Read Online Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard - Free Book Online Page B

floor, took another and flipped the top off with the opener on his key ring. He always fetched three or four bottles at once so that he wouldn’t have to keep running into the kitchen, as he put it. Lifted it to his lips, glugged down a few mouthfuls. Mm, he said. Sun’s nice. Yes, I said. I’ve got a tan anyway! he said. Yes, I said. Me too. Know what?! he said, blowing out his cheeks. We’ve bought ourselves a solarium up north, you know. Have to in all that darkness. Yes, I said. I saw it when I was up there. Yes, you may have done, he said. Took another long swig, put the empty bottle down by the previous one, rolled a cigarette, lit it, opened another bottle. When do you want dinner? he asked. Makes no odds, I said. You two decide. Yeah, I don’t get hungry in this weather, he said, snatching the section of the newspaper that lay on the table. I rested my arm on the balustrade and looked down. The grass beneath the veranda was scorched, more yellow and brown than green. The grey road was deserted. This side of it was a dusty gravel area, beyond it some trees, behind them the walls and roofs of houses. They knew no one here, neither in the immediate vicinity nor in town. A small propeller plane flew past high in the blue sky. From the living room I heard Unni’s heavy footsteps on the floor. Another head-on collision on the E18, dad said. A car and an articulated lorry. Oh? I said. Almost all these accidents are disguised suicides, he said. They drive straight into a lorry or into a mountainside. No one can possibly know whether it was intentional or not. So they’re spared the shame. Do you really believe that? I said. Indeed I do, he said. And it’s effective too. A little swing to the side and seconds later they’re dead. He lifted the paper to show me. Not much chance of surviving that, is there, he said. The photo showed a car that had been completely crushed. No, I said, and got up, went downstairs and into the toilet. Sat down on the seat. I was slightly drunk. Got up again and splashed some cold water over my face. Flushed the loo in case anyone noticed such details. When I reappeared on the veranda he had discarded the newspaper and was sitting with his elbow over the balustrade, and I remembered he used to sit like that when he was driving the car in the summer, with his elbow sticking out of the open window. How old was he actually? I wondered and counted. Forty-three this May. Then I thought about his birthdays, how we had always bought him the same green Mennen aftershave and how I had always puzzled over what he did with it as he had a beard. I smiled. He rose to his feet unsteadily, paused for a second to find his balance. Then he walked into the living room, taking his usual long strides and hitching his shorts up from behind.
    The idea he had sown, to work as a teacher in Northern Norway, had grown and grown afterwards. In fact, there were only advantages: 1) I would be far away, far from everyone and everything I knew, and totally free. 2) I would be earning my own money doing a respectable job. 3) I would be able to write.
    And now here I was, I thought, looking down at the book in front of me again. At the end of the little vestibule just outside the staffroom, where our two toilets were, Torill hove into sight. She smiled but said nothing, bent forward and took out a thin file from her shelf.
    ‘Great being a teacher!’ I said.
    ‘Give it time . . .!’ she said, flashing me a smile, and was off again. Outside, Nils Erik was crossing the playground with my pupils around him.
    Five years ago I had been the same age as them. And in five years I would be the same age as him.
    Oh, by then I would have made my debut. By then I would be living in a city somewhere, writing and drinking and living the life. I would have a beautiful slim lissom girlfriend with dark eyes and big breasts.
    I got up and went into the staffroom, lifted the coffee Thermos and shook it. It was empty, I filled the jug with