Karl Knausgaard - Some Rain Must Fall

She walked across the floor, half a litre in each hand, and sat down.

‘Who do you reckon will make it?’ she said.

‘What do you mean?’

‘In class, at school.’

I didn’t care much for her choice of word — I preferred academy — but I said nothing.

‘I don’t know,’ I said.

‘I said reckon. Of course you don’t know.’

‘I liked what you wrote.’

‘Flattery will get you nowhere.’

‘It’s true.’

‘Knut: nothing to say. Trude: posturing. Else Karin: housewife’s prose. Kjetil: childish. Bjørg: boring. Nina: good. She’s repressed, but she writes well.’

She laughed and slyly glanced up at me.

‘What about me?’ I said.

‘You,’ she snorted. ‘You understand nothing about yourself and you have no idea what you’re doing.’

‘Do you know what you’re doing?’

‘No, but at least I know I don’t know,’ she said and laughed again. ‘And you’re a bit of a jessie. But you’ve got big strong hands, so that makes up for it.’

I looked away, my insides on fire.

‘I’ve always had a wicked tongue on me,’ she said.

I took some long swigs of the beer and scanned the room.

‘You weren’t offended by that little gibe, were you?’ she said with a giggle. ‘I could say far worse things about you if I wanted.’

‘Please don’t,’ I said.

‘You take yourself too seriously as well. But that’s your age. It’s not your fault.’

And what about you then! I felt like saying. What makes you think you’re so bloody good? And if I’m a jessie, you’re butch. You look like a man when you walk!

I said nothing though, and slowly but surely the fire subsided, not least because I was beginning to get seriously drunk and approaching the point where nothing meant anything any longer, or to be more accurate, when everything meant the same.

A couple more beers and I would be there.

Into the room, between all the occupied tables, strode a familiar figure. It was Morten, wearing his red leather jacket and carrying a light brown rucksack on his back and a folded umbrella in his hand, the long one I had seen before. When he spotted me his face lit up and he rushed at full speed across to our table, tall and lanky, his hair spiky and glistening with gel.

‘Hi there!’ he grinned. ‘Out drinking, are you?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘This is Petra. Petra, this is Morten.’

‘Hi,’ Morten said.

Petra gave him the once-over and nodded, then turned and looked the other way.

‘We’ve been out with the Academy,’ I said. ‘The others went home early.’

‘Thought writers were on the booze 24/7,’ he said. ‘I’ve been in the reading room until now. I don’t know how this is going to work out. I don’t understand a thing! Not a thing!’

He laughed and looked around.

‘Actually I’m on my way home. Just popped by to see if there was anyone I knew. But I’ll tell you one thing: I admire you writers-to-be.’

He looked at me seriously for a moment.

‘Well, I’m off,’ he said. ‘See you!’

When he had rounded the corner by the bar I told Petra he was my neighbour. She nodded casually, drank the rest of her beer and got up.

‘I’ll be off now,’ she said. ‘There’s a bus in fifteen minutes.’

She lifted her jacket from the back of the chair, clenched her fist and put it in the sleeve.

‘Weren’t you going to sleep at my place? It’s not a problem, you know.’

‘No, I’m going home. But I might take you up on your offer another time,’ she said. ‘Bye.’

So, with her hand round her bag and a steadfast gaze ahead she walked towards the staircase. I didn’t know anyone else there but sat for a little longer in case someone turned up, but then being on my own began to prey on my mind and I put on my raincoat, grabbed my bag and went out into the blustery night.

I woke up at around eleven to rattling and banging inside the wall. I sat up and looked around. What was that noise? Then I realised and slumped back down. The post boxes were on the other side of the wall, but so far I hadn’t slept long enough to know what it sounded like when the postman came.

Above me someone was walking around singing.

But the room, wasn’t it remarkably light?

I got up and lifted the curtain.

The sun was shining.

I got dressed, went over to the shop and bought some milk, rolls and the daily papers. When I returned I opened my post box. Apart from two bills that had been sent on to me there were two parcel-delivery cards. I hurried to the Post Office and was given two fat parcels, which I opened with the scissors in the kitchen. Shakespeare’s Collected Works, T.S. Eliot’s Collected Poems and Plays, Oscar Wilde’s Collected Works and a book with photos of naked women.

I sat down on my bed to flick through it, trembling with excitement. No, they weren’t completely naked, many of them were wearing high heels and one had a blouse hanging open around her slim tanned upper body.

I put down the book and had breakfast while reading the three papers I had bought. The main news in Bergens Tidende was a murder that had taken place yesterday morning. There was a picture of the crime scene, which I thought I recognised, and I had my suspicions confirmed when I read the text underneath: the murder had been committed only a couple of blocks from where I was sitting now. And as if that wasn’t enough the suspected murderer was still at large. He was eighteen years old and attended Technical School, it said. For some reason, this made quite an impression on me. I pictured him at this moment in a basement bedsit, in my imagination, alone behind drawn curtains which every so often he parted to see what was going on in the street, he viewed it from ankle height, his heart pounding and despair tearing at his insides because of what he had done. He punched the wall, paced the room, considering whether to hand himself in or wait for a few days and then try to get away, on board one of the boats perhaps, to Denmark or England, and then hitchhike his way down through Europe. But he had no money and no possessions, only what he stood up in.

I peered out of the window to see if anything unusual was happening, uniformed officers gathering, for example, or some parked police cars, but everything was as normal — except for the sunshine, that is, which hung like a veil of light over everything.

I could talk to Ingvild about the murder, it was a good topic of conversation, his presence here, in my part of town, right now, while virtually the whole of the police force was out looking for him.

Perhaps I could write about that too? A boy who kills an old man and goes into hiding while the police slowly close in on him?

I would never ever be able to do that.

A wave of disappointment washed over me and I got up, took the plate and glass, put them in the kitchen sink, together with all the other dirty crockery I had used during the week. Petra was wrong about one thing, and that was that I didn’t understand myself, I thought, looking across the resplendent green park as a woman crossed with a child in each hand. Self-knowledge was the one quality I did have. I knew exactly who I was. Not many of my acquaintances knew as much about themselves.

I went back into the sitting room, was about to bend down to browse through my records when it was as if my eye was dragged towards the new book. A stab of joy and fear went through me. It might as well be now, I was alone, I had nothing in particular to do, there was no reason to defer it, I thought, and picked the book up, looked over my shoulder, how could I take it down to the toilet unnoticed? A plastic bag? No, who on earth takes a plastic bag with them to the toilet?