They opened their books to see what I had written.
‘Don’t we get grades?’ Hildegunn said.
‘Not for such a small exercise,’ I said. ‘I gave you the exercise mostly so that I could get an impression of you.’
Andrea and Vivian compared their comments.
‘You’ve written almost the same for both of us!’ Vivian said. ‘Are you so feeble?’
‘Feeble?’ I said with a smile. ‘You’ll get grades which will show you all where you stand soon enough. I’m not sure that’s much to look forward to.’
Behind me, the door opened. I turned. It was Richard. He went over and sat down at a table by the wall while motioning me to carry on.
What was this? Was he going to observe me?
‘The first thing we have to get to grips with is your dialect,’ I said. ‘You can’t write like you speak. That’s no good at all. You have to write jeg and not æ. Er and not e. Hvordan and not koss.’
‘But that’s what we say!’ Vivian said and twisted round in her chair to glance at Richard, who sat with his arms crossed and face impassive. ‘Why should we write jeg when we say æ, eh?’
‘And Harrison said we could write like that last year,’ Hildegunn said.
‘He said it was better to write something than to write correctly,’ Live said.
‘Last year you were at a school for children,’ I said. ‘This year you’re in a higher school. Where your language has to be standardised, as it’s known. This is how it is up and down the country. We can talk as we like, but when we write, it has to be standard Norwegian. There is nothing to discuss. Unless you want your essays covered in red ink and low grades, you have to do this.’
‘Oh!’ Andrea said, looking first at me, then Richard. The others giggled. I asked them to get out their books and then, when they had all turned to the same page, I asked Hildegunn to start reading. Richard got up, nodded briefly to me and left the room.
In the break I went to his office and knocked on the door.
He looked up from his desk as I walked in.
‘Hi, Karl Ove,’ he said.
‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I was just wondering why you came into my lesson.’
The gaze he sent me was partly probing, partly curious. Then he smiled and chewed his lower lip, this was a quirk of his, I had realised, his bearded chin jutted forward and made him resemble a goat.
‘I just wanted to see how you were getting on in the class,’ he said. ‘I will be doing that now and again. There are quite a few of you who have no training. I need to get an idea of how you are coping. Teaching is not easy, you know.’
‘I promise to tell you if I have any problems,’ I said. ‘You can trust me.’
He laughed.
‘I know that. That’s not the issue. Go and have yourself a break now!’
He looked down at the papers in front of him. That was a rank-pulling number, and for a few seconds I refused to yield to it; however there was nothing else I could do, I had nothing else to say and there was nothing unreasonable about what he had said, so in the end I turned and went into the staffroom.
There were three letters in my PO box when I went to the post office after school. One from Bassen, who had started university in Stavanger, one from Lars, who had moved in with his girlfriend in Kristiansand, and one from Eirik, who was now studying at the Institute of Technology in Trondheim.
Bassen told me about an incident that had taken place just before he moved. He had gone home with a girl, or rather a woman, because she was twenty-five, and while they were on the job, as he put it, she had suddenly had some kind of fit. He had been scared out of his wits. It was as though she was being convulsed by electric shocks, he wrote, her body was quivering and shaking, he thought it was epilepsy, he withdrew and stood up.
I was terrified, Karl Ove! I didn’t know whether to ring for an ambulance or what. What if she died! In fact that’s what I thought she was going to do. But then she opened her eyes and pulled me back down and asked me what I was doing. Keep going! she shouted. Can you imagine? She’d only been having an orgasm! That’s mature women for you!
Walking along, I laughed as I read his letter, but I also felt a stab of something else because I had never slept with a girl, I’d never had sex, in other words I was a virgin, and was not only ashamed that for two years I had been lying about the amount of sexual experience I’d had, which Bassen and several others were presumably taken in by, but I was also desperate for it, to sleep with a girl, any girl actually, and to experience what Bassen and my other pals experienced on such a regular basis. Whenever I heard about their escapades it was as though equal portions of enervation and desire spread through me, equal portions of powerlessness and power, for the longer I went without sleeping with a girl the more afraid of it I became. I could talk to others about almost any other problem I had, to ease my mind, but I couldn’t reveal this, not to anyone, not ever, not under any circumstances, and whenever I thought about it, which was not seldom, it must have been several times an hour, I was overcome by a kind of black gloom, a gloom of hopelessness, sometimes only fleetingly, like a cloud drifting past the sun, sometimes for longer periods, and whatever form the hopelessness took I could not surmount it, there was so much doubt and torment associated with it. Could I? Could I? If, against all the odds, I succeeded in manoeuvring myself into a suitable situation and was in a room alone with a naked girl, would I be able to make love to her? Would I be able to go through with it?
All the secrecy and pretence surrounding this didn’t make it any easier for me.
‘Do you know what it says on the teat of condoms?’ Trond once said, in a break that spring, as he fixed me with his eye. We were standing in a group on the grass outside the school and jabbering away.
It was me he singled out.
Why? Did he suspect that I was lying about the girls, about the sex I’d had?
I blushed.
What should I say? No, and give myself away? Or yes, and then invite the natural follow-up question, what then?
‘No, what does it say?’ I said.
‘Have you got such a little prick?’ he said.
They laughed.
I laughed too, unutterably relieved.
But Espen was staring at me, wasn’t he? Kind of knowingly, and semi-revelling in it as a result?
Two days later he drove me home at night. We had been at Gisle’s together.
‘How many have you actually shagged, Karl Ove?’ he said as we drove up the gentle gradient by Krageboen, flanked on both sides of the road by crumbling old houses.
‘Why do you ask?’ I said.
‘I was just wondering,’ he said, sending me a glance before returning his eyes to the road ahead. The smile playing on his lips was furtive.
I frowned and pretended to concentrate.
‘Erm,’ I said. ‘Six. No, hang on, five.’
‘Who were they?’
‘Is this the Inquisition or what?’
‘Noo. Surely you can answer me that?’
‘Cecilie, you know, the girl I went out with from Arendal,’ I said.
Outside, the shop where I had pinched so many sweets drifted past. It had closed down ages ago. Espen indicated.
‘And?’ he said.
‘And Marianne,’ I said.
‘Did you fuck Marianne?’ he said. ‘I didn’t know that. Why didn’t you say?’