plan to write letters for a year and then make a surprise visit, with the exciting possibility that it was there, in America, that my future lay.

For the rest of the spring I was drunk almost all of the time. The first thing I did when I woke up in the russ van or on a sofa at a friend’s or on a bench in the park was to get my hands on something to drink and continue where I had left off. And there was little that beat starting the day with a beer and walking around drunk in the morning. What a life. Going here, there and everywhere, having a drink, sleeping whenever an opportunity offered itself, eating something maybe and then just carrying on. It was fantastic. I loved being drunk. I came closer to the person I really was and dared to do what I really wanted to do. There were no limits. I only went home for a shower and a change of clothes, and once, when I was sitting in the living room with a six-pack of Carlsberg, which I drank while waiting for the russ van to come and collect me, mum suddenly flew into a rage. She had tolerated so much, but she drew the line here, at this, sitting alone and drinking in the living room, she would not put up with it. I could choose: either I stopped drinking or found myself somewhere else to live. It was a simple choice, I got up, grabbed the beers, said bye and went out, down the road, where I sat on the verge, lit a cigarette and opened a beer while waiting for the van. If she didn’t want me to live at home, well, I wouldn’t live at home.

‘What are you sitting there for?’ Espen said when the van pulled up in front of me.

‘I’ve been chucked out,’ I said. ‘Actually, it makes no odds.’

I got in, we drank what we had on the way to town, bought some more crates of beer at a supermarket, went on towards Vågsbygd, where we were meeting that night, a grass plain by the sea with an ancient deciduous forest sloping upwards, where we sat drinking, where I disappeared into myself and walked around without a thought in my head. It was fantastic, as always. The interpersonal shit I usually got bogged down in meant nothing, I was footloose and free, everything was as cold and clear as glass. I asked after Geir Helge, a lean sociable guy with glasses and a Mandal dialect. He smoked hash, everyone knew that, and now I wanted to do it too. I had been considering it for a long while. Smoking hash was a stigma, if you did you were on the outside, you were no longer a decent person, you were on the way to becoming a junkie. In any case that was how it was in Kristiansand. And the idea of it being the beginning of a road that would lead me to a life as a junkie was incredibly appealing and filled life with destiny and meaning. Being a junkie, just living for drugs, renouncing everything else, for me that was the worst of the worst. Junkies had abandoned their humanity, they were a kind of devil, it was terrible, terrible, the worst, hell. I laughed at those who associated hash with heroin, it was propaganda, nothing else, smoking hash was a bid for freedom for me, but although hash was completely harmless it was in the same category as harmful drugs, in a way smoking it made me a drug addict, and what an immense and exhilarating thought that was.

I wanted to steal, drink, smoke hash and experiment with other drugs — cocaine, amphetamines, mescaline — to freak out and live the great rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, to feel to the last drop of my blood that I couldn’t give a flying fuck about anything. Oh, what appeal there was in that! But then there was all the rest of me inside that wanted to be a clever student, a decent son, a good person. If only I could blow that to smithereens!

This was an attempt to do that. The thought of smoking hash, the thought that I could actually do it, that I could actually become a junkie, if I ever dared, it was only a question of doing it, making the move, this simply made my insides explode with happiness and excitement as I walked up the slope under the leafy trees to where Geir Helge hung out. I asked if he had anything to smoke, I said I had never done it before, he would have to show me, which he was more than happy to do. After we had finished I walked slowly down the slope and into the crowd. At first I didn’t notice anything in particular, perhaps I was too drunk, Geir Helge had said something about this, that it didn’t always work the first time and it didn’t always work if you were too drunk. But when I got into the back of the russ van, which was empty, something happened. I moved my shoulder and it was as though the joint had been lubricated with oil, indeed as though the whole of me was full of oil. A tiny, tiny movement anywhere was enough to fill my body with sensual pleasure. So I sat there wagging a finger, lifting one shoulder, shaking a hip, and wave after wave of pure sensuality washed through my body.

Espen stuck his head in.

‘What are you up to? Are you ill?’

I opened my eyes and straightened up. The movement was so vigorous that a jolt of pleasure rippled through me.

‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘I’m having an absolutely fantastic time. But I want to be alone. I’ll be out afterwards.’

I wasn’t, I fell asleep, and in the following days I smoked as much hash as I could, as well as drinking. The last nights before Constitution Day, 17 May, I was so stoned and drunk that I didn’t know where I had been, and when I woke up that morning I was in a russ van, we were parked in some square, and outside the windows the streets were lined deep with people. Vaguely I remembered we had been to Tresse and that at some point we had been sitting under a tarpaulin in a double-ender moored to the pontoons, together with some uncommunicative and inert man, and that Espen had later run over and dragged Sjur and me away, the man was dead, he said, but when we stood by the boat it was empty. Espen desperately ran up and down, and then I remembered nothing else. How many minutes of the long night were left? Ten maybe?

Once we came across a tramp, he was sitting on a bench in the park, we stood around him chatting. He said he had sailed with Leif Larsen during the war, running refugees and agents between the Shetlands and Norway. From then on I called him the Shetland Shit. Laughed and repeated it as often as I could. Hi, Shetland Shit! After a while I went behind him to have a piss, and then I pissed on him, up and down his back. Then we drifted on through the night, settling here, settling there, there was always someone with a beer or a bottle of spirits. I laughed, danced, drank and smooched with whoever was there. I could go over to a girl in the class and tell her she had always been on my mind, I had always stolen furtive glances at her, it was a lie, but it did the trick, everything had opened up. Everything was open.