‘No,’ he said, rubbing his chin as he looked at me.
‘But he’s a. . well, chubby lad. Others tell him that. And perhaps he’s not as good at ball games as some of the others. So he avoids them. And that means he’s sometimes left to his own devices. He goes around on his own.’
‘Yes.’
‘I don’t know what we should do,’ I said. ‘But it’s a small school. We’re not talking about a lot of pupils. Everything’s quite open. Everyone knows everyone else inside out. So if he was being bullied it would be easy to do something about it. I mean, these are not children we don’t know, big gangs or anything like that. This is Stig, Reidar, Endre. Do you understand what I’m trying to say? It shouldn’t be impossible to talk to them about it.’
‘No,’ he said.
Oh, he did trust me, he was thinking through what I had said, and it hurt, it hurt him, he was a father in his forties, I was a boy of eighteen, so should he listen to me?
‘It’s all fine in the classroom,’ I went on. ‘There may be the odd comment, but there is about everyone, more or less, and if anything more serious crops up of course it’s dealt with at once, so what we’re really talking about is the breaks. Maybe we can try to set up some activities he likes and can do, and get others to join in? I can talk to Hege about it, and then we can draw up a little plan. It might be as simple as talking to the other boys and explaining the situation to them. I don’t think they know how he feels.’
‘I think they do,’ he said. ‘I think they know all too well. They never come back to play with him any more, and they exclude him from their games.’
‘Right,’ I said. ‘But I don’t have the impression there’s anything malicious in it or that it means much to them. It’s more that it’s just happened that way.’
‘Won’t it get worse if you talk to them about it?’
‘It’s a risk we have to take. It has to be handled sensitively. And they’re nice children, all of them. I think it’ll be fine.’
‘Do you think so?’ he asked.
I nodded.
‘I’ll have a word with Hege on Monday. Then we’ll put together a plan of action.’
He got up. ‘Then I won’t take up any more of your time.’
‘It’s not a problem,’ I said.
‘Thank you very much!’ he said, and shook my hand.
‘Everything will be fine,’ I said.
After he had gone I flopped down on the sofa. The sitting room was freezing cold, the window was still open. Noises filtered in from outside and filled the room, which in the atmospheric conditions became distorted, everything seemed to be close. It sounded as if the waves on the shore were beating against the house wall. Footsteps on the road, the crunch of the snow, seemed to come from out of thin air, as though a ghost were walking past, on its way to the sea. A car passed, the drone of the engine rebounded off the wall I was lying next to. Someone laughed somewhere, how eerie, I thought, the devils are out tonight. The state of disquiet Jo’s father had produced in me, the chasm between his trust and my betrayal, was like an ache in my chest. I got up, put on a record, the one I had been playing most of that year, Lloyd Cole and the Commotions’ latest, which I sensed would always remind me of the moods up here, lit a cigarette, closed the window, pressed my forehead against the chilly glass. After a while I went into the little study adjoining the sitting room, full of piles of books and papers, switched on the light and sat down at the desk.
The second I laid eyes on the sheet in the typewriter I saw someone had written something on it. I went cold. The first half of the page was mine, and then came five lines that weren’t. I read them.
Gabriel stuck his fingers up her wet cunt. Oh my God, Lisa groaned. Gabriel took his fingers out and smelled them. Cunt, he thought. Lisa was squirming underneath him. Gabriel knocked back a slug of vodka. Then he grinned and unzipped his fly and stuffed his hard dick up her wrinkly cunt. She screamed with delight. Gabriel, that’s my boy!
Shaken to the core, close to tears, I sat there staring at the five lines. It was a well-observed parody of the way I wrote. A good imitation. I knew who had done it, it was Tor Einar, and I recognised the spirit in which it had been done, the spirit of the good-natured joke, he’d ‘had a good laugh’ while he was doing it, read it aloud to Nils Erik, who had laughed his Østland laugh.
It wasn’t meant nastily, but I couldn’t forgive them for this. I wanted nothing more to do with them, didn’t want to speak to them beyond what was absolutely necessary: work and practical arrangements.
I tore the sheet out of the typewriter, crumpled it up and threw it on the floor. Then I got dressed and went out into the night. No point going to the village, along the illuminated road, I would be seen and perhaps also spoken to. Instead I followed the dead-end road after the bend, it ran along the gentle mountainside, it was dotted with houses. At the end there was a huge pile of snow. Behind it there was nothing, just snow, low trees and a rock face that after approximately fifty metres rose sharply in the darkness. The snow reached to above my knees, it was futile going any further, so I turned and waded through the snow down to the sea, stood gazing at the black water and the waves that rolled into the shore again and again, without much power, they were more like thoughtless little slaps.
Fuck.
It wasn’t just a text he had tampered with, that wouldn’t have offended me in the slightest, it was something else, much more than that, there was a soul in it, my soul. And when he tampered with that, I could feel it. It looked different from the outside than from the inside, and it was perhaps that which lay at the heart of my despair. What I wrote was worthless. So that meant I was worthless too.
I retraced my steps. At the crossroads I stood not knowing what to do. I could walk five hundred metres along one road, ending up at the school, or five hundred metres along the other, also ending up at the school. There were no other options. The shop was closed, the snack bar was closed, and if anyone was drinking somewhere I didn’t know about it. There was no one I knew well enough to drop in on. The sole exceptions were Nils Erik and Tor Einar, whom I no longer wanted anything to do with, and Hege, whom I didn’t feel like visiting now, and nor could I, as her husband, who was always exceptionally open towards me but evidently also had a heart darkened with jealousy, was at home. Sitting at home reading and playing records wasn’t an option either, I saw, a light had come on in the sitting room, which meant that Nils Erik was there.
I couldn’t stay standing under the lamp post much longer either, someone somewhere would be watching me and wondering what I was doing.
Slowly I moved off. On reaching the house I warily opened the door, carefully removed my coat and was about to creep upstairs as quietly as I could when the hall door opened and Nils Erik stood looking at me.
‘Hi!’ he said. ‘We got mølje at Tor Einar’s grandmother’s. Shame you weren’t with us! It’s a bit of a delicacy — cod with liver and roe and onions!’
‘I’m going to bed,’ I said, avoiding his eyes. ‘Goodnight.’
‘Already?’ he said.
I didn’t answer, opened the door to my room, slipped in and lay on the mattress in the dark, fully clothed. Staring at the ceiling. Heard Nils Erik washing up in the kitchen. He had the radio on. Now and then his humming, which I couldn’t hear, but after two months of living in the house with him I knew he was humming, developed slowly into loud hearty singing. A car with its stereo on full blast drove by. The throb of the drums became fainter and fainter as it went up the hill and followed the road to the other end, then the drums grew louder until they were again pounding outside the wall next to which I was lying.