‘Let’s have a look,’ Stig said, and tried to crawl past Jo.
‘It’s ours,’ Jo said, looking at me again. ‘Isn’t it, Karl Ove?’
‘You made it,’ I said. ‘But you can’t refuse to let others in. You’d have to stand guard day and night if you did.’
‘But it’s ours!’ he said.
‘It’s on school premises,’ I said. ‘You can’t stop anyone going in.’
Reidar smiled and pushed past Jo. Soon the cave was full of kids. They immediately started planning how they could make it bigger and began to dig a tunnel from the end. Jo tried to take charge, but they ignored him, he had to find his place, which was and would always be at the bottom of the pecking order. I turned and went. I did have a bit of a bad conscience, Jo was as unhappy now as he had been happy a few minutes before, but there was nothing I could do about it, he would have to work out the social game for himself. He would have to learn he would get nowhere by whining or telling tales.
‘Are you hanging around here again?’ I said to the gumchewing seventh-year girls standing inside the wet-weather shelter.
‘It’s snowing and it’s windy,’ Vivian said. ‘Surely you don’t think it’s right we should have to stand outside in this weather, do you?’
‘You don’t have to stand, do you?’ I said. ‘You could run like the other kids.’
‘We’re not kids,’ Andrea said. ‘And it’s not fair. The eighth and ninth years can be indoors.’
‘Only kids say something is unfair,’ I said. ‘Besides, the eighth and ninth years have a double slot, so they’re in class now.’
‘That’s what we want. Working indoors is better than being out in this weather,’ Andrea said and looked up at me. Her cheeks had reddened with the cold. Her eyes were narrow and beautiful.
I laughed.
‘So all of a sudden you want to work, do you? That’s a new tune,’ I said.
‘You just laugh at us,’ Vivian said. ‘You don’t have any respect for us.’
‘I treat you how you deserve to be treated,’ I said, eyeing the clock on the wall between the entrance to the main school building and the large wing where the swimming pool and gymnasium were. Four minutes left of the break.
I went to the other side to see how the fourth years were doing. No sooner had I rounded the corner than I saw Jo and Endre trudging along, heads bowed into the wind, feet stamping on the snow.
‘How’s the cave?’ I said.
‘It’s ruined!’ Jo said. ‘Reidar put his head through the roof. The whole blooming cave collapsed.’
His eyes were moist.
‘Don’t swear,’ I said.
‘Sorry,’ he said.
‘It can happen,’ I said. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t intentional.’
‘But it was our cave! We built it! And now it’s ruined.’
‘Build one with them next time,’ I said. ‘Then they won’t ruin it.’
‘We don’t want to,’ he said. ‘Come on, Endre.’
They walked past me.
‘I can help you make a new one, if you want,’ I said. ‘In the next break.’
‘Can you?’
‘We can make a start at any rate. But the others might join in.’
‘Yes, but then you’re there,’ he said. ‘They won’t dare smash it up.’
It had been a stupid offer to make, I thought as I went back into the staffroom a few minutes later. Now I would have to dig in the snow with the tenth years for the rest of the breaks. On the other hand, Jo’s face had lit up, I remembered, and I closed the toilet door behind me, unzipped and began to pee. I aimed the jet at the porcelain so that the teachers who were still in the toilet wouldn’t hear the splashing sound. While I washed my hands I stared at my reflection in the mirror. The singular feeling that arose when you looked at your own eyes, which so purely and unambiguously expressed your inner state, of being both inside and outside, filled me to the hilt for a few intense seconds, but was forgotten the moment I left the room, in the same way that a towel on a hook or a bar of soap in the small hollow in the sink also were, all these trivialities that have no existence beyond the moment, but hang or lie undisturbed in dark empty rooms until the door is opened the next time and another person grasps the soap, dries their hands on the towel and examines their soul in the mirror.
I was in the sitting room eating when Nils Erik rang at the door. Snow from the drift beside the porch swirled in the air around him. The gusting wind hung like an invisible cupola above the village.
‘I’m eating,’ I said. ‘But I’ll soon have finished. Come in.’
‘But you won’t want to go swimming after eating,’ he said.
‘I’m eating fish,’ I said. ‘They’re used to swimming.’
‘That’s true,’ he said.
‘Do you want some? Fish roe and potatoes?’
He shook his head, untied his boots and came into the sitting room.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘How’s it going?’
I shrugged, swallowed and took a long drink of water.
‘How’s what going?’ I said.
‘Everything,’ he said. ‘Writing, for example.’
‘It’s going fine.’
‘Teaching?’
‘Fine.’
‘Sex life?’
‘Erm. . what shall I say? Not very well. What about you?’
‘Well, you saw yourself today,’ he said. ‘That’s about all there is.’
‘Right,’ I said, scraping up the last roe, butter and some crumbly potato with the knife, offloading it onto the fork and lifting it to my mouth. My lips became greasy with the fat.
‘And my prospects in that direction are not particularly rosy either,’ he continued. ‘All the girls over sixteen have moved out. All that’s left is school pupils and their mothers. The age ranges in between have been wiped out.’
‘Completely wiped out,’ I said, got up, put the cutlery on the plate, took them in one hand and the glass in the other and went to the kitchen. ‘But you make it sound as though they’ve been hunted to destruction or something.’
‘They have been! If they’d stayed here we could have hunted them. But where they are, there are others chasing after them.’
I put the plate and glass on the worktop and went into the bedroom to fetch my swimming gear.
‘Now I finally understand what’s meant by the term “happy hunting grounds”,’ I said. ‘I’ve never understood what was supposed to be so fantastic about it. Running around in the forest until eternity. But obviously it was meant in a figurative sense.’
‘I don’t know how fantastic it is,’ Nils Erik said in a loud voice so that I could hear him. ‘It’s a lot of work and there’s little to show for it at the end. At least for me. Much, much better to be in a relationship.’
I put my trunks and a towel into a plastic bag, considered whether I needed anything else, no, that should do it.
‘When was the last time you were in a relationship?’ I said.
‘Three years ago,’ he said and moved towards the door when he saw me emerge with the bag in my hand.
‘What about one of the other temporary teachers?’ I said. He was bending down and tying his laces, and straightened up a touch redder in the face.
‘If they fancy it, fine by me,’ he said.
We walked up the steep hill in silence, walking was as much as we could manage in the gale. Snow stung against the skin I hadn’t covered. When we closed the school door behind us it was like leaving the top deck of a large ship and going inside. Nils Erik switched on the light, we bounded down the stairs in long strides, sat on opposite sides of the dressing room and changed. Although the wind made the walls creak and the ventilation howl, it still seemed quiet indoors. Perhaps because of the lack of movement? All the rooms were empty, the pool was empty and smooth and still.