When I woke, at first I couldn’t remember a thing.
Everything was a complete blank.
I didn’t know who I was or where I was. All I knew was that I had woken up from something.
But the room was familiar, it was the bedroom in my flat.
How had I got here?
I sat up and could feel that I was still drunk.
What time was it?
What had happened?
I held my face in my hands. I had to have something to drink. Now. But I was too wiped out to go into the kitchen and slumped back on the bed.
I had been to the pre-party and on a bus. And had sung. Sung!
Oh no, oh no.
And I had put my hand on his shoulder. As if we were pals. But we weren’t. I wasn’t even a man. Only a stupid Sørlander who couldn’t even tie a knot. With arms as thin as drinking straws.
No, now I had to have something to drink.
I sat up. My body was as heavy as lead and totally uncooperative, but I forced my feet onto the floor, braced myself mentally and pushed myself onto my legs.
Oh God.
The yearning for my bed was so strong that I had to mobilise all the willpower I had not to go back. The few paces to the kitchen exhausted me, I had to hang over the worktop for a while before I could summon the energy to run the tap, fill a glass and drink. One more, and one more. And the distance to my bedroom seemed so immense that I stopped halfway and lay down on the sofa instead.
I hadn’t done anything stupid, had I?
I’d danced. Yes, I’d danced with all and sundry.
Hadn’t there been a woman in her sixties as well? Whom I had smiled at and danced with? And pressed myself against?
Yes, there had.
Oh my God. Oh my God.
Oh bloody hell.
Then it was as though the pressure inside me was ratcheted up, although there was no particular place that hurt, everything was painful, and the pain grew and grew, it was unbearable, and then my stomach muscles went into a spasm. I swallowed, dragged myself to my feet and tried to hold it back as I stumbled towards the bathroom, the pressure mounting and mounting, that was all that existed, and then I snatched at the toilet seat, flung it up, knelt down, wrapped my arms around the bowl and spewed a cascade of yellow and green vomit into the water with such force that it splashed back into my face, but it didn’t matter, nothing mattered any more, it was so wonderful to feel the relief, so fantastically wonderful.
I slumped to the floor.
Oh God, how good it was.
But then it came back. The muscles in my stomach writhed like snakes. Oh shit. I leaned over the bowl again, caught a glimpse of a pubic hair next to my forearm resting on the porcelain as the cramps tore through my empty stomach, and I opened my mouth and groaned ooooh, ooooooh, ooooooh, and nothing came out.
But then, without warning, a gob of yellow bile was expelled. It slid down the white porcelain, a sliver still hung from my mouth and I wiped it away, and I lay down on the bathroom floor. Was that the last? Was it over now?
Yes.
Suddenly everything was as serene as in church. I lay in a foetal position on the bathroom floor enjoying to the full the calm that had settled over my body.
What had I done with Irene?
Everything inside me tensed up.
Irene.
We had danced.
I had pressed myself against her, hard, rubbed my erect dick against her stomach.
And then?
Anything else?
It was as if this one scene was surrounded by darkness on all sides. I remembered it but nothing of what came before or after.
Anything bad?
I imagined her in a ditch, strangled with torn clothes.
No, no, what rubbish.
But the image returned. Irene in a ditch, strangled, her clothes torn.
How could the image be so clear? Her blue trousers, with those wonderfully full thighs beneath, a white blouse ripped open, part of a naked breast exposed, her eyes lifeless. The mud in the ditch, between the scattered blades of grass, yellow and green, the insane light, late in the night.
No, no, what rubbish.
How had I got home?
Hadn’t I been standing by the bus when the band stopped playing and the car park outside the community centre was packed with people laughing and screaming?
Yes.
And Irene was there!
We were kissing!
Me with a bottle of booze in one hand, drinking straight from it. She grabbed my lapel, she was the type of girl who grabbed lapels, and then she looked up at me, and then she said. .?
What did she say?
Oh hell, no.
Out of nowhere the snakes in my stomach entwined themselves again, and since there was nothing left below they were furious and squeezed so hard that I groaned. OOOOOHH I went. OOOHHHH. I wrapped my arms around the toilet bowl and hung my head over the hole, but nothing came, I was empty.
CHRIST ALMIGHTY! I shouted. STOP THIS! NOW!
Then came a mouthful of unbelievably thick bile, I spat it out and reckoned that was it, but it wasn’t, my stomach continued to churn, and I tried to alleviate it by hawking, from the bottom of my throat, for if only a little came up surely the vomiting would stop.
OOOHH. OOOHH. OOOHH.
Some phlegm came up.
There. That’s the way.
Finished now?
Yes.
Ah.
Oh.
I grabbed the edge of the sink with one hand and pulled myself up. Rinsed my face with cold water and staggered into the sitting room, not too difficult, fine, lay back down on the sofa, thought I should find out what the time was but didn’t have the energy, all that counted now was to wait for my body to recover and then the day could begin. After all, I was going to write another short story.
I had experienced blackouts like this, after which I remembered only fragments of what I had done, ever since I first started drinking. That was the summer I finished the ninth class, at the Norway Cup, when I just laughed and laughed, a momentous experience; being drunk took me to places where I was free and did what I wanted while it raised me aloft and rendered everything around me wonderful. Only recalling bits and pieces afterwards, isolated scenes brightly illuminated against a wall of darkness from which I emerged and disappeared back into, was the norm. And so it went on. The following spring I went to the carnival with Jan Vidar, mum had made me up as Bowie’s Aladdin Sane, the town was heaving with people wearing curly black wigs, hot pants and sequins, everywhere there was the throb of samba drums, but the air was cold, people were stiff, there was a huge amount of embarrassment to be overcome all the time, and this was visible in the processions, people were squirming rather than dancing, they wanted to feel emancipated, that was what this was about, they were not, they wanted to be, this was the 1980s, this was the new liberated and forward-looking era in which everything Norwegian was pathetic and everything Mediterranean was alive and free, when the sole TV channel which had informed the Norwegian population for twenty years about what one small circle of educated people in Oslo considered important for them to know was suddenly joined by new very different TV channels which took a lighter approach, they wanted to entertain, and they wanted to sell, and from then on these two entities fused: entertainment and sales became two sides of the same coin and subsumed everything else, which also became entertainment and sales, from music to politics, literature, news, health, in fact everything. The carnival marked this transition, a nation moving away from the seriousness of the 1970s to the levity of the 1990s, and this transition was visible in the awkward movements, in the nervous eyes and the wild triumphant looks of those who had overcome this awkwardness and nervousness and were now wiggling their lean bottoms on the backs of the lorries that crawled through Kristiansand’s streets on this cold spring morning with a light drizzle in the air. That was how it was in Kristiansand and that was how it was in all the other towns in Norway of any size and any self-respect. Carnival was the rage and would become a tradition, they said, every year these stiff white men and women would affirm their emancipation to the best of their ability on lorries, decked out as Mediterraneans, dancing and laughing to the drums that former school brass band musicians played with such a seductive hypnotic beat.