Dancing in the Dark: My Struggle Book 4 by Karl Ove Knausgaard

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?’
    I shrugged. ‘You’ve got to keep some things private.’
    ‘You devil! Of all the people I know, you’re the one I know least about. But that’s just two.’
    The big man with the enormous gut and the ever-open mouth stood by the fence watching us as we went past.
    ‘Quite a family, they are,’ I said.
    ‘Now, don’t you wriggle out of it,’ Espen said. ‘There are three left. I’ll list mine afterwards, if you’re interested.’
    ‘OK. There was an Icelandic girl working at an ice cream stand next to mine in the summer. When I was flogging