What was brilliant about the place was that it made it easier for you to approach girls. Usually they were out of your reach, in recent months the majority had a blasé, world-weary air about them, they sat there in the sun chatting or knitting during the breaks with their cassette recorders on, most of what we did was childish, they were impossible to reach. Even though I tried, because I still spoke their language, it never led to anything. As soon as the bell rang we went our separate ways.
But at the youth club it was different, there you could go straight up to a girl and ask her to dance. So long as you didn’t set your sights too high and approach the most attractive year-nine with boys buzzing round her, it always went well, they said yes and all you had to do was step onto the floor, press yourself against her warm, soft body, and sway from side to side until the song had finished. The hope was that it would develop into something more, perhaps being followed by stolen glances and tiny mischievous smiles, but even if it didn’t, these moments had value in themselves, not least because of all the promises they bore of a future paradise in complete nakedness. All the girls I had gone out with so far, Anne Lisbet, Tone, Mariann, and Kajsa, went to school and were at the youth club, but even though I could still feel a stab in the heart when I saw them with boys, they were dead to me, history, from them I wanted nothing except that they shouldn’t say anything to others about the person I had been. Especially in Kajsa’s case. I had realized that what happened in the forest was ridiculous, I had behaved like a complete clod, I was deeply ashamed, and had decided long ago that I would never tell anyone, not even Lars. Especially not Lars. But she had no reason to feel ashamed, and I kept a bit of an eye on her when she was in the vicinity, to see whether she would lean forward and whisper, and everyone would look at me. It didn’t happen. Instead the body blows came from other, unexpected sources. Right from the fourth class I’d had my eye on Lise in the parallel class, she was good-looking and I liked watching her, the way she smiled, what she wore, the sharpness in her character, she was one of those who would say if she didn’t agree, she was fearless, but her facial expressions were gentle, and when we started the seventh class, her figure was beautifully rounded. More and more my eyes were drawn to her. She was Mariann’s best friend, and after the arguments since I had ended it with her had subsided Mariann and I would often sit together and chat or walk together back from school, and it was on one of those occasions she repeated something Lise had said about me that day.
I had gone into the old gymnasium, which during the day was used as a dining hall where we could tuck into our lunch boxes in the breaks. I had gone in, and when Lise, who was sitting at a very full table, saw me coming she had said, “Yuk, he’s so revolting! I get the heebie-jeebies whenever I see him!”
“Well, I don’t agree,” Mariann added after she had told me. “I don’t think you’re a jessie, either.”
“Jessie?” I said.
“Yes, that’s what everyone says.”
“What?”
“Didn’t you know?”
“No.”
And as if there had been some secret pact not to call me a jessie to my face, before I had been properly but discreetly informed, after the conversation with Mariann it began to be used against me, spreading with the speed of sound. Suddenly I was the jessie. Everyone called me that. The girls in the class, the girls from other classes, some of the boys in the class, boys from other classes, in fact, even on the soccer team they would call me that. One day John turned to me in training and said, “What a damned jessie you are.” Even younger kids, fourth-years on the estate, had picked it up and would shout it after me. “Jessie, jessie, jessie,” I heard all around me. A sentence had been passed, and it could not have been worse. If I was arguing with someone, for example Kristin Tamara, she swept away all the arguments and crushed me totally by just saying: “You’re such a jessie. You jessie. Hey, Jessie! Come here, Jessie.” This got me down, I thought of almost nothing else, it was like a black wall in my consciousness and impossible to escape. It was the worst; there was nothing I could do.
It wasn’t as if I could behave in a less effeminate way for a couple of days and then everyone would say, “Oh, you aren’t a jessie after all!” No, this went deeper, and it would be there forever. They had something on me and they used it for all it was worth. Apart from Lars, he just said I shouldn’t take any notice, and for that I was grateful, one of my first thoughts when this all started was that Lars would no longer want to be seen with me, suddenly he had a lot to lose. But it didn’t bother him. Neither Geir nor Dag Magne nor Dag Lothar said it. And of course none of the teachers or parents. But everyone else did. The term undermined any other qualities I had, it made no difference what I could or couldn’t do, I was a jessie.
In a biology lesson, as we were about to focus on human reproduction, as Fru Sørsdal called it, Jostein from the parallel class, our goalkeeper, came into the class and sat down at a free table. At first he wasn’t noticed, the lesson began, Fru Sørsdal talked about homosexuality, and Jostein said, Karl Ove knows all about that! He’s one himself! You should ask him to tell you. The laughter that followed was desultory, he had gone too far and was at once ejected, but a seed was sown. Was I perhaps homosexual as well? Was that what was wrong with me? I began to ponder on that. I was a jessie, perhaps even a homo, and, if so, all hope was lost. Then there would be nothing to live for. Dark times, they had never been as dark as now.
I said nothing to Mom, of course, but after a few weeks I plucked up courage and told Yngve. He was on his way up the hill to the shop when I caught him.
“Are you in a hurry or what?” I said.
“Pretty much,” he said. “What’s the matter?”
“I’ve got a problem,” I said.
“Oh, yes?” he said.
“They’re calling me names,” I said.
He glanced at me as though he didn’t really want to know.
“What names?”
“Yeah …,” I said. “Well, it’s …”
He stopped.
“What are they calling you? Tell me!”
“Well, they call me a jessie,” I said. “I’m the jessie.”
Yngve laughed.
How could he laugh?
“That’s no big deal, Karl Ove,” he said.
“Jesus Christ,” I said. “Of course it is! Don’t you understand?”
“Think about David Bowie,” he said. “He’s androgynous. It’s a good thing in rock, you see. David Sylvian as well.”