Straight afterwards the bell rang and the teachers came in one by one, some silent, others with chirpy one-liners for everyone. I had put the Thermos on the table and was standing by the window with a full cup in my hand. The pupils were already running around outside. I tried to put names to the faces, but the only one I could remember was Kai Roald, the boy in the seventh class, perhaps because I had sympathised with him, the reluctance I had sensed in his body occasionally countermanded by an interested, perhaps even an enthusiastic, glint in his eyes. And then Liv, the stunner in the ninth, of course. She was standing up against the wall, her hands in her back pockets, wearing a beige anorak, blue jeans and worn grey trainers, chewing gum and stroking away some strands of hair that the wind had blown into her face. And Stian, over there, standing legs apart, hands in his pockets, chatting to his beanpole of a friend.
I turned back to the room. Nils Erik smiled at me.
‘Where do you live?’ he said.
‘Down the hill from here,’ I said. ‘A basement flat.’
‘Under me,’ Torill said.
‘Where did you end up?’ I said.
‘At the top of the village. Also a basement flat.’
‘Yes, under me!’ Sture said.
‘So that’s how they’ve organised it,’ I said. ‘The trained teachers get the flats with the view and everything while the temps get the cellars?’
‘You may as well learn that right from the start,’ Sture said. ‘All privileges have to be earned. I grafted for three years at a teacher training college. There has to be some bloody payback.’
He laughed.
‘Shall we carry your bags for you too, then?’ I said.
‘No, that’s too much responsibility for the likes of you. But every Saturday morning you’re expected to come and clean for us,’ he said with a wink.
‘I’ve heard there’s a party in Hellevika this weekend,’ I said. ‘Anyone here going?’
‘You’ve settled in fast, I have to say,’ Nils Erik said.
‘Who told you?’ Hege said.
‘Heard it on the grapevine,’ I said. ‘I was wondering whether to go or not. But it’s not much fun going alone.’
‘You’re never alone at a party up here,’ Sture said. ‘This is Northern Norway.’
‘Are you going?’ I said.
He shook his head.
‘I’ve got a family to take care of,’ he said. ‘But I’ll give you some tips. If you want.’ He laughed.
‘I was thinking of going,’ Jane said.
‘Me too,’ Vibeke said.
‘What about you?’ I said, looking at Nils Erik.
He shrugged.
‘Maybe. Is it on Friday or Saturday?’
‘Friday, I think,’ I said.
‘Maybe not such a bad idea,’ he said.
The bell rang.
‘We can talk about it later,’ he said and stood up.
‘OK,’ I said, put my cup down on the worktop, fetched my books from my workstation, went to the classroom, sat on the teacher’s desk and waited for the pupils to arrive.
When I walked down to my flat after school, my removal boxes were waiting in the porch. They contained everything I owned, which wasn’t much: a box of records, another with an old stereo in, one full of kitchen utensils and one with the odds and ends that had accumulated in my old room, plus some of mum’s books. It still felt as though I had been given a huge present as I carried them into the sitting room. I assembled the stereo, stacked the records against the wall, flicked through them, selected My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by Brian Eno and David Byrne, one of my all-time favourites, and with it resounding through the room I started to organise the other items. Everything I had brought with me from home when we moved — pans, plates, cups and glasses — I’d had around me ever since I was small and we lived in Tybakken. Brown plates, green glasses, a large pot with only one handle, blackened underneath and some way up the sides. I’d had the picture of John Lennon in my room all the time I was at gymnas and proceeded to hang it on the wall behind the typewriter. I’d had the enormous poster of Liverpool FC, the 1979/80 season, since I was eleven, and it was now given a position on the wall behind the sofa. It was perhaps their best team ever: Kenny Dalglish, Ray Clemence, Alan Hansen, Emlyn Hughes, Graeme Souness and John Toshack. I had grown tired of the Paul McCartney poster, so I put it in the bedroom cupboard, rolled up. When everything was tidy, I flicked through the records again imagining I was someone else, someone who had never seen them before, and wondered what they would have made of the collection, or rather of the person who owned this collection, in other words me. There were more than 150 LPs, most from the last two years, when I had been reviewing records for the local paper and spent almost all the money I had on new ones, often the complete back catalogue of bands I liked. Every single one of these records embraced an entire little world of its own. All of them expressed quite definite attitudes, sentiments and moods. But none of the records was an island, there were connections between them which spread outwards: Brian Eno, for example, started in Roxy Music, released solo records, produced U2 and worked with Jon Hassell, David Byrne, David Bowie and Robert Fripp; Robert Fripp played on Bowie’s Scary Monsters; Bowie produced Lou Reed, who came from Velvet Underground, and Iggy Pop, who came from the Stooges, while David Byrne was in Talking Heads, who on their best record, Remain in Light, used the guitarist Adrian Belew, who in turn played on several of Bowie’s records and was his favourite live guitarist for years. But the ramifications and connections didn’t only exist between the records, they extended right into my own life. The music was linked with almost everything I had done, none of the records came without a memory. Everything that had happened in the last five years rose like steam from a cup when I played a record, not in the form of thoughts or reasoning, but as moods, openings, space. Some general, others specific. If my memories were stacked in a heap on the back of my life’s trailer, music was the rope that held them together and kept it, my life, in position.
But this wasn’t its most important aspect, which was the music itself. When, for example, I played Remain in Light, which I had done regularly since the eighth class and never tired of, and the third track started, ‘The Great Curve’, with its fantastic rolling, multilayered accompaniment, brimful of energy, and the horns joined in, and afterwards the voices, it was impossible not to move, impossible, it ignited every part of my body, me, the world’s least rhythmic eighteen-year-old, sitting there squirming like a snake, to and fro, and I had to have it louder, I turned it up full blast, and then, already up on my feet, yes, then I had to dance, at that moment, even if I was alone. And, towards the end, on top of all this, like a bloody fighter plane above a tiny dancing village, comes Adrian Belew’s overriding guitar, and oh, oh God, I am dancing and happiness fills me to my fingertips and I only wish it could last, that the solo would go on and on, the plane would never land, the sun would never set, life would never end.
Or Heaven Up Here with Echo and the Bunnymen, the diametric opposite of Talking Heads, because here the essence is not rhythm or drive but sounds and moods, this tremendous wailing that springs from them, all longing and beauty and gloom, which swells and subsides in the music, no, which is the music. And even though I understand a lot of what he is singing about, even though I have read piles of interviews with him, as is the case with most of the bands whose records I own, this knowledge is obliterated by the music; the music doesn’t want to know about it, because in music there is no meaning, there is no explanation, there are no people, only voices, each with its own special distinctive quality, as though this is its essential quality, its essence, unadulterated, no body, no personality, yes, a kind of personality without a person, and on every record there is an infinity of such characteristics, from another world, which you meet whenever you play the music. I never worked out what it was that possessed me when music possessed me, other than that I always wanted it.