Even two sixteen-year-olds like Jan Vidar and me understood that this was sad. Of course there was nothing we wanted more than a Mediterranean-style explosion in our day-to-day reality, for there was nothing we yearned for more than inviting breasts and bums, music and loads of fun, and if there was anything we wanted to be it was dark-skinned confident men who took these women at will. We were against meanness and all for generosity, we were against constraints and for openness and freedom. Nevertheless we saw these processions and were overcome by sadness on behalf of our town and country because there was an unbelievable lack of pride about all this, indeed it was as if the whole town was making a fool of itself, without realising. But we did realise and we were sad as we strolled around, each with half a bottle of spirits in an inside pocket, becoming more and more drunk and cursing our town and the idiotic people in it while always keeping an eye open for faces we knew and could perhaps get together with. That is, girls’ faces, or at a pinch boys’ faces we knew who were with girls’ faces we didn’t know. Our project was doomed, we were never going to meet girls this way, but we didn’t give up as long as there was a glimmer of hope, we strolled on, getting drunker and drunker, more and more depressed. And then, at some point, I disappeared from myself. Not from Jan Vidar, he could see me of course, and when he said something to me he received an answer so he imagined that everything was as it should be, but it wasn’t, I had disappeared, I was empty, I was in the void of my soul, there was no other way for me to describe it.
Who are you when you don’t know you exist? Who were you when you didn’t remember that you existed? When I woke up in the bedsit in Elvegaten the following day and knew nothing about anything it felt as if I had been let loose in the town. I could have done anything because when I was as drunk as I was there were no longer any limits in me, I did everything that entered my head, and indeed what would not enter a person’s head?
I rang Jan Vidar. He was in bed asleep, but his father summoned him to the phone.
‘What happened?’ I said.
‘We-ell,’ he said, keeping me on tenterhooks. ‘Strictly speaking nothing happened. That’s what was such crap.’
‘I don’t remember any of the last bit,’ I said. ‘Somewhere on the way to Silokaia, that’s the last thing I remember.’
‘Don’t you? Nothing?’
‘No.’
‘Don’t you remember standing on the back of a lorry and mooning at everyone?’
‘Did I do that?’
He laughed.
‘No, of course not. No, relax, man. Nothing happened. Or rather, yes, something did happen when we were walking home. You bent all the wing mirrors along one street. Someone shouted, “Hey!” at us and so we ran for it. I didn’t notice any difference in you. Were you that drunk?’
‘Yes, it was the spirits.’
‘I fall asleep when I get that drunk. Jesus, though, what a crap evening. You won’t get me to go to carnival again, that’s for sure.’
‘Do you know what I think?’
‘What?’
‘When they have the carnival next year we’ll be there again. We can’t afford not to be. Not much happens in this shite town after all.’
‘True.’
We rang off and I went to wash the Aladdin Sane lightning off my face.
The next time it happened was on Midsummer Night, also with Jan Vidar. We had dragged ourselves, each carrying a bag of beers, down to a place on the coast, to some sea-smoothed rocks below the forest in Hånes, where we wandered around drinking and freezing in the pouring summer rain, surrounded by Øyvind’s many pals and a few people we knew from Hamresanden. Øyvind had chosen this evening of all evenings to finish with his girlfriend, Lene, so she sat crying on a rock, away from the others. I went over to console her, sat beside her and stroked her back while telling her there were other boys, she would get over it, she was so young and beautiful, and she looked at me with gratitude in her eyes and sniffled, I thought it was a shame we were outdoors and not somewhere indoors, where there were beds, and that it was raining now we were outdoors. Suddenly she looked at her jacket and screamed, the shoulder was covered in blood and, as it turned out, her back too. It came from me, I’d cut my hand without noticing and it was bleeding profusely. You prat, she said and stood up. This jacket’s brand new. Do you know how much it cost? Sorry, I said, it wasn’t intentional, I just wanted to cheer you up a bit. Go to hell, she said and headed towards the others, where in the course of the evening she found herself back in favour with Øyvind, while I sat drinking alone staring across the grey surface of the water which the falling rain continued to dot with small evocative rings until Jan Vidar came over and sat down next to me and we could pursue the years-long conversation we had about which girls were pretty or not and who we most fancied sleeping with, all as we slowly but surely got drunker until in the end everything disintegrated and I drifted into a kind of ghost world.
The ghost world: when I was inside it went straight through me, and when I woke up from it there was little I could remember, a face here, a body there, a room, a staircase, a backyard, pale and shimmering, surrounded by an ocean of darkness.
It was nothing less than a horror film. Now and then I would remember the most peculiar details, like a rock at the bottom of a stream or a bottle of olive oil on a kitchen shelf, everyday items in themselves but as symbols of a whole night’s mental activity, in fact all that was left of it, which was bizarre. What was it about that rock? What was it about that bottle? The first two times it happened I hadn’t been afraid, I registered it simply as a kind of objective fact. Then, when it happened again, there began to be something eerie about it because I was so out of control. No, nothing had happened and probably nothing was going to happen either, but the fact was, I had no control over my actions at all. If I was basically a nice person, that was how I would be then as well, but was I? Actually?
On the other hand, I was also proud: occasionally getting so drunk that I couldn’t remember a thing was cool.
At that time, I was sixteen that summer, there were only three things I wanted. The first was a girlfriend. The second was to sleep with a girl. The third was to get drunk.
Or, if I am being totally honest, there were only two things: sleeping with a girl and getting drunk. I had loads of other interests, I was full of ambition in all sorts of areas: I liked reading, listening to music, playing the guitar, watching films, playing football, swimming and snorkelling, travelling abroad, having money and buying myself bits of equipment, but in effect all that was about having a good time, about spending my time in the most agreeable fashion possible, and that was fine, all of it, but when it came to the crunch there were only two things I really wanted.
No, when it actually came to the crunch, there was only one.
I wanted to sleep with a girl.
That was the only thing I wanted.
A fire burned inside me, one that never went out. Even when I was asleep, it flared up, a glimpse of a breast in a dream was all I needed and I came.
Oh no, not again, I thought every time I woke with underpants sticking to my skin and my pubic hair. Mum washed my clothes and at first I always rinsed them thoroughly before putting them in the laundry basket, but there was something suspicious about that too. What are all these sopping wet underpants doing here? she must have thought, and after a while I stopped and put the semen-drenched underpants, which after a few hours became stiff, as if permeated with salt flakes or something, in the basket, and even though she must have noticed, because it happened at least two, often three, times a week, I dismissed the thought of her bemusement as I replaced the laundry basket lid. She never mentioned it, I never mentioned it, and that was how it was with so much, and probably had to be, in the house where she and I lived alone: some things were said, commented on, pored over, and attempts were made to understand them; others were not articulated, not mentioned, and no attempts were made to understand them.