I just turned and went back up the stairs. I did not want to give him the pleasure of seeing my moist eyes. The shame of being on the verge of tears at the age of fifteen, soon sixteen, was stronger than the ignominy of his mimicking me. I did not usually cry anymore, but my father had a hold on me that I never succeeded in breaking. But I was certainly capable of registering a protest. I went up to my room, grabbed some new cassettes, stuffed them in my bag and carried it down to the room beside the hall, where the wardrobe was, put a few sweaters in, went into the hall, put on my coat, slung the bag over my shoulder, and headed into the yard. The snow had formed a crust; the lights above the garage were reflected in the glistening snow which was all yellow below the streetlamps. The meadow down the road was also bright because it was a starry night and the almost full moon hung above the uplands on the other side of the river. I began to walk. My footsteps crunched in the ruts left by tires. I stopped by the mailbox. Perhaps I should have said that I was going. But that would have ruined everything. The whole point was to make him consider what he had done.
What was the time, I wondered?
I yanked the mitten half off my left hand, pulled up my sleeve and peered. Twenty to eight. There was a bus in half an hour. I still had time to go back.
But no. Not likely.
I slung the bag over my back again and continued down the hill. Glancing up at the house for a last time, I saw smoke rising from the chimney. He must have thought I was still in my room. Obviously he had felt remorse, carried in some wood, and lit the stove.
The ice on the river creaked. The sound seemed to ripple along and climb the gentle valley slopes.
Then there was a boom.
A thrill went down my spine. That sound always filled me with joy. I looked up at the sweep of stars. The moon hanging over the ridge. The car headlights on the other side of the river tearing deep gashes of light into the darkness. The trees, black and silent, though not hostile, stood dotted along the banks of the river. On the white surface, the two wooden water-level gauges, which the river covered in the autumn but now, at low water, were naked and shiny.
He had lit the fire. It was a way of saying he was sorry. So, leaving without a word no longer had any purpose.
I retraced my steps. Let myself in, began to unlace my boots. I heard his footsteps in the living room and straightened up. He opened the door, paused with his fingers on the handle, and looked at me.
“Going already?” he asked.
That I had already gone and come back was impossible to explain, so I just nodded.
“Reckon so,” I said. “Start early tomorrow.”
“Yes, of course,” he said. “Think I’ll pop by in the afternoon. Just so you know.”
“Okay,” I said.
He watched me for a few seconds. Then he closed the door and went back into the living room.
I opened it again.
“Dad?” I said.
He turned and looked at me without speaking.
“You know it’s parents’ evening tomorrow, don’t you? At six.”
“Is it?” he asked. “Well, I’d better go then.”
He turned around and continued into the living room, whereupon I closed the door, laced up my boots, slung my bag over my shoulder, and set off for the bus stop, which I reached ten minutes later. Below me was the waterfall which had frozen in great arcs and arteries of ice, dimly illuminated by the light from the parquet factory. Behind it and behind me rose the uplands. They surrounded the scattered, illuminated habitation in the river valley with darkness and impersonality. The stars above seemed to be lying at the bottom of a frozen sea.
The bus rolled up, its lights sweeping the road, I showed my card to the driver and sat down one seat from the back on the left, which I always did if it was free. There wasn’t much traffic, we zipped along Solsletta, Ryensletta, drove by the beach at Hamresanden, into the forest on the way to Timenes, out onto the E18, over Varodd Bridge, past the gymnas in Gimle, and into town.
The flat was down by the river. Grandad’s office was on the left as you came in. The flat was on the right. Two living rooms, a kitchen, and a small bathroom. The first floor was also split into two, on one side there was a huge loft, on the other the room where I lived. I had a bed, a desk, a small sofa, and a coffee table, a cassette player, a cassette rack, a pile of schoolbooks, a few magazines including some music mags, and in the cupboard a heap of clothes.
The house was old, it had once belonged to my father’s paternal grandmother, in other words, my great-grandmother, who had died there. As far as I had gathered, Dad had been close to her when he was growing up and spent a lot of time down here then. For me she was a kind of mythological figure, strong, authoritative, self-willed, mother of three sons, of whom my father’s father was one. In the photographs I had seen she was always dressed in black buttoned-up dresses. Toward the end of her life, that began in the 1870s, she had been senile for almost an entire decade or had started to “unravel” as the family called it. That was all I knew about her.
I took off my boots and went up the staircase, steep as a ladder, and into my room. It was cold; I put on the fan heater. Switched on the cassette player. Echo and the Bunnymen, Heaven Up Here. Lay down on the bed and began to read. I was halfway through Dracula by Bram Stoker. I had already read it once, the year before, but it was just as intense and fantastic this time. The town outside, with its low, steady drone of cars and buildings, was absent from my consciousness, returning only in waves as though I were in motion. But I was not, I lay reading, completely motionless, until half past eleven when I brushed my teeth, undressed, and went to bed.
It was a very special feeling to wake up in the morning, all alone in a flat, it was as though emptiness were not only around me but also inside me. Until I started at the gymnas I had always woken to a house where Mom and Dad were already up and on their way to work with all that entailed, cigarette smoke, coffee drinking, listening to the radio, eating breakfast, and car engines warming up outside in the dark. This was something else, and I loved it. I also loved walking the kilometer or so through the old residential area to school, it always filled me with thoughts I liked, such as that I was someone. Most of the kids at school came from town or neighboring areas, it was only me and a handful of others who came from the country, and that was a huge disadvantage. It meant that all the others knew one another and met outside school hours, hung around together in cliques. These cliques were also operative during school hours, and you couldn’t just tag along, not at all, so during every break there was a problem: where should I go? Where should I stand? I could sit in the library and read, or sit in the classroom and pretend to be going through homework, but that was tantamount to signaling I was one of the outsiders and was no good in the long run, so in October that year I started smoking. Not because I liked it, nor because it was cool, but because it gave me somewhere to be: now I could skulk around doorways with the other smokers in every break without anyone asking questions. When school was over and I was walking back to my place the problem ceased to exist. First of all, because I would usually go to Tveit to train or to meet Jan Vidar, my best pal from the last school, and secondly because no one saw me and therefore could not know that I sat on my own in the flat all those evenings that I did.
It was different in the lessons. I was in a class with three other boys and twenty-six girls, and I had a role, I had a place, I could speak there, answer questions, discuss, do schoolwork, be someone. I had been brought together with others, all of them had been, I had not forced myself on anyone and my being there was not questioned. I sat at the back in the corner, beside me was Bassen, before me Molle, at the front of the same row Pål, and the rest of the classroom was occupied by girls. Twenty-six sixteen-year-old girls. I liked some better than others, but none of them enough to say I was in love. There was Monica, whose parents were Hungarian Jews, she was as sharp as a razor, knowledgeable, and doggedly defended Israel to the bitter end when we debated the Palestine conflict, a stance I could not understand, it was so obvious, Israel was a military state, Palestine a victim. And there was Hanne, an attractive girl from Vågsbygd, who sang in a choir, was a Christian and quite naïve, but someone whose appearance and presence cheered you up. Then there was Siv, blond, tanned, and long-legged who on one of the first days had said the area between the Cathedral School and the Business School was like an American campus, a statement which singled her out for me at first as she knew something I didn’t, about a world of which I would have liked to be part. She had lived in Ghana for the last few years and boasted too much and laughed too loud. There was Benedicte too with sharp, almost fifties-like facial features, curly hair, clothes with a hint of class. And Tone, so graceful in her movements, dark-haired and serious, she sketched, and seemed more independent than the others. And Anne, who had braces on her teeth and whom I had made out with in Bassen’s mother’s hairdressing chair at a class party that autumn; there was Hilde, fair-haired and rosy-cheeked, firm of character but still somehow anonymous, who often turned around to me; and there was Irene, the girls’ focal point, she had that attractiveness that can dazzle and wilt in the space of one glance; and there was Nina who had such a robust, masculine frame but also something fragile and bashful about her. And Mette, small, edgy, and scheming. She was the one who liked Bruce Springsteen and always wore denim, the one who was so small and laughed all the time, the one who dressed in clothes that were as provocative as they were vulgar and smelled of smoke, the one whose gums were visible every time she smiled, attractive apart from that, but her laughter, a kind of constant giggle that accompanied everything she said, and all the stupid things she came out with, and the fact that she had a slight lisp, detracted from her beauty, in a way, or invalidated it. I was in the midst of a deluge of girls, a torrent of bodies, a sea of breasts and thighs. Seeing them in formal surroundings alone, behind their desks, only made their presence stronger. In a way it gave my days meaning, I looked forward to entering the classroom, sitting where I was entitled to sit, together with all these girls.