The Kingdom

40

INCREDIBLE SPEED. THE BEAST CHARGING towards the abyss. The black hunk of metal, chrome, leather, plastic, glass, rubber, smells, tastes, memories you thought would stay with you forever, the ones you loved you thought you could never lose, all of it rolling away from you. I was the one who started it moving, the one who started the train of events in this story. But at a certain point – and it’s bloody difficult to say exactly when and where – the story itself begins to make the decisions, the weight of gravity is in the driving seat, the beast accelerates, becomes autonomous and now it’s of no consequence for the result if I’ve changed my mind. Incredible speed.

Do I wish everything that happened had never happened? Fucking right I do.

And yet there’s something fascinating about seeing the avalanches from Ottertind in March, seeing the snow smash the ice on Lake Budal, seeing a forest fire in July and knowing that the old GMC fire engine won’t be able to make it up the hills. It is thrilling to see the first proper storm of the autumn again test the roofs of the barns down there in the village, and think that this year it’ll succeed in tearing off at least one of them, and you’ll see it bowling along on its sides like a giant fucking sawblade across the fields before it breaks apart. And then that’s exactly what happens. And the next thought you have is, what if someone, some person, had been standing out there when the sawblade came. Of course you don’t wish it, but you can’t quite dismiss the thought; that it would have been quite a sight to see. No, you don’t wish for it. So if I’d known the train of events I was setting in motion, I would probably have done things differently. But I didn’t, so I can’t really claim I would have done things differently if I’d had another chance but no new information.

And even if it was your will directing the blast of wind that took the barn roof off, what happens after that is out of your hands. The barn roof, now a wheel of razor-sharp corrugated iron, is heading for that solitary person out there in the field, and all you can do is watch with a mixture of horror, curiosity and regret that this was part of something you were hoping for. But the next thought is maybe something you weren’t ready for: that you find yourself wishing you yourself were that person out there in the field.

41

ME AND PIA SYSE SIGNED a contract of employment that said that after two years in Sørlandet I was free to return to my job as station boss in Os.

The service station was outside Kristiansand, on the other side of the Europa highway that passes the zoo and amusement park. Naturally it was much bigger than the one in Os, with more employees, more pumps, a bigger shop stocking a bigger range and with a higher turnover. But the biggest difference was that because the previous boss had treated the staff like a brain-dead financial drain on the firm what I got there was a bunch of demoralised and moaning boss-haters who never did more than exactly what they were employed to do and sometimes not even that.

‘All service stations are different,’ said Gus Myre, the sales director at head office, in his lectures to us. ‘The sign is the same, the petrol’s the same, the logistics are the same, but in the final analysis our stations aren’t about petrol, Peugeots and Pepsi, they’re about people. The ones standing behind the counter, the ones in front of it, and the meeting between the two.’

He sang his message as though it was a tune he was growing a bit more tired of playing with each passing year, and yet was, in spite of everything, his hit. From the exaggeratedly playful alliteration of what must have been that self-composed petrol, Peugeots and Pepsi, to the equally exaggerated and – over time – ever more forced sincerity of people, which always put me in mind of those revivalist meetings at Årtun. Because, just like a preacher, it was Myre’s job to get the gathering to believe in something that, deep down, everyone knew was just bollocks, but which they badly wanted to believe was true. Because belief makes life – and in the preacher’s case: death – that much easier to deal with. If you really believe yourself to be unique, and every encounter therefore unique, you can maybe trick yourself into believing in a kind of purity, an everlasting and virgin innocence which stops you spitting in the customers’ face and puking with boredom.

But I didn’t feel myself to be unique. And the station was – the previously mentioned differences notwithstanding – not unique either. The chain observes strict franchise principles, meaning that you can move from a small station in one part of the country to a larger one in another part, and it’s like changing sheets on the same bed. It took me two days from the moment I arrived to learn the technical details that distinguished this one from the one at Os, four days to talk to all members of staff, find out what their ambitions were, what changes they thought might turn the station into a better place for them to work, and a better place for the customer to be. Three weeks to have introduced ninety per cent of these changes.

I gave an envelope to the safety deputy and told her not to open it for eight weeks but to wait until the day of a staff meeting to evaluate the changes. We had hired a local cafe for the meeting. I welcomed everyone and then handed over to a staff member who gave the figures for sales and profits; another gave us the statistics for absence due to sickness; and a third announced the results of a simple customer satisfaction survey, along with a more informal assessment of the atmosphere among the employees. I just listened as the employees, after much arguing, then voted to drop eighty per cent of their own suggested changes. Afterwards I summarised which changes everyone thought had worked and which we would be continuing with, and announced that we would be eating now and the bar was open. One member of the staff, a real old sourpuss, raised his hand and asked if that was all I was in charge of, the bar.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m in charge of the fact that for the last eight weeks you’ve been allowed to be your own bosses. Lotte, will you open the envelope I gave you before we introduced the changes?’

She did so and read out my list of which changes I thought would work, and which wouldn’t. There was a lot of murmuring as it gradually became apparent that my advance projections – with just two exceptions – agreed with what they had decided themselves after the results were known.

‘The point here is not to convince you that I’m Mr Know-it-all,’ I said. ‘Look, I was wrong on two counts, the coffee cards, which I thought would work, and the offer of five day-old buns for the price of one, which I thought wouldn’t. But since I was right about the other twelve it might look as though I know something about running a service station, right?’

I saw a few heads nodding in agreement. They nod in a different way here in the south. Even slower, in fact. As the nodding spread there were sounds of a low murmuring. Finally even the old sourpuss was nodding.

‘We’re second bottom of the list of the best stations in the county,’ I said. ‘I’ve spoken to head office and worked out a deal. If we’re among the ten best at the next grading, they’ll pay for a trip on the Danish ferry for the whole gang. If we’re among the five best, a trip to London. And if we’re best, you’ll be given a budget and allowed to decide for yourselves what the prize should be.’

They just stared at me. Then the cheering began.

‘This evening…’ I shouted, and the racket immediately died down. ‘This evening we’re the second worst in the county, so the bar is only going to be open for one hour. After that everyone will go home and charge their batteries ready for tomorrow, because it’s tomorrow – and not the day after – that we start climbing up that list.’

I lived in Søm, a quiet residential area on the east side before you cross the bridges over to the town side. I rented a spacious three-roomed apartment, of which I only had furniture enough for two. I figured that by now the rumours about Carl having been abused by Dad were spreading like wildfire through Os. That the only one who hadn’t heard them was Carl. And me. Though she had waited fifteen years, when Grete made up her mind to tell people what Carl had confided in her I was the first one she told, and by now she must be having one field day after another in her hair salon. If Carl found out, he would probably be able to handle it. And if he never heard anything that was probably OK too. In any event, the responsibility and the shame were above all mine. I couldn’t take it. I was weak. But that wasn’t the main reason I’d had to leave Os. It was her.

By night I dreamed of Shannon.

By day I dreamed of Shannon.

Eating, driving between work and home, serving customers, working out, washing clothes, sitting on the toilet, masturbating, listening to an audio book or watching TV, I dreamed of Shannon.

About that sleepy, sensual eye. An eye that expressed more feelings, more warmth and cold than other people’s two eyes put together. Or about a voice that was almost as deep as Rita’s, and yet completely different, so soft you felt you wanted to lie down in it like a warm bed. About kissing her, fucking her, washing her, holding her tight, setting her free. About the red hair that glowed in the sunlight, about the tense bow of her spine, laughter that contained an almost imperceptible predatory snarl, as well as a promise.

I tried to tell myself it was the same old story all over again, about Mari, about falling in love with my brother’s girl. That it was some kind of fucking sickness or short circuit in my brain. Driving yourself crazy over what you can’t have or shouldn’t have. And that if by some miracle Shannon wanted me too, that would just be a repeat of what happened with Mari. That love would dissolve, the way the rainbow you see stretched above the mountain top disappears when you drive. Not because the love was delusory, but because rainbows need to be seen from a particular angle – from outside – and from a certain distance – not too close up. And if the rainbow should happen to be still there when you reach the top of the mountain, you’ll discover there’s no pot of gold at the end, just tragedy and shattered lives.

I told myself all of this, but it didn’t help. It was like fucking malaria. And I thought that maybe it’s true what people say, that it’s the second time you catch jungle fever that it does you in. I tried to work it away, but it kept coming back. I tried to sleep and forget, but was woken by screams from the zoo, even though that was impossible, the place was almost ten kilometres away.

I tried going out, someone recommended a pub in Kristiansand, but I ended up sitting alone at the bar. Hadn’t a clue how to approach people, and no desire to either, it was more a case of thinking I ought to. Because I don’t get lonely. Or rather yes, I do, but it doesn’t bother me, at least not to mention. What I was thinking was that maybe women would help, that they might be a remedy for the fever. But none of them looked at me for more than a second. If it’d been the Fritt Fall at least after a couple of beers someone would have asked who you were. But they probably saw it in that single second, that I was a country bumpkin out for a night on the town and not worth the bother, as people say. Maybe noticed the way my middle finger stuck out when I picked up my glass. So I gulped down the rest of the beer – a pale lager, Miller’s, American dishwater – and took the bus home. Lay in bed and heard the apes and the giraffes screaming.

It was when Julie called with some technical questions about the stocktaking that I realised Grete had kept her mouth shut about Dad’s abuse. After I’d explained the technicalities to her I asked her for the latest gossip. Which she provided, although somewhat surprised, I noticed, since I’d never shown any interest in that kind of stuff before. When it turned out to be uninteresting stuff I asked her straight out if there were any rumours involving our family, anything concerning Carl and Dad.

‘No – why should there be?’ she asked, and I could hear that she really had no idea what I was talking about.

‘Just ring if there’s anything else you want to know about the stocktaking,’ I said.

We hung up.

I scratched my head.

Maybe it wasn’t so strange that Grete hadn’t been spreading the news about Carl and Dad. She’d kept her mouth shut for all these years. Because in all her craziness she was most of all crazy in love, just like me. She didn’t want to hurt Carl, and for that reason she would continue to keep her mouth shut. But then why had Grete told me what she knew? I remembered her question about how had I saved Carl. What did you do, Roy? Was it a threat? Was she trying to tell me she had worked out who was to blame for Mum and Dad going over the edge into Huken? That I mustn’t do anything that got in the way of her plans for Carl?

If so, then it was so crazy the mere thought of it made me shiver.

But what it did mean was that I had one reason less to stay away from Os.

I didn’t go home at Christmas.

Nor Easter either.

Carl called and kept me updated on the hotel.

Winter had arrived earlier than expected and the snow had lain for a long time, so they were behind schedule. They’d also had to make some adjustments to the drawings after the council had said they wanted to see more timber and less concrete.

‘Shannon’s pissed off, she doesn’t understand that if the council hadn’t got those fucking timber walls of theirs then we wouldn’t have got permission from the planning department. She tried arguing that timber isn’t solid enough, but of course that’s crap, all she cares about is the aesthetics of the place, that it’ll have like her signature on it. But you always have these kinds of discussions with the architect.’

Maybe so, but I could hear in his voice that the quarrel had probably been a bit more violent than those one usually had with architects.

‘Is she—’ I coughed to interrupt myself when I realised I couldn’t complete the question in a neutral tone of voice. Not neutral enough for Carl’s ears, at least. But at least I understood she hadn’t told him about that idiotic declaration of love I’d made during the launch party at Fritt Fall, or I would have heard it in his tone of voice, because that’s a door that swings both ways. I could, for example, hear that he’d downed a few Budweisers.

‘Is she settling down OK?’

‘Yeah yeah,’ he said. ‘It takes time to adapt to something that’s so different from what you know. For example, after you left she was very quiet and taciturn for a while. Of course, she wants kids, but it’s not that easy, she has some kind of something, so it looks like the test tube is the only way.’

I felt the muscles of my stomach tighten.

‘That’s OK too, but it’s a bit much right at the moment. Oh, and she’s going to Toronto in the summer, got a couple of projects there to finish off.’

Did I hear a false note there? Or was that just something I wanted to hear? I could no longer even trust my own bloody judgement.

‘Maybe you should take some holiday and come up here then?’ said Carl. ‘We’ll have the whole house to ourselves. What d’you think? Party time. Like in the old days! Yeah!’

That old enthusiasm in his voice was still infectious, and I very nearly just said yes.

‘I’ll have to see. Summer is like the peak season with all the holidaymakers here down south.’

‘Come on. You need a holiday too. Have you had even a single day off since you’ve been there?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, counting them. ‘When is she leaving?’

‘Shannon? First week in June.’

I drove home the second week in June.

42

SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENED AS I was driving over Banehaugen, passing the county sign for Os, Lake Budal calm as a millpond before me. I felt myself choking up, and the road began to float away, and I had to blink hard. It was like one of those times when from sheer boredom you’re slumped in front of the TV watching some third-rate tearjerker and – because you’re quite relaxed and unprepared – you suddenly find yourself having to swallow hard.

I’d taken four days off.

For four days Carl and I sat around on the farm and looked out at the summer. At a sun that seemed as though it would never set. Drinking beer after beer in the winter garden. Talking about the old days. About school, friends, parties, the dances at Årtun and the Aas cabin. He talked about the USA and Toronto. About the money pouring in through a red-hot property market. About the project where, finally, they had bitten off more than they could chew.

‘What’s hardest to take is that it could’ve worked out,’ said Carl, adding his empty beer bottle to the row along the windowsill. His was three times longer than mine. ‘It was just a question of timing. If we’d managed to keep the project afloat for another three months, we’d be filthy rich today.’

When it all went pear-shaped the other two partners had threatened to sue him, he said.

‘I was the only one who hadn’t lost absolutely everything, so they thought they could shake a bit of money out of me,’ he said with a laugh and opened another bottle.

‘Don’t you have a ton of work you should be doing?’ I asked.

We’d visited the building site and had a look around. Work had begun there, but it didn’t exactly look like things were in full swing. A lot of machinery but not many people. And if you were to ask me, I’d have to say it didn’t look as though all that much had happened in the nine months they’d been at it. Carl explained they were still working on below-ground stuff, and that it had taken time to organise the roads, the water supply and sewage disposal. But that once they started work on the actual hotel building things would really speed up.

‘Actually the hotel is being built somewhere else even as we stand here. Module building is what they call it. Or element building. Over half the hotel will arrive here ready-made as large boxes that we then put in place.’

‘On the foundations?’

Carl rolled his head. ‘In a way.’ He said it the way people say things when they either want to spare you the details because they’re too complicated to explain, or want to hide the fact that they don’t really know themselves. Carl went over to have a word with some of the guys working while I wandered around in the heather and looked for new birds’ nests. I didn’t find any. Maybe the noise and the traffic had frightened them, but they were probably brooding not far away.

Carl returned. Wiped the sweat from his brow. ‘Want to go for a dive?’

I laughed.

‘What?’ Carl shouted.

‘The gear is so old it would be almost suicide.’

‘Swim then?’

‘OK.’

But of course we’d just ended up back here in the winter garden again. Somewhere between his fifth or sixth bottle Carl suddenly asked: ‘D’you know how Abel died?’

‘He was murdered by his brother,’ I said.

‘I’m talking about the Abel Dad named me after, the secretary of state, Abel Parker Upshur. He was being given a guided tour of the USS Princeton on the Potomac River and they wanted to demonstrate the firepower of one of the cannons. It exploded, killing Abel and five others. It was in 1844. So he never saw the completion of his life’s greatest achievement, the annexation of Texas in 1845. What d’you make of that?’

I shrugged. ‘Sad?’

Carl laughed loudly. ‘At least you live up to your own middle name. Did you hear about the woman that sat next to Calvin Coolidge…?’

I only half listened, because of course I knew the anecdote, Dad loved to tell the story. The lady sitting next to Coolidge at a formal dinner had made a bet that she’d get more than a couple of words out of the famously taciturn president. Towards the end of the meal the president turned to her and said: ‘You lose.’

‘Which of us is most like Dad and which like Mum?’ asked Carl.

‘Are you kidding?’ I said, diligently taking a couple of pulls of my Budweiser. ‘You are Mum and I’m Dad.’

‘I drink like Dad,’ said Carl. ‘You like Mum.’

‘That’s the only thing that doesn’t add up,’ I said.

‘So you’re the pervert?’

I didn’t answer. Didn’t know what to say. Even when it was happening we hadn’t talked about it, not really, I would just comfort him as though he’d got a normal beating from Dad. And promised revenge without saying anything directly related to the subject. I have often wondered whether things might have been different if I’d talked openly about it, set the words free, turned them into something that could be heard, something real and not just something that happened inside our heads and could therefore be rejected as just imagination. Damned if I know.

‘Do you think about it?’ I asked.

‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘And no. It bothers me less than the ones I read about.’

‘Read about?’

‘Other victims of abuse. But it’s probably mostly those who’ve been badly damaged who write about it and talk about it. I’m guessing there’s a lot like me. Who put it behind them. It’s a question of context.’

‘Context?’

‘Sexual assault is harmful mostly because of the social condemnation and shame that surrounds it. We’re taught that we will be traumatised by it, so everything that goes wrong in our lives, we blame it on that. Take Jewish boys who get circumcised. It’s a sexual mutilation. Torture. Much worse than being fiddled with. But there’s not much to suggest that many of them suffer mental damage from circumcision. Because it takes place within a context that says this is OK, this is something you just have to put up with, it’s a part of the culture. Maybe the worst damage is done not when the abuse takes place, but when we understand that it’s beyond what’s regarded as acceptable.’

I looked at him. Did he mean it? Was it his way of rationalising it away? And if so, why not? Whatever gets you through the night, it’s all right.

‘How much does Shannon know?’ I asked.

‘Everything.’ He put the bottle to his lips, turned it upwards instead of putting his head back. Clucking sound. Not like laughter, like crying.

‘Well she knows that we covered it up when Olsen went over into Huken, but does she also know I fixed the brakes and the steering on the Cadillac when Mum and Dad died?’

He shook his head. ‘I only tell her everything that concerns me.’

‘Everything?’ I asked, looked out, let the low evening sun dazzle me. Saw from the corner of my eye that he was looking enquiringly at me.

‘Grete came up to me at the opening do last year, after the first spadeful was dug up there,’ I said. ‘She said you and Mari have secret meetings up at the Aas cabin.’

Carl said nothing for a few moments. ‘Shit,’ he said in a low voice.

‘Yes,’ I said.

In the silence out there I heard two quick cries from a raven. Warning calls. And then came the question: ‘Why did Grete tell you?’

I had been waiting for it. It was the reason I hadn’t told him before. To avoid the question and the need to lie, to keep secret what Grete thought she’d found out about me: that I wanted Shannon. Because if I just said the words, no matter how mad it sounded and though we both knew how crazy Grete was, the possibility would have been planted in his mind. And then it would be too late, Carl would see the truth, as if it stood printed across my forehead in capital letters.

‘Haven’t a clue,’ I said casually. Too casually, probably. ‘She still wants you. And if you want to start a fire in paradise and get away with it then you creep in and start at the edge and hope the fire spreads. Something like that.’

I put the bottle to my mouth and knew that my explanation had been a little too poetic, the metaphor a bit too artificial to seem spontaneous. I had to put the ball back in his court. ‘But is that true, about you and Mari?’

‘Clearly you don’t,’ he said, placing the empty bottle on the windowsill.

‘I don’t what?’

‘Have a clue. Or else you would have told me before. Warned me, like. Or at least confronted me with it.’

‘Of course I didn’t believe it,’ I said. ‘Grete had had a few and that makes her even crazier than usual. The whole thing just slipped my mind.’

‘Then what made you remember it now?’

I shrugged. Nodded towards the barn. ‘Could use another coat. Maybe you can get an estimate from one of the guys painting the hotel?’

‘Yeah,’ said Carl.

‘We split it, then?’

‘I mean yes to your other question.’

I looked at him.

‘About Mari and me meeting each other,’ he concluded, and belched.

‘None of my business,’ I said and took another swig of my beer which was beginning to taste flat.

‘It was Mari who took the initiative. At the homecoming party she asked if we couldn’t meet, just the two of us, and talk things over, clear the air. But she said all eyes were on us right then, so it was best we meet somewhere discreet, so there wouldn’t be any tittle-tattle. She suggested we meet at the cabin. We each drove our own cars there, parked in different spots, and I arrived a while after her. Pretty smart, right?’

‘Pretty smart,’ I said.

‘Mari thought of it because Grete told her Rita Willumsen once had a similar arrangement at her cabin with a young lover.’

‘Jesus. She keeps herself pretty well informed, that Grete Smitt.’ I could feel my voice was dry. I hadn’t asked Carl if he remembered telling Grete about Dad that time he’d been drinking at Årtun.

‘Something wrong, Roy?’

‘No. Why d’you ask?’

‘You’ve gone all pale.’

I shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you. I swore on your soul.’

‘Did you say mine?’

‘Yes.’

‘Ah, that was lost a long time ago. Come on.’

I shrugged. I couldn’t remember if I’d sworn to keep silent for all eternity back then – after all I was only a teenager; or just to serve out a period of quarantine. ‘That young lover of Rita Willumsen’s,’ I said. ‘That was me.’

‘You?’ Carl stared at me, eyes wide open in astonishment. ‘You’re kidding.’ He slapped his thigh and laughed loudly. Clinked his bottle against mine. ‘Tell,’ he ordered.

I told. In rough outline at least. Sometimes he laughed, and sometimes he was serious.

‘And you’ve been keeping this secret from me ever since you were a teenager?’ he said when I finished, his head shaking from side to side.

‘Well, we’ve had plenty of practice at doing that in this family,’ I said. ‘Now your turn to tell me about Mari.’

Carl told me. At that very first reunion they’d ended up in the hay, as people say. ‘I mean, she’s had plenty of practice when it comes to seducing me,’ he said with an almost melancholic smile. ‘She knows what I like.’

‘So you think you had no chance,’ I said, and could hear it sounded more accusing than I had intended.

‘I take my share of the blame, but it’s obvious that’s what her aim was.’

‘To seduce you?’

‘To prove both to herself and to me that she would always be my first choice. To show me I was prepared to risk everything. That Shannon and anyone like her were and always would be substitutes for Mari Aas.’

‘Betray everything,’ I said, taking out my snuffbox.

‘Eh?’

‘You said risk everything.’ This time I really couldn’t bring myself to even try to hide the accusatory tone.

‘Whatever,’ said Carl. ‘We carried on seeing each other.’

I nodded. ‘All those evenings you said you had meetings and Shannon and I waited at home.’

‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m no better than I should be.’

‘And that time you said you were at Willumsen’s, but you’d seen Erik Nerell and his wife out for an evening walk?’

‘Yeah, I nearly gave myself away there. Of course, I was on my way back from the cabin. Maybe I wanted to give myself away. It’s no fucking picnic walking around with a guilty conscience all the time.’

‘But you managed to survive,’ I said.

He acknowledged the barb, just lowered his head. ‘After we’d met a few times, Mari probably felt that she’d made her point and dumped me. Again. But it was OK by me too. It was just… nostalgia. We haven’t seen each other again since.’

‘Well, you’ve seen each other in town.’

‘Yes, it happens, of course. But she just smiles as if she’s won at something.’ Carl smirked contemptuously. ‘Shows Shannon the kids in the pram which is of course being wheeled by her newspaper guy, he trips along behind her like a fucking coolie. I’m sure he suspects something. Behind that straight, snobbish mug of his I see a guy that wants to kill me.’

‘Oh?’

‘Yes. If you ask me he’s definitely asked Mari, and she’s – quite deliberately – given him an answer that leaves room for doubt.’

‘Why would she do that?’

‘Keep him on his toes. That’s what they’re like.’

‘Who’s they?’

‘Oh, you know. The Mari Aases and Rita Willumsens. They suffer from queen syndrome. That’s to say it’s us, the male drones, who suffer. Of course even queens want their physical needs satisfied, but the most important thing is for them to be loved and worshipped by their subjects. So they manipulate us like puppets in their fucking schemes. You get so fucking tired of it.’

‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?’

‘No!’ Carl put his beer bottle down hard on the windowsill and two of the empties toppled over and fell to the floor. ‘Real love doesn’t exist between a man and a woman who aren’t related, Roy. There has to be blood. The same blood. The only place you find real, selfless love is in the family. Between brothers and sisters and between parents and their children. Outside of that…’ He gestured expansively, knocked over another bottle and I realised he was drunk. ‘Forget it. It’s jungle law. Every man is his own best friend.’ By now he was snuffling. ‘You and me, Roy, we’re all we’ve got. Nobody else.’

I wondered where that left Shannon, but I didn’t ask.

Two days later I drove back south.

As I passed the county sign I glanced in the rear-view mirror. It looked as though it said OZ.

43

IN AUGUST I GOT A text message.

My heart almost stopped beating when I saw it was from Shannon.

I read it over and over again during the next few days before finally figuring out what it meant.

That she wanted to meet me.

Hi Roy, it’s been a while. I’ll be in Notodden, meeting a possible client, on 3 September. Can you recommend a hotel? Hugs, Shannon.

When I first read the message I thought it had to mean that she knew I used to go there and meet Unni at a hotel. But I had never told her about that, and I couldn’t remember telling Carl about it either. Why hadn’t I mentioned it to Carl? I don’t know. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of having an affair with a married woman. And hardly that the taciturn Cain in me had kept quiet about it. I don’t know. Maybe it was just something I came to understand at a certain point. That Carl didn’t tell me everything either.

Shannon probably just figured I would have some idea about good places to stay in the vicinity of Os, I thought. And studied that text message – even though of course I knew it off by heart – one more time. Told myself not to read things into a text that consisted of three everyfuckingday sentences.

But all the same.

Why get in touch with me after a year’s silence and ask about hotels in Notodden? In reality there were two, at the most three hotels to choose between, and Tripadvisor had of course more relevant and up-to-date information than I could provide. I knew that, having checked online the day after receiving the text message. And why tell me the date when she was going to be there? And that she was meeting a potential client, which was another way of telling me she would be travelling alone. And as people say, last but not least: why spend the night there when it was just a two-hour drive home?

OK, so maybe she didn’t fancy driving those roads in the pitch-dark. Maybe her and the client were having dinner together, and she wanted to be able to have a glass of wine. Or maybe it was simply that she looked forward to spending the night at a hotel as a change from staying on the farm. Maybe she even wanted a short break from Carl. Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me with that slightly laboured text message. No, no! It was just an ordinary text message, a slightly feeble opportunity to re-establish normal communications with her brother-in-law after he’d blown the whole thing by telling her he was in love with her.

I replied the same evening I received the message.

Hi – yes, long time. Brattrein’s pretty good. Got great views. Hugs, Roy.

Every single bloody syllable had, of course, been carefully considered. I had to force myself not to send anything with a question mark, along the lines of how are you? Or anything else that seemed to beg for a continuation. An echo of her own message, nothing more, nothing less, that’s what it had to be. I got a reply an hour later.

Thanks for the help. Big hug.

There was nothing you could read into that, and anyway, all she could do was relate to my own short and inhibited reply. So that sent me back to her initial message: was that an invitation to go to Notodden?

Over the next two days I tormented myself. Even counted the words and saw that she had sent 24, I had answered with 12, and then she had sent 6. Was this halving accidental, or should I now send 3 words and see if she replied with one and a half? Ha ha.

I was going crazy.

I wrote:

Enjoy the journey.

The reply came as I lay there trying to sleep.

Thanks. X

One and a half words. I knew of course that x was the symbol for a kiss, but what kind of kiss? I googled it the next morning. No one knew, but some thought the x stemmed from the days when letters were sealed with an x and a kiss on top of it. Others suggested that the x – as an ancient symbol of Christ – made it a religious kiss, like a kiss of blessing. But the explanation I liked best was that the x shows two pairs of lips meeting.

Two pairs of lips that meet.

Was that what she meant?

No, for chrissakes, she couldn’t possibly have meant that.

I looked at the calendar and began counting the days to 3 September until I realised what I was doing.

Lotte popped her head in the door to say that the display on pump number 4 had gone out and asked what my calendar was doing on the floor.

At a bar in Kristiansand one evening, just as I was getting up to leave, a woman approached me.

‘Going home already?’

‘Maybe,’ I said, and looked at her. It would be an overstatement to say she was pretty. Maybe one day she had been. No, not beautiful, but all the same one of the first girls in class who got the boys’ attention. Because she was sassy, a bit cheeky, a lot of front. Promising, as people used to say. And maybe she’d kept her promise a little too quickly, given them what they wanted before they’d earned it. Thought she’d get something in return. A lot had happened since then, and most of it she wished hadn’t, the things she’d done to herself, as well as the things that had been done to her.

Now she was a bit tipsy and looking hopefully for someone she knew deep down would disappoint her again. But if you abandon hope, what’s left?

So I bought her a beer, told her my name, my marital status, where I worked and lived. Then I asked the questions and let her do the talking. Let her pour bile over all the men she’d met who’d ruined her life. Her name was Vigdis, she worked at a garden centre, at the moment she was off sick. Two children. Each with its respective father that week. Only a month ago she’d kicked a third man out of the house. I wondered whether it was during that eviction she’d got that bruise on the forehead. She said he drove around outside her house at night to check whether she was bringing anyone home with her so it was best if we went to my place.

I considered it. But her skin wasn’t pale enough, and her body too big. Even if I closed my eyes, that metallic voice of hers – which I already knew wouldn’t be silent for long – would destroy the illusion.

‘Thanks, but I have to go to work tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Some other time.’

Her mouth twisted into an ugly grimace. ‘You’re no great catch yourself, if that’s what you were thinking.’

‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ I said, emptied my glass and left.

Out in the street I heard heels clacking against the asphalt behind me and knew that it was her. Vigdis linked arms with me and blew smoke from a freshly lit cigarette into my face.

‘At least take me home in a taxi,’ she said. ‘I live in the same direction as you.’

I hailed a taxi and let her out after the first bridge, outside a house in Lund.

I had seen someone in one of the cars parked by the pavement, and as the taxi pulled away I turned and saw a man climb out of the car and walk quickly towards Vigdis.

‘Stop,’ I said to the driver.

The taxi slowed, and I saw Vigdis fall to the pavement.

‘Back up,’ I said.

If the driver had seen the same as me he probably wouldn’t have done it. I jumped out of the taxi and felt in my pockets for something to wrap round my right hand as I walked towards the man who was standing over Vigdis and yelling something that was lost among the echoes from the blind, silent walls of the houses along the street. I guessed it must be curses, and it wasn’t until I got up close I could hear the words:

‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’

I walked up to him and lashed out as he turned his tearful face towards mine. I felt the skin of my knuckles tear. Fuck. Hit him again, in the nose, which is softer, and didn’t know if the blood that spurted out was his or mine. Hit him a third time. The idiot stood there swaying in front of me without trying to defend himself or avoid the punches, forcing himself to stay on his feet so that he could go on being hit, as though it was something he welcomed.

I hit him quickly and methodically, the same way I hit the punchbag. Not hard enough to do more damage to my knuckles, but enough to make him bleed and the fluid run under the skin of his face until gradually it began swelling up like a fucking lilo.

‘I love you,’ he said between two flurries of punches, not to me, but in a whisper, as though to himself.

His knees buckled, and then buckled again, and I had to aim gradually lower, he was like the Black Knight in that Monty Python sketch, the one who gets his legs cut off but refuses to give up, until he becomes a torso hopping round on the ground.

I drew my shoulder back to give him one last punch, but my arm got caught up in something. It was Vigdis. She was on my back.

‘Don’t!’ that metallic voice of hers screeched in my ear. ‘Don’t! Don’t hurt him, you bastard!’

I tried to shake her off, but she wouldn’t let go. And on the tearful, swollen face of the man in front of me I saw an insane smile start to spread.

‘He’s mine!’ she screamed. ‘He’s mine, you bastard!’

I looked at the man. He looked at me. I nodded. Turned and saw that the taxi had left and started to walk towards Søm. Vigdis clung on for ten or fifteen metres before she let go, and I heard the clacking of her shoes as she ran back, heard her words of comfort, and the sobbing of the man.

I carried on walking eastwards. Through sleeping streets, towards the E18. It began to rain. And for once it was proper rain. My shoes were squelching as I set off across the half-kilometre of the Varoddbro Bridge over to Søm. Halfway across it occurred to me that there was actually an alternative. And I was already soaking wet. I peered over the edge at the greeny-black waters down below. Thirty metres? But already I must have started to doubt, even before my head began telling me I would probably survive the drop, and the survival instinct would kick in and I would splash my way to shore, almost certainly with a few broken bones and damaged organs that wouldn’t mean a shorter life, just an even more shitty life. And even if I was lucky enough to die in the water down there, was there really anything to be gained in being dead? Because I had just remembered something. The answer I gave when the former sheriff asked why we should go on living when we didn’t enjoy it. ‘Because being dead may be even worse.’ And once I’d recalled that, I remembered what Uncle Bernard had said when he had been diagnosed with cancer: ‘When you’re up to your neck in shit, best not to hang your head.’

I laughed. Like a madman I stood there alone on the bridge and roared with laughter.

And then walked on towards Søm, my footsteps lighter, and after a while I even began whistling that Monty Python song, the one where Eric Idle is hanging on the cross. When the Vigdises of this world manage to go on hoping, hoping for miracles, why shouldn’t I?

On 3 September, at two o’clock in the afternoon, I rolled into Notodden.

44

A HIGH, MILKY-BLUE SKY. STILL some lingering summer warmth, the smell of pine trees and new-mown grass, but also a bite in the gusts of wind, a sharpness that was quite absent down in the soft south of the country. The drive from Kristiansand to Notodden had taken three and a half hours. I drove slowly. Changed my mind several times along the way. But in the end concluded that only one thing would be more pathetic than what I was now embarked upon, and that would be to drive halfway to Notodden and then turn back.

I parked in the town centre and began to trawl the streets looking for Shannon. When we were growing up, Notodden had seemed to us big, alien, almost threatening. Now – perhaps because I had spent so much time in Kristiansand – it seemed strangely small and provincial.

I kept an eye out for the Cadillac, though I guessed she would have hired a car from Willumsen. Glanced in at the cafes and restaurants I passed. I headed down towards the water, passed the cinema. Finally I entered a small cafe, ordered a black coffee, sat so that I had a view of the door and looked through the place’s newspapers.

Notodden didn’t have many cafes and bars and the perfect scenario was obviously if it was Shannon who found me and not the other way round. That she came in, I looked up, our eyes met, and in that gaze I could read that I wouldn’t be needing the cover story I’d dreamed up, that I was here to take a look at a service station that was for sale. That I remembered she was going to be in Notodden, but not that it was today. That if she wasn’t busy with her client the whole day, maybe we could meet for a drink after dinner? Or even meet for dinner if she didn’t have other plans?

The door opened and I glanced up. A gang of kids in eager conversation. A few moments later the door opened again, another gang of kids, and I realised school was out for the day. The third time the door opened I saw her face. It had changed, was not at all the way I recalled it. This face looked open. She didn’t see me, and I could study her unobserved from behind my newspaper. She sat and listened to the boy she had come in with. She neither smiled nor laughed, and you could still sense a certain watchfulness, that she was guarding a sensitive vulnerability. But I thought that I could also tell that she and this boy had something, a contact you don’t get unless you let someone in close. Then her eyes glided round the room, and when they met mine they tensed for a moment.

I don’t know if Natalie knew the reason why her father, Moe the roofer, had sent her to secondary school here in Notodden. Nor how he had explained the injuries he had come by at home in their kitchen. In all probability she didn’t know I had anything to do with either situation. But if she did? If she came over here now, sat down and asked why I had done it, what should I answer? That I had intervened because of the shame I felt at not having been able to do the same for my brother? That I had nearly made an invalid of her father because he was a punchbag with my own father’s face on it? That in reality it was all about me and my family, not hers?

Her gaze wandered on. Maybe she hadn’t recognised me. But of course she had. Obviously. But even if she didn’t know that I had threatened to kill her father, she might well want to pretend she didn’t recognise the guy who’d sold her morning-after pills, especially now she had the chance to be another girl from that cowed and withdrawn person she had been back home in Os.

I could see she was having difficulty concentrating on what the boy over there was saying, turning towards the window, turning her face away from me.

I stood up and left. Partly to leave her in peace. Partly because I didn’t want anyone from Os as a witness if Shannon should turn up.

By five o’clock I had been to every cafe and bar and restaurant in Notodden, apart from the restaurant at the Brattrein, which I was guessing still didn’t open until six.

As I walked across the car park towards the main entrance I felt for a moment the same expectant tickle in the stomach as when I was going to meet Unni. But that was probably just Pavlov’s dogs who recognised a situation and began to salivate, because in the next moment it was driven out by anxiety. What the hell was I doing? Suicide from the bridge would have been better. If I jumped in the car now I could probably get there by sundown. But I kept going. Into the hotel reception, which looked exactly the same as when I had left it for the last time… years earlier.

She was sitting in the empty restaurant working on a laptop. Dark blue suit and white blouse. Her short red hair was parted at the side and held in place by grips. Stockinged knees and black high-heeled shoes pressed together below the table.

‘Hi, Shannon.’

She looked up at me. Smiled without a trace of surprise but as though I’d finally turned up to a meeting we’d agreed upon. Took off the glasses that I’d never seen her wearing before. Her wide-open eye expressed the joy of reunion, a joy that might have been of the sisterly variety. Real enough, but with no undercurrent. The half-shut eye told a very different story. It made me think of a woman who has just turned towards you in bed with the reflected light of morning glinting in her iris, a look still drenched in sleep and lovemaking from the night before. I felt a jolt, something heavy, like sorrow. I had to swallow and sank into the chair opposite her.

‘You’re here,’ she said. ‘In Notodden.’

Her tone was enquiring. OK, so we were going to beat about the bush for a while after all.

I nodded. ‘I’m looking at a service station I’m interested in.’

‘Did you like it?’

‘Very much,’ I said, not taking my eyes off her. ‘That’s the problem.’

‘Why is that a problem?’

‘It’s not for sale.’

‘Well, you can always find another.’

I shook my head. ‘I want this one.’

‘And how are you going to manage that?’

‘Persuade the owner that since he’s losing money on it, that sooner or later he’ll lose it anyway.’

‘Maybe he’s planning to change the way he runs it.’

‘I’m sure he is planning to, he’s promising to, probably even believes it himself. But after a while everything will go back to the same old same old again. The staff will desert him, the station will go bust, and he’ll have thrown away even more years on a hopeless project.’

‘So when you take the station from him, you’ll be doing him a favour. Is that what you’re saying?’

‘I’ll be doing us all a favour.’

She looked at me. Was that hesitation I read in her face?

‘When is your meeting?’ I asked.

‘It was at twelve,’ she said. ‘We were finished before three.’

‘Did you expect it to last longer?’

‘No.’

‘So then why book a hotel room?’

She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. I felt my breathing stop. Could feel an erection coming on.

‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.

She shook her head.

‘They don’t open for another hour,’ I said. ‘Feel like a walk?’

She nodded down at her high-heeled shoes.

‘Fine here too,’ I said.

‘Know who I saw here?’ she asked.

‘Me,’ I said.

‘Dennis Quarry. The film star. He was at the service station location-scouting, remember? I think he’s staying here. I read somewhere that they’re making that film now.’

‘I love you,’ I whispered, but at that precise moment she closed the lid of her laptop with unnecessary force so she could pretend she hadn’t heard.

‘Tell me what you’ve been up to lately,’ she said.

‘Thinking about you,’ I said.

‘I wish you hadn’t.’

‘Me too.’

Silence.

She sighed heavily. ‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ she said.

Was. Past tense. Had she said is a mistake it would have meant the wheels were still in motion but was meant that she had already made up her mind.

‘Probably,’ I said, waving dismissively to a waiter whom I recognised and guessed was on his way to offer something from the kitchen, even though it wasn’t open yet.

‘Faddah-head,’ hissed Shannon, slapping her palm against her forehead. ‘Roy?’

‘Yes?’

She leaned forward across the table. Laid her small hand in mine and looked me in the eyes. ‘Can we agree that this never happened?’

‘Of course.’

‘Goodbye.’ She gave a quick smile, as though she had a pain somewhere, picked up the laptop and left. I closed my eyes. The clacking of those heels on the parquet behind me reminded me of Vigdis’s footsteps behind me that night in Kristiansand, only those footsteps were approaching. I opened my eyes again. I hadn’t moved my hand, which was still lying on the table. The sensation of the only touch between us since I had entered the room was still there, like prickling beneath the skin after a scalding hot shower.

I went out into reception where the tall, thin man in the red suit jacket smiled at me. ‘Good afternoon, herr Opgard. Nice to see you back again.’

‘Hello, Ralf,’ I said as I stood in front of the counter.

‘I saw you on your way in, herr Opgard, so I took the liberty of reserving the last vacant room we have today for you.’ He indicated the screen in front of him with a nod. ‘So tiresome if someone else were to snap it up at the last moment.’

‘Thanks, Ralf. But I was wondering which room Shannon Opgard was in. Or Shannon Alleyne.’

‘333,’ said Ralf, making a point of not even having to look at his screen.

‘Thank you.’

Shannon had finished packing the bag which was on the bed, and was struggling to close the zip as I pushed open the door to Room 333. She loosed off a few curses that I guessed must be in Baja-English, squeezed the two sides of the bag, tried again. I left the door half open as I walked in and stood behind her. She gave up, her hands went to her face and her shoulders began to shake. I put my arms around her and felt her soundless crying transfer itself from her body and into mine.

We stood like that for a while.

Then I carefully turned her round, dried her tears with two fingers and kissed her.

And, still sobbing, she kissed me, her teeth biting into my lower lip so that I felt the sweet, metallic taste of my own blood mingle with the strong, spicy taste of her spittle and her tongue. I held back, ready to withdraw if she showed any sign of not wanting this. But she didn’t, and slowly I let go of what was holding me back: common sense, the thought of what must come – or not come – afterwards. The image of me lying in the lower bunk with my arms around Carl, the only thing he has, the only thing that has not yet betrayed him. But it slips away, drifts away, and all that remains are her hands pulling up my shirt tails, the nails pressing my body against hers, the tongue like an anaconda round mine, her tears running down my cheek. Even in high-heeled shoes she’s so small I have to bend my knees to pull up her tight skirt.

‘No!’ she groans and pulls herself free, and my first reaction is one of relief. That she has saved us. I take a step backwards, unsteady and still shaking a little, and push one of my shirt tails back under my belt.

Our breaths share the same gasping rhythm. I hear footsteps and a voice speaking on a phone out in the corridor. And as the steps and the voice move away we stand staring watchfully at each other. Not like a man and a woman, but like boxers, like two raging bucks ready for a fight. Because of course the fight isn’t over, it’s hardly even begun.

‘Shut that bloody door,’ hisses Shannon.

45

‘I HIT MEN,’ I ANSWERED, handed a piece of moist snuff to Shannon and wedged one under my lower lip.

‘That’s what you actually do?’ she asked, raising her head so I could put my arm back on the pillow.

‘Not all the time, but I’ve done a lot of fighting, yes.’

‘You think it’s in your genes?’

I studied the ceiling of Room 333. It was different from the one Unni and I used to spend our hours together in, but it looked exactly the same and the smell was the same, some mildly perfumed cleaning agent possibly. ‘My father mostly hit a punchbag,’ I said. ‘But yes, I probably get the fighting from him.’

‘We repeat the mistakes of our own parents,’ she said.

‘And our own too,’ I said.

She pulled a face, took the wedge of snuff, put it on the bedside table.

‘You have to get used to it,’ I said, meaning the snuff.

She snuggled into me. The little body was even softer than I had imagined, the skin even smoother. The breasts were slight rises on snow-covered viddas of skin on which the nipples stood up like two burning beacons. She smelled of something, a sweet, strong spice, and her skin was shaded, darker under the armpits and around her sex. And she was glowing like an oven.

‘Do you sometimes get the feeling you’re going round in circles?’ she asked.

I nodded.

‘And when you find yourself walking in your own footsteps, isn’t that a sign that you’ve lost your way?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. But right at that moment it didn’t feel like that. Sure, the sex had been more like mating than loving, with more fight than tenderness, more anger and fear than joy and pleasure. At one point she pulled away, struck me in the face with the flat of her hand and told me to stop. So I stopped. Until she hit me once more and asked why the hell I had stopped. And when I started to laugh, she buried her face in the pillow and wept, and I stroked her hair, the tensed muscles of her back, kissed her neck. She stopped crying, began breathing heavily. Then I slipped my hand between the cheeks of her arse and bit her. And she cried out something in Baja-English, pushed me down the bed, lay on her stomach with her arse sticking up in the air. And I was so horny I didn’t care at all that her screams when I took her were the same as those I heard from the bedroom when she was with Carl. God knows, maybe that’s what I was thinking of when I came, distracting me so much that I withdrew a little too late, but in time to see the remainder of my load land on the skin of her back, like a mother-of-pearl chain, greyish white and glistening in the light from the lamp that had been turned on in the car park outside. I had fetched a towel and dried it off, tried also to dry off two dark flecks before I realised they were shading that wouldn’t wipe off. And thought that this too, the things we had just done, was the same, dark patches that couldn’t be wiped away.

But there would be more. And it would be different, I knew that. Lovemaking that wasn’t fighting, not just a meeting between two bodies but two souls. I know it sounds corny, but I can’t think of any other way to express it. Two fucking souls is what we were and I was home now. She was my footprint and I had found it. All I wanted was to be here and go round in circles, in a delirium, quite lost, just as long as it was with her.

‘Will we regret this?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ I said, but knew that I wouldn’t. I simply didn’t want to frighten her, something that was bound to happen if she realised that I loved her so much I didn’t care a damn about anything else.

‘We just have tonight,’ she said.

We pulled the blackout curtains to prolong it and make the most of the hours we had.

I awoke to a shriek from Shannon.

‘I’ve overslept!’

She slipped out of the bed before I could get hold of her, and the arm I threw out after her hit instead her mobile phone that was on the bedside table. It hit the floor some distance away from the bed. I jerked the curtains open to get what I knew could well be the last sight I would have of Shannon’s naked body for a long time. Daylight flooded the room and I caught a glimpse of her back as she disappeared into the bathroom.

I stared down at the phone lying in the shadow of the bed. The screen had turned itself on. The glass was cracked. And from behind the prison bars of that shattered screen a smiling Carl looked up at me. I swallowed.

A single glimpse of her back.

But it was enough.

I lay back in the bed. The last time I had seen a woman so naked, so stripped bare by daylight, was when Rita Willumsen stood there in the mountain lake, humiliated in her swimming costume, her skin bluish in the icy cold. If I’d been in any doubt, it was now that I saw the writing on the wall, as people say.

I understood what Shannon had meant when she asked if hitting was in my genes.

46

CARL WAS MY BROTHER. THAT was what the problem was.

Or problems.

More specifically, one of the problems was that I loved him. The other that he had inherited the same genes as me. I don’t know why I had once been so naive as to believe that Carl didn’t have the same capacity for violence in him as me and Dad. Maybe because it was an accepted fact that Carl was like Mum. Mum and Carl who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Only people.

I got up from the bed and crossed to the window, saw Shannon running over the car park towards the Cadillac.

Probably she regretted it. Probably she had no appointment to keep, she had just woken up and knew that this was wrong, that she had to go.

She had showered, dressed in the bathroom, probably put on her make-up, and when she’d emerged given me a sisterly kiss on the forehead. She muttered something about a meeting in Os about the hotel, grabbed her bag and ran from the room. The brake lights on the Cadillac went on as she almost drove onto the road straight into a bin lorry.

The air in here was still dense from the sex, the perfume and the sleep of the night. I opened the window which I had closed at some point because she was shrieking so loudly I was afraid it might bring someone to the door, and because I knew we weren’t finished for the night. And I had been right. Each time one of us woke even the most innocent touch had started a new session, like a hunger that could not be satisfied.

What I had seen once the curtains were opened was that what I had thought were dark patches on the skin were bruises. These were not like the red love-marks and the streaks which had also appeared on her white skin during the night, and which hopefully would disappear in a day or two. These were the marks left by heavy blows, the way they look for days and weeks afterwards. If Carl had hit her in the face too then he had held back just enough for her to be able to cover it up with a little make-up.

Hit her, the way I’d seen Mum hit Dad in the corridor of the Grand Hotel that time. That was the memory that flickered through my brain when Carl had tried to convince me it was an accident when Sigmund Olsen went over the edge and down into Huken. Mum. And Carl. You live with a person and think you know all there is to know about them, but what do you really know? Did it occur to Carl that I might be capable of having sex with his wife behind his back? Hardly. A long time ago I had realised that we are all strangers to each other. And of course it wasn’t just those bruises on Shannon that made me realise Carl had violence in him. That my little brother was a murderer. It was the simple facts. Bruises and plumb lines.

47

FOR DAYS AFTER RETURNING TO Sørlandet I waited for Shannon to ring, to send a message, an email, anything. It was obvious that she would have to be the one to take the initiative, she was the one who had most to lose. Or so I thought.

But I heard nothing.

And there was no longer any room for doubt. She regretted it, of course. It had been a fairy tale, a fantasy I had planted in her when I told her I loved her and then went away, a fantasy that she, in peace and quiet, and in the absence of any other stimulation, had turned into something fantastic while she went about her daily round in the village and bored herself. So fantastic that the real me had been unable to live up to it. But now she’d got it out of her system and could return to her normal life.

The question now was when would I be able to get it out of my system? I told myself that our night together had been the aim, something to cross off on my to-do list, and that now I had to move on. But all the same, the first thing I did every morning was to check the phone for a message from Shannon.

Nothing.

So I started sleeping with other women.

I don’t know why it was, but it was as though they had suddenly discovered me, as though there was a secret society of women in which the news that I’d bedded my wife’s brother began to circulate, and that had to mean I was hot stuff. A bad reputation is a good reputation, as people say. Or else it was just writ large on my forehead that I didn’t care a damn. Maybe that was it. Maybe I had become the silent, sad-eyed man in the bar whom they’d heard could get anyone except the one he wanted, and for that reason didn’t give a fuck. The man they all wanted to prove wrong, that there is hope, there is salvation, there is another, and it’s them.

And yes, I played up to it. I played the part I had been allotted, told them the story, just left out the names and that it involved my brother, went home with them if they lived alone or to Søm if not. Woke up beside a stranger and turned to check my phone for messages.

But things improved, they did. On some days, hours would go by without my thinking of her. I knew that malaria is a parasitic illness that never completely leaves your blood, but it can be neutralised. If I stayed away and didn’t see her then I reckoned that the really hard part should be over within two years, three at the outside.

In December Pia Syse phoned and informed me that the station was now ranked sixth best in all Sørlandet. Naturally, I knew that it was the sales manager Gus Myre’s job to make calls with that type of news, not the personnel manager’s. That she probably had something else on her mind.

‘We want you to continue to run the station after the contract runs out next year,’ she said. ‘The conditions will of course reflect the fact that we are very pleased. And that we believe you can move the station even further up the list.’

It suited my plans well. I looked out the window of my office. Flat landscape, big industrial buildings, motorway with circular entrance and exit roads that made me think of the racing-car track on the floor of the back room at Willumsen’s Used Car and Breaker’s Yard, where kids could play if their father was out front buying a car. I’m guessing quite a few used-car sales came about because of kids kicking up about wanting to go down there.

‘Let me think about it,’ I said and hung up.

I sat there looking at the mist over the woods by the zoo. Jesus, the leaves on the trees were still green. I hadn’t seen a snowflake since coming here fourteen months earlier. They say you never really get a winter down here in the south, just more of that pissrain that isn’t really rain but just something wet in the air that can’t decide whether to go up or down or just stay where it is. Same as the mercury in the thermometer that reads six degrees for day after day. I stared into that bank of fog that lay like a thick duvet across the landscape and rendered it even flatter and more shapeless. A winter in Sørlandet was a shower of rain frozen in time. It just was there. So when the phone rang again and I heard Carl’s voice, for about two seconds I longed – yes, I longed! – for those ice-cold, freezing blasts, and that driving snow that whips against your face like grains of sand.

‘How’s things?’ he asked.

‘Can’t complain,’ I said. Sometimes Carl rang just because he wondered how I was doing. But today I could hear that was not the reason.

‘Can’t complain?’

‘Sorry, it’s just something they say down here in Sørlandet.’ I hated the way they said ‘can’t complain’. It was like the winters, neither one thing nor the other. When people down here meet someone they know on the street they say ‘now then’, which I think is a cross between a question and a greeting, sort of like ‘how are you’, but sounding more like they’ve caught you red-handed at something.

‘And you?’

‘Fine,’ said Carl.

I heard that it wasn’t fine. Waited for the ‘but’.

‘Apart from going slightly over budget,’ he said.

‘How slightly?’

‘Not much. What it actually is, there’s a little disharmony in the cash flow. The invoices from the builders are due for payment earlier than expected. We don’t need more cash putting into the project, we just need it a little earlier. I told the bank that we’re a bit ahead of schedule now.’

‘And are you?’

‘We, Roy. We. You’re a co-owner, or have you forgotten? And no, we aren’t ahead. It’s one hell of a conjuring trick when so many airheads have to be coordinated. The building business is a strange ragbag of subcontractors who are all school dropouts and ended up in jobs no one else wants. But because there’s such a demand for the few of them there actually are, they can come and go as they please.’

‘The last shall be first.’

‘Do they say that down south as well?’

‘All the time. They like everything that’s slow. Compared to down here things in Os are all fast-forward.’

Carl laughed his warm laugh, and I felt happy and warm myself. Warmed by the sound of the murderer’s laugh.

‘The bank manager pointed out that one of the conditions of the loan is that certain milestones have to be reached before we can have access to further credit. He said they’d been up to have a look around the site and that what I said about progress up there wasn’t accurate. So there was what you might call a crisis of confidence. Sure, I managed to patch things up, but now the bank is saying I have to inform the participants before they’ll make further payments. It says in the participants’ agreement that, since they have unlimited responsibility, they need an official resolution from the committee to the effect that the project needs more capital.’

‘Then that’s what you’ll have to do.’

‘Yeah yeah, so I guess I will. It’s just that that may set up bad vibes, and in principle the committee can summon a general meeting and put a stop to the whole thing. Especially now that Dan has started digging and poking around.’

‘Dan Krane?’

‘He’s been trying to dig up something to take me down all autumn. Calling round the contractors and asking about progress and budgets. He’s looking for something that he can turn into a full-blown crisis, but he can’t print a thing as long as he’s got nothing definite to go on.’

‘And not as long as a quarter of your readers and your father-in-law are involved in the hotel.’

‘Exactly,’ said Carl. ‘You don’t shit in your own nest.’

‘Well, not unless you’re a gentoo penguin,’ I said. ‘Then you shit in your own nest so as to make it your nest.’

‘Really?’ said Carl doubtfully.

‘The shit attracts the sunlight, which melts the ice so you get a depression and – hey presto – there’s your nest. It’s the same method journalists use to attract a readership. The media lives off the attracting powers of shit.’

‘An interesting image,’ said Carl.

‘Indeed,’ I said.

‘But for Krane this is personal, you do realise that?’

‘And how do you propose to put a stop to it?’

‘I’ve talked to the contractors and got them to promise to keep their mouths shut. Fortunately they know what’s best for them. But yesterday I heard from a pal in Canada that Krane has started digging around into that business in Toronto.’

‘What will he find there?’

‘Not a lot. It’s my word against theirs, and the whole thing is too complex for a Mickey Mouse journo like Krane to be able to understand.’

‘Unless he’s got the bit between his teeth,’ I said.

‘Shit, Roy, I’m ringing you to cheer me up here.’

‘It’ll all work out. And if it doesn’t you can get Willumsen to set one of his enforcers on Krane.’

We laughed. It sounded as if he was relaxing a bit.

‘How are things at home?’ The query was so general it could hardly make my vocal cords quaver suspiciously.

‘Well, you know, the place is still standing. And Shannon seems to have calmed down. Not when it comes to all her objections to the hotel, but at least she’s stopped going on about us having kids. Probably realises the timing’s off when we’re in the middle of all this.’

I made a few appropriate noises that told him this was information of interest, but nothing more than that.

‘But what I’m really calling you about is that the Cadillac needs a bit of work doing on it.’

‘Define a bit of work.’

‘You’re the expert, I haven’t a clue, you know that. Shannon was driving it and she heard some funny noises. She grew up in a Buick from Cuba and says she has a feel for veteran American cars. She suggested you take a look down at the workshop when you’re home for Christmas.’

I didn’t answer.

‘Because you are coming home for Christmas?’ he said.

‘A lot of people at the station want time off—’

‘No! A lot of people at the station want overtime. And they live there, and you’re coming home for Christmas! And you promised, remember? You’ve got family. Not a big family, but the family you have got are looking forward so damn much to seeing you again.’

‘Carl, I…’

‘Pinnekjøtt,’ said Carl. ‘She’s taught herself to make pinnekjøtt. And mashed swede. I’m not kidding. She loves Norwegian Christmas food.’

I closed my eyes, but there she was, so I opened them again. Damn. Not damn. Damn. And why hadn’t I worked out a proper excuse? After all, I knew the question about Christmas would come up.

‘I’ll see what I can work out, Carl.’

Right. That gave me time to think of something. Something he’d accept. Hopefully.

‘You’ll work it out,’ Carl exulted. ‘We’ll arrange a proper family Christmas here, you won’t have to worry about a thing! Just cruise on into the yard, smell that smell of pinnekjøtt, and be served an aquavit on the steps by your little brother. It won’t be the same without you, you must. You hear me? You must!’

48

THE DAY BEFORE CHRISTMAS EVE. The Volvo was purring along nicely and the piled-up snow lay like massive lines of cocaine along the sides of the highway. ‘Driving Home for Christmas’ came on the radio, which was appropriate enough as far as it goes, but I slipped J. J. Cale’s ‘Cocaine’ into the CD player anyway.

Speedometer needle under the speed limit. Pulse normal.

I sang along. Not that I sniff that stuff. Apart from the one time Carl sent it in one of his rare letters from Canada. I was already on a high anyway when I took it, which was maybe why I didn’t really notice any difference. Or maybe it was because I was alone. Alone and on a high, like now. There was the county sign by the roadside. High, and pulse normal. That must be what people mean when they say happy.

I hadn’t managed to come up with an excuse not to come home for Christmas. And I could hardly not ever see my family again, now could I? So I ought to be able to manage three days of Christmas celebrations. Three days in the same house as Shannon. And after that straight back to solitary.

I parked in front of the house next to a brown Subaru Outback. There must be a name for that particular shade of brown, but I’m not much good at colours. The snow lay several metres deep, the sun was on its way down, and behind the rise in the west the silhouette of a crane was visible.

As I rounded the house Carl was already standing in the doorway. His face looked sort-of wide, like that time he had mumps.

‘New motor?’ I called as soon as I saw him.

‘Old,’ he said. ‘We need a four-wheel drive for the winter, but Shannon wouldn’t let me buy a new one. It’s a 2007 model, got it for fifty big ones down at Willumsen’s. One of the chippies who’s got the same type says it was a steal.’

‘Blimey, you mean you bargained with him?’ I said.

‘Opgards don’t bargain.’ He grinned. ‘But ladies from Barbados do.’

Carl gave me a long and warm embrace out there on the steps. His body felt bigger than before. And he smelled of alcohol. Already started celebrating Christmas, he said. Needed to wind down after a tough week. It would be good to think about something else for a few days. During the holly days, as Carl used to think it was when he was a kid.

We entered the kitchen while Carl talked. About the hotel, where they had finally managed to get things moving. Carl had pressed the contractors to get the walls up and a roof so that they could get started on the indoor work and not have to wait for the spring.

There was no one else in the kitchen.

‘Tradesmen give you a better price if they can work indoors during the winter months,’ said Carl. At least I think that’s what he said, I was listening out for other sounds. But all I heard was Carl’s voice and the pounding of my own heart. Not exactly normal pulse now.

‘Shannon’s up at the building site,’ he said, and now I listened attentively. ‘She’s so bloody concerned that it’s got to be exactly like on the drawings.’

‘That’s good then.’

‘It is and it isn’t. Architects don’t think of the cost, they only want to make sure they’re reflected in the glory of their masterpiece.’ Carl gave a sort of tolerant laugh, but I could hear the anger bubbling below it. ‘Hungry?’

I shook my head. ‘Maybe I’ll take the Cadillac down to the workshop, get that out of the way.’

‘Can’t. Shannon’s got it.’

‘Up at the hotel site?’

‘Yup. The road isn’t that good yet, but it does go all the way up to the building site now.’ He said it with a strange mixture of pride and pain. As though that road had cost him plenty. And if that was the case I wasn’t surprised, it was steep and there was a lot of mountain to be blasted.

‘With road conditions like this, why doesn’t she take the Subaru?’

Carl shrugged. ‘She doesn’t like manual gears. Prefers the big Americans, that’s what she grew up with.’

I carried my bag up to the boys’ room, went back down.

‘A beer?’ said Carl, standing there with one in his hand.

‘Nope. I’m going to drive down and say hello at the station and pick up a decent shirt at the workshop.’

‘Then I’ll call Shannon and she can take the Cadillac straight down to the workshop and get a lift back up with you. Sound OK?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said. Carl looked at me. At least I think he looked at me, I was busy examining a loose seam on one of my gloves.

Julie was on with Egil. She glowed and squealed with delight when she saw me. Customers were queuing up at the till but she ran round the counter and threw herself around my neck as though it was a family reunion. And that’s exactly what it was. It wasn’t there any more, that steamy undercurrent of something else, of longing and desire. And for a brief moment it was almost a disappointment, a recognition of the fact that I had lost her, or at least stopped being that teenage crush of hers. And though I never wanted to have it or respond to it, I knew that in lonesome times I would think about what might have been, what it was I had said no to.

‘Much happening?’ I asked when she finally released me and I had time to glance around. Looked like Markus had copied the Christmas decorations and choice of stock we’d done so well with in previous years. Smart kid.

‘Yes,’ Julie cried excitedly. ‘Me and Alex are engaged.’

She held her hand up to me. And damned if there wasn’t a ring on her finger.

‘You lucky monkey.’ I smiled, heading behind the counter to turn over a hamburger that was about to be incinerated. ‘How are you, Egil?’

‘Fine,’ he said as he worked the till for a Christmas sheaf of oats for the birds and a battery shaver. ‘Merry Christmas, Roy!’

‘Same to you,’ I said, and for a moment I observed the world from my old vantage point. From behind the counter of what should have been my own station.

Then I stepped out again into the cold and the winter darkness, said hello to people hurrying by puffing grey clouds before them. Saw a guy in a skinny-fit suit standing smoking by one of the petrol pumps and went over to him.

‘You can’t smoke here,’ I said.

‘Yes I can,’ he said in a low, rasping voice that made me think he might have damaged vocal cords. Three short words weren’t enough for me to identify the accent, but it sounded guttural, like a Sørlandet accent.

‘No,’ I said.

Could be he smiled, because his eyes turned to narrow slits in his pitted face. ‘Watch me,’ he said in English.

And I did. I watched him. He wasn’t tall, shorter than me, around fifty, but with pimples in his red, swollen-looking face. At a distance he’d looked chubby in his accountant’s suit, but I saw now that it was other things that made it look a little too tight. Shoulders. Chest. Back. Biceps. A muscle mass you probably needed roids to maintain at his age. He raised his cigarette and took a long drag. The tip glowed. And suddenly my middle finger was itching.

‘You’re in the pump area of a fucking service station,’ I said, pointing at the large SMOKING PROHIBITED sign.

I didn’t see him move, but suddenly he was right up close to me, so close I wouldn’t be able to put any power into a punch.

‘And what do you propose to do about it?’ he said, his voice even lower.

Not Sørlandet. Denmark. His speed worried me more than his muscles. That, and the aggression, the will, no, the lust to do harm that shone from his small eyes. It was like staring into the mouth of a fucking pit bull. It was like the time I tried cocaine. I did it once, and that sure didn’t leave me wanting more either. I was scared. Yes, I was. And it struck me that this was how they must have felt, those boys and men at Årtun, in the second before they got hammered. They had known, as I knew now, that the man in front of them was stronger, faster and had a willingness to cross certain lines that I knew I didn’t possess. It was staring into that willingness, and that madness, that made me back off.

‘I don’t propose to do anything at all,’ I said, my voice as quiet as his. ‘You have a merry Christmas in hell.’

He grinned and stepped back himself. Never took his eyes off me. I’m guessing he saw something of the same in me as I had seen in him, and showed his respect by not turning his back on me before he had to, in order to slip into the low, white, torpedo-shaped sports car. A Jaguar E-Type, a late-seventies model. Danish plates. Wide summer tyres.

‘Roy!’ The voice came from behind me. ‘Roy!’

I turned. It was Stanley. He was on his way out of the door, loaded down with bags from which I could see Christmas wrapping paper sticking out. He staggered over to me. ‘Good to see you back!’ He offered me his cheek since his hands weren’t free and I gave him a quick hug.

‘Ha! Men buying Christmas presents on 23 December at a service station,’ I said.

‘Typical, isn’t it?’ Stanley laughed. ‘I came here because there are queues in all the other shops. Dan Krane says in today’s paper that there’s a record turnover in Os, never before have so many spent so much on Christmas presents.’ He wrinkled his brow. ‘You look pale, nothing wrong I hope?’

‘No no,’ I said, and heard the low roar and then growling as it rolled away down the highway. ‘Seen that car before?’

‘Yes, I saw it driving off when I called in at Dan’s office earlier today. Smart-looking beast. Seems like a lot of people have been getting themselves these smart-looking beasts recently. But not you. And not Dan. He was looking pale today too, as it happens. I hope it’s not flu doing the rounds, because I’m counting on a quiet Christmas, you hear?’

The low white car slid away into the December darkness. Southwards. On its way home to the Amazon.

‘How’s that finger?’

I held up my right hand with the stiff middle finger. ‘It’s still fit for purpose.’

Stanley laughed obligingly at the stupid joke. ‘Good. And how’s Carl?’

‘Everything as it should be, I think. I only came home today.’

Stanley seemed to be on the point of saying something else but changed his mind. ‘We’ll talk later, Roy. By the way, I’m having my annual open-house breakfast on Boxing Day. Like to come?’

‘Thanks, but I’ll be heading back early on Boxing Day, have to get back to work.’

‘New Year’s Eve then? I’m having a party. Mostly single people you know.’

I smiled. ‘Lonely hearts club?’

‘In a way.’ He smiled back at me. ‘See you there?’

I shook my head. ‘I got Christmas Eve off on condition I work New Year’s Eve. But thanks.’

We wished each other a merry Christmas and I crossed the car park and unlocked the door to the workshop. That old familiar smell came rolling out as I opened it. Engine oil, car shampoo, scorched metal and oily rags. Not even pinnekjøtt, wood fires and sprigs of spruce smell as good as that cocktail there. I turned on the light. Everything was just as I had left it.

I went into the sleeping alcove and got a shirt from the cupboard. Entered the office, which was the smallest room and the quickest to heat up, turned the fan heater on full blast. Looked at my watch. She might arrive at any time. It was no longer that old, spotty-faced guy at the petrol pumps who was making my heart pound like a piston. Thud thud. I checked myself in the mirror, neatened my hair. Dry throat. Like when I was taking the theory exam. I straightened the licence plate from Basutoland, it had a tendency to slip round on its nail when the cold came and the walls compressed, same thing in the summer, only the other way.

I jerked so the office chair screeched when there was a sudden knock on the window.

I stared out into the darkness. Saw first just my own reflection, but then also her face. It was within mine, as though we were one and the same person.

I got to my feet and went to the door.

‘Brr,’ she said and slipped inside. ‘It is cold! Good job I’m getting toughened up with the ice-bathing.’

‘Ice-bathing,’ I repeated, and my voice was all over the place, just air and thickness. I stood there bolt upright, my arms sticking out from my body, as naturally relaxed as a scarecrow.

‘Yes, can you imagine? Rita Willumsen’s an ice-bather and she persuaded me and a few other women to join her, three mornings a week, but now I’m the only one left still with her, she bores a hole in the ice and then plop, in we go.’ She spoke quickly and breathlessly and I was glad it wasn’t just me who was feeling tense.

And then she stopped and looked up at me. She had changed the simple, elegant architect’s coat for a quilted jacket, black, as was the hat she wore pulled down over her ears. But it was her. It really was Shannon. A woman I had been with in a very concrete, physical sense, and yet it was as though she, here, now, had stepped out of a dream. A dream that had been recurring since 3 September. And now, here she stood, her eyes bright with joy, and a laughing mouth I had kissed goodnight 110 times since that day.

‘I didn’t hear the Cadillac,’ I said. ‘And yes, it’s really good to see you.’

She put her head back and laughed. And that laughter loosened something inside me, like a snowdrift grown so heavy that even the slightest thaw caused it to collapse.

‘I parked in the light, in front of the station,’ said Shannon.

‘And I still love you,’ I said.

She opened her mouth to say something, then closed it again. I saw her swallow, her eyes glisten, and I didn’t know it was tears until one fell onto her cheek and ran and ran.

And then we were in each other’s arms.

When we got back to the farm two hours later, Carl sat snoring in Dad’s armchair.

I said I was going up to bed and heard Shannon wake Carl as I climbed the stairs.

That night, for the first time in over a year, I didn’t dream of Shannon.

Instead I dreamed of falling.

49

CHRISTMAS EVE FOR THREE.

I slept until twelve, had worked like a Trojan over the last few weeks and had a lot of catching up on sleep to do. Went downstairs, said Happy Christmas, heated up the coffee and browsed through an old Christmas magazine, explained some of the unique Norwegian Christmas traditions to Shannon, helped Carl mash the swedes. Carl and Shannon hardly exchanged a word. I cleared snow, even though it was obvious none had fallen over the last couple of days, changed the birds’ Christmas sheaf, made porridge and took a bowl to the barn for the barn elf, hit the punchbag a few times. Put my skis on out in the yard. Skied the first few metres along some unusually broad tyre tracks left by summer tyres. Stumped up and over the snow piled alongside the road and then made my own tracks as I set off in the direction of the hotel building site.

For some reason the view of the building site up there on the bare mountain made me think of the moon landing. Emptiness, stillness, and the sense of something man-made that was out of place in the landscape. The large, prefabricated timber modules Carl had talked about were held up on the foundations by steel cables that would, according to the engineers, keep everything in place even in gusts of hurricane force. This being Christmas week and holidays, there were no lights on in the workmen’s sheds. Darkness fell.

On the way back I heard a long, sad and familiar sound, but saw no bird.

I don’t know how long we sat around the table, probably not more than an hour, but it felt like four. The pinnekjøtt was probably excellent, Carl at least was full of praise for it, and Shannon looked down at the food, smiled and said thank you, politely. Carl had charge of the bottle of aquavit, but he kept refilling my glass, so that had to mean I was knocking it back too. Carl described the big Santa Claus parade in Toronto where he and Shannon had met for the first time, when they joined the parade along with mutual friends who had made and decorated the sleigh they sat in. The temperature had been minus twenty-five and Carl had offered to keep her hands warm beneath the sheepskin rugs.

‘She was shaking like a leaf, but said no thanks.’ Carl laughed.

‘I didn’t know you,’ said Shannon. ‘And you were wearing a mask.’

‘A Father Christmas mask,’ said Carl, looking at me. ‘Who are you going to trust if you don’t trust Father Christmas?’

‘It’s OK, you’ve taken the mask off now,’ said Shannon.

After the meal I helped Shannon clear the table. In the kitchen she rinsed the plates with warm water and I ran my hand over the small of her back.

‘Don’t,’ she said in a quiet voice.

‘Shannon…’

‘Don’t!’ She turned towards me. There were tears in her eyes.

‘We can’t just carry on as though nothing has happened,’ I said.

‘We must.’

‘Why must we?’

‘You don’t understand. We must, believe me. So just do as I tell you.’

‘Which is?’

‘Carry on as though nothing has happened. Jesus Christ, nothing has happened. It was… it was just…’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t nothing. It was everything. I know it. And you know it too.’

‘Please, Roy. I’m asking you.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘But what is it you’re afraid of? That he’ll hit you again? Because if he so much as touches you…’

She uttered a sound, part-laughter, part-sob. ‘It’s not me who’s in danger, Roy.’

‘Me? You’re afraid Carl might beat me up?’ I smiled. I didn’t want to, but I did.

‘Not beat you up,’ she said. She folded her arms across her chest as though she were cold, and she must have been, because the outside temperature had fallen rapidly, and the walls had started to creak.

‘Presents!’ cried Carl from the living room. ‘Someone’s put presents under a bloody spruce tree in here!’

Shannon went to bed early, complaining of a headache. Carl wanted to smoke and insisted that we wrap up warmly and sit out in the winter garden, which is obviously a highly fucking misleading name when the thermometer falls below fifteen minus.

Carl pulled out two cigars from his jacket pocket. Held one of them out to me. I shook my head and held up my snuffbox.

‘Come on,’ said Carl. ‘Got to get in training for when you and me light the victory cigars, don’t you know.’

‘An optimist again?’

‘Always the optimist, that’s me.’

‘Last time we spoke there were a couple of problems,’ I said.

‘There were?’

‘Cash flow. And Dan Krane poking about.’

‘Problems are there to be solved,’ said Carl, puffing out a mixture of condensed air and cigar smoke.

‘And how did you solve those?’

‘The important thing is, they were solved.’

‘Maybe the solution to both problems is connected to Willumsen in some way?’

‘Willumsen? What makes you think that?’

‘Only that the cigar you’ve got there is the same brand as he hands out to people he’s doing deals with.’

Carl removed the cigar and looked at the red band. ‘Is it?’

‘Yes. So they aren’t particularly exclusive.’

‘No? You could’ve have fooled me.’

‘So what sort of deal have you done with Willumsen?’

Carl sucked on the cigar. ‘What do you think?’

‘I think you’ve borrowed money from him.’

‘Cripes. And some people think I’m the brainy one.’

‘Have you? Have you sold your soul to Willumsen, Carl?’

‘My soul?’ Carl emptied the last drop of aquavit into the absurdly small glass. ‘Didn’t know you believed in souls, Roy.’

‘Come on.’

‘It’s always a buyer’s market when it comes to souls, Roy, and looked at in that light he gave me a good price for mine. Plus, his business can’t afford to let this village go under. And by now he’s so heavily into the hotel that if I fall, then he falls too. If you’re going to borrow from someone, Roy, it’s important to borrow a lot. That way you’ve got as much hold on them as they have on you.’ He raised his glass to me.

I had neither glass nor response. ‘What did he get in security?’ I asked.

‘What security does Willumsen usually ask for?’

I nodded. Just your word. Your soul. But in that case the loan couldn’t really be all that big.

‘But let’s talk about something else besides money, it’s so boring. Willumsen has invited Shannon and me to his New Year party.’

‘Congratulations,’ I said curtly. Willumsen’s New Year party was where everybody who was somebody in the village gathered. Old and current council chairmen, landowners selling off their land for cabins, those with money, and those with farms big enough to pretend they had. Everyone on the inside of an invisible divide here in the village, the existence of which everyone who was inside it denied, of course.

‘Anyway,’ said Carl. ‘So what was the problem with my lovely little Cadillac?’

I coughed. ‘Minor stuff. It’s no wonder, it’s done a lot of kilometres and been driven hard. Lot of steep hills here in Os.’

‘So nothing that can’t be repaired?’

I shrugged. ‘Sure I can do a temporary repair, but it might be time to think about getting rid of that jalopy. Get yourself a new car.’

Carl looked at me. ‘Why is that?’

‘Cadillacs are complicated. When small parts start to go it’s a warning there’s bigger trouble on the way. And you’re no grease monkey when it comes to cars, are you?’

Carl wrinkled his brow. ‘Maybe not, but that’s the only car I want. Can you repair it or can’t you?’

I shrugged. ‘You’re the boss.’

‘Good,’ he said and sucked on his cigar. Took it out and looked at it. ‘In a way it’s a shame they never got to see what you and I achieved in life, Roy.’

‘Mum and Dad, you mean?’

‘Yes. What d’you think Dad would be doing now if he was alive?’

‘Scratching on the inside of his coffin lid,’ I said.

Carl looked at me. Then he started to laugh. I shuddered. Looked at my watch and forced a yawn.

That night I dreamed about falling again. I was standing on the edge of Huken and heard Mum and Dad calling to me down there, calling me to join them. I leaned over the edge, the way Carl had described the old sheriff doing before he fell. I couldn’t see the front of the car that was closest to the rock face, and at the back, on top of the boot, two huge ravens were sitting. They took off and came flying up towards me and as they got closer I saw they had Carl and Shannon’s faces. As they passed me I heard Shannon cry out twice, and I woke with a start. I stared out into the darkness and held my breath, but not a sound came from the bedroom.

On Christmas Day I lay in bed for as long as I could stand it. By the time I got up Carl and Shannon had left for the church service. I’d seen them from the window, middle class, subtly dressed up. They drove off in the Subaru. I hung around the house and the barn, repaired a couple of things. Heard the crisp ringing of the church bells wafting all the way up from the village on the cold air. Then I drove down to the workshop and started on the Cadillac. There was enough there to keep me busy until far into the evening. At nine I called Carl, told him the car was ready and suggested he come down and fetch it.

‘I’m in no fit state to drive,’ he said. As though I hadn’t reckoned on that.

‘Send Shannon then,’ I said.

I heard his hesitation. ‘Then the Subaru will have to stay down at your place,’ he said. And two meaningless thoughts flitted across my brain. That by your place he meant the workshop, which meant that he thought of the farm as his place.

‘I’ll drive the Subaru and Shannon the Cadillac,’ I said.

‘That leaves the Volvo behind.’

‘OK,’ I said. ‘Then I’ll drive the Cadillac up and Shannon can drive me back down to pick up the Volvo.’

‘Goats and oats,’ said Carl.

I held my breath. Had he really just said that? That leaving Shannon and I alone at the same place was like leaving the goat alone with the sack of oats? How long had he known? What was going to happen now?

‘You still there?’ said Carl.

‘Yes,’ I said, strangely calm. And I felt it now, I felt the relief. Yes. It was going to be brutal, but at least now I could stop slinking around like a fucking cheat. ‘Come again, Carl,’ I said. ‘What was that about goats and oats?’

‘The goat,’ Carl said patiently. ‘That has to stay in the rowing boat both ways, right? Oh, it’s too complicated. Just leave the Cadillac outside the workshop and come back here, and Shannon or I can fetch it later. Thanks for the work, bro. Now come up and have a drink with me.’

I could feel myself clutching the phone so hard that my damaged middle finger was throbbing. Carl had been talking about logistics, the solution to that old fairy-tale riddle about the goat in the rowing boat and the sack of oats. I started breathing again.

‘OK,’ I said.

We ended the call.

I stared at the phone. He had been referring to the logistics, hadn’t he? Of course he had. Maybe we Opgard men didn’t always say everything that was on our minds, but we didn’t talk in riddles.

When I got back to the farm Carl was sitting in the living room and offered me a drink. Shannon had gone to bed. I said I didn’t really feel like a drink, I was tired myself and would be going straight to work as soon as I was back in Kristiansand.

In the bunk bed I tossed and turned in a sleepless dreaming state until seven o’clock and then got up.

It was dark in the kitchen and I jumped when I heard the whispered voice from over by the window. ‘Don’t switch on the light.’

I knew my way blindfold around that kitchen, took a mug from the cupboard and poured coffee from the warm pot. I didn’t see the swelling until I crossed to the window and that side of her face was lit by the snow outside.

‘What happened?’

She shrugged. ‘It was my own fault.’

‘Oh yeah? Did you cross him?’

She sighed. ‘Go home now, Roy, don’t think about it any more.’

‘Home is here,’ I whispered. I lifted my hand and laid it carefully on the swelling. She didn’t stop me. ‘And I can’t stop thinking. I think about you all the time, Shannon. It isn’t possible to stop. We can’t stop. The brakes are gone, they’re past repair.’

I had raised my voice while speaking, and she glanced automatically up at the stovepipe and the hole in the ceiling.

‘And the road we’re on now leads straight over the edge,’ she whispered. ‘You’re right, the brakes don’t work, so we need to take another road, one that doesn’t take us closer to the edge. You need to take another road, Roy.’ She took my hand and pressed it against her lips. ‘Roy, Roy. Get away while there’s still time.’

‘Beloved,’ I said.

‘Don’t say that,’ she said.

‘But it’s true.’

‘I know it is, but it hurts so much to hear it.’

‘Why?’

She made a face, a scowl that abruptly banished all the beauty from her face, and made me want to kiss it, kiss her, I had to.

‘Because I don’t love you, Roy. I want you, yes, but it’s Carl I love.’

‘You’re lying,’ I said.

‘We all lie,’ she said. ‘Even when we think we’re telling the truth. What we call true is just the lie that serves us best. And there are no limits to our ability to believe in necessary lies.’

‘But you know yourself that isn’t true!’

She laid a finger against my lips.

‘It must be true, Roy. So leave now.’

It was still pitch-dark as the Volvo and I passed the county sign.

Three days later I called Stanley and asked if I was still invited on New Year’s Eve.

50

‘SO PLEASED YOU COULD COME,’ said Stanley, squeezing my hand and giving me a glass containing some sort of yellowy-green slush.

‘Merry Christmas,’ I said.

‘Finally – someone who knows when to say “merry” and when to say “happy”!’ he said with a wink. I followed him into the room where the other guests had already arrived.

It would be going too far to say that Stanley’s house was luxurious, since there were no such houses in Os, with the possible exception of the Willumsens’ and the Aases’. But while the Aas house was furnished with a mixture of peasant common sense and the self-assured discretion of old money, Stanley’s villa was a confusing mix of rococo and modern art.

In the living room, above the calf-legged chairs and round table, hung a large crudely painted picture that resembled the cover of a book with the title Death, What’s in It for Me?

‘Harland Miller,’ said Stanley, who had followed my gaze. ‘Cost me a fortune.’

‘You like it that much?’

‘I think so. But OK, there may have been a touch of mimetic desire involved. I mean, who doesn’t want a Miller?’

‘Mimetic desire?’

‘Sorry. René Girard. Philosopher. He called it that when we automatically desire the same things as people we admire. If your hero falls in love with a woman, your unconscious goal becomes to win that same woman.’

‘I see. Then which one are you actually in love with, the man or the woman?’

‘You tell me.’

I looked around. ‘Dan Krane’s here. I thought he was a regular at Willumsen’s New Year’s Eve party.’

‘Right now he’s got better friends here than there,’ said Stanley. ‘Excuse me, Roy, I need to fix a couple of things in the kitchen.’

I circulated. Twelve familiar faces, twelve familiar names. Simon Nergard, Kurt Olsen. Grete Smitt. I stood there, rocking on my heels like a sailor, and listened to the conversations. Turning the glass in my hand and trying not to look at the clock. They talked about Christmas, the highway, the weather, climate change and the forecast storm that was already drifting the snow outside.

‘Extreme weather,’ someone said.

‘The regular New Year’s Eve storm,’ said another. ‘Just check in the almanac, it comes every five years.’

I stifled a yawn.

Dan Krane stood by the window. It was the first time I had seen the controlled and always correct newspaper man like that. He spoke to no one, just watched us with a curious wildness in his gaze as he downed glass after glass of the strong yellow slush.

I didn’t want to, but I went over to him.

‘And how are you?’ I asked.

He looked at me, seemingly surprised that anyone at all should address him.

‘Good evening, Opgard. Are you familiar with the komodo dragon?’

‘You mean those giant lizards?’

‘Precisely. They’re found on only a couple of small Asian islands, one of them is Komodo. About the size of Os county. And they really aren’t that big, not as big as people believe anyway. They weigh about the same as a grown man. They move slowly, you and I would be able to run from it. So for that reason it has to use ambush, yes, cowardly ambush. But it doesn’t kill you there and then, oh no. It just bites you. Anywhere. Perhaps just an innocent nibble on the leg. And you get away and think you’re saved, right? But the truth is, they injected you with poison. And it’s a weak, slow-acting poison. I’ll return to the subject of why it’s weak, here I’ll mention only that it costs the animal an enormous amount of energy to produce the poison. The stronger the poison, the more energy. The poison of the Komodo dragon prevents the blood from coagulating. So you’ve suddenly become a bleeder, the wound in your leg won’t heal, nor the inner bleeding from the bite either. So no matter where you run to on that little Asiatic island, the Komodo dragon’s long, olfactory tongue picks up the scent of blood and comes slowly waddling after you. The days go by, you grow weaker and weaker. Soon you can’t run any faster than the dragon, and it’s able to give you another bite. And another one. Your whole body is bleeding and bleeding, the blood won’t stop, decilitre by decilitre you’re being emptied. And you can’t get away of course, because you’re trapped on this little island and your scent is everywhere.’

‘So how does this end?’ I asked.

Dan Krane stopped and stared at me. He looked offended. Perhaps he interpreted the question as a desire to get his lecture over with.

‘Venomous creatures that live in small places from which prey, for practical or other reasons, cannot escape, don’t need to produce precious, quick-acting poison. They can practise this form of evil slow torture. It’s evolution in practice. Or am I wrong, Opgard?’

Opgard didn’t have much to say. I realised, of course, that he was talking about a human version of the venomous animal; but did he mean the enforcer? Or Willumsen? Or somebody else?

‘According to the forecast the wind is going to drop during the night,’ I said.

Krane rolled his eyes, turned away, stared out of the window.

Not until we were seated at table did the conversation turn to the subject of the hotel. Of the twelve sitting there, eight were involved in the project.

‘Anyway, I hope the building’s securely moored,’ said Simon, with a glance towards the large picture window that was creaking as the wind gusted.

‘Oh it is,’ a voice said with great certainty. ‘My cabin’ll blow away before that hotel does, and that cabin’s been standing for fifty years.’

I couldn’t contain myself any longer and looked at my watch.

In our village there was a traditional gathering in the square just before midnight. There were no speeches, no countdowns or other formalities, it was just an opportunity for people to come together, wait for the rockets and then – in an atmosphere of carnival chaos and social anarchy – use the big community embrace at midnight to press bodies and cheeks against the person or persons who would, in the remaining nine thousand hours of the year, otherwise be off-limits. Even the New Year party at Willumsen’s would break up so that guests could mingle with the hoi polloi.

Somebody said something about it being a boom time for the village.

‘The credit must go to Carl Opgard,’ Dan Krane interrupted. People were used to hearing him speak in a slightly nasal, quiet voice. Now his voice sounded hard, and angry. ‘Or blame. All depending.’

‘Depending on what?’ someone asked.

‘Oh yes, that revivalist speech on capitalism he gave up at Årtun, that got everyone dancing round the golden calf. Which, by the way, should be the name of the hotel. The Golden Calf Spa. Although…’ Krane’s wild gaze spun round the table. ‘Actually Os Spa is pretty appropriate anyway. Ospa is the Polish word for smallpox, the sickness that wiped out whole villages as late as the twentieth century.’

I heard Grete laugh. Krane’s words were maybe what people were used to hearing from him – intelligent, witty – but delivered now with an aggression and chill that silenced the table.

Registering the mood, Stanley raised his glass with a smile. ‘Very amusing, Dan. But you’re exaggerating, aren’t you?’

‘Am I?’ Dan Krane smiled coldly and fixed his gaze on a spot on the wall somewhere above our heads. ‘This business where everyone and anyone can invest without having the money for it is an exact replica of what happened in the crash of October 1929. Those bankers jumping from the tops of skyscrapers along Wall Street – that was just the tip of the iceberg. The real tragedy involved the little people, the millions of small investors who trusted the stockbrokers when they talked in tongues about an everlasting boom and borrowed way over their heads to buy shares.’

‘OK,’ said Stanley. ‘But take a look around, there’s optimism everywhere. To be blunt, I don’t exactly see any big warning signals.’

‘But that is precisely the nature of a crash,’ said Krane, his voice getting louder and louder. ‘You see nothing until suddenly you see everything. The unsinkable Titanic sank seventeen years earlier, but people learned nothing. As late as September 1929 the stock exchange was at its highest ever. People think the wisdom of the majority is unimpeachable. That the market is right, and when everyone wants to buy, buy, of course no one cries wolf. We’re gregarious animals, who delude ourselves that it’s safer in the flock, in the crowd…’

‘And so it is too,’ I said quietly. But a silence descended so quickly that even though I didn’t raise my eyes from my plate, I knew everyone was looking at me.

‘That’s why fish form shoals and sheep flocks. That’s why we form limited companies and consortiums. Because it really is safer to operate as a flock. Not a hundred per cent safe, a whale could come along at any moment and swallow up the whole shoal, but safer. That’s where evolution has tried and failed us.’

I lifted a loaded fork of gravlax to my face and chewed away, feeling those staring eyes on me. It was as though a deaf-mute had suddenly spoken.

‘Let’s drink to that!’ cried Stanley, and when I finally looked up, I saw everyone with glasses raised in my direction. I tried to smile and raised my own, though it was empty. Quite empty.

Port was served after the dessert and I sat on the sofa opposite the Harland Miller painting.

Someone sat next to me. It was Grete. She had a straw in her glass of port. ‘Death,’ she said. ‘What’s in it for me?’ she added in English.

‘Are you just reading, or are you asking?’

‘Both,’ said Grete, looking around. Everybody else was engaged in conversation.

‘You shouldn’t have said no,’ she said.

‘To what?’ I asked, though I knew what she was referring to, I was just hoping I could get her to understand by pretending not to understand that she would drop the subject.

‘I had to do it alone,’ she said.

I stared at her in disbelief. ‘You mean that you’ve…’

She nodded gravely.

‘You’ve been gossiping about Carl and Mari?’

‘I have been spreading information.’

‘You’re lying!’ It just slipped out, and I glanced round quickly to make sure no one else had heard my outburst.

‘Oh yeah?’ Grete smiled sardonically. ‘Why do you think Dan Krane’s here and Mari isn’t? Or to be more precise, why do you think they aren’t both at Willumsen’s like they usually are? Babysitting? Yes, that’s probably what they want people to think. When I told Dan he thanked me. He made me promise not to tell anyone else. That was the initial reaction, see? On the outside they act like nothing has happened. But on the inside, believe you me, the split is complete.’

My heart was pounding and I could feel the sweat that had broken out under my tight-fitting shirt. ‘And Shannon, have you gossiped to her too?’

‘This isn’t gossip, Roy. It’s information I think everyone has a right to if their partner is unfaithful. I told her at a dinner at Rita Willumsen’s. She thanked me too. You see?’

‘When was this?’

‘When? Let me see. We’d stopped ice-bathing, so it must have been in the spring.’

My brain was working feverishly. The spring. Shannon had travelled to Toronto in the early summer, stayed away for some time. Come back. Contacted me. Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck. I was so angry the hand holding the glass had started to shake. I felt like I wanted to empty the port all over Grete’s fucking perm, see if it worked like white spirit when I pushed her face down into the candles standing on a plate next to us. I clenched my teeth.

‘Must have been a disappointment for you then that Carl and Shannon are still together.’

Grete shrugged. ‘They’re obviously unhappy, and that’s always a comfort.’

‘If they’re unhappy, why are they together? They don’t even have children.’

‘Oh yes,’ said Grete. ‘The hotel is their child. That’s going to be her masterpiece, and that makes Shannon dependent on him. In order to get something you want, you’re dependent on someone you hate – sound familiar?’

Grete looked at me as she sucked at her port. Clenched cheeks, lips shaped as though kissing around the straw. I got up, couldn’t sit there any longer, went out into the hall and put on my jacket.

‘Are you going?’ It was Stanley.

‘Heading down to the square,’ I said. ‘My head needs airing.’

‘There’s still an hour to midnight.’

‘I walk and think slowly,’ I said. ‘See you there.’

Walking down the highway I had to lean into the wind. It blew right through me, blew everything away. The clouds from the sky. The hope from the heart. The fog around everything that had happened. Shannon knew about Carl’s infidelity. She’d got in touch with me prior to going to Notodden so that she could have her revenge. Just like Mari wanted. Of course. Replay. I’d crossed my own footsteps; it was the same fucking circle all over again. Impossible to break out of it. So why struggle? Why not just sit down and let yourself drift into a frozen sleep?

A car drove by. It was the new red Audi A1 that had been standing outside Stanley Spind’s house. Meaning that the person in question must be driving under the influence, because I hadn’t seen anyone there who wasn’t drinking that yellow slush. I saw the brake lights as it turned off before the square, heading in the direction of Nergard’s farm.

People had already started gathering in the square, mostly young, wandering around aimlessly in groups of four or five. And yet everything, the tiniest gesture or action, had a purpose, an aim, was part of the hunt. People came from every quarter. And even though the wind swept across the open square you could smell the adrenaline, like before a football match. Or a boxing match. Or a bullfight. Yes, that was it. Something was about to die. I was standing in the alleyway between the sports shop and Dals Clothes for Kids and from where I stood I could take in everything without being seen myself. I thought.

A girl broke from the group she was in, it looked like a division of cells, her walk was unsteady but she came more or less in my direction.

‘Hi, Roy!’ It was Julie. Her voice was hoarse and slurred from alcohol. She put a hand against my chest and pushed me further into the alleyway. Then she wrapped her arms tightly around me. ‘Happy New Year,’ she whispered, and before I had time to react she pressed her lips against mine. I felt her tongue against my teeth.

‘Julie,’ I groaned, my jaws clenched.

‘Roy,’ she groaned back, clearly misunderstanding.

‘We can’t,’ I said.

‘It’s a New Year’s kiss,’ she said. ‘Everybody—’

‘What’s going on here?’

The voice came from behind Julie. She turned, and there was Alex. Julie’s boyfriend was in line to take over the farm at Ribu, and lads in line to take over the farm tend to be – with certain exceptions, such as me – big. He had the kind of thick, cropped hair that looks as though it’s been painted on the head, with a parting, gel and stripes in it, like an Italian footballer. I weighed up the situation. Alex looked a bit unsteady on his feet too, and he still had his hands in his coat pockets. He’d have more to say before he hit out. He had an agenda. I pushed Julie away from me.

She turned and saw clearly what was brewing.

‘No,’ she shouted. ‘No, Alex!’

‘No, what?’ asked Alex, pretending to be astounded. ‘I just want to thank Opgard and his brother for what they’ve done for the village.’ He held out his right hand.

OK, so no agenda. But the way he was standing – one foot in front of the other – showed plainly what he had in mind. The old handshake-to-nut-in-the-face trick. He was probably too young to know how many people I had beaten up. Or maybe he knew, but realised also that he had no choice, that he was a man and had to defend his territory. All I had to do was stand to one side of his line of sight, give him my hand, and jerk him off balance as he adjusted his footing. I took his hand. And at the same moment I saw the fear in his eyes. Was he afraid of me after all? Or was he afraid because he thought he was about to lose the one he loved, the one he had been hoping until now would be his. Well, soon he’d be flat on his back feeling the pain of yet another defeat, yet another humiliation, yet another reminder that he didn’t count for much, and Julie’s comfort would be like salt in his wounds. In short, a repeat of that night at Lund in Kristiansand. A repeat of that morning in the kitchen at the roofer’s house. A repeat of every fucking Saturday night at Årtun when I was eighteen years old. I’d be leaving the spot with yet another scalp in my belt, and I’d still be the loser. I didn’t want that any more. I had to get away, break out of the circle, disappear. So I let it happen.

He jerked me forward, butting me at the same time. I heard the crunch as his forehead met my nose. I took a backward step, and saw his right shoulder pulled back ready to swing. I could have easily sidestepped, instead I moved forward and walked straight into his punch. He yelled as his hand caught me directly below the eye. I steadied myself, ready for the next punch. His right wrist was hurting him, but after all, the lad had two hands. Instead he kicked out. Good choice. Caught me in the stomach and I doubled over. Then he elbowed me, catching me in the temple.

‘Alex, stop!’

But Alex didn’t stop. I felt the juddering in the cerebral cortex, the pain flashing like lightning in the dark before everything turned black.

Was there ever a moment when I would have welcomed the end? The net, the seine net that trapped me and drew me down under the water, the certainty that at last I would receive my punishment, for what I had done as well as for what I had not done? The sins of omission, as they call it. My father should be burning in hell because he didn’t stop doing what he was doing to Carl. Because he could have done. And I could have. So I should burn too. I was dragged down to the bottom, where they waited for me.

‘Roy?’

Life is, in essence, a simple matter. Its only goal is the maximising of pleasure. Even our much-lauded curiosity, our inclination to explore the universe and human nature, is a mere manifestation of the desire to accentuate and protract this pleasure. So when our sums end up on the minus side, when life offers us more pain than pleasure, and there’s no longer any hope of things changing, we end it. We eat or drink ourselves to death, swim out to where the current is strong, smoke in bed, drive when drunk, put off seeing the doctor even though the lump on the throat is growing. Or quite simply hang ourselves in the barn. It’s banal when you realise for the first time that this is actually a completely practical alternative; indeed, it doesn’t even feel like the most important decision of your life. To build that house or get that education – these are bigger decisions than choosing to end your life sooner than it otherwise would have ended.

And this time I decided I wouldn’t struggle. I would freeze to death.

‘Roy.’

Freeze to death, I said.

‘Roy.’

The voice calling to me was as deep as a man’s but soft as a woman’s, with no trace of an accent, and I loved to hear her say my name, the rolling, caressing way she pronounced the ‘r’.

‘Roy.’

The only problem was that the lad, Alex, risked a fine and possibly even a prison sentence that took no account of the situation that led up to the fight. In fact, it wasn’t even a ‘situation’ but a quite reasonable response, given how he’d misunderstood things.

‘You can’t lie here, Roy.’

A hand shaking me. A small hand. I opened my eyes. And looked straight into Shannon’s, brown and worried. I wasn’t sure whether she was real, or I was dreaming, but that didn’t matter.

‘You can’t lie here,’ she repeated.

‘No?’ I said, raising my head slightly. We were alone in the alleyway, but from the square I could hear people chanting in unison. ‘Have I taken someone’s place?’

Shannon looked at me for a long time. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘Shannon,’ I said, my voice thick, ‘I lo…’

The remainder was drowned in the noise as the heavens above her exploded in sizzling light and colour.

She took hold of my lapels and helped me to my feet, the landscape around me swimming, nausea blocking my throat. Shannon helped me out of the alleyway at the back of the sports shop. She led me along the highway, probably unseen, since everyone was gathered in the square and looking up as the fireworks blew this way and that in the gusting wind. A rocket whizzed low above the rooftops, as another – must have been one of Willumsen’s powerful emergency flares – climbed into the sky where it described a white parabola as it headed towards the mountains at two hundred kilometres an hour.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, as we concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

‘Julie kissed me and—’

‘Yes, she told me, before her boyfriend dragged her away. I mean, what are you doing here, in Os?’

‘Celebrating New Year’s Eve,’ I said. ‘At Stanley’s.’

‘Carl told me that. But you’re not answering my question.’

‘Are you asking me if I came because of you?’

She didn’t reply. So I answered myself.

‘Yes. I came here to be with you.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am crazy for believing you wanted me. I should have understood. You were with me as revenge on Carl.’

There was a jerk in my arm, and I realised she had slipped and lost her balance for a moment.

‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

‘Grete. She told me that she’d told you about Carl and Mari last spring.’

Shannon nodded slowly.

‘So it’s true?’ I said. ‘You and me, for you it was just revenge?’

‘It’s half true,’ she said.

‘Half?’

‘Mari isn’t the first woman Carl’s been unfaithful with. But she’s the first one I know he cared about. That’s why it had to be you, Roy.’

‘Oh?’

‘For my revenge to be equal it had to be with someone I had feelings for.’

I had to laugh. It was brief, hard laughter. ‘Bullshit.’

She sighed. ‘Yes, it is bullshit.’

‘There, you see.’

Suddenly Shannon let go my arm and stood in front of me. Behind the small figure the highway stretched like a white umbilical cord into the night.

‘It is bullshit,’ she said. ‘Bullshit to fall in love with the brother of your husband because of the way he strokes the breast of a bird you’re holding while he tells you about the bird. It’s bullshit to fall in love with him because of the stories his brother has told about him.’

‘Shannon, don’t—’

‘It’s bullshit!’ she shouted. ‘Bullshit for you to fall in love with a heart that you know doesn’t know the meaning of the word betrayal.’

She put her hands against my chest as I tried to walk by her.

‘And it is bullshit,’ she said quietly. ‘Bullshit that you can’t think of anything but this man because of a few hours in a hotel room in Notodden.’

I stood there, swaying.

‘Shall we go?’ I whispered.

The moment the workshop door closed behind us she pulled me in to her. I breathed in the smell of her. Dizzy and intoxicated I kissed those sweet lips, felt her bite my own until they bled, and we tasted once more the sweet, metallic taste of my blood as she unbuttoned my trousers and whispered a few angry words I seemed to recognise. Held me at the same time as she kicked and swept my legs from under me, so that I fell onto the stone floor. I lay there looking up at her as she danced round on one foot, pulling off her shoe and one of her stockings. Then she pulled up her dress and sat on me. She wasn’t wet but grabbed my stiff cock and forced it into her, and it felt as though the skin of my prick was being ripped off. But fortunately she didn’t move, she just sat there looking down at me like a queen.

‘Is it good?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

We both began laughing at the same time.

The laughter made her sex contract around mine, and she must have felt it too, because she laughed even more.

‘There’s engine oil on the shelf up there,’ I said, pointing.

She put her head on one side and gave me a loving look, as though I were a child who should be going to sleep. Then she closed her eyes, still not moving, but I could feel her sex growing warm and wet.

‘Wait,’ she whispered. ‘Wait.’

I thought of the midnight countdown in the square. That the circle had finally been broken. That we had come out the other side and I was free.

She began to move.

And when she came it was with an angry, triumphal cry, as though she too had just managed to kick open the door that had been keeping her imprisoned.

We lay entwined in the bed and listened. The wind had dropped, and now and then we heard the burst of a late rocket. And then I asked the question I had been asking myself ever since that day Carl and Shannon had swung into the yard at Opgard.

‘Why did the two of you come to Os?’

‘Did Carl never say?’

‘Only that business about putting the village on the map. Is he on the run from something?’

‘He didn’t tell you?’

‘Just something about a legal wrangle concerning some property project in Canada.’

Shannon sighed. ‘It was a project in Canmore that had to be scrapped because of soaring costs and the finances running out. And there’s no wrangling. Not any more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The case is closed. Carl was ordered to pay restitution to his partners.’

‘And?’

‘And he couldn’t. So he ran off. Came here.’

I raised myself up on one elbow. ‘You mean Carl is… on the run?’

‘In principle, yes.’

‘Is that what the spa hotel is about? A way for him to pay off this debt in Toronto?’

She smiled vaguely. ‘He’s not planning on going back to Canada.’

I tried to take all this in. So Carl’s homecoming was nothing more than the flight of a common-or-garden swindler?

‘And you? Why did you come here with him?’

‘Because I did the drawings for the Canmore project.’

‘And?’

‘It was my magnum opus. My IBM building. I didn’t get it built in Canmore, but Carl promised me another chance.’

It became clear to me. ‘The spa hotel. You’ve designed it before.’

‘With a few modifications, yes. The landscapes round Canmore in the Rocky Mountains and round here aren’t very different. We had no money left and no one who was willing to invest in our project. So Carl suggested Os. He said it was a place where people trusted him, where they regarded him as a local wonder-boy made good.’

‘So you came here. Without a krone in your pockets. But in a Cadillac.’

‘Carl said appearances are everything when you’re trying to sell a project like this.’

I thought of Armand, the travelling preacher. When it emerged one day that he’d been lining his pockets with money taken from gullible people who were hoping for a cure, at the same time as he stopped them getting the medical help they needed, he’d had to flee north. But when they caught up with him there it turned out he’d started a sect, built himself a church of miracle healing, and had three ‘wives’. He was arrested for non-payment of income taxes and fraud, and when he was asked in court why he had carried on swindling after he’d got away he had replied:

‘Because that’s what I do.’

‘Why didn’t the two of you tell me all this?’ I asked.

Shannon smiled to herself.

‘Eh?’ I said.

‘He said it wouldn’t be good for you. I’m just trying to remember exactly how he put it. That’s right: he said that even though you aren’t sensitive and you don’t know much about empathy, you’re a moralist. Unlike himself, who is a sensitive and sympathetic cynic.’

I felt like cursing out loud, but instead I had to laugh. Damn him, he had a knack for describing things. He didn’t just correct the orthography in my school essays, sometimes he tacked on a sentence or two. Sort of lifted it a bit, gave wings to the crap. Giving wings to crap. Yeah, that was what his talent was.

‘But you’re wrong if you don’t think Carl’s intentions are good,’ said Shannon. ‘He wishes everybody well. But of course, he wishes himself a bit more well. And look, he actually manages it.’

‘There are probably a few submerged rocks to look out for. Dan Krane, for example, is planning an article.’

Shannon shook her head. ‘Carl says that problem has been solved. And things are going much better now. The project is back on schedule. In two weeks he’s signing a contract with a Swedish hotelier who’s going to run the place.’

‘So Carl Opgard saves the village. Gets to erect a permanent monument to himself. And gets rich. Which of those do you think matters most to him?’

‘I think our motives are so complex that we don’t even understand them completely ourselves.’

I stroked the bruise beneath her cheekbone.

‘And his motives for beating you, are they complex too?’

She shrugged. ‘Before I left him and went to Toronto last summer he’d never laid so much as a finger on me. But when I came back something had changed. He had changed. He drank all the time. And he started to hit me. He was so distraught after the first time that I convinced myself it was a one-off. But then it turned into a pattern, like a form of compulsive behaviour, something he had to do. Sometimes he would be crying even before he began.’

I thought of the crying down below in the bunk bed, that time I realised it wasn’t Carl but Dad.

‘Why didn’t you leave then?’ I asked. ‘Why come back from Toronto at all? Did you love him so much?’

She shook her head. ‘I’d stopped loving him.’

‘Did you come because of me?’

‘No,’ she said, and stroked my cheek.

‘You came because of the hotel,’ I said.

She nodded.

‘You love that hotel.’

‘No,’ she said. ‘I hate the hotel. But it’s my prison, it won’t let me go.’

‘And yet still you love it,’ I said.

‘The way a mother loves the child that holds her hostage,’ she said, and I thought of what Grete had said.

Shannon turned.

‘When you’ve created something that has cost you so much time, pain and love, as I’ve put into the creation of that building, it becomes a part of you. No, not a part, it’s bigger than you, more important. The child, the building, the work of art, it’s your only shot at immortality, right? More important than anything else you might love. Do you understand?’

‘So then, it’s also your own personal monument?’

‘No! I don’t design monuments. I’ve designed a simple and useful and beautiful building. Because we, the people, need beauty. And the beauty of my designs for the hotel lies in their simplicity, their self-evident logic. There’s nothing monumental about my drawings.’

‘Why do you say the drawings and not the hotel? I mean, it’s almost finished.’

‘Because they’re destroying it. These compromises with the council regarding the facade. The cheap materials Carl has agreed to use to stay within the budget. The entire lobby and the restaurant that were altered while I was in Toronto.’

‘So you came back to save your child.’

‘But I came too late,’ she said. ‘And the man I thought I loved tried to beat me into submission.’

‘Then if you’ve already lost the battle, why are you still here?’

She smiled bitterly. ‘You tell me. I guess maybe a mother feels compelled to be present at the funeral of her own child.’

I swallowed. ‘Is there nothing else keeping you here?’

She gave me a long look. Then she closed her eyes and nodded slowly.

I took a deep breath. ‘I need to hear you say it, Shannon.’

‘Please. Don’t ask me to do that.’

‘Why not?’

I saw her eyes fill with tears. ‘Because it’s an open sesame, Roy. And that’s why you’re asking me.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘If I hear myself say it, my heart opens up, and then I’m weak. And until everything’s finished here, I need to stay strong.’

‘I need to stay strong too,’ I said. ‘And to stay strong enough I need to hear you say it. Say it low so that I’m the only one that hears it.’ And I cupped my hands over her small, white, shell-like ears.

She looked at me. Took a breath. Stopped. Started again. And then she whispered the magic words, more powerful than any password, any declaration of faith, any oath of allegiance: ‘I love you.’

‘And I love you too,’ I whispered in return.

I kissed her.

She kissed me.

‘God damn you,’ she said.

‘When this is over,’ I said, ‘when the hotel is up, will you be free then?’

She nodded.

‘I can wait,’ I said. ‘But then we’ll pack up and leave.’

‘Where?’ she asked.

‘Barcelona. Or Cape Town. Or Sydney.’

‘Barcelona,’ she said. ‘Gaudí.’

‘Deal.’

As though to seal the deal we looked into each other’s eyes. From out of the darkness came a sound. A golden plover? What had caused him to come all the way down here from his mountain? The rockets?

Something showed in her face. Anxiety.

‘What is it?’ I asked.

‘Listen,’ she said. ‘It isn’t a good sound.’

I listened. It wasn’t a plover. This note rose and fell.

‘It’s the bloody fire engine,’ I said.

As though at a signal we jumped up out of bed and ran into the workshop. I opened the door, just in time to see the old fire engine disappear in the direction of the village. I’d done repair work on it; it was a GMC. The council had bought it from the armed forces, who’d been using it at an airport. The sales argument was that the price was reasonable and came with a water tank with a capacity of 1,500 litres. One year later the sales argument was that the heavy vehicle was so slow in the steep terrain that if a fire broke out in the hills there would be nothing for those fifteen hundred litres of water to put out by the time it got there. But there were no takers for the monster and it was still here.

‘In weather like this they shouldn’t allow fireworks in the middle of the village,’ I said.

‘The fire isn’t in the middle of the village,’ said Shannon.

I followed her gaze. Up the mountain, up in the direction of Opgard. The sky above was a dirty yellow.

‘Ah shit,’ I whispered.

I turned the Volvo into the yard. Shannon was right behind me in the Subaru.

There was Opgard, sloping, shining, leaning a little eastward in the moonlight. Intact. We got out of the cars; I headed towards the barn and Shannon towards the main house.

Inside I saw that Carl had already been there and picked up his skis. I took my own and the ski poles and ran to the house where Shannon stood in the doorway holding out my ski boots. I fastened my skis and set off at double pace through the trees, towards that dirty yellow sky. The wind had dropped so much that Carl’s tracks hadn’t been covered over and I was able to use them to speed along. I would guess that the wind was down to a strong breeze by now, and now I could hear the shouts and the crackle of fire before I came up on the ridge. For that reason I was surprised and relieved when at last I arrived and looked down at the hotel, the framework and the modules. Smoke, but no flames – they must have managed to put it out. But then I noticed the glow in the snow on the far side of the building, on the red bodywork of the fire truck, and on the expressionless faces of those standing there, turned towards me. And when the wind dropped for a moment I saw those yellow, licking tongues everywhere, and realised that it was just that the wind had temporarily blown the flames out on the lee side. And I realised too the problem facing those trying to put them out. The road only went as far as the front of the hotel, and the fire truck had to park some distance away because the snow hadn’t been cleared from the area in front. It meant that even with the hose fully unrolled it wasn’t long enough for them to get round to the rear of the hotel and direct the jet of water with the wind behind them. Now, even though they must have had the hose turned on full, the jet dissipated in the facing wind and blew back across them as rain.

I was standing less than a hundred metres away and could feel no heat from the fire. But when I picked out Carl’s face among the crowd, wet with sweat or maybe water from the hose, I saw that it was hopeless. All was lost.

51

THE GREY LIGHT OF THE first day of the year dawned.

It made the landscape look flat and featureless, and when I drove from the workshop up to the hotel site for a moment I had the feeling that I had lost my way, that this wasn’t a landscape I knew like the back of my hand but somewhere strange, some strange planet.

When I got there I saw Carl standing with three men next to the smouldering blackened ruins of what was to have been the pride of the village. Which still could be that, of course, though hardly this year. Black, charred pieces of wood pointed to the sky like warning fingers, telling us, them, anyone, that you do not build a bloody spa hotel on the bare mountain, it’s against nature, it awakens the spirits.

As I got out of the car and walked towards them I saw that the three other men were the sheriff Kurt Olsen, the council chairman Voss Gilbert, and the fire chief, a man named Adler who worked as an engineer for the council when he wasn’t on duty at the fire station. I don’t know whether they clammed up because I arrived or they’d just finished exchanging theories.

‘Well?’ I said. ‘Any theories?’

‘They found the remains of a New Year’s Eve rocket,’ Carl said so quietly I could only just hear him. His gaze was focused on something far, far away.

‘That’s right,’ said Kurt Olsen, cigarette held into his palm between index finger and thumb, like a soldier on night watch. ‘Obviously, it could have been carried up from the village by the wind and set fire to the timbers.’

Obviously and obviously. From the way he stressed the could it was evident he didn’t have much faith in the theory himself.

‘But?’ I said.

Kurt Olsen shrugged. ‘But the fire chief here says that when they got here, they saw two sets of footprints half covered by snow leading towards the hotel. With a wind like that they can’t have been made much before the fire truck arrived.’

‘It wasn’t possible to tell whether the footprints were two people who went in, or one person who went in and then came out again,’ said the fire chief. ‘We had to operate on a worst-case scenario and send men in to check whether there was anyone in the modules. But they were already alight and it was too hot.’

‘There are no bodies here,’ said Olsen. ‘But it does look as though someone was here during the night. So obviously we can’t rule out arson.’

‘Arson?’ I almost shouted.

Olsen perhaps thought I sounded a little too conspicuously surprised; at any rate he gave me that scrutinising sheriff’s look of his.

‘Who would have anything to gain by that?’ I asked.

‘Yes, who might that be, Roy?’ said Kurt Olsen, and I did not like the fucking way he said my name.

‘Well,’ said the council chairman, with a nod down towards the village that lay half hidden beneath a layer of fog that had drifted in across the ice on Lake Budal, ‘This is one helluva a hangover for them to wake up to.’

‘Well,’ said I, ‘when you’re up to your neck in shit the only thing to do is start the rebuilding.’

The others looked at me as though I’d said something in Latin.

‘Maybe, but it’ll take some doing to get a hotel up this year,’ said Gilbert. ‘And that means people can’t be selling off land for cabin-building for a while.’

‘Really?’ I glanced over at Carl. He said nothing, didn’t even seem to have heard us, just stared vacantly at the site of the fire with a look on his face that reminded me of newly set cement.

‘Those are the terms of the agreement with the council.’ Gilbert sighed in such a way that I realised he was repeating something he’d just said. ‘First the hotel, then the cabins. Unfortunately quite a few in the village have been counting their chickens before they’re hatched and bought themselves more expensive cars than they should have.’

‘Good job the hotel was fully insured against fire,’ said Kurt Olsen with a glance at Carl.

Gilbert and the fire chief managed little smiles, as much as to say that yes, true enough, but right now that was small comfort.

‘Right, well,’ said the council chairman and stuck his hands into his coat pockets as a sign that he wanted to leave. ‘Happy New Year.’

Olsen and the fire chief trudged along behind him in the snow.

‘Is it?’ I asked quietly once they were out of earshot.

‘A happy new year?’ Carl asked with a voice like a sleepwalker’s.

‘Fully insured?’

Carl turned his whole body to face me, as though he really were cast in cement. ‘Why in the world wouldn’t it be fully insured?’ He spoke so slowly, so quietly. This wasn’t alcohol. Had he been taking pills of some kind?

‘But is it more than fully insured?’

‘What do you mean?’

I felt the anger beginning to bubble up in me, but knew I had to keep my voice down until they were inside their cars. ‘I mean Kurt Olsen is more or less implying that the fire was started deliberately and that the hotel is overinsured. He’s accusing you of an insurance fraud. Or didn’t you realise that?’

‘That I started the fire?’

‘Did you, Carl?’

‘Why would I do that?’

‘The hotel was pretty much shot to hell, the spending way over budget, but so far you’ve managed to keep it hidden. Maybe this was the only way out, for your neighbours in the village to avoid paying the bill and you to avoid the shame. Now you can make a fresh start, from scratch, build the hotel the way it should be built, with proper materials and a fresh injection of insurance money. See, you can still erect that monument to Carl Opgard.’

Carl looked at me with a kind of fascination, as though I had changed shape in front of his very eyes. ‘Do you, my own brother, really believe that I am capable of something like that?’ Then he put his head slightly to one side. ‘Yes, you do believe it. So then answer me this: why am I standing here and feeling like I want to commit hara-kiri? Why aren’t I at home breaking out the champagne?’

I held his gaze. And it began to dawn on me. Carl could lie, but not act grief in a way that could fool me. No way.

‘No,’ I whispered. ‘Not that, Carl.’

‘Not what?’

‘I know you were desperate and cutting costs. But not that.’

‘What?’ he roared, suddenly furious.

‘The insurance. You didn’t stop making the insurance payments on the hotel?’

He looked away, and the fury seemed to have passed. Had to be pills.

‘Yes, that would have been stupid,’ he whispered. ‘To stop making the insurance payments just before the fire. Because then…’ Slowly a smile spread across his face, the kind of smile I imagine the acid tripper on a balcony gives just before he demonstrates he can fly. ‘Yeah, because what actually happens then, Roy?’

52

IN MOUNTAIN LANDSCAPES SUCH AS ours, darkness doesn’t fall, it rises. It rises from the valleys, from the forests and the lake down there, and for a time we can see that evening has come to the village and the fields while up here it’s still day. But that day, the first of the year, was different. Maybe it was because of the cloud that lay so thick above us, colouring everything grey, maybe it was the blackened site of the fire that seemed to suck all the light from the mountainside, or maybe it was the despair that hung over Opgard, or the cold from space. Whatever it was, daylight just disappeared as though it had burned out.

Carl, Shannon and I ate dinner in silence and listened to the sounds as the temperature fell in the walls. When I was finished I grabbed a serviette, wiped the cod and the fat from my mouth and then opened it.

‘On the Os Daily website Dan Krane says the fire just means a delay.’

‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘He called and I told him we’ll start the rebuilding next week.’

‘So he doesn’t know the place wasn’t insured against fire?’

Carl put his elbows either side of his plate. ‘The only people who know, Roy, are those of us sitting round this table. And let’s keep it that way.’

‘You’d’ve thought that, with him being a journalist, he would have looked more closely at the insurance situation. After all, what’s at stake is the future of the village.’

‘No need to worry. I’ll sort this out, you hear me?’

‘I hear you.’

Carl ate more cod. Glanced over at me. Stopped, drank more water. ‘If Dan had any suspicion the hotel wasn’t covered for fire, he wouldn’t have written that everything was under control. You do see that, right?’

‘Well, OK, if you say so.’

Carl put down his fork. ‘What is it you’re actually trying to say, Roy?’

And for an instant I saw him. His imperious body language, his quiet but commanding voice, his penetrating gaze. For an instant it was as though Carl had become him, become Dad.

I shrugged. ‘What I’m probably saying is that it might look like someone has told Dan Krane not to write anything negative about the hotel. And that it was well before the fire.’

‘Like who for example?’

‘A Danish enforcer who was here in town. Someone saw his Jaguar parked outside the offices of the Os Daily just before Christmas. And afterwards people said Dan Krane looked pale and ill.’

Carl grinned. ‘Willumsen’s enforcer? The guy we talked about when we were kids?’

‘I didn’t believe in him back then. I do now.’

‘OK. And why would Willumsen want to shut Dan Krane up?’

‘Not shut him up. Just guide his pen. When Dan Krane was talking about the hotel at Stanley’s party yesterday he wasn’t exactly complimentary about it.’

When I said that something blinked through Carl’s eyes. Something I’d never seen there before. It was hard and dark, like the blade of an axe.

‘Dan Krane doesn’t write what he thinks,’ I said. ‘Willumsen censors him. So I’m asking you why?’

Carl grabbed his serviette, wiped around his mouth. ‘Oh, Willumsen might well have a million good reasons for stopping Dan.’

‘He’s worried about the loan he’s made to you?’

‘Could be. But why do you ask me?’

‘Because on Christmas Eve I saw tyre tracks in the snow outside here. Wide tracks, from summer tyres.’

Carl’s face became curiously long. It was almost as though I was looking at him inside a Hall of Mirrors at a funfair.

‘It snowed two days before Christmas,’ I said. ‘Those tyre tracks must have been from the same day or the day before.’

There was no need for me to say any more. No one else in the village still uses summer tyres in December. Carl cast what was supposed to be a casual look in Shannon’s direction. She looked back at him, and there was something hard in her eyes too, something I’d also never seen before.

‘Are we done?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Carl. ‘That’s all we need to say about this.’

‘I meant the food; have we finished eating?’

‘Yes,’ said Carl, and I nodded.

She stood up, gathered the plates and the cutlery and went out to the kitchen. We heard her turn on the tap.

‘It’s not like you think it is,’ said Carl.

‘How do I think it is?’

‘You think it was me who put that enforcer on Dan Krane.’

‘But you didn’t?’

Carl shook his head. ‘That loan from Willumsen is obviously confidential and isn’t part of the accounting where it looks as though we’re drawing on credit we don’t have. But in terms of cash flow, the loan enabled us to carry out the final phase of the building and now things were back on track, we’d cut costs dramatically and still managed to catch up on almost the entire delay from the spring. So it was quite a surprise when that enforcer turned up…’ Carl leaned forward and hissed between clenched teeth. ‘Here, to my own house, Roy! Came here to tell me what’ll happen if I don’t pay what I owe. As though I needed reminding.’ Carl closed his eyes tight, sat back in his chair again and sighed heavily. ‘Anyway, it turned out that the reason for the reminder was that Willumsen was starting to get worried.’

‘Why, if everything was back on track?’

‘Because a while ago Dan called Willumsen to interview him as one of the most prominent participants in the village, and to ask him how he felt about the project, and about me. In the course of the interview Willumsen realised that Dan finally had enough material for a highly critical article, one that would impact on the participants’ belief in the project and in the indulgence of the council. About the accounts, or rather the lack of accounts. And Dan had talked to people in Toronto who’d told him I’d run off from a bankruptcy, and that there were a number of similarities between that case and the Os Spa and Mountain Hotel project. So Willumsen gets worried that I’m going to do a bunk again, and Dan’s going to ruin the whole project with this article about fraud and swindling. So he called up his enforcer to carry out two jobs.’

‘To stop Dan’s article, and frighten you off any plans you might have for defaulting on your debt.’

‘Yes.’

I looked at Carl. No doubt about it, he was telling the truth now.

‘And now the whole fucking lot has burned down, what are you going to do?’

‘Sleep on it,’ said Carl. ‘Nice if you’d sleep up here too.’

I looked at him. It wasn’t just a courtesy. When a crisis comes some people try to sort things out on their own. Others, such as Carl, need people around them.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘I can take a couple of days off and stay here. Could be you’ll need help.’

‘Will you?’ he said, giving me a grateful look.

Just then Shannon came in with the coffee cups. ‘Good news, Shannon, Roy’s staying.’

‘That’s nice,’ said Shannon with what sounded like genuine enthusiasm, smiling at me like I was her dear brother-in-law. I wasn’t sure if I liked her acting talent, but right now I appreciated it.

‘It’s good to know you’ve got family you can rely on,’ said Carl, pushing his chair back, the legs making coughing sounds against the rough floorboards. ‘I’ll give the coffee a miss, I haven’t slept for the last day and a half, so I’m off to bed now.’

Carl left, and Shannon sat in his chair. We drank coffee in silence until we heard the toilet flush up there and the bedroom door shut.

‘Well?’ I said quietly. ‘How does it feel?’

‘How does what feel?’ Her voice was flat, her face expressionless.

‘Your hotel burned down.’

She shook her head. ‘It wasn’t my hotel. As you know, that disappeared somewhere along the line.’

‘OK, but Os Spa and Mountain Hotel SL will be declared bankrupt when it emerges the hotel wasn’t insured. No hotel means no plots for sale for cabins, and in that case the market value of the land goes back to somewhere around zero. It’s over for everyone now. Us, Willumsen, the village.’

She didn’t reply.

‘I’ve been doing a bit of research on Barcelona,’ I said. ‘I’m no city person, I like the mountains. And there are a lot of mountains just outside Barcelona. Houses are cheaper too.’

She still said nothing, just stared down into her coffee cup.

‘There’s a mountain called Sant Llorenç that looks really great,’ I said. ‘Forty minutes from Barcelona.’

‘Roy…’

‘And it must be possible to buy a service station there. I’ve got some money put aside, enough to—’

‘Roy!’ She raised her eyes from the coffee cup and looked at me. ‘This is my chance,’ she said. ‘Don’t you understand that?’

‘Your chance?’

‘Now that that abortion has burned down. This is my chance to get my building up. The way it should be.’

‘But—’

I shut up when her fingernails dug into my underarm. She leaned forward. ‘My baby, Roy. Don’t you understand? It’s risen from the dead.’

‘Shannon, there’s no money.’

‘Roads, water, sewage, the site, everything’s in place.’

‘You don’t get it. Maybe in five or ten years someone will build something there, but no one is going to build your hotel, Shannon.’

‘You’re the one who doesn’t get it.’ There was a strange, feverish glow in her eyes that I had not seen before. ‘Willumsen, he’s got too much to lose. I know men like that. They have to win; they don’t accept defeat. Willumsen will do anything not to lose the money he’s owed and the profit on the cabin plots.’

I thought of Willumsen and Rita. Shannon had a point.

‘You think Willumsen will take one more chance,’ I said. ‘Double or quits, like?’

‘He has to. And I have to stay here until I’ve got my hotel up. Oh, you must think I’m mad,’ she exclaimed in desperation, and laid her forehead against my arm. ‘But that building is the building I was born to build, you must see. But once it’s up, then you and I can go to Barcelona. I promise.’ She pressed her lips to my hand. Then she stood up.

I was about to stand up too and put my arms around her, but she forced me back down into the chair.

‘We’ve got to keep cool heads and cool hearts now,’ she whispered. ‘Think. We have to think, Roy. So that later we can be unthinking. Goodnight.’

She kissed me on the forehead and left me.

I lay in the bunk bed and thought about what Shannon had said.

It was true that Willumsen hated to lose. But he was also a man who knew when he had to take a hit in order to limit his losses. Did she believe what she said because she wanted it so badly? Because she loved that hotel, and love makes you blind? And was that why I let her convince me to believe it too? I didn’t know which of the two opposing forces, greed and fear, would win when Willumsen found out that the hotel wasn’t insured; but Shannon was probably right to say that he was the only one who could save the project.

I leaned out of the bed and looked at the thermometer outside the window. Minus twenty-five. Not a living soul out there today. But then I heard the warning cry of the raven. So there was something. Something was on its way. Living or dead.

I listened. Not a sound in the house. And suddenly I was a child again, telling myself there are no such things as monsters. Lying to myself that monsters don’t exist.

Because next day it came.