The Kingdom

27

THEY SAY I’M THE ONE who’s most like Dad.

Silent and steady. Kind and practical. An average, hard-working type with no obvious talent for anything in particular but will always get by, perhaps mostly because he never asks too much of life. Bit of a loner but sociable when necessary, with enough empathy to know when someone’s in trouble, but enough sense of shame not to interfere in other people’s lives. The way Dad didn’t let others interfere in his. They said he was proud without being arrogant, and the respect he showed others was reciprocated, though he was never the village bellwether. He left that to the more literary, the more eloquent, the more pushy, the more charismatic and visionary, the Aases and the Carls. Those with less shame.

Because he did feel shame. And that quality is something I very definitely inherited from him.

He felt ashamed of what he was and what he did. I felt ashamed of what I was and what I didn’t do.

Dad liked me. I loved him. And he loved Carl.

As the older son I was given a thorough grounding in how to run a mountain farm with thirty goats. The goat population of Norway had been five times greater in my grandfather’s day, and the number of goat farmers had fallen by half just over the last ten years, and my father probably realised that in the future it wouldn’t be possible to make a living from goat farming on such a small scale at Opgard. But as he said: there’s always the chance that one day the power would go, the world be hurled into a chaos in which it was every man for himself. And people like me will still get by.

And people like Carl will go under.

And maybe that’s why he loved Carl more.

Or maybe it was because Carl didn’t worship him the way I did.

I don’t know if that’s what it was, a mixture of Dad’s protective instincts and a need to be loved by his son. Or that Carl was so like my mother when she and my dad first met. Alike in the way they talked, laughed, thought and moved, and even in the photos of Mum from back then. Carl was as good-looking as Elvis, Dad used to say. Maybe that’s what he fell for in Mum. Her Elvis looks. A blonde Elvis, but with the same Latino or Indian features: almond-shaped eyes, smooth, glowing skin, prominent eyebrows. The smile and the laughter that seemed always to be just below the surface. Maybe my father fell in love all over again with Mum. And then with Carl.

I don’t know.

All I know is that Dad took over the bedtime reading in the boys’ room and that he spent longer and longer doing it. That he carried on long after I had fallen asleep in the upper bunk, and that I knew nothing about it until one night I was woken by Carl’s crying and Dad trying to hush him up. I peered over the edge of the bunk and saw that Dad’s chair was empty, that he must have sneaked into bed beside Carl.

‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

There was no answer from down below, so I repeated the question.

‘Carl was just having a bad dream,’ said my father. ‘Go back to sleep, Roy.’

And I went back to sleep. I slept the guilty sleep of the innocent. And I went on doing so until one night Carl was crying again, and this time Dad had left, so my little brother was alone with no one to comfort him. So I climbed down to his bunk, wrapped my arms around him and told him to tell me what he had dreamed, because then the monsters would all disappear.

And Carl sniffed and said the monsters had said he wasn’t to tell anybody, because then they would come and take me and Mum too, take us down into Huken and eat us.

‘But not Dad?’ I asked.

Carl didn’t reply, and I don’t know if I understood and repressed it right there, or if I only understood later, wanted to understand it: that the monster was our father. Dad. And I don’t know either if Mum wanted to understand it but that in her case the will was lacking, because it was happening right in front of our eyes and ears. And that made her as guilty as me in looking the other way and not trying to stop it.

When I finally did it I was seventeen years old and Dad and I were alone in the barn. I was footing the ladder as he shifted light bulbs up under the ridge. Barns on mountain farms aren’t all that high, but still I felt I was a risk for him, standing there a few metres below him.

‘You’re not to do what you do to Carl.’

‘All right then,’ said Dad quietly, and finished changing the light bulbs.

Then he climbed down the ladder, with me holding it as steady as I could. He put the used bulbs down before attacking me. He didn’t hit me in the face, only on the body, in all the soft places where it hurt the most. As I lay in the hay, unable to breathe, he leaned over me and whispered in a thick, hoarse voice: ‘Don’t you accuse your father of something like that or I’ll kill you, Roy. There’s only one way to stop a father and that’s by keeping your mouth shut, wait for your chance and then kill him. You understand?’

Of course I understood. That was what Little Red Riding Hood should have done. But I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even nod, just raised my head very slightly and saw that he had tears in his eyes.

Dad helped me to my feet, we ate supper, and that night he was with Carl in the lower bunk again.

Next day he took me into the barn where he’d suspended the big punchbag that came over with him from Minnesota to Norway. For a time he’d wanted Carl and me to box, but we hadn’t been interested, not even when he told us about the famous boxing brothers Mike and Tommy Gibbons from Minnesota. Tommy Gibbons was Dad’s favourite – he’d shown us pictures of him, said how Carl looked like the tall, blond heavyweight Tommy. I was more like Mike, the big brother who was nevertheless smaller, and whose career wasn’t so successful. Anyway, neither of them had been champions, Tommy came closest in 1923, when he went fifteen rounds and lost on points to the great Jack Dempsey. It was in the little town of Shelby, a crossing on the Great Northern Railway which the railway director Peter Shelby – the place was named after him – called ‘a godforsaken mudhole’. The town had been promised that the fight would put them on the map in the USA and they invested all they had and more in it. A big stadium was built, but only seven thousand turned up to watch, plus a handful that sneaked in without paying, and the whole town – including four banks – went bankrupt. Tommy Gibbons left a town in ruins, without a title, without a cent in his pocket, with nothing but the knowledge that he had at least tried.

‘How’s your body feeling?’ asked Dad.

‘Fine,’ I said, though I still ached all over.

Dad showed me how to stand and the basic punches, then he tied his worn-out old boxing gloves on me.

‘What about the guard?’ I asked, recalling a newsreel I had seen from the Dempsey–Gibbons fight.

‘You hit hard and you hit first, so you don’t need that,’ he said, and positioned himself behind the bag. ‘This is the enemy. Tell yourself you’ve got to kill him before he kills you.’

And I killed. He kept a firm hold on the bag to stop it swinging too much, but now and then he peered out from behind it, as though to show me who it was I was training to kill.

‘Not bad,’ he said as I stood there bent double, dripping sweat, my hands on my knees. ‘Now we’ll tape your wrists and do it again without gloves.’

Within three weeks I had punched holes in the bag and the cloth had to be sewn up with thick twine. I bloodied my knuckles hitting those stitches, let them heal for two days and then bloodied them again. It felt better that way, the pain deadened the pain, deadened the shame I felt just standing there and punching, unable to do anything else.

Because it went on.

Not as often as before, maybe, I don’t remember.

Remember only that he no longer cared if I was asleep or not, didn’t care if Mum was asleep, cared only to show that he was master in his own house, and that a master does as he pleases. And that he had turned me into his physically equal opponent, as though to show us that he controlled us spiritually, not physically. Because what is physical is evanescent and fades, while spirit is eternal.

And I felt shame. Shame as my thoughts tried to flee from the sounds down below, from the swaying and creaking frame of the bunk beds, from that house. And after he’d gone I climbed down to Carl, held him until his crying stopped, whispered in his ear that one day, one day we’d go somewhere far away. I’d stop him. Stop that fucking mirror image of me. Empty words that only made my shame the greater.

We grew old enough to go to parties. Carl drank more than he should. And wound up in trouble more often than he should. And I was glad of it, because it opened up a place where I could do what I could never do at home: protect my little brother. It was simple, I just did what Dad had taught me: hit first and hit hard. Hit faces as though they were punchbags with Dad’s face on them.

But the day had to come.

And the day did come.

Carl came and told me he’d been to the doctor’s. That they’d examined him and asked him a lot of questions. That they had their suspicions. I asked what was wrong with him and he pulled down his trousers and showed me. I felt so angry I began to cry.

Before going to bed that night I went to the porch and took down the hunting knife. I put it under my pillow and waited.

On the fourth night he came in. As usual I was woken by the little creak from the door. He’d turned off the light in the corridor so all I saw was the outline in the doorway. I put my hand under the pillow and gripped round the handle of the knife. I had asked Uncle Bernard, who had read all about the saboteurs in Os during the war, and he said that silent killing was something you did by sticking your knife into the enemy’s back at the level of the kidneys. That cutting someone’s throat was much more difficult than it looks in films, that a lot of them ended up cutting their own thumb that was holding the enemy. I didn’t know exactly how high up the kidneys were, but my plan anyway was to stab lots of times, so one of them would probably hit. If not, then I’d have to go for his throat and my thumb, I didn’t give a fuck.

The figure in the doorway swayed slightly, maybe he’d drunk a few more beers than usual. He just stood there, as though wondering if he’d taken the wrong turning. As indeed he had. For years. But this would be the last time.

I heard a sound, as though he was drawing breath. Or sniffing the air.

The door closed, pitch darkness descended and I got ready. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it literally pressing against my ribs. Then I heard his footsteps on the stairs and realised he had changed his mind.

I heard the front door open.

Had he sensed something? I had read somewhere that adrenaline has a distinctive smell that our brain – consciously or unconsciously – registers, and puts us on the alert automatically. Or had he come to a decision there in the doorway? Not just to walk away from it tonight, but that it was over. That it would never happen again.

As I lay there I could feel my body start to shake. And when a rasping sound came from my throat as I drew breath I realised I had been holding it from the moment I heard the door creak.

After a while I heard the sound of someone crying quietly. I held my breath again, but it wasn’t coming from Carl, he was breathing regularly again. It was coming through the stovepipe.

I crept out of bed, pulled on some clothes and went downstairs.

Mum was sitting in the half-dark in the kitchen by the worktop. She was wearing her red dressing gown that looked like a quilted coat, and staring out the window towards the barn, where the lights were on. She was holding a glass, and on the table stood the bottle of bourbon that for years had remained unopened in the cupboard in the dining room.

I sat down.

Looked in the same direction as her, towards the barn.

She emptied her glass and filled it up again. It was the first time since that evening at the Grand Hotel that I had seen her drinking when it wasn’t Christmas Eve.

When at last she spoke her voice was hoarse and trembling.

‘You know, Roy, that I love your father so much I can’t live without him.’

It sounded like the conclusion of a long, silent discussion she’d been having with herself.

I said nothing, just stared across at the barn. Waiting to hear something from over there.

‘But he can live without me,’ she said. ‘You know, there were complications when Carl was born. I had lost a lot of blood and was unconscious, and the doctor had to let your father take the decision. There were two ways of doing it, one that was a risk for the foetus, and one that was a risk for the mother. Your father chose the one that was dangerous for me, Roy. Afterwards he said that of course I would have made the same choice, and he was right about that. But I wasn’t the one that chose, Roy. It was him.’

What was I expecting to hear from the barn? I know what it was. A shot. The door to the porch had been open when I came down the stairs. And the shotgun that usually hung high up on the wall was gone.

‘But if I had had to choose between saving your life and Carl’s, then I would have chosen him, Roy. So now you know. That’s all the mother I’ve been to you.’ She raised the glass to her mouth.

I had never heard her talk that way before, and yet I didn’t care. All I could think about was what was happening in the barn.

I got up and walked out. It was late summer, and the night air was cool against my hot cheeks. I didn’t rush. Walked at a measured tread, almost like a grown man. In the light from the open barn door I saw the shotgun, leaning up against the door jamb. As I came closer I saw the ladder leaning against one of the roof beams, and a rope slung over it.

I heard the dull thud of punches against the plastic covering of the punchbag.

I stopped before I reached the door, but close enough to be able to see him. He was punching and jabbing the bag. Did he know the face I had drawn on it was his? Probably.

Was that shotgun leaning there because he hadn’t managed to finish what he had started? Or was it an invitation to me?

My cheeks were no longer hot. Abruptly, along with the rest of my body, they had turned ice cold, and the slight night breeze blew right through me as though I were a fucking ghost.

I stood there and watched my father. Of course I knew that he wanted me to stop him, stop what he was doing, stop his heart. Everything was arranged. He’d organised things so that it would look as though he’d done it himself, even that rope gave its own clear message. So all I needed to do was shoot at close range and lay the shotgun beside the body. I shook. I could no longer control my body, nothing obeyed, my limbs quivered and shook. I didn’t feel anger or fear any longer, all I felt was impotence and shame. Because I couldn’t do it. He wanted to die, I wanted him to die, and yet I still could not fucking do it. Because he was me. And I hated him and I needed him, as I hated and needed myself. As I turned and walked away I heard him groan and punch, swear and punch, sob and punch.

At breakfast next morning it was as though it hadn’t happened. As though it was all just something I had dreamed. Dad peered out the kitchen window and passed some remark about the weather, and Mum hurried Carl along so he wouldn’t be late for school.

28

A FEW MONTHS AFTER I’D left my father in the barn, fru Willumsen pulled up in front of the workshop and booked a service for her Saab Sonett ‘58 model, a roadster, and the only cabriolet in the village.

People in the village claimed that Willumsen’s wife was obsessed with a Norwegian pop diva from the seventies and tried to copy her in every way: the car, the clothes, the make-up and her way of walking. She even went so far as to try to copy the diva’s famous deep voice. I was too young to remember this pop star, but fru Willumsen was a diva all right, no question about it.

Uncle Bernard had a doctor’s appointment so I had to go over the machine myself to see if there were any obvious problems.

‘Nice lines,’ I said, stroking a hand over one of the front fins. Fibreglass reinforced plastic. According to Uncle Bernard, Saab had produced fewer than ten of them, and it must have set Willumsen back more than he liked.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

I opened the bonnet and looked over the engine. Checked the leads and that the caps were on properly, copying someone else again, in this case Uncle Bernard.

‘You look like you know how to handle the insides too,’ she said. ‘Even though you look so young.’

It was my turn to say thanks.

It was a hot day; I’d been working on a lorry and pulled down the top half of the overalls so my chest was bare when she arrived. I was boxing a lot up in the barn now, I had muscles where before there was just skin and bone, and her eyes glided over me as she told me what she wanted. And when I pulled on a T-shirt before checking over her car she had almost looked disappointed.

I closed the bonnet and turned to her. The high heels she was wearing meant she wasn’t just taller than me, she towered over me.

‘Well?’ she said, and then continued after a pause that was much too long. ‘Do you like what you see?’

‘It seems fine but I ought to take a closer look,’ I said with a fake self-assurance, as though it would be me and not Uncle Bernard who would be taking that look.

It occurred to me that she was older than she looked. The eyebrows looked as though they’d been shaved off and then drawn on again. There were small wrinkles in the skin above her upper lip. But all the same, fru Willumsen was what Uncle Bernard called a full rigger.

‘And after that…’ She put her head on one side and appraised me, as though she was in a butcher’s shop and I was a piece of meat laid out on the slab. ‘…look?’

‘Then we’ll go over the engine and change anything that needs changing,’ I said, ‘within the limits of what’s reasonable and acceptable, naturally.’ Another line I’d nicked from Uncle Bernard. Apart from when I had to swallow in the middle of the sentence.

‘Reasonable and acceptable.’ She smiled, as though I’d just served up a witticism in the Oscar Wilde class. Apart from the fact that I’d never heard of Oscar Wilde at that time. But right about then it dawned on me that I wasn’t the only one standing there and reading all sorts of hidden sex fantasies into the conversation. There could no longer be any doubt about it, fru Willumsen was flirting with me. Not that I kidded myself she wanted to take it any further, but she was definitely taking time for a little game with a seventeen-year-old, the way a grown cat will pat your dangling balls of wool before padding on its way. And just that was enough to make me feel proud and a little arrogant as I stood there.

‘But I can tell you already that there isn’t much here that needs to be fixed,’ I said, fishing up my silver box of snuff from the pocket of my overalls as I leaned against the bonnet. ‘The car looks to be in excellent condition. For its age.’

Fru Willumsen laughed.

‘Rita,’ she said, extending a dazzlingly white hand with blood-red nails.

If I’d been more on the case I would probably have kissed it, but instead I put down my snuffbox, wiped my hand on the rag that was dangling from my back pocket and gave her a firm handshake. ‘Roy.’

She gave me a thoughtful look. ‘OK, Roy. But there’s no need to squeeze so hard.’

‘Eh?’

‘Don’t say “eh”. Say “what”. Or “excuse me”. Try again.’ She offered me her hand once more.

I took it again. Carefully this time. She pulled it towards her.

‘I didn’t tell you to treat it as though it were stolen property, Roy. I’m giving you my hand, and for these few brief moments it’s yours. So use it, be good to it, treat it in such a way that you know you will be allowed to have it again.’

She offered me her hand for a third time.

And I put both of mine around it.

Stroked it. Pressed it against my cheek. No idea where I got the bottle from. Only knew that right now I had it, all that courage I had lacked as I stood outside the barn and saw the shotgun in the doorway.

Rita Willumsen laughed, looked around quickly as though to confirm that we were still unobserved, let me keep her hand a little longer before slowly withdrawing it.

‘You learn quickly,’ she said. ‘Quickly. And soon you’ll be a man. I think you’ll make someone very happy, Roy.’

A Mercedes pulled up in front of us. Willumsen jumped out and hardly had time to say hello to me he was so busy opening the car door for fru Willumsen. Who was now Rita Willumsen. He held her hand as she manoeuvred her way in, high heels, high hair, tight skirt. And when they drove off I felt a mixture of excitement and confusion at the thought of what now suddenly lay before me. The excitement came from having fru Willumsen’s hand in mine, those long nails scraping against my palm. And the fact that she was the clearly much-treasured wife of Willumsen, the man who had cheated Dad over the purchase of the Cadillac and boasted of it afterwards. The confusion was caused by the engine compartment, in which everything seemed to be back to front. I mean, the gearbox was in front of the engine. Later Uncle Bernard explained to me that it was because of the special dispersal of the weight in a Sonett, that they had even turned the crankshaft so the engine on this car went the opposite way to all other cars. Saab Sonett. What a car. What a gorgeous, useless piece of outdated beauty.

I worked on the Saab until late at night, checking, tightening, changing. I possessed a new, furious energy and I didn’t know quite where it came from. Or actually, yes, I did. It came from Rita Willumsen. She had touched me. I had touched her. She had seen me as a man. Or at least as the man I could become. And that had changed something. At some point, as I stood there in the grease pit and ran my hand over the chassis of the car, I felt myself growing hard. I closed my eyes and imagined it. Tried to imagine it. A semi-naked Rita Willumsen on the bonnet of the Saab, beckoning to me with her index finger. That red nail varnish. Jesus.

I listened out to make sure I was alone in the workshop before I pulled down the zip on my overalls.

‘Roy?’ whispered Carl in the dark as I was about to creep up to the top bunk.

I was on the point of saying something about doing overtime at the workshop, that we should sleep now. But something in his voice stopped me. I turned on the light above his bed. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying and one of his cheeks was swollen. I felt my stomach tighten. After that time in the barn with the shotgun, Dad had kept away.

‘Has he been here again?’ I whispered.

Carl just nodded.

‘Did he… did he hit you as well?’

‘Yes. And I thought he was going to strangle me. He was furious. Asked where you were.’

‘Shit,’ I said.

‘You’ve got to be here,’ said Carl. ‘He doesn’t come if you’re here.’

‘I can’t always be here, Carl.’

‘Then I’ll have to go away. I can’t take it any more… I don’t want to live any more with someone who…’

I put one arm around Carl, the other around the back of his head, pressed his head into my chest so that his sobbing wouldn’t wake Mum and Dad.

‘I’ll fix it, Carl,’ I whispered down into his fair hair. ‘I swear. You won’t have to run away from him. I’ll fix this, d’you hear me?’

With the coming of the first pale light of morning my plan was complete.

Just to be thinking about it didn’t put me under any obligation, but at the same time I knew I was ready now. I thought of what Rita Willumsen had said, that soon I would be a man. Well, this was soon. This time I wouldn’t back off. I wouldn’t walk away from that shotgun.

29

I HAD LEARNED A COUPLE of things during those hours I worked on the Saab Sonett. Not only was the engine mounted back to front, but the braking system was easier too. Modern cars have double braking systems so that if one of the brake hoses is cut, the brakes will still work, at least on two of the wheels. But on the Sonett all you have to do is cut one hose and hey presto, what you’ve got is a freewheeling wagon, a loose cannon on deck. And it struck me that this was generally true of most old cars – including Dad’s 1979 Cadillac DeVille, although that does actually have two brake hoses.

When men in this part of the country don’t die of some routine sickness, they die on a country lane in a car, or in a barn at the end of a rope or a shotgun barrel. I had failed the time Dad gave me the chance to use the shotgun, and maybe I understood too that he wouldn’t be giving me a second chance. That now I had to do the thinking for myself. And once I’d thought it through, I knew I’d found the right solution. It wasn’t about the skipper having to go down with his own ship or anything like that, it was purely practical. A car accident wouldn’t be investigated in the same way as a man who’d been shot through the head, at least that’s what I persuaded myself. And I didn’t know how I was going to get Dad into the barn and shoot him without Mum at least knowing what had happened. And God knows whether she would lie to the police when the man she couldn’t live without had been killed. That’s all the mother I’ve been to you. But sabotaging the brakes on the Cadillac was a simple matter. And the consequences as easy to predict. Every morning Dad got up, saw to the goats, heated up his coffee and watched in silence as Carl and I ate breakfast. After me and Carl had cycled off – him to school, me to the workshop – Dad got in his Cadillac and drove down into the village to fetch the mail and buy a newspaper.

The Cadillac stood under the barn roof and I’d seen him do it countless times. Start the car, drive off and – unless there was snow and ice on the road – not touch the brakes or turn until he was heading into Geitesvingen.

We ate supper in the dining room and then I said I was going out to the barn for a workout on the punchbag.

No one said anything. Mum and Carl scraped their plates, but Dad gave me a quizzical look. Maybe because he and I didn’t usually announce what we were going to do, we just went ahead and did it.

I took my training bag containing the tool I’d brought home from the workshop. The job was a little more complicated than I had supposed, but after half an hour I’d got the set screw loose and the bolt holding the steering column to the rack, punched holes in both of the brake hoses and collected the brake fluid in a bucket. I changed into my workout gear and spent another thirty minutes on the punchbag, so when I entered the living room where Mum and Dad were sitting like some couple from a sixties advert, him with his newspaper, Mum with her knitting, I was dripping with sweat.

‘You were late home last night,’ said Dad without looking up from his paper.

‘Overtime,’ I said.

‘You’re allowed to tell us if you’ve met a girl,’ said Mum. Smiled. As if that’s exactly what we were, the average family in a fucking advert.

‘Just overtime,’ I said.

‘Well,’ said Dad, folding his newspaper, ‘there might be more overtime from now on. They just rang from the hospital in Notodden. Bernard’s been admitted. Apparently they saw something they didn’t like when he was at the doctor’s yesterday. He might have to have an operation.’

‘Oh?’ I said, and felt myself go cold.

‘Yes, and his daughter’s in Mallorca with her family and can’t interrupt their holiday. So the hospital wants us to go.’

Carl came in. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. His voice still sounded as if he’d been anaesthetised, and there was a nasty bruise on his cheek, although it was less swollen.

‘We’re going to Notodden,’ said Dad, pushing himself up out of the chair. ‘Get dressed.’

I felt panic, like the morning you open the front door and aren’t prepared for the fact that the temperature’s fallen to minus thirty, it’s blowing a gale and you don’t feel the cold, just a sudden and complete paralysis. I opened my mouth, closed it again. Because paralysis affects the brain too.

‘I’ve got an important exam tomorrow,’ said Carl, and I saw he was looking at me. ‘And Roy’s promised to test me.’

I hadn’t heard anything about any exam. I don’t know exactly what Carl had or hadn’t understood, only that he realised I was desperately looking for a way out of going to Notodden.

‘Well,’ said Mum, with a look at Dad, ‘they can probably—’

‘Out of the question,’ said Dad curtly. ‘Family comes before everything.’

‘Carl and I’ll take the bus to Notodden after school tomorrow,’ I said.

They all looked at me in surprise. Because I think we all heard it. That suddenly I sounded like him, like Dad when his mind was made up and there was nothing else to discuss, because that was the way things were going to be.

‘Fine,’ said Mum, sounding relieved.

Dad didn’t say anything but kept his gaze fixed on me.

When Mum and Dad were ready to leave Carl and I followed them out into the yard.

Stood there in front of the car in the dusk, a family of four parting company after supper. ‘Drive carefully,’ I said.

Dad nodded. Slowly. Of course it’s possible that I, like other people, make much too much out of famous last words. Or in Dad’s case, the last silent nodding. But there was definitely something there that looked almost like a kind of recognition. Or was it acknowledgement? Acknowledgement that his son was turning into an adult.

He and Mum sat in the Cadillac and it started with a snarl. The snarl turned into a soft purring. And then away they drove in the direction of Geitesvingen.

We saw the brake lights on the Cadillac flare. They’re connected to the pedal, so even if the brakes don’t work the lights do. Their speed increased. Carl made a sound. I could see in my mind’s eye Dad turning the wheel, hear a scraping noise from the steering column, feel the steering wheel turning and meeting no resistance, having no effect on the wheels. And I feel pretty sure he understood it then. I hope so. That he understood and accepted it. That he accepted it included Mum, and that the sums added up. She could live with what he did, but not without him.

It happened quietly and with a strange lack of drama. No desperate pounding on the horn, no scorching rubber, no screams. All I could hear was the crunching of the tyres, and then the car was just gone, and the golden plover sang of loneliness.

The crash from Huken sounded like the far-off rumble of delayed thunder. I didn’t hear what Carl said or shouted, I just thought that from now on Carl and I were alone up here in the world. That the road ahead of us was empty, that all we could see right now in the dusk was the mountain in silhouette against a sky coloured orange in the west and pink in the north and south. And it seemed to me the loveliest thing I had ever seen, like a sunset and a sunrise both at the same time.

30

I REMEMBER ONLY SNATCHES OF the funeral.

Uncle Bernard was on his feet again, they had decided not to operate, and he and Carl were the only ones I saw crying. The church was full of people that – as far as I know – Mum and Dad had almost no connection with apart from what is absolutely unavoidable in a village like Os. Bernard said a few words and read out the condolences on the wreaths. The biggest was from Willumsen’s Used Cars and Breaker’s Yard, which probably meant he could charge it to customer services for tax purposes. Neither Carl nor I had expressed any wish to say anything, and the priest didn’t press us, I think he appreciated the elbow room when he had such a large audience. But I don’t remember what he said, don’t actually think I was listening. The condolences came afterwards, an endless row of pale, grief-stricken faces, like sitting in a car at a level crossing and watching the train pass by, faces staring out, seemingly at you, but actually on their way to quite other places.

Many people said they felt for me, but then of course I couldn’t tell them that in that case they weren’t feeling too bad.

I remember Carl and me standing in the dining room up at the farm the day before we were due to move down to Uncle Bernard’s. We didn’t know, of course, that it would only last a few days and that we would move back to Opgard. It was so bloody quiet in there.

‘This is all ours now,’ said Carl.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But is there anything you want?’

‘That,’ said Carl, pointing to the cupboard where Dad kept his crates of Budweiser and bottles of bourbon. I took the carton of tins of Berry’s moist snuff, and that’s how I began using the stuff. Not too often, because you never know when you’re going to be able to get hold of Berry’s next time, and you don’t want to be using that Swedish shite, not once you’ve known the taste of properly fermented tobacco.

Even before the funeral we’d both been interrogated by the sheriff, though he referred to it as ‘just a chat’. Sigmund Olsen wondered why there were no braking marks on Geitesvingen and asked if my father was depressed. But Carl and I stuck to our story that it had looked like an accident. Maybe driving a little too fast and a momentary lapse of attention as he glanced in the rear-view mirror to check that we were following. Something like that. And finally the sheriff appeared to be satisfied. But it struck me too that it was lucky for us these were the only two theories he had: accident or suicide. I knew that punching a couple of holes in the brake hoses and draining off enough brake fluid to significantly reduce the car’s braking power would not in itself be enough to arouse suspicion if it was discovered. Air in the braking system is something you get all the time in old cars. It would be worse if they found out that the set screw holding the steering column had been loosened so the steering didn’t work. The car had landed on its roof and not been the total wreck I’d been expecting. If they went over the car they might have come to the conclusion that anything that’s fixed can also work loose, even set screws. But loose screws as well as holes in the brake hoses? And why no traces of leaking brake fluid on the ground beneath the car? As I say, we had been lucky. Or more accurately, I had been lucky. Of course I knew that Carl knew that somehow or other I had been behind the accident. He had instinctively realised that at any cost he and I must not ride in the Cadillac that evening. And then there was the promise I had given him, that I would fix things. But he never asked exactly how I’d done it. He probably realised it was the brakes, because he’d seen the brake lights go on without the Cadillac slowing down. And when he never asked, why would I tell him? You can’t be punished for something you don’t know about, and if I did get done for the murder of our parents I could take the fall alone, I didn’t need to have Carl beside me, not the way Dad had had Mum. Because unlike them, Carl could easily live without me. Or so I thought.

31

CARL WAS BORN EARLY IN the autumn, I was born during the summer holidays. It meant that on his birthday he got presents from his classmates and even had a birthday party, whereas mine passed by without celebrations. Not that I ever really complained. That’s why it took a couple of seconds before I realised that the words being sung were actually being sung for me.

‘Happy eighteenth birthday!’

I was on a break and sitting out in the sun on a couple of pallets, my eyes closed and listening to Cream on my headphones. I looked up and pulled out the earbuds. Had to shade my eyes. Not that I didn’t remember that voice. It was Rita Willumsen.

‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling my face and ears start to glow as though I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t be doing. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Coming of age,’ was all she said. ‘The right to vote. Driving licence. And they can put you in jail.’

The Saab Sonett was parked behind her, just the way it had been all those months ago. But at the same time something felt different, as though she’d given me a promise back then and had come now to keep it. I felt my hand shaking slightly as I pushed the headphones into the back pocket. I was no longer completely unkissed and I’d fumbled a bit under a bra behind the village hall at Årtun, but I was very definitely still a virgin.

‘There’s funny sounds coming from the Sonett,’ she said.

‘What kind of sounds?’ I asked.

‘Maybe we should take a drive and you can hear them for yourself.’

‘Sure thing. Just a moment.’ I went into the office.

‘I’ll be away for a while,’ I said.

‘OK,’ said Uncle Bernard without looking up from ‘that damned paperwork’, as he used to call it, and which now surrounded him in enormous piles after his stay in hospital. ‘When are you back?’

‘I don’t know.’

He took off his reading glasses and looked at me. ‘OK.’ He said it like a question, like, was there something else I wanted to tell him? And if I didn’t want to, fine by him, he trusted me.

I nodded and went back out into the sunlight.

‘On a day like this we ought really to have had the roof back,’ said Rita Willumsen as she drove the Sonett out onto the main highway.

I didn’t ask why we didn’t.

‘What kind of sounds are you hearing?’ I asked.

‘People round here ask if I bought this car because the roof goes back. Here where the summer only lasts a month and a half, they’re probably thinking. But do you know what the reason is, Roy?’

‘The colour?’

‘Quite the male chauvinist.’ She laughed. ‘It was the name. Sonett. Know what that is?’

‘It’s a Saab.’

‘It’s a verse form. A type of love poem with two quartets and two trios, fourteen lines in all. The master sonneteer was an Italian named Francesco Petrarch who was madly in love with a woman named Laura who was married to a count. Altogether he wrote 317 sonnets to her. Quite a lot, don’t you think?’

‘Pity she was married then.’

‘Not at all. The key to passion is that you never wholly and completely get the one you love. We human beings are made rather impractically when it comes to things like that.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You’ve a lot to learn, I can hear that.’

‘Maybe so. But I don’t hear any strange noises from the car.’

She glanced in the mirror. ‘It’s there when I start it in the morning. It goes once the engine heats up. We’ll park for a while, give the engine a chance to cool down properly.’

She indicated and turned down a wooded track. She’d obviously driven here before, and after a while she turned down an even narrower track and stopped the car under some low-hanging pine-tree branches.

The sudden silence as she turned off the engine took me by surprise. I knew instinctively that silence had to be filled with something, because it was more charged than anything I could think of to say. I – who was already a killer – didn’t dare to either move or look at her.

‘So tell me, Roy. Have you met any girls since the last time we spoke?’

‘A few,’ I said.

‘Anyone special?’

I shook my head. Glanced from the corner of my eye. She was wearing a red silk scarf and a loose-fitting blouse, but I could see the outlines of her breasts clearly. Her skirt had glided up and I could see her naked knees.

‘Anyone you’ve… done it with, Roy?’

I felt a sweet surge in my stomach. I thought of lying, but what had I to gain by that?

‘Not everything, no,’ I said.

‘Good,’ she said and slowly pulled off the silk scarf. The three top buttons of her blouse were undone.

I was hard, felt it straining in my trousers and laid my hands in my lap to hide it. Because I knew my hormones were so disturbed right there and then that I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t misinterpreted the situation completely.

‘Let’s see if you’re any better at holding a woman’s hand,’ she said and put her right hand on top of mine in my lap. It was as though the heat radiated straight down through the hand and down into my sex, and for a moment I was afraid I was going to come right there.

I let her take my hand, pull it towards her, saw her loosen her blouse slightly and draw my hand inside it, onto the bra over her left breast.

‘You’ve waited a long time for this, Roy.’ She gave a cooing laugh. ‘Take firm hold of me, Roy. Squeeze the nipple a bit. Those of us who aren’t young girls like it a bit harder. Easy, easy, that’s a little too much. That’s it. You know what, Roy, I think you’re a natural.’

She leaned over towards me, held my chin between her thumb and forefinger and kissed me. Everything about Rita Willumsen was big, including the tongue as it coiled itself rough and strong like an eel round mine. And there was so much more taste to her than the two girls I had French-kissed with before. Not better, but more. Maybe even a bit too much – my senses were electrified, overloaded. She ended the kiss.

‘We’ve still got some way to go there.’ She smiled as she slid a hand under my T-shirt and stroked my chest. And even though I was so hard I could have broken stones with it I felt myself growing calmer. Because not much was being asked of me, she was the one at the wheel, she was in charge of the speed and where we were going.

‘Let’s take a walk,’ she said.

I opened the door and stepped out into the intense shrill chirping of birds in the quivering summer heat. For the first time I noticed the blue trainers she was wearing.

We followed a track that curved upward over a hill. It was the summer holidays, fewer people in the village and on the roads, and up here the chances of meeting someone were minimal. All the same she asked me to stay fifty metres behind her so I could slip behind a tree if she gave a signal.

Near the top of the hill she stopped and beckoned to me.

She pointed down at the red-painted cabin below us.

‘That’s the sheriff’s,’ she said. ‘And that one there…’ She pointed up at a small summer farmhouse ‘…is ours.’

I wasn’t sure whether by ‘ours’ she meant hers and mine, or hers and her husband’s; but at least I knew that was where we were going.

She unlocked the door and we stepped inside a sun-warm and stuffy room. She closed the door behind me. Kicked off her trainers and put her hands on my shoulders. Even without shoes she was taller than me. We were both breathing heavily, we’d walked the last stretch quickly. So heavily we panted in each other’s mouths when we kissed.

Her fingers unbuckled my belt as if that was all she’d ever done, while I dreaded loosening the fastener on her bra, which I figured would be my job. But apparently it wasn’t, because she led me into what had to be the main bedroom, where the curtains were drawn, pushed me down on the bed and let me watch as she undressed herself. Then she came to me and her skin was cold with dried sweat. She kissed me, rubbed herself against my naked body, and soon we were sweating again, slipping around each other like two wet seals. She smelled good and strong and moved my hands away when I was being too intimate. I veered between being too active and intolerably passive, and in the end she got hold of me and guided me in.

‘Don’t move,’ she said, sitting motionless on top of me. ‘Just feel it.’

And I felt it. And thought that now it’s official. Roy Opgard is no longer a virgin.

‘I thought it was tomorrow,’ said Uncle Bernard when I got back that afternoon.

‘What was?’

‘That you were taking your driving test.’

‘It is tomorrow.’

‘You don’t say? Judging by that grin on your face I thought you must’ve gone and taken it now.’

32

UNCLE BERNARD GAVE ME A Volvo 240 for my eighteenth birthday present.

I was speechless.

‘Don’t look at me like that, lad,’ he said in embarrassment. ‘It’s second-hand, no big deal. And you and Carl need a car up there, you can’t be riding your bikes all through the winter.’

The thing about the Volvo 240 is that it’s the perfect car for tinkering about on, the parts are easy to come by even though they stopped production in ’93, and if you look after it nicely you can keep it all your life. The bearings and the bushings on the front suspension were a little worn, as was the spider joint on the intermediate shaft, but the rest of it was in great condition, no trace of rust.

I sat behind the wheel, put my newly acquired driving licence in the glove compartment, turned on the ignition, and as I glided along the main road and passed the sign with Os on it I realised something. That the road went on. And on. That a whole world lay in front of that red bonnet.

It was a long, hot summer.

Every morning I drove Carl down to the Co-op where he had a summer job before heading on to the workshop.

And in the course of those weeks and months I became not just a useful driver but also, according to Rita Willumsen, a satisfactory if not expert lover.

We usually met in the late mornings. We each drove our own car, and I parked in a different farm track from her so that no one would connect us.

Rita Willumsen made just one condition.

‘As long as you’re with me, I don’t want you going with other girls.’

There were three reasons for her condition.

The first was that she didn’t want to catch any of the sexually transmitted diseases that she knew from working at the surgery were rife in the village, and the girls people like me have it away with are always tarts. Not that she was scared stiff of a dose of chlamydia or crabs, that could be quickly sorted out by a doctor in Notodden, but because now and then Willumsen still demanded his conjugal rights.

The second reason was that even tarts can fall in love, and analyse every word the boy says, take note of every evasion, ask questions about every undocumented trip to the woods, until they end up knowing things they shouldn’t know, and suddenly you’ve got a full-blown scandal.

The third reason was that she wanted to hang on to me. Not because I was in any way unique, but because the risk of changing lovers in a little place such as Os was too great.

In simple terms, the condition was that Willumsen mustn’t find out. And the reason was that Willumsen – like the canny businessman he was – had insisted on a prenup agreement, and fru Willumsen owned nothing beyond her physical attributes, as people say. She was dependent on her husband if she wanted to go on living the life she had become accustomed to. And that was fine by me, because suddenly I had a life that was worth living.

What fru Willumsen did have was culture, as she herself referred to it. She came from a good family over in the east of the country, but after her father squandered the family fortune she chose security over insecurity and married the charmless but wealthy and hard-working used-car salesman and for twenty years persuaded him that she wasn’t using contraception and that there must be something wrong with his swimmers. And all the fine words, the useless knowledge of painting and the equally useless knowledge of literature that she didn’t manage to force-feed him, got handed on to me instead. She showed me paintings by Cézanne and van Gogh. Read aloud from Hamlet and Brand. And from Steppenwolf and The Doors of Perception, which up until then I had thought were bands, not books. But best of all she liked to read Francisco Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura. Usually in a refined New Norwegian translation, and usually with a slight quivering in her voice. We smoked hash, though Rita would never say where she got it from, and listen to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. I could say that the school I went to during the time Rita Willumsen and I had those secret meetings up at her cabin gave me more than any university or academy would have done; although that would probably be a serious exaggeration. But it had the same effect on me as the Volvo 240 did that time I drove it out of the village; it opened my eyes to the fact that there was a whole other world out there. One that I could dream about making mine, if only I could learn the esoteric codes. But that would never happen, not to me, the dyslexic brother.

Not that Carl seemed to have any urge to travel the world either.

Rather the opposite. As summer turned to autumn and winter, he isolated himself more and more. When I asked what he was brooding about, if he wouldn’t take a drive with me in the Volvo, he just looked at me with a vague, mild smile, almost as though I wasn’t there.

‘I have strange dreams,’ he said one evening, completely out of the blue, as we sat in the winter garden. ‘I dream that you’re a killer. That you’re dangerous. And I envy you for being dangerous.’

I knew of course that in some sense or other Carl knew that I had fixed things so the Cadillac would go over the edge at Geitesvingen that evening, but he’d never said a word about it, and I saw no reason to tell him and make him an accomplice as someone who’d heard a confession but not reported it. So I didn’t respond, just said goodnight and left him there.

It was the closest to a happy time I had ever had. I had a job I loved, a car to take me wherever I wanted, and I was living out the sex dreams of every teenage boy. Not that I could boast of it to anyone, not even Carl, because Rita had said ‘not a single soul’, and I had sworn it on my brother’s name.

And then one evening the inevitable happened. As usual Rita had left the cabin before me to avoid us being seen together. As usual I gave her twenty minutes, but that evening we were late, I’d been working hard at the workshop the night before and the whole day, and lying there in bed I was relaxing totally. Because even though the cabin had been bought and rebuilt with herr Willumsen’s money, according to Rita he would never set foot there again, being too fat and sedate and the path there too long and steep. She’d told me he’d bought the place partly because it was bigger than Chairman Aas’s cabin and he could look down on it, and partly as pure investment in the countryside wilderness at a time when oil was in the process of turning Norway into a wealthy nation – even back then Willumsen could smell the boom in mountain cabins that would come along many years later. That it came further up the highway was down to chance and certain councils that were quicker on the buzzer than ours, but it was still smart thinking by Willumsen. Anyway, lying there and waiting until I could leave, I fell asleep. When I woke up it was four o’clock in the morning.

Three-quarters of an hour later I was at Opgard.

Neither Carl nor I wanted to sleep in Mum and Dad’s room, so I crept into the boys’ room, not wanting to wake Carl. But as I was about to sneak into the upper bunk he gave a start and I was looking down at a pair of wide-open eyes shining in the dark.

‘We’re going to jail,’ he whispered groggily.

‘Eh?’ I said.

He blinked twice before he sort of shrugged it off, and I realised he had been dreaming.

‘Where have you been?’ he asked.

‘Fixing a car,’ I said, swinging my leg over the railing.

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘Uncle Bernard called by with some lapskaus. Asked where you were.’

I took a breath. ‘I was with a woman.’

‘A woman? Not a girl?’

‘We’ll talk about it tomorrow, Carl. We’ve got to get up in two hours.’

I lay there listening out to see if his breathing eased down. It didn’t.

‘What was that about jail?’ I finally asked.

‘I dreamed they were going to put us in jail for murder,’ he said.

I took a breath. ‘For murdering who?’

‘That’s the crazy thing about it,’ he said. ‘Each other.’

33

IT WAS EARLY IN THE morning. I was looking forward to a day with cars and simple mechanical problems to solve. Little did I know, as people say.

I was standing in the workshop as I’d done more or less every day for the past two years and was just about to start work on a car when Uncle Bernard came out and said there was a phone call for me. I followed him back into his office.

It was Sigmund Olsen, the sheriff. He wanted to have a word with me, he said. Hear how things were. Take me on a short fishing trip up near his cabin, it was just a few kilometres down the main road. He could pick me up in a few hours. And even though his voice had been soft as butter on the phone I could hear it wasn’t an invitation but an order.

Which naturally gave me pause for thought. Why the hurry if it was just a harmless little chat?

I carried on working on the engine, and after lunch lay down on the car creeper and shoved myself under the car and away from this world. There is nothing more calming than working on an engine when you’ve got ants in your brain. I don’t know how long I’d been lying there when I heard someone cough. I had a nasty premonition, which was maybe why I waited a bit before shoving myself out on the creeper.

‘You’re Roy,’ said the man standing there looking down at me. ‘You’ve got something that belonged to me.’

The man was Willum Willumsen. Belonged. Past tense.

I lay there beneath him, completely defenceless. ‘And what might that be, Willumsen?’

‘You know very well what it is.’

I swallowed. I wouldn’t have time to do anything before he stamped the breath and the life out of me. I’d seen it done at Årtun, had some idea of how to do it, but not how to avoid it. I’d learned to hit first and hit hard, not how to keep up a guard. I shook my head.

‘A wetsuit,’ he said. ‘Flippers, mask, diving cylinder, valve and a snorkel. Eight thousand five hundred and sixty kroner.’

He laughed loudly when he saw the look of relief on my face, which he obviously interpreted as astonishment. ‘I never forget a deal, Roy.’

‘Oh no?’ I said, getting to my feet and wiping my fingers with a long rag. ‘So not the one when my father bought the Cadillac either?’

‘Nope.’ Willumsen looked up into the air, chuckling, as though it were a fond memory. ‘He didn’t like haggling, your father. If I’d known how little he liked it I might even have started a little lower.’

‘Oh? You mean you’ve got a guilty conscience?’ Maybe I was hoping to get in before him if this was what he’d come to ask me. Attack is the best form of defence, people say. Not that I thought there was anything to defend, I wasn’t ashamed. Not about that. I was just a young lad that had got hit on by some married woman, so what? That was something they would have to sort out between themselves, I wasn’t going to get involved in a fight over territorial rights. All the same, I had twisted the rag around the knuckles of my right.

‘Always,’ he said, smiling. ‘But if there’s one talent I was born with, it’s how to deal with a bad conscience.’

‘Yeah?’ I said. ‘What do you do?’

He grinned until his eyes vanished in his fleshy face and pointed to one of his shoulders. ‘When the devil on my right discusses things with the angel on my left, I let the devil put his arguments first. And then I put a stop to the discussion.’ Willumsen laughed again. The laughter was followed by a rasping sound, the sound of a car being thrown into reverse while it’s moving forward. The sound of a man who is going to die at some unknown point in the future.

‘I’ve come here because of Rita,’ he said.

I weighed the situation up. Willumsen was bigger and heavier than me, but unless he pulled out a weapon he presented no physical threat. And what else could he threaten me with? I wasn’t dependent on him economically or in any other way, and nor could he threaten either Carl or Uncle Bernard, as far as I knew.

But of course there was one person he could threaten. Rita.

‘She says she’s very pleased with you.’

I didn’t respond. A car drove slowly by on the road outside, but we were alone in the workshop.

‘She says the Sonett has never run better. So I’ve brought along a car I want you to check over and fix whatever absolutely has to be fixed. But no more than that.’

I glanced over his devil-shoulder and saw the blue Toyota Corolla parked outside. Tried not to look as relieved as I was feeling.

‘The problem is, it has to be done by tomorrow,’ said Willumsen. ‘I’ve got a customer coming from a long way off who’s more or less bought it over the phone. It’d be a pity for both of us if he ended up disappointed. Get my drift?’

‘I get it,’ I said. ‘Sounds like overtime.’

‘Ha, Bernard’s probably glad to take any job that comes his way at hourly rates.’

‘That’s something you’ll have to discuss with him.’

Willumsen nodded. ‘Given Bernard’s state of health it’s probably just a question of time before it’s you and me discussing hourly rates, Roy, so I want you to know even at this early stage who this workshop’s most important customer is.’ He handed the car keys to me, said it didn’t look like rain today after all, and left.

I drove the car inside, opened the bonnet and groaned. I would be working into the night. And I couldn’t even make a start on it now, as in another half-hour Sigmund Olsen would be picking me up. Suddenly I had a couple of things to think about. That was fine, this was still the happy time. But as things turned out, the last day of the happy time.

34

‘WILLUMSEN WAS PISSED OFF HIS car wasn’t ready,’ said Uncle Bernard when I arrived late at the workshop the morning after the Fritz night.

‘There was more to do than I thought,’ I said.

Uncle Bernard put his large, square head on one side. It sat atop a small and equally square body. When we wanted to tease him Carl and I called him our Lego man. We really loved him. ‘Like what for example?’ he asked.

‘Shagging,’ I said as I opened the bonnet of the Corolla.

‘Eh?’

‘There was a bit of a double booking. I’d arranged to do some shagging yesterday too.’

Uncle Bernard gave a short, involuntary laugh. Struggled to resume his serious face. ‘Work comes before shagging, Roy. Understood?’

‘Understood.’

‘What’s the tractor doing outside?’

‘No room for it in here, got three cars coming in later today. Cabin people.’

‘OK. And why is the scoop up in the air?’

‘Takes less room.’

‘You think there’s a shortage of space out there in the car park?’

‘OK then, it’s a celebration of the job I was working on last night. The one that wasn’t the Corolla, that is.’

Uncle Bernard looked out at the tractor with its proudly raised elevating arms. Shook his head and left. But I could hear him laughing again inside his office.

I carried on working on the Corolla. It wasn’t until late in the evening that rumours that Sheriff Sigmund Olsen was missing began to circulate, as people say.

When they found the boat with Sigmund Olsen’s boots no one doubted that he had drowned himself, there wasn’t even anything to discuss. Quite the opposite, people tried to outdo one another in saying how clearly they had seen the writing on the wall.

‘Of course, Sigmund always had that dark edge behind the smile and the jokes, but people didn’t notice it, they’re blind to things like that.’

‘Just the day before he said to me that it looked as though it was clouding over, but of course I thought he was talking about the weather.’

‘Of course they have confidentiality at the surgery, but I heard they were prescribing those happy pills for Sigmund. Oh yes, a few years ago, when his cheeks were so firm and round, remember that? But just lately he was so hollow-cheeked. Stopped taking his pills.’

‘You could see it on him. He had something on his mind. Something was bothering him and he couldn’t work it out. And when we don’t find the answer, when we can’t find a meaning, can’t find Jesus, well, that’s the kind of thing that can happen.’

A woman sheriff came over from the neighbouring county and probably heard all this, but she still wanted to speak to those who had met Sigmund on the day he disappeared. Carl and I had discussed what Carl should say. I suggested it would be best to stay as close to the truth as possible and only leave out what was absolutely necessary. Say when Sigmund Olsen had visited him at the farm, roughly what time he left, that Carl hadn’t noticed anything special about him. Carl had protested that he probably ought to say that Olsen had seemed down, but I’d explained that in the first place she would be talking to others who would say Olsen seemed his usual self that day. And in the second place, given that she suspected that someone else might be involved, what was it someone was trying to make her think?

‘If you’re too keen to convince them that Olsen has killed himself, it’ll seem suspicious.’

Carl had nodded. ‘Of course. Thanks, Roy.’

Two weeks later, and for the first time after the Fritz night, I was lying in bed in the cabin again.

I hadn’t actually done anything different, but Rita Willumsen seemed to appreciate more than usual what had become our regular sessions of lovemaking.

Now she lay with her head resting in her hand, smoking a menthol cigarette as she studied me.

‘You’ve changed,’ she said.

‘Really?’ I said, a wedge of Berry’s under my upper lip.

‘You’re more grown up.’

‘Is that so surprising? It’s been a while since you took my virtue, you know.’

She gave a slight start, I didn’t usually speak to her like that.

‘I mean since the last time we met,’ she said. ‘You’re someone else.’

‘Better or worse than the previous me?’ I asked, fishing out the wad of tobacco with my index finger and laying it in the ashtray beside the bed. I turned towards her. Lay a hand on her thigh. She looked at it in a demonstrative way. One of the unwritten rules was that she was the one who decided when we made love and when we rested, not me.

‘You know, Roy,’ she said, and took a drag on her cigarette, ‘I’d actually made up my mind to tell you today that it’s time we rounded off this affair of ours.’

‘Really?’ I said.

‘A friend of mine said that that hairdresser girl, Grete Smitt, has been spreading rumours about me having secret meetings with a young man.’

I nodded, but didn’t tell her that I’d been thinking it might be time to stop too. I was simply getting tired of how repetitive it was getting. Drive over to the cabin, fuck, eat the home-made food she brought along, fuck, go home. But when I said the sentence aloud to myself, of course I didn’t really know what it was I was getting tired of. And it wasn’t as if I had some other fru Willumsen waiting for me.

‘But after what you did to me today I’m thinking we can wait a while before we stop,’ she said. She put her cigarette out in the ashtray and turned to me.

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

‘Why?’ She gave me a long, thoughtful look, as though she didn’t have the answer. ‘Maybe it’s Sigmund Olsen’s drowning. The thought that you can wake up dead one day. Because we sure can’t postpone living, now can we?’

She caressed my chest and stomach.

‘Olsen took his own life,’ I said. ‘He wanted to die.’

‘Exactly.’ She looked at her own hand with the red-painted fingernails as it continued on its way downward. ‘And that can happen to any of us.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, picking up my watch from the bedside table. ‘But I have to go now. Hope you don’t mind me leaving first for once.’

At first she looked a bit surprised, but then she composed herself, gave a thin smile and asked teasingly if I had a date with another girl.

In reply I gave an equally teasing smile, got up and began to dress.

‘He’s away this weekend,’ she said, watching me from the bed with a slightly sulky expression on her face.

The name Willum Willumsen was never mentioned.

‘You can come and visit me.’

I stopped dressing. ‘Visit you at home?’

She leaned out over the side of the bed, dipped her hand into her bag, fished out a bunch of keys and began to work one of them loose.

‘Come after dark, use the garden on the blind side of the house, where no neighbours can see you. This is to the basement door.’

She dangled the freed key in front of me. I was so surprised all I could do was stare at it.

‘Take it, you idiot!’ she hissed.

And I took it. Stuck it in my pocket and knew I wouldn’t be using it. I’d taken it because for the first time I’d seen what looked like vulnerability in Rita Willumsen’s expression. And with that anger in her voice she was trying to hide something I hadn’t even thought about; that she might be afraid of rejection.

And walking down the path away from the cabin, I knew the balance between Rita Willumsen and me had changed.

Carl had changed too.

In some way he held himself more erect. And no longer kept himself to himself but had started going out and seeing people. It had happened almost overnight. The Fritz night. Maybe he felt – like me – that the experience of the Fritz night was something that lifted us above the crowd. When Mum and Dad went over the edge into Huken, Carl had been a passive spectator, the victim who was being saved. But this time he’d been a participant, done what had to be done, things the people around us couldn’t have imagined. We had crossed a line and crossed back over again, and you can’t have been to the place we had been to without it changing you. Or to put it this way: maybe it was only now that Carl could be the person he had really been all along; maybe the Fritz night just tapped a hole in the cocoon that let this butterfly out. He had already grown taller than me, but in the course of the winter he had gone from being a fragile, shy young lad into a youth who understood he had nothing to be ashamed of. He’d always been well liked, now he became popular too. I began to notice that when he was hanging out with his friends it was him who was the leader, his comments people listened to, his jokes people laughed at, he was the one they looked at first when they were trying to impress or make the gang laugh. He was the one they imitated. And the girls noticed it too. It wasn’t just that Carl’s sweet, girlish prettiness had matured into strapping good looks, the way he acted had changed too. I noticed it when we were at the gatherings at Årtun, that he had acquired a natural self-assurance both in the way he spoke and the way he moved. He could be uninhibitedly playful, as though nothing was really serious, and then sit down with a mate who was having girl trouble, or a female friend with a broken heart, listen sympathetically to what they had to say and give them advice, as though he possessed experience and wisdom they hadn’t yet acquired.

As for me, I guess I just became more of what I always had been. More self-assured, of course. Because I knew now that, when it really mattered, I was capable of doing what had to be done.

‘Are you sitting here, reading?’ Carl said one Saturday evening. It was gone midnight, he’d just come home, obviously a bit tipsy, and I was sitting in the winter garden with An American Tragedy open on my lap.

And in a flash it was as though I saw the two of us from outside. That I had taken his place now. Alone in a room without company. Only it wasn’t his place. It was just him who had borrowed mine for a while.

‘Where have you been?’ I asked.

‘At a party,’ he said.

‘Didn’t you promise Uncle Bernard you would take it easy with the partying?

‘Sure,’ he said. There was laughter in his voice, but real regret too. ‘I broke my promise.’

We laughed.

It was good to laugh with Carl.

‘You have a good time?’ I asked, closing the book.

‘I danced with Mari Aas.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yes. And I think I’m a little bit in love.’

I don’t know why, but the words cut me like a knife.

‘Mari Aas,’ I said. ‘The chairman’s daughter and an Opgard boy?’

‘Why not?’ he said.

‘Well, sure, there’s no law against dreaming,’ I said, and heard how ugly and mean my own laughter sounded.

‘Guess you’re right,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’ll head up and dream a bit.’

One day a few weeks later I saw Mari Aas at the coffee shop.

She was very pretty. And apparently ‘dangerously intelligent’, as someone put it. One thing was for certain, she sure knew how to speak. According to the local newspaper she’d seen off aspiring politicians much older than herself when she represented AUF in a debate in Notodden before the local election. Mari Aas stood there, leaning forward slightly, chubby, blonde pigtails, breasts pressing against the Che Guevara T-shirt, and the cold, blue eyes of a wolf, and a gaze that passed over me there in the coffee shop as though I wasn’t there, as though in search of something worth hunting for and I wasn’t it. A gaze without fear, that’s what I thought. The gaze of something at the very top of the food chain.

Summer returned and Rita Willumsen – who had been on a trip to America with him, her husband – sent a text message saying she wanted to meet at the cabin. She wrote that she’d been missing me. She, who always made the decisions, had started to write stuff like that in her messages, especially since I never turned up at her home through the basement door that weekend she was alone.

When I got to the cabin she seemed unusually excited. She had presents for me, and I unwrapped a pair of silk underpants and a little bottle of so-called perfume-for-men, both bought in New York City itself, she said. But best of all were the two cartons of Berry’s moist snuff, even though I wasn’t allowed to take any of it home, it belonged to our world at the cabin, she said. So the snuff was stored in the fridge there. And I realised she thought of it as an extra incentive for me once I ran out at home.

‘Take your clothes off,’ I said.

She looked at me in astonishment for a moment. Then she did as I had told her.

Afterwards we lay in the bed, sweating, and slippery with bodily fluids. The room felt like a baker’s oven, the summer sun roasting the roof, and I pulled myself free of Rita’s literally damp embrace.

I picked up the book of Petrarch’s sonnets from the bedside table, opened it at random and began reading aloud:

Clear, sweet fresh water where she, the only one who seemed woman to me.

I closed the book with a thump.

Rita Willumsen blinked uncomprehendingly. ‘Water,’ she said. ‘Let’s go for a swim. I’ll bring some wine.’

We got dressed, she with a bathing costume underneath, and I followed her up to the mountain lake that lay behind some knolls above the cabin. There, beneath some overhanging birch trees, lay a little red dinghy that obviously belonged to the Willumsens. In the space of that short walk it had clouded over, but we were still warm and damp from the lovemaking and the steep climb, so we lifted the boat out onto the water, and I rowed until we were so far from land that we were sure no one passing by could identify us.

‘Swim,’ said Rita when we were halfway through the bottle of sparkling wine.

‘Too cold,’ I said.

‘Softie’ she said, and started taking off the clothes she was wearing over the swimming costume, which was tight in all the right places, as people say. And I remembered her explanation for her athletic body and broad shoulders, how in her youth she’d been a promising competitive swimmer. She stood on the thwart on one side, and I had to lean out the other side so the dinghy wouldn’t capsize. The wind had risen and the surface of the water had turned a greyish white, like the coating of a blind eye. Small waves came in quick, rushing succession, actually more like ripples, and it occurred to me just as she bent her knees to dive off.

‘Wait!’ I shouted.

‘Ha ha!’ she said, and kicked off. Her body described an elegant parabola through the air. Because like so many swimmers, Rita Willumsen knew the art of diving. But she didn’t know the art of gauging depth from the way the wind shapes the surface of water. Her body cut soundlessly down into the water before suddenly stopping. For a moment she looked like the diver on a Pink Floyd album cover Uncle Bernard had shown me, the one where the guy is standing on his hands underwater and his body seems to be growing out of the mirror-smooth surface of the water. Uncle Bernard told me it took the photographer several days just to get that one picture, and that the main problem was from the air bubbles ruining the surface when the diver breathed out air from the cylinder he was using. What ruined the picture here was that fru Willumsen’s straight legs and the lower part of her upper body collapsed. It was like that footage you see on television showing the controlled demolition of a tower block, only without the control.

And when she stood up, a furious look on her face, greenish slime on her forehead and the water only reaching to her navel, I lay back, laughing so hard the dinghy almost capsized.

‘Idiot!’ she hissed.

I could have stopped there. I should have stopped there. Maybe blame it on the wine, say I wasn’t used to it. But anyway, I grabbed the orange life jacket that lay under the thwart and tossed it out to her. It hit the water next to her and lay there and floated, and that was when I understood it was too late. Rita Willumsen, the woman who had towered over me at the workshop that first time, who had commanded me and guided me every step of the way we had taken, at that moment looked like a lost soul, an abandoned young girl dressed up as an older woman. Because now, in the merciless light of day, her make-up all washed off, I could see the wrinkles and years that lay between us. Her skin was white, with goose bumps from the cold, and it sagged around the edges of her swimsuit. I had stopped laughing, and maybe she read what I had seen in my face, because she crossed her arms in front of her, as though to protect herself from my gaze.

‘Sorry,’ I said. Maybe it was the only right thing to say, and maybe it was the worst thing. Maybe it would have made no difference what I said.

‘I’m swimming back,’ she said, and glided away below the surface, vanished from sight.

I didn’t see Rita Willumsen again for a long time.

She swam faster than I rowed, and when I reached the shore I saw only the wet prints of her naked feet. I pulled the dinghy out of the water, emptied what was left of the wine, and picked up her clothes. And by the time I reached the cabin she had already left. I lay down on the bed, took a wad of Berry’s from the silver snuffbox and checked the clock to see how long was left of the prescribed half-hour. Felt the burn of that fermented tobacco against the inside of my upper lip, and the shame on the inside of my heart. Shame at having caused her to feel shame. Why was that so much worse than the shame at my own inadequacy? Why was it worse to have laughed a little too heartily at a woman who had chosen you, just a kid, as her lover, than it was to have killed your own mother and dismembered a sheriff? I don’t know. It just was.

I waited twenty minutes. Then I drove home. Even though I knew I wouldn’t be coming back, I resisted the temptation to take the carton of Berry’s with me.

35

IT WAS A SUNDAY, TOWARDS the end of the summer. As arranged Uncle Bernard arrived at Opgard with a casserole of lapskaus which I heated up while he sat at the kitchen table and talked about everything except his health. He was by now so thin it was a topic we both avoided.

‘Carl?’

‘He’ll be along,’ I said.

‘How’s he doing?’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Doing well at school.’

‘Does he drink?’

I chewed on it a moment before shaking my head. Knew Uncle Bernard was thinking of Dad’s thirst.

‘Your father would be proud of you,’ he said.

‘Yeah?’ was all I said.

‘He wouldn’t have said so in so many words, but believe me.’

‘Well, if you say so.’

Uncle Bernard sighed and looked out the window. ‘And I am certainly proud of you. Here comes your little brother, by the way. Got company.’

I hadn’t time to look out the window before Carl and his company had disappeared round the northern side of the house. Then I heard footsteps in the hallway and low, almost intimate voices, one of them female. Then the kitchen door opened.

‘This is Mari,’ said Carl. ‘Is there enough lapskaus?’

I got to my feet and just stared at my now big, erect kid brother and the tall blonde with the wolf’s eyes. My hand mechanically stirred the spoon around in the bubbling casserole.

Had I seen it coming or hadn’t I?

On the one hand this was straight out of a fairy tale; the orphaned son of a mountain farmer who’d won the king’s daughter, the princess whom no one could silence. On the other hand there was something almost inevitable about it, they were quite simply the logical couple, the way the moon and the stars shone down over Os just then. All the same I stared at him. To think that he, my kid brother, the one I’d held my arms around, the one who couldn’t put Dog out of his misery, who panicked and called me for help on the Fritz night, that he had dared to do something I would never have dared. To approach a girl like Mari Aas, talk to her, introduce himself. Believe himself worthy of her attention.

And I stared at her. She looked quite different now from the last time, down at the Kaffistova. Now she smiled at me, and that cold, hunter’s gaze had been replaced by something open, inviting, almost warm. I realised of course that it wasn’t me personally, it was the situation that brought out that smile, but right there and then it felt almost as though she was raising me too, the big brother from the little farm, up into her own sphere.

‘Well?’ said Uncle Bernard. ‘Serious or just good friends?’

Mari gave a high, trilling laugh that was just a touch nervous. ‘Oh, well, I guess we’d say—’

‘Serious,’ Carl interrupted her.

She swayed slightly away from him and looked at him with raised eyebrows. Slipped her hand in beneath his arm.

‘Well, then let’s say that,’ she said.

Summer ended and the autumn was long and wet.

Rita rang once in October and once in November. I saw the R on the screen but didn’t take the call.

Uncle Bernard was hospitalised again. With each passing week he grew sicker, weaker and smaller. I worked too much and ate too little. Drove to the hospital in Notodden two or three times a week. Not because I thought I had to, but because I enjoyed the minimalist conversations I had with Uncle Bernard, and the long drives alone up and down the highway listening to J. J. Cale.

Carl came with me sometimes, but he had a lot to do. He and Mari had become the village’s glamorous couple. There were always things going on around them socially, and when I had the time I joined them. For some reason or other Carl liked me to come along, and on top of that it dawned on me I had no friends of my own. Not that I’d been lonely, or not had anyone to talk to, it was just something I didn’t do. Would have found it boring, preferred to spell my way through one of the books Rita had recommended and which I usually found in the library at Notodden. Since I read so slowly I couldn’t borrow too many at once, but what I did read I read thoroughly. On the Road. Lord of the Flies. The Virgin Suicides. The Sun Also Rises. The Wasp Factory. And I read out loud to Uncle Bernard from one called Post Office by Charles Bukowski, which made him – who had never read a book all the way through in his life – laugh so much he ended up having a coughing fit. Afterwards he looked tired. He said thanks for coming, but now it was best if I went.

And then came the day when he told me he was going to die. And followed that up with a Volkswagen joke.

And his daughter came and took the keys to the house.

I had expected Carl to start blubbing when I gave him the news about Uncle Bernard, but he seemed prepared for it, at least he shook his head sorrowfully for a while, as though it was something you could shake off. The way he seemed to have shaken off the Fritz night. Sometimes it seemed almost as though he had forgotten what had happened. We never spoke of it, as though we both understood that if we packed it in enough layers of silence and time it might one day become an echo from the past, like those flashbacks of old nightmares that for a fraction of a second seemed to have really happened, before you remember, and your pulse drops back down to normal again.

I told Carl I thought he should move into Mum and Dad’s bedroom, on the grounds that he was eight centimetres taller than me and needed a longer bed. But really it was because I slept so badly there in the boys’ room. Carl no longer heard the screams from Huken. Now I was the one hearing them.

Carl gave a long and wonderful eulogy for Uncle Bernard at the funeral, about how fine and genuine and funny he was. Maybe some people thought it was odd that Carl and not me, who was the older brother, spoke for us both, but I had asked him to do it, being afraid I would simply break down and cry. Carl said yes and got the material from me, all the anecdotes and thoughts, since I had been closer to Bernard than him. Carl had taken notes, written, rewritten, added his own lines, rehearsed in front of the mirror and really given the task his all. I had never realised he had so many refined thoughts in him, but then that’s how things are: you think you know someone like the back of your own hand, and then suddenly they show you sides of themselves you had no idea about. But the truth is that trouser pockets – even your own – are just a darkness you fumble about in. Now and then you find a ten-øre coin, a lottery ticket or a foil-wrapped aspirin in the lining. Or you can be so hopelessly in love with a girl that you’re on the verge of topping yourself, even though you don’t really know her. So you start wondering is that ten øre maybe just from yesterday, that love just something you’ve made up, that she’s just an excuse, a reason to go somewhere you long to go: anywhere that’s away from here? But I never drove further than the county line when I just wanted to think, or to Notodden, if I wanted to borrow books. Never thought about driving into the mountain by the tunnel opening at the end of that long, straight stretch, or doing a repeat of what happened up at Huken. I always came back. Ticked off one day and waited for the next. One where I would see Mari, or I wouldn’t see Mari.

It was around this time I started hitting people.

36

THE PERIOD AFTER UNCLE BERNARD’S death was a bleak time. I had taken over the workshop and was working all hours, and I think that was what saved me. That, and the fighting at Årtun.

The only relief were those Saturday-evening dances, with Carl getting drunk and flirting and me waiting for some poor jealous bastard to lose control so I could plant my fist in my own, pathetic mirror-image, punch it to the ground over and over again, week in and week out.

It was often the early hours of the morning before we got home from those Saturday night dances. Carl would collapse on the lower bunk, hung-over, farting and giggling. And once we had finished going through the night’s adventures he might exclaim:

‘God but it’s good to have a big brother!’

And that warmed my heart, even though it was a lie. Because we both knew that by now it was him who was the big brother.

Not once did it occur to me to tell him I was in love with his girlfriend. I hadn’t told Uncle Bernard either, or given any sign at all to Mari, obviously. The shame I felt was something I had to bear alone. I could hardly even endure my own reflection in the mirror. Was that something Dad had felt too? Had he thought that a man who lusts after his own son doesn’t deserve to fucking well live, and left that shotgun outside the barn in the hope that I would do it for him? I believe I understood more of him now, and it scared all kinds of hell out of me, and didn’t exactly do anything to lessen my self-contempt.

I can’t remember much of what I thought or said when Carl told me he wanted to study. It was actually pretty obvious, not just because of the good marks he used to get at school, or the fact that he wasn’t especially practical, but because Mari was equally obviously destined to be a student. And of course they would be students in the same city. I’d imagined the two of them sharing a little flat in Oslo or Bergen, coming back home to the village together in the holidays and hanging out with the old crowd. And I’d be hanging out with them too.

But then came that business with Grete and Carl at Årtun, Grete telling all to Mari, and suddenly everything was turned upside down.

And when Carl disappeared to Minnesota I was left with the feeling that he’d run out on the whole business. From the little village scandal and Mari Aas. From his responsibilities on the farm. From me, who had become more dependent on him than he was on me. And for all I know, maybe he’d started hearing them again, those screams from Huken.

At least it was quiet after he left.

Damn quiet.

The oil company bought the workshop and the land and suddenly I – a lad in his early twenties – was running a service station. I don’t know if they noticed something I’d never noticed myself, but anyway I worked round the clock. It wasn’t because I was particularly ambitious, that came later. But because I found it harder than expected to deal with being up there on the farm, listening to Huken and to the golden plover’s song of loneliness. A bird on the lookout for company. Not a friend, necessarily, just company. All of that could be dealt with by being at work, having people around me, having sounds, things to do, having my thoughts somewhere they could be put to use, and not just grinding round and round the same old crap.

I’d got Mari out of my system, like a tumour after a successful operation. I realised of course that it was no coincidence it happened at the same time as the break between her and Carl, but I tried not to think about it too much. It was probably complicated, and I had just read Kafka’s Metamorphosis – about a guy who wakes up one day to find he’s turned into a disgusting insect – and had realised that, if I started grubbing around in my subconscious and all that, the chances of finding something I didn’t like were pretty high.

Naturally I bumped into Rita Willumsen now and then. She looked good, the years didn’t seem to have taken their toll on her. But she was always with someone, or there were people around us, so all I got was the general friendly smile between two villagers, and a question about how the station was doing, or Carl over there in the States.

One day I saw her outside by the pumps. She was talking to Markus who was filling her Sonett with petrol. Usually it was Willumsen himself who filled the petrol in their cars, but Markus is a nice-looking lad, quiet and gentle, and for a moment I wondered if Markus was her new project. It was strange, but it didn’t seem to bother me at all, I just wished them both well. When Markus had replaced the petrol cap, as Rita was about to get into the car, she looked over towards the station shop. I doubt she could see, but anyway she lifted her hand almost like she was waving. And I waved back. When Markus came back in he said Willum Willumsen had got cancer but that he was expected to make a full recovery.

The next time I saw Rita was at the annual celebration of Constitution Day on 17 May at Årtun. She looked wonderful in her national costume. And was walking hand in hand with her husband. That was something I’d never seen before. Willumsen was thin, or at least less fat, and if you ask me it didn’t suit him. The skin under his chin dangled and swung about like a lizard. But when he and Rita spoke together, the one leaned in towards the other and listened, as though wanting to catch every word. Smiling, nodding, looking each other in the eyes. Maybe the cancer had been an epiphany, a revelation. Maybe she had discovered that she had learned to love this man who adored her. And who knows, maybe Willumsen hadn’t been as blind as I thought either. Anyway, I realised that that wave from the petrol pump had been a final goodbye. And that was fine, we had meant something to each other at a time when we both needed it. From what I’ve seen, very few affairs have a happy ending, but when I saw the two of them together it seemed to me that, in a way, Rita Willumsen and I were two of the lucky ones. And maybe Willum Willumsen a third.

So I was the golden plover again.

But just one year later I met the woman who would be my secret lover for the next five years. At the dinner following a meeting at head office in Oslo I met Pia Syse. She was the personnel manager and sat on my left, and as such she was not my formal dinner partner, but after a while she turned to me and asked if I would rescue her from the cavalier sitting on her left, a man who had been talking about petrol for the preceding hour, and there really isn’t that much to say about petrol. I’d drunk a couple of glasses of wine and asked if it wasn’t a type of chauvinism – in one direction or the other – to place on a man a greater responsibility to entertain a woman than the other way round. She agreed, so I gave her three minutes to say something that I found interesting, made me laugh, or provoked me. If she couldn’t then she’d have to forgive me if I returned to the formal dinner partner on my right, a bespectacled brunette from Kongsberg who had said her name was Unni, and not much else. And respect to Pia Syse, she met all three challenges, and in well under three minutes.

We danced afterwards, and she said I was the worst dance partner she had ever had.

In the lift on the way up to our rooms we started making out, and she told me I couldn’t kiss either.

And when we woke up in her hotel bed – as personnel manager she’d been allotted one of the suites – she said straight out that the sex was well below average.

But that she had rarely laughed as much as she had done over the last twelve hours.

I told her one out of four was above average for me, and she laughed again. And I spent the next hour trying to do something about that first impression. At least I hope I did. At any rate Pia Syse said she’d be summoning me to head office at some point during the next fourteen days, and that the agenda would be ‘loose’.

Standing in the queue to check out at reception, Unni, my formal dinner partner, asked if I was driving to Os, and if so could she have a lift as far as Kongsberg.

We didn’t talk much on the drive.

She asked about the car, and I said it was a present from my uncle and had sentimental value for me. I could have told her that even if every damn part on it had been replaced at least once, the 240 was a mechanical marvel. That it had for example none of the problems associated with the posher V 70 which often had trouble with the tie rod and the steering arm. And that one day I hoped to be buried in the chassis of my 240. But instead of jabbering on about uninteresting things, I asked about uninteresting things, and she told me she worked in accounts, had two kids and that her husband was headmaster at a secondary school in Kongsberg. She worked from home two days a week, commuted to Oslo, and took every Friday off.

‘What do you do then?’ I asked.

‘Nothing,’ she said.

‘Isn’t that difficult?’ I asked. ‘Doing nothing?’

‘No,’ she said.

And that was the full extent of our conversation.

I turned on J. J. Cale and felt a deep peace stealing over me. It was probably from lack of sleep, Cale’s laid-back minimalism, and realising that Unni’s default mode was silence, same as mine.

When I woke, with a start, staring out at the cars coming towards us, their lights scattered across the windscreen by the rain, my brain reached the conclusion that I had a) fallen asleep at the wheel, b) must have been asleep for more than a couple of seconds since I couldn’t remember the rain or turning on the windscreen wipers, and c) should have stopped for a break long ago. Automatically I raised my hand and put it on the wheel. But instead of the wheel it closed around another warm hand that was already steering.

‘I think you fell asleep,’ said Unni.

‘Kind of you not to wake me,’ I said.

She didn’t laugh. I glanced across at her. There was perhaps the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. In time I would learn it was about as far as that face would go when it came to expressing things. And only now did I see for the first time that she was pretty. Not classically beautiful like Mari Aas, or dazzling like Rita Willumsen in the pictures she had shown me of herself when young. Actually, to tell the truth, I don’t know if Unni Holm-Jensen was pretty by any other standards than her own, because what I’m trying to say is that she was – at that moment, in that light, from that angle – prettier than I had seen her looking so far. Not the kind of pretty to fall in love with, I was never in love with Unni Holm-Jensen, and over five years she never fell in love with me either. But just right now she was pretty in the kind of way that makes you want to go on looking at her. And of course I could have done so, she was keeping her eyes on the road, hadn’t let go the wheel, and I realised that here is someone you can actually count on.

It wasn’t until after we’d met a couple of times halfway between us, which is to say at Notodden, and drunk coffee together, and the third time booked in at the Brattrein Hotel, that she told me she’d already made up her mind during the dinner in Oslo.

‘You and Pia liked each other,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘But I liked you better. And I knew you would like me better.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because you and I are alike, and you and Pia aren’t. And because it isn’t as far to Notodden.’

I laughed. ‘You think I like you better because it isn’t as far to Notodden as to Oslo?’

‘As a rule our sympathies are practical.’

I laughed again and she smiled. Slightly.

Unni wasn’t actually unhappy in her marriage, she said.

‘He’s a fine man and a good father,’ she said. ‘But he never touches me.’ Her body was thin and hard, like a skinny young boy. She worked out a bit, jogging, pumping iron. ‘We all need to be touched,’ she said.

She wasn’t too worried about him finding out she was having an affair. She thought he would understand. It was the kids she was worried about.

‘They have a good, secure home. I can’t let anything destroy that for them. My children will always come first, ahead of that type of happiness. I really like these hours with you, but I’ll give it all up like a shot if it risks the slightest unhappiness or insecurity for my children. Do you understand?’

The question was delivered with a sudden intensity, like when you download a fun app and suddenly a very serious, almost threatening form appears that you have to complete, filled with conditions you have to accept before the fun can begin.

One day I asked her if she, faced with a hypothetical crisis, would be willing to shoot me and her husband if doing so increased the likelihood of her children surviving by forty per cent. That accountant’s brain of hers needed a few seconds before replying.

‘Yes.’

‘Thirty per cent?’

‘Yes.’

‘Twenty?’

‘No.’

What I liked about Unni was that I knew exactly what I was dealing with.

37

CARL SENT ME EMAILS AND pics from his university. It looked and sounded like he was doing fine. White smile and friends who looked as though they’d known Carl all his life. He always was adaptable. ‘Chuck that boy in the water and he’ll grow gills before he’s even wet,’ Mum used to say. I remember that towards the end of that summer when he hung out with that pretty cabin visitor I was jealous of, Carl had learned to speak with an Oslo accent. And now American expressions began to crop up more and more in his emails, more than Dad ever used. It was as though his Norwegian was slowly but surely withering away. And maybe that was what he wanted. Pack everything that had happened here in layers of forgetfulness and distance. When Stanley Spind, the new doctor, heard me refer to the boot of the car as the ‘trunk’, he told me something about forgetting.

‘In Vest-Agder where I grew up, whole villages emigrated to America. Some of them came back. And it turned out that the ones who had forgotten their Norwegian had forgotten almost everything about their old home country. It’s as though language preserves the memories.’

In the days that followed I toyed with the idea of learning a new language, of never speaking Norwegian again, to see if it helped. Because now it wasn’t just screams I heard from Huken. When the silence fell I could hear a low murmuring, as though the dead were talking to each other down there. Planning something. Fucking conspiring.

Carl was hard up, he wrote. He had failed a couple of exams and lost his stipend. I sent money. It was no problem, I had my wage, my outgoings were minimal, I’d even managed to put a little bit aside.

The year after that the college fees went up and he needed more. That winter I equipped a room down in the disused workshop that meant I saved on electricity and petrol. I tried to rent out the farm but there were no takers. When I suggested to Unni that we change our meeting place from the Brattrein to the Notodden Hotel, which was cheaper, she asked if I was short of money. And suggested we could share the cost of the room as she had insisted on doing for a while. I said no, and in the end we carried on meeting at the Brattrein, but the next time we met Unni told me she’d checked the accounts and seen that I was getting a lower wage than station managers with smaller stations than mine.

I rang head office and after a bit of toing and froing was put through to someone I was told could take decisions about pay rises.

The voice that took the call was bright: ‘Pia Syse.’

I hung up.

Before the final semester – at least, he claimed it was the final semester – Carl called in the middle of the night and told me he was short twenty-one thousand dollars, two hundred thousand Norwegian kroner. He’d been banking on the award of a stipend from the Norwegian Society in Minneapolis, but he’d just found out he hadn’t got it, and he needed the school fees before 0900 the next day, or he’d be excluded and not allowed to take his final exams. And without them his whole education was wasted, he said.

‘Business administration is not about what you know but what people think you know, Roy. And what they believe in are exams and diplomas.’

‘Have the school fees really doubled since you started there?’ I asked.

‘It’s really… unfortunate,’ said Carl, slipping into English. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask, but the chairman of the Norwegian Society told me two months ago that there shouldn’t be any problem.’

I was waiting outside the bank when it opened. The bank manager listened as I suggested a loan of two hundred thousand, with the farm as security.

‘You and Carl own the farm and land together, so for that we’ll need both your signature and your brother’s,’ said the bank manager, a man with a bow tie and eyes like a St Bernard. ‘And the processing and documentation take a couple of days. But of course I realise you need this today, and I’ve been authorised by head office to give you a hundred thousand on account of your honest face.’

‘Without security?’

‘We trust people here in the village, Roy.’

‘I need two hundred thousand.’

‘But not that much.’ He smiled, and his eyes grew even more mournful.

‘Carl’s going to be barred at nine o’clock. Four o’clock Norwegian time.’

‘I’ve never heard of universities operating with regimes as strict as that,’ said the bank manager, scratching the back of his hand. ‘But if you say so, then…’ He scratched and scratched away at the back of his hand.

‘Well…?’ I asked impatiently, glancing at my watch. Six and a half hours left.

‘Well, you didn’t hear this from me, but maybe you should have a word with Willumsen.’

I looked at the bank manager. So it really was true what people said, that Willumsen loaned money to people. With no security and at extortionate rates of interest. No security, that is, other than the certainty that Willumsen, somehow or other, sometime or other, would call in his debt. And if there was any trouble, rumour had it that he brought in that enforcer from Denmark to get the job done. I actually knew that Erik Nerell had borrowed from Willumsen when he bought the Fritt Fall bar, but there was no talk there of strong-arm stuff. On the contrary, Erik said that Willumsen had been patient and waited, and when he asked for an extension, Willumsen had answered: ‘As long as there’s interest coming in, I’ll do nothing, Nerell. Because compound interest, that’s heaven on earth.’

I drove down to Willumsen’s Used Cars and Breaker’s Yard. Knew Rita wouldn’t be there, she hated the place. Willumsen saw me in his office. Above his desk was a stag’s head that looked as if it had butted its way through the wall and was looking in astonishment at the sight that met its eyes. Willumsen sat beneath it and leaned back in his chair, his double chin flopping over his shirt collar, his small, pudgy fingers folded across his chest. Just raised the right hand now and then to flick off ash from his cigar. Put his head on one side and studied me thoughtfully. A process known as credit rating, I realised.

‘Interest rate two per cent,’ he said after I had described my problem and the time limit. ‘Payable monthly. I can call the bank and transfer the money now.’

I took out my snuffbox and pushed a wedge in under my lip as I worked it out in my head.

‘That’s more than twenty-five per cent a year.’

Willumsen removed his cigar. ‘The boy can do his sums. You get that from your dad.’

‘And this time you’ve worked on the assumption that I don’t haggle either?’

Willumsen laughed. ‘Yup, that’s the lowest I can offer you. Take it or leave it. The clock is ticking.’

‘Where do I sign?’

‘Oh, this’ll be plenty good enough,’ said Willumsen, holding out his hand to me over the desk. It looked like a bunch of bulging sausages. I suppressed a shudder and took it.

‘Have you ever been in love?’ asked Unni. We were walking in the big gardens of the Brattrein Hotel. Clouds raced across the sky and Lake Heddal, the colours changing with the light. I’ve heard it said that most couples talk less as the years go by. In our case it was the other way round. Neither of us was the talkative type, and the first few times I was the one who had to do most of the talking. We’d been meeting about once a month for five years now, and although Unni was more forthcoming now than when we had first met, it was unusual for her to broach a theme like this with no preamble.

‘Once,’ I said. ‘How about you?’

‘Never,’ she said. ‘And what do you think?’

‘About being in love?’

‘Yes.’

‘Not something to hanker for,’ I said, turning up the collar of my jacket to the gusting wind.

I glanced at her, saw that almost invisible hint of a smile. Wondered where she was headed with this.

‘I read that you can only fall properly in love twice in your life,’ she said. ‘That the first time is action, and the second reaction. Those are the two earthquakes. The rest are just emotional aftershocks.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘So that means there’s still a chance for you, then.’

‘But I don’t want any earthquake,’ she said. ‘I’ve got children.’

‘I understand. But earthquakes happen, whether you want them or not.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And when you say it’s nothing to hanker for, that’s because the love didn’t go both ways, am I right?’

‘That was probably it.’

‘So the safest thing is to get out of anywhere that’s prone to earthquakes,’ she said.

I nodded slowly. It began to dawn on me what she was talking about.

‘I think I’m beginning to fall in love with you, Roy.’ She stopped walking. ‘And I don’t think the house back home could withstand such a quake.’

‘So…’ I said.

She sighed. ‘So I’m going to have to get away…’

‘…from anywhere earthquake-prone,’ I concluded for her.

‘Yes.’

‘On a permanent basis?’

‘Yes.’

We stood there in silence.

‘Aren’t you going to…?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You’ve decided for me. And I’m probably like my father.’

‘Your father?’

‘No good at haggling.’

We spent our last hours together in the room. I had booked the suite and from the bed we had a view over the lake. The sky had cleared by sunset, and Unni said it made her think of that Deep Purple song, the one about the hotel by Lake Geneva in Switzerland. The hotel burns down in that song, I said.

‘Yes,’ said Unni.

We checked out before midnight, gave each other a farewell kiss in the car park and left Notodden, each driving in our own direction. We never saw each other again.

Carl called me on Christmas Eve that same year. I could hear party voices and Mariah Carey singing ‘All I Want for Christmas is You’ in the background. As for me I was sitting alone in my room at the workshop with an aquavit and a plate of Fjordland’s ready-made lamb ribs with vossa sausage and mashed swede.

‘Is it lonely?’ he asked.

I hesitated. ‘A bit.’

‘A bit?’

‘Quite. And you?’

‘There’s a Christmas dinner here at the office. Punch. We’ve closed the switchboard and—’

‘Carl! Carl, come and dance!’ The female voice, half whining, half snuffling that interrupted us, came straight out of the speaker. It sounded as if she was sitting in his lap.

‘Listen, Roy, I’ve got to go now. But I’ve sent you a little Christmas present.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. Check your bank account.’

He hung up.

I did as he said. Logged in and saw there was a transfer from an American bank. In the comment field it said: Thanks for the loan, dear brother. And Happy Christmas! Six hundred thousand kroner. Far more than I had sent for college fees, even allowing for the interest, and the compound interest.

I was so happy I broke out into a grin. Not because of the money, I was managing. But because of Carl, that he was managing. Of course I could have asked questions about how he’d managed to earn such a large amount of money in just a few short months on starting salary at a property company. But I knew what I was going to do with the money. Proper insulation and a bathroom up at the farm. No fucking way was I going to spend another Christmas Eve down here at the workshop.

Here in the village – same as in the city – the only time heathens like me ever visit the church is at Christmas. Not on Christmas Eve the way they do in the city, but on Christmas Day.

On the way out after the service Stanley Spind came over and invited me over for Boxing Day breakfast – he’d asked several others too. It was a little surprising, and at such short notice that I realised something must have just told him that that Roy Opgard, he’s alone at his workshop this Christmas, poor sod. A good man, Stanley, but I told him I was working all Christmas and had given the other staff time off, which was the truth. He put his hand on my shoulder and said that I was a good man. So he’s no people expert, Stanley Spind. Because now I excused myself, hurried along and overtook Willumsen and Rita who were headed for the car park. Willumsen had swelled back up to his natural size again. Rita was looking good too, rosy-cheeked and probably warm inside that fur coat. And me, the lecher who had just been told he was a good man, took Willumsen’s bunch of sausages – which was fortunately gloved – and wished them a very merry Christmas.

‘Happy Christmas,’ said Rita.

I remembered of course that she had told me that in refined circles one says ‘Merry Christmas’ up until Christmas Eve, but that from Christmas Day onwards until New Year’s Eve it’s ‘Happy Christmas’. But if Willumsen realised a country bumpkin like me was familiar with such niceties it might make him suspicious, so I nodded as though I hadn’t registered the correction. Good man my arse.

‘I just want to thank you for the loan.’ I handed Willumsen a single white envelope.

‘Oh?’ he said, weighing it in his hand and looking at me.

‘I transferred the money to your account last night,’ I said. ‘That there is the printout.’

‘Interest until the first working day,’ he said. ‘That’s another three days away, Roy.’

‘I’ve taken account of that, yes. Plus a little extra.’

He nodded slowly. ‘It feels good, doesn’t it? To clear a debt.’

I did and didn’t understand what he meant. I mean, I understood the words, of course, but not the way he said them.

But I would before the calendar year was over.

38

DURING THAT ENCOUNTER WITH WILLUMSEN and his wife outside church on Christmas Day Rita hadn’t given away a thing with her body language and her facial expressions. She was good. But the meeting clearly set something going inside her. Enough for her to forget what ought to stay forgotten and remember what was worth remembering. Her text message came three days later, on the first working day after the break.

The cabin day after tomorrow 12.00.

It was so recognisably short and businesslike that I felt something like a shiver pass through my body and the saliva begin to run like one of Pavlov’s dogs. Conditioned reaction, that’s what they call it.

I had a brief and turbulent discussion with myself about whether to go. Commonsense Roy lost, in spades. And I had forgotten why it felt so like a liberation once we stopped meeting, but recalled all the rest in richly sensual detail.

At five to twelve I had reached that clearing in the woods from where you can see the cabin. I’d walked the whole way with the erection I got every time I saw the Saab Sonett parked along the gravel track. The snow had been late in coming that year, but there was a black frost, the sun only seen in glimpses, and the air sharp and good to breathe. Smoke rose from the chimney, and the curtains at the living-room window were closed. She didn’t usually do that, and the thought that she had planned a surprise, that she was perhaps lying there all ready and waiting for me in front of the open fire in some way that required subdued lighting sent shockwaves through my body. I crossed the patch of open terrain and went up to the door. It was ajar. Before it had usually been closed when I arrived, sometimes even locked, so that I had to reach up and take down the extra key from the top of the door jamb. I suspected she liked the feeling that I was an intruder, literally a thief in the night. I knew that was why she had given me the key to the basement that time, a key I still had and that I now and then fantasised about using. I pushed the door open all the way and walked into the semi-darkness.

And sensed immediately that something was wrong.

It smelled wrong.

Unless Rita Willumsen had started smoking cigars.

And even before my eyes had adapted to the darkness, I knew who that figure was sitting in the armchair in the middle of the living-room floor, facing me.

‘Glad you could come,’ said Willumsen in a voice so friendly it made my back go cold.

He was wearing a fur coat and hat and looked like a bear. And in his hands he was holding a shotgun that was pointed at me.

‘Shut the door behind you,’ he said.

I did as he told me.

‘Come three steps closer, slowly. And kneel.’

I took three steps closer.

‘Kneel,’ he repeated.

I hesitated.

He sighed. ‘Now listen. Every year I pay a lot of money to travel to some foreign country and shoot an animal I’ve never shot before.’ He raised his hand and make a ticking gesture in the air. ‘I’ve got one of most species, but not a Roy Opgard. So kneel!’

I knelt. I noticed for the first time that plastic covering of the kind you use when you’re decorating had been rolled out between the front door and the armchair.

‘Where did you park your car?’ he asked.

I told him. He nodded in satisfaction.

‘The snuffbox,’ he said.

I didn’t respond. My head was full of questions, not answers.

‘You’re wondering how I found out, Opgard. The answer is the snuffbox. The doctor told me the best thing I could do for my health after the cancer was to start eating more healthily and exercise more. So I started going for walks. Including up here, where I hadn’t been for years. And I found a couple of these in the fridge.’

He tossed a silver Berry tin onto the plastic in front of me.

‘You can’t buy those in Norway. Or certainly not in this village. I asked Rita and she said they were probably left behind by the Polish workers who were here refurbishing the cabin the year before. And I believed her. Up until the point at which I saw you pull out the same box when you came to my office asking for a loan. I put two and two together. Moist snuff. The repair job on the Saab Sonett. The cabin. And a Rita who overnight turned into the sweetest and most agreeable of all Ritas, which she never is unless there’s something behind it. So I checked her phone. And there, under the name of Agnete, I found an old message she hadn’t deleted. The cabin, the day, the hour, that was all. I checked with directory enquiries and sure enough, Agnete’s number was registered to you, Roy Opgard. And so – day before yesterday – I borrowed Rita’s phone again and sent the same message to you all over again, just changed the hour.’

The kneeling had meant that I had to look upwards at him, but now my neck was getting tired and I bowed my head. ‘If you found this all out months ago,’ I said, ‘why wait until now to do something?’

‘That should be obvious to someone who’s as good at mental arithmetic as you are, Roy.’

I shook my head.

‘You’d borrowed money from me. If I’d blown your head off then, who would clear your debt?’

My heart wasn’t beating faster, it was beating slower. This was unbefuckinglievable. Patient as the hunter he was, he had waited until his prey was in the right place, waited for me to clear my debt. Waited until I had paid the compound interest, until the cow had been milked dry. And now he was going to clear his debt. That was what he’d meant with that question he’d asked me outside the church; about how good it must feel to clear a debt. He was intending to shoot me. That was what this was about. Not scare me or threaten me but fucking well kill me. He knew I’d told no one where I was off to, that I’d made sure no one saw me walking up here, and that I’d parked the car so far away that no one would think of looking for me round here. He was just going to put a bullet through my forehead and then bury me somewhere nearby. The plan was so simple and straightforward I had to smile.

‘Wipe that grin off your face,’ said Willumsen.

‘I haven’t met your wife for years,’ I said. ‘Didn’t you see the date on that message?’

‘It should have been deleted, but there it was, and it tells me you two were at it for a long time,’ he said. ‘But not any more. Pray your last prayer.’ Willumsen raised the rifle to his cheek.

‘Aw, I already prayed that,’ I said. My heart was still slowing down. Resting pulse. Psychopath’s pulse, as people say.

‘So you have, have you?’ Willumsen breathed, the skin of his cheek flopping up onto the rifle butt.

I nodded and bowed my head again. ‘So just go ahead, you’ll be doing me a favour, Willumsen.’

A dry laugh. ‘Are you trying to convince me you want to die, Opgard?’

‘No. But I shall die.’

‘That’s true of us all.’

‘Yes, but not within two months.’

I heard him fidgeting with the trigger. ‘Says who?’

‘Says Stanley Spind. Maybe you saw, I spoke to him at church. He’s just received the most recent pictures of my brain tumour. I’ve had it for over a year, but now it’s growing fast. If you aim just here…’ I put my index finger to my forehead on the right-hand side, just above where the hair starts, ‘then maybe I’ll get rid of it at the same time.’

I could almost hear the used-car salesman’s calculator ticking and whirring.

‘You’re desperate, of course, so you’re lying,’ he said.

‘If you’re so sure of that then go ahead and shoot,’ I said. Because I knew what his brain was telling him. That if it was true, then the Roy Opgard problem would soon disappear by itself, and without any risk at all to him. But if I was lying, it would mean he had squandered a perfect chance that he would probably never get again. That’s to say, the chance would be there, but I would be ready, it would be more difficult. Risk contra profit. Cost against income. Debit and credit.

‘You can call Stanley,’ I said. ‘I’ll just have to tell him first he’s released from his vow of confidentiality.’

In the pause that followed the only thing that could be heard was Willumsen’s breathing. This dilemma demanded an increased supply of oxygen to the brain. I said a prayer, not for my soul, but that the stress might give him a stroke right here and now.

‘Two months,’ he said suddenly. ‘If you’re not dead in two months, starting today, then I’ll be back. You won’t know where, or when or how. Or who. But it could be the last words you’ll ever hear will be Danish. This is not a threat, it’s a promise. OK?’

I stood up. ‘Two months at the most,’ I said. ‘This tumour is a powerful bastard, Willumsen, it won’t let you down. And one other thing…’

Willumsen was still aiming the rifle at me, but with a lowering and raising of the eyelid signalled for me to continue.

‘Is it OK if I take my tins of snuff from the fridge?’

Of course I knew I was pushing it, but I was supposed to be a dying man who didn’t much care how it happened.

‘I don’t use the stuff, so do what you want.’

I took my tins of snuff and left. Jogged down through the trees with daylight already fading. Headed west in an arc and then, hidden from view behind the rocks, up towards the lake where I had seen Rita that last time; naked, humiliated, aged by daylight and a young man’s gaze.

I headed back towards the cabin from the north. There were no windows on that side, only thick timber walls, human fortifications, because attack always came from the north.

I walked right up to the wall, sneaked round the corner to the door. Wrapped my scarf around my right hand and waited. When Willumsen emerged I kept it simple. A punch directly behind the ear, where the cranium gives the brain less protection, and two in the kidneys which, besides hurting so much you can’t even scream, makes you amenable. He dropped to his knees, and I relieved him of the shotgun which was slung over one shoulder. Hit him on the temple and dragged him back inside.

He’d tidied away the roll of plastic and pushed the chair back into place by the wall next to the fireplace.

I let him get his breath back, let him look up and stare into the mouth of his own shotgun before starting to talk.

‘As you can see, I lied,’ I said. ‘But only about the tumour. It’s true that I haven’t met Rita for years. And since it only took one text message for me to come bounding up here with my tail wagging you’ll also understand that she was the one who ended it, not me. Don’t get up!’

Willumsen cursed quietly but did as I told him.

‘In other words, this could have been a story about what you never know will never hurt you and how we all live happy ever after,’ I said. ‘But since you don’t believe me and have expressed your intention to bump me off, you leave me with no choice but to bump you off. Believe me, it brings me no pleasure to do so, and I’ve no intention of taking the opportunity to resume the affair with the woman who will shortly be your widow. In other words it might seem extremely unfuckingnecessary to kill you, but unfortunately, from a practical point of view, it’s the only solution.’

‘I’ve no idea what you’re talking about,’ groaned Willumsen. ‘But you’ll never get away with murder, Opgard. A thing like that has to be planned.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And I’ve had the few minutes I needed to realise that your plan to kill me has provided me with the best chance in the world to kill you. We’re here alone, at a place where no one saw us come or go, and do you know what the most common cause of death among men between the ages of thirty and sixty is, Willumsen?’

He nodded. ‘Cancer.’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh yes.’

‘It’s not cancer,’ I said.

‘Car crash then.’

‘No.’ But I made a mental note to google that when I got home. ‘It’s suicide.’

‘Nonsense.’

‘In our village at least we’ll have made our contribution to the statistic if we include my father along with Sheriff Olsen and you.’

‘Me?’

‘Christmas week. Man takes his shotgun and goes alone to his cabin without telling anyone, found in the living room with the shotgun lying next to him. That’s about as classic as it gets, Willumsen. And oh yeah, black frost. So no trails leading to and from the cabin.’

I raised the shotgun. Saw him swallow. ‘I’ve got cancer,’ he said, his voice thick.

‘You had cancer,’ I said. ‘Sorry, but you recovered.’

‘Shit,’ he said, a sob in his throat. I curled my finger around the trigger. The sweat broke out on his forehead. He began shaking uncontrollably.

‘Pray your last prayer,’ I whispered. Waited. He sobbed. A puddle swelled out from under his bearskin.

‘But of course, there is one alternative,’ I said.

Willumsen’s mouth opened and closed.

I lowered the shotgun. ‘And that is if we agree not to kill each other,’ I said. ‘And take a gamble on trusting each other.’

‘Wh-what?’

‘What I’ve now just proved is that I’m so certain you will realise there’s no reason to kill me that I’m passing up a more or less perfect opportunity to kill you. That is what I call a leap of trust, Willumsen. See, trust is a benign, contagious sickness. So if you don’t kill me, I won’t kill you. What d’you say, Willumsen? Gonna take that leap with me? Have we got a deal?’

Willumsen wrinkled his brow. Gave a sort of hesitant nod.

‘Good. Thanks for the loan.’ I handed the shotgun back to him.

He blinked, staring at me in disbelief. He wouldn’t take it, almost as though he suspected a trick. So instead I propped the shotgun up against the wall.

‘You realise of course that I – I…’ He coughed snot, tears and slime from his throat. ‘…I would have said yes to anything right now. I haven’t made any jump, only you. So how can I get you to trust me?’

I thought it over for a moment.

‘Oh, this’ll be plenty good enough,’ I said, and held out my hand.

39

IT SNOWED ON NEW YEAR’S Day and the snow lay until the end of April. At Easter there were more people than ever before heading for their cabins and the service station did record business. We’d also been given an award as the best service station in the county, so the mood in the shop was good.

Then came the report into the development of the road network that concluded a tunnel should be built, and the main highway be routed around Os.

‘It’s a long way off yet,’ said Voss Gilbert, Aas’s successor in the party. Maybe so, but it wasn’t long until the next local elections, and his party would lose. Because it stands to reason, when a village can be wiped off the map of Norway with a stroke of the pen then someone in the village hasn’t been doing his lobbying job.

I had a meeting with head office and we agreed just to keep on milking the cow as long as we had her. Following that: readjustment, scaling back, for which read – redundancies. Small stations are needed too. And if things didn’t work out, I wasn’t to worry, they told me.

‘The door is always open to you, Roy,’ said Pia Syse. ‘If you want to try something new, all you have to do is call, you have my number.’

I stepped up a gear. Worked harder than ever. That was fine, I like working. And I’d given myself a goal. I was going to get my own station.

One day Dan Krane came in as I was cleaning the coffee machine. Asked if he could ask me a few questions for a story he was doing about Carl.

‘We hear he’s doing well over there,’ said Dan Krane.

‘Oh yeah?’ I said and carried on cleaning. ‘So this is going to be a positive article, is it?’

‘Well, our job is to show both sides.’

‘Not all sides?’

‘See there, you put it better than the newspaper editor,’ said Dan Krane with a thin smile.

I didn’t like him. But then again, I don’t like many people. When he first came to the village he’d reminded me of one of those English setters that cabin people have with them in their SUVs; thin and restless, but friendly enough. But it was a cool friendliness, deployed as the means towards a more distant goal, and after a while I began to realise that’s what Dan Krane really was, a marathon runner. A strategist who never loses patience in the field, who never pulls away but just patiently keeps on grinding because he knows that what he possesses is the kind of endurance that will, in the end, get him to the top. And this certainty showed itself in his body language, it could be heard in the way he formulated himself, it even shone from his eyes. That even if today he was no more than the humble editor of a local newspaper, he was going places. Was meant for greater things, as people say. He’d joined the same party as Aas, but even though the Os Daily was an open supporter of the Labour Party, the paper’s own internal regulations stipulated that the editor was prohibited from any political position that might cast doubt on his or her political integrity. Krane was moreover a father with a young family and a lot on his plate, so he wouldn’t be standing at the coming election, although perhaps at the one after that. Or the one after the one after that. Because it was just a matter of time before Dan Krane got those skinny hands of his around the chairman’s gavel.

‘Your brother was a risk-taker and made good money from that shopping mall investment while he was still a student.’ Krane fished notepad and pen up from the pocket of his Jack Wolfskin jacket. ‘Were you a part of that too?’

‘No idea what you’re talking about,’ I said.

‘No? I gather you provided the last two hundred thousand for the share purchase?’

I hoped he didn’t see the jolt that passed through me.

‘Who told you that?’

Again that thin smile, as though smiling caused him physical pain. ‘Even in local newspapers we need to protect our sources, I’m afraid.’

Was it the bank manager? Or Willumsen? Or someone else in the bank? Someone who’d followed the money, as people say.

‘No comment,’ I said.

Krane laughed softly and made a note. ‘You really want it to say that, Roy?’

‘Say what?’

‘No comment. That’s what big-time politicians and celebs in the cities answer. When they’re in trouble. It can create a rather strange impression.’

‘I’m thinking it’s more likely you’re the one who creates the impression.’

Still smiling, Krane shook his head. Narrow, hard, smooth-haired. ‘I only write what people say, Roy.’

‘Then do it. Write this conversation, word for word. Including your self-serving advice about the no-comment comment.’

‘Interviews have to be edited, you know. So we focus on what’s important.’

‘And you’re the one who decides what’s most important. So you’re the one who creates the impression.’

Krane sighed. ‘I gather from your dismissive attitude that you don’t want it generally known that you and Carl were a part of this high-risk project.’

‘Ask Carl,’ I said, closed the front of the coffee machine and pressed the On switch. ‘Coffee?’

‘Yes thanks. So then you’ve no comment either to the fact that Carl has just moved his business to Canada following an investigation by the American Stock Exchange Supervisory Authority into what they believe to be market manipulation.’

‘What I do have a comment on,’ I said as I handed him the paper coffee cup, ‘is that you’re writing a story about your wife’s ex-boyfriend. Do you want my comment?’

Krane sighed again, pushed the notebook back into his jacket pocket and sipped the coffee. ‘If a local paper in a village like this couldn’t write about someone they have some connection or other with then we wouldn’t be able to write a single story.’

‘I understand that, but you will include the information below the article, right? That this was written by the man who was served after Carl Opgard.’

I saw the marathon runner’s eyes flash now. That his long-term strategy was under pressure, that he was close to saying or doing something that wouldn’t serve his ultimate goal.

And after his brother, Roy, turned down the offer of service.

I didn’t say it. Of course I didn’t say it. Just played with the thought of how it might cause Dan Krane to lose his rhythm.

‘Thanks for your time,’ said Krane, pulling up the zip on his rain jacket.

‘You’re welcome,’ I said. ‘Twenty kroner.’

He looked up at me from his coffee cup. I tried to mimic his wafer-thin smile.

The newspaper ran a story about Carl Abel Opgard, our very own local lad made good on the other side of the pond. The byline was by one of Krane’s financial journalists.

Back home after the conversation with Krane I went for a run up behind the farm, inspected a couple of nests I had found, went out to the barn and punched that old sandbag for half an hour. Then I went upstairs to the new bathroom and showered. Stood there with soap in my hair and thought about the money that had been enough to cover not just the bathroom and the insulation but new windows. I raised my face to the warm jets and let them wash the day away. A new one awaited. I’d found my rhythm. I had a goal and I had a strategy. I wasn’t aiming to be council chairman, all I wanted was my own bloody service station. But all the same, I was turning into a marathon runner.

Then Carl called, and said he was moving home.