The girls drag each other down and wrestle on the floor. There’s no blood on anyone’s face. The girl with the pink clamshell, who has been watching them coolly, jumps up and runs to the scene with a bottle of ketchup from the canteen counter. She begins to squirt it at the two on the floor, and the ketchup splashes over their mouths and noses and collars and arms. At one point we see a jet of blood-coloured liquid squirt across the lips of one girl as she tilts her head back.
A teacher comes to the rescue and yells something at the students that we don’t hear. They glare at her but immediately stop fighting. The teacher grabs the hand of the girl with the ketchup bottle and leads her out of the room. The other combatants are left, and stand panting heavily for a moment before walking toward the classroom door, checking their phones as they go.
The rest of the students, those who sat calmly watching the scene, return to their lunch. In a moment the school bell will ring for the next class with an SMS-like ding. This usually makes the screens blink, causing the students to jerk and then rise and make their way to the classroom. But that hasn’t happened yet.
While they are still sitting calmly picking at the leftovers from their portion-packaged food, the room disappears behind colours. It’s as if an invisible glass wall or curtain has dropped in front of them, and this invisible curtain or wall is now being covered by splats of colour, or occult symbols, or squirts from the ketchup bottle that was just involved in the fight. Picture this: The students behind the wall move more sluggishly now, as though in slow motion, while they literally drown in colour, like crab sticks drowning in aspic. Then they are completely still, smartphones held in motionless hands, a fork frozen en route to a mouth. Frozen solid. As if the students have been rewritten into fossils, as if the wall in front of this room has stopped time, the space completely enclosed, and completely filled with something else.
The students won’t notice anything; this is only a brief flash to them, during a boring school day, far beyond the colours. Without their realising it, the band in here has split their time in two, and like prawns and peas in aspic they are stuck in there, while we’ve opened a space between two seconds where we own the canteen, where we can remake it into our own venue.
This room between the seconds is darker. The small canteen tables have been pushed together to create a long, set dinner table. The scrape of chair legs, the buzz of chit-chat and laughter sound from corner to corner. There must be fifteen people here now. There are still more chairs than women sitting down around the table, but it’s beginning to fill up. Most are older than school age, and aren’t wearing a uniform. A few have been here all along, like us, disguised as students.
In the background we can hear the opening tone of the SMS-like ding that summons the students to their next class, but in the room between the seconds, time has stopped and the faint tone remains whirling in the air as food is served to us and our dinner party guests. Our food isn’t portion packaged, but arrives on big platters. Everything served is soft and gelatinous, to represent the dimensions: height, width, length, time, gelatin.
More aspic, I say. That was the password for the gathering: aspic.
An enormous aspic trembles in the middle of the table; it’s not as set as the one Venke ordered. In its gelatinous consistency it’s reminiscent of some man-made mollusc. Around the aspic platter are other dishes with more soft, smooth food: mushy peas, jelly, boiled eggs, soft custards and cheesecakes, Norwegian lye- softened salted cod, lutefisk, and a pasta sauce without spaghetti, swimming in oil. The food has been decadently arranged and partly spills onto the table.
The guests, who aren’t students anymore, but girls and women of all ages and shapes, start eating. We’re all excited, and more concerned with talking than eating. The food jiggles on our forks in time with the conversations; after all, we are in this faintly unstable space between time zones, where stuff connects a little more loosely and everything is a little more smeared than in ordinary reality.
Where’s the spaghetti? a younger girl asks. No one knows if there’ll be spaghetti, or where it might be found.
Fucking hell, I say. No one reacts; everyone continues with animated conversations in different groups, but we know what’s about to happen.
A new, different figure has entered the room, has perhaps already been here for a while. Someone looks up, jumps to her feet, nudging the table and making the delicate dishes jerk. The figure is dressed in black. The guests sit petrified for a moment, the food alone jiggles, nothing else moves.
The person looks like a mix of priest and demon. This new arrival stands in a corner at first, then one of the older women approaches and invites the person to sit at the table in one of the empty chairs. The figure sits, politely, is served aspic on a plate but remains seated without eating. Perhaps the figure participates in the conversation.
Gradually, the guests’ conversations resume. Spaghetti is requested once more. No one knows where it is this time, either.
More strangers arrive and are invited to the table. They have typical demonic characteristics, like cloaks and makeup, and some are the size of school kids, others so big they can barely sit on the chairs without crashing to the floor; they sit looking down between their legs to keep their balance. They appear masculine. One of them is completely concealed by a cloak. The demons’ conversation is annoying at first; they speak slowly and their accent is archaic. But the conversation picks up when they start talking about
