The Kingdom

1

I HEARD HIM BEFORE I saw him.

Carl was back. I don’t know why I thought of Dog, it was almost twenty years ago. Maybe I suspected the reason for this sudden and unannounced homecoming was the same as it was back then. The same as it always was. That he needed his big brother’s help. I was standing out in the yard and looked at my watch. Two thirty. He’d sent a text message, that was all. Said they’d probably arrive by two. But my little brother’s always been an optimist, always promised more than he could deliver. I looked out over the landscape. The little bit of it that showed above the cloud cover below me. The slope on the other side of the valley looked like it was floating in a sea of grey. Already the vegetation up here on the heights had a touch of autumnal red. Above me the sky was heavenly blue and as clear as the gaze of a pure young girl. The air was good and cold, it nipped at my lungs if I breathed in too quickly. I felt as though I was completely alone, had the whole world to myself. Well, a world that was just Mount Ararat with a farm on it. Tourists sometimes drove up the twisting road from the village to enjoy the view, and sooner or later they would always end up in our yard here. They usually asked if I still ran the smallholding. The reason these idiots referred to it as a smallholding was probably that they thought a proper farm would have to be like one of those you get down on the lowlands, with vast fields, oversized barns and enormous and splendid farmhouses. They had never seen what a storm in the mountains could do to a roof that was a bit too large or tried to start a fire in a room that was a little too big with a gale thirty degrees below blowing through the wall. They didn’t know the difference between cultivated land and wilderness, that a mountain farm is grazing for animals and can be a wilderness kingdom many times the size of the flashy, corn-yellow fields of a lowland farmer.

For fifteen years I had been living here alone, but now that was over. A V8 engine growled and snarled somewhere down below the cloud cover. Sounded so close it had to have passed the corner at Japansvingen halfway up the climb. The driver put his foot down, took his foot off, rounded a hairpin bend, foot down again. Closer and closer. You could tell he’d navigated those bends before. And now that I could hear the nuances in the sound of the engine, the deep sighs when he changed gear, that deep bass note that’s unique to a Cadillac in low gear, I knew it was a DeVille. Same as the great black beast our dad had driven. Of course.

And there was the aggressive jut of the grille of a DeVille, rounding Geitesvingen. Black, but more recent; I guessed an ’85 model. The accompaniment the same though.

The car drove right up to me and the window on the driver’s side slid down. I hoped it didn’t show, but my heart was pounding like a piston. How many letters, text messages and emails and phone calls had we exchanged in all these years? Not many. And yet: had even a single day passed when I didn’t think about Carl? Probably not. But missing him was better than dealing with Carl-trouble. The first thing I noticed was that he looked older.

‘Excuse me, my good man, but does this farm belong to the famous Opgard brothers?’

And then he grinned. Gave me that warm, wide irresistible smile, and it was as though time was wiped from his face, as well as the calendar which told me it had been fifteen years since last time. But there was also something quizzical about his face, as though he were testing the waters. I didn’t want to laugh. Not yet. But I couldn’t help it.

The car door opened. He spread his arms wide and I leaned into his embrace. Something tells me it should have been the other way round. That it was me – the big brother – who should have been inviting the embrace. But somewhere along the line the division of roles between me and Carl had become unclear. He had grown bigger than me, both physically and as a person, and – at least when we were in the company of others – now he was the one conducting the orchestra. I closed my eyes, trembling, took a quavering breath, breathed in the smell of autumn, of Cadillac and kid brother. He was wearing some kind of ‘male fragrance’, as they call it.

The passenger door had opened.

Carl let go of me and walked me round the enormous front end of the car to where she stood, facing the valley.

‘It’s really lovely here,’ she said. She was thin and slightly built, but her voice was deep. Her accent was obvious, and although she got the intonation wrong, at least the sentence was Norwegian. I wondered if it was something she had been rehearsing on the drive up, something she had made up her mind to say whether she meant it or not. Something that would make me like her, whether I wanted to or not. Then she turned towards me and smiled. The first thing I noticed was that her face was white. Not pale, but white like snow that reflects light in such a way as to make it difficult to see the contours in it. The second was the eyelid of one of her eyes. It drooped, like a half-drawn blind. As though half of her was very sleepy. But the other half looked wide awake. A lively brown eye peering out at me from beneath a short crop of flaming red hair. She was wearing a simple black coat with no sidecut and there was no indication of shape beneath it either, just a black, high-necked sweater sticking up above the collar. The general first impression was of a scrawny little kid photographed in black and white and the hair coloured in afterwards.

Carl always had a way with girls, so in all honesty I was a bit surprised. It wasn’t that she wasn’t sweet, because she actually was, but she wasn’t a smasher, as people round here say. She carried on smiling, and since the teeth could hardly be distinguished from the skin it meant they were white too. Carl had white teeth too, always did have, unlike me. He used to joke and say it was because his were bleached by daylight because he smiled so much more. Maybe that was what they had fallen for in each other, the white teeth. Mirror images. Because even though Carl was tall and broad, fair and blue-eyed, I could see the likeness at once. Something life-enhancing, as people call it. Something optimistic that is prepared to see the best in people. Themselves as well as others. Well, maybe; of course, I didn’t know the girl yet.

‘This is—’ Carl began.

‘Shannon Alleyne,’ she interrupted, reaching out a hand so small that it felt like taking hold of a chicken’s foot.

‘Opgard,’ Carl added proudly.

Shannon Alleyne Opgard wanted to hold hands longer than me. I saw Carl in that too. Some are in more of a hurry to be liked than others.

‘Jet-lagged?’ I asked, and regretted it, feeling like an idiot for asking. Not because I didn’t know what jet lag was, but because Carl knew that I had never crossed even a single time zone and that whatever the answer was it wouldn’t mean a lot to me.

Carl shook his head. ‘We landed two days ago. Had to wait for the car – it came by boat.’

I nodded, glanced at the registration plates. MC. Monaco. Exotic, but not exotic enough for me to ask for it if the car was to be re-registered. On the walls of the office at the service station I had obsolete plates from French Equatorial Africa, Burma, Basutoland, British Honduras and Johor. The standard was high.

Shannon looked from Carl to me and then back again. Smiled. I don’t know why, maybe she was happy to see Carl and his big brother – his only close relative – laughing together. That the slight tension was gone now. That he – that they were welcome home.

‘Why don’t you show Shannon round the house while I get the suitcases?’ said Carl, and opened the trunk, as Dad used to call it.

‘Probably take us about the same time,’ I murmured to Shannon as she followed me.

We walked round to the north side of the house, where the main entrance was. Why Dad hadn’t had the door open straight onto the yard and the road I really don’t know. Maybe because he liked to see all his land each day when he stepped outside. Or because it mattered more to have the sun warm the kitchen than the corridor. We crossed the threshold and I opened one of the three doors in the corridor.

‘The kitchen,’ I said, noticing the smell of rancid fat. Had it been there the whole time?

‘How lovely,’ she lied. OK, so I’d tidied up and even washed it, but you couldn’t exactly say it was lovely. Wide-eyed – and maybe slightly anxious – her gaze followed the pipe that led from the wood stove through a hole sawn in the ceiling to the upper floor. Precision carpentry, that’s what Dad had called it, the way the circular pipe had safety clearance through the timbers on its way up. If that was true then it was – along with the two equally circular holes in the outside toilet – the only example of it on the farm. I turned the light switch on and off to show her that at least we had our own electricity.

‘Coffee?’ I asked and turned on the tap.

‘Thanks, but maybe later.’

At least she’d mastered her Norwegian courtesies.

‘Carl will,’ I said and opened the kitchen cupboard. Fished and fumbled about until I found the coffee pot. I’d actually even bought some old-fashioned coarse ground coffee for the first time in… well, ages. I managed just fine myself with freeze-dried and noticed as I held the pot under the tap that from sheer habit I’d turned on the hot tap. Felt myself getting a little hot around the ears myself. But anyway, who says there’s something sad about making powdered coffee with water from the hot tap? Coffee’s coffee. Water’s water.

I put the pot on the hot plate, turned on the oven and took the two paces over to the door to one of the two rooms that sandwiched the kitchen. The one facing west was the dining room, which was closed in winter since it acted as a buffer against the wind from the west, and we ate all our meals in the kitchen. Facing east was the living room with its bookcases, TV and its own wood stove. On the south side Dad had allowed the house’s only extravagance, a covered glass terrace, which he called the porch and Mum ‘the winter garden’, even though it was of course closed off in the winter and solidly barricaded behind wooden shutters. In summer Dad would sit there and suck on his Berry’s tobacco and drink a Budweiser or two – another couple of extravagances. He had to travel to town to buy his pale American beer, and the silvery-green boxes of Berry’s moist snuff were sent over the pond from a relative in America. Dad explained to me early on that unlike the Swedish crap American moist snuff goes through a fermentation process that you can taste. ‘Like bourbon,’ said Dad, who claimed that Norwegians only used that Swedish crap because they didn’t know any better. Well, at least I knew better, and when I began using it was Berry’s I used. Carl and I used to count up the empty bottles Dad lined up along the windowsill. We knew that if he drank more than four he could get tearful, and no one wants to see his dad tearful. Thinking back now, that might be why I seldom if ever drank more than one or two beers. I didn’t want to get tearful. Carl was a happy drunk, so he had less need to set these kinds of limits.

All this was going through my mind while we traipsed around and I showed Shannon the biggest bedroom, the one Dad referred to, in English, as the master bedroom.

‘Fantastic,’ she said.

I showed her the new bathroom, which wasn’t new any more, but at least it was the newest thing in the house. She probably wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told her we grew up without one. That we washed downstairs in the kitchen, with water heated up on the stove. That the bathroom came after the car accident. If what Carl had written was true, that she was from Barbados, from a family that could afford to send her to college in Canada, then it would naturally be difficult for her to imagine sharing the grey water with your brother while the two of you stood there shivering over the bowl in the middle of winter. While Dad, paradoxically enough, had had a Cadillac DeVille parked out there in the yard, because a proper car, that was definitely something we should have.

The door to the boys’ room had obviously swollen and I had to wiggle the latch a bit to get it open. A breath of stale air and memories wafted over us, like the smell of old clothes you’d forgotten you owned from a wardrobe. Along one of the walls stood a desk with two chairs next to each other; along the opposite wall a bunk bed. The stovepipe from the hole in the floor down to the kitchen was at one end of it.

‘This was Carl’s and my room,’ I said.

Shannon nodded at the bunk bed ‘Who was on top?’

‘Me,’ I said. ‘The oldest.’ I drew my finger through a layer of dust on the back of one of the chairs. ‘I’ll move in here today. So you two can have the big bedroom.’

She looked at me in alarm. ‘But, Roy, of course we don’t want to…’

I focused my gaze on her one open eye. Isn’t that a little strange, to have brown eyes when you have red hair and skin as white as snow? ‘There are two of you and only one of me so it’s no problem, OK?’

She gazed round the room again. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

I led her into Mum and Dad’s room. I’d aired it thoroughly. Regardless of what people smell like, I don’t like to breathe in their smells. Excepting Carl’s. Carl smelled – if not exactly good – at least right. He smelled of me. Of us. When Carl was ill in the winter – like he always was – I snuggled up to him. His smell was always right, even though his skin was covered with the dried sweat of fever, or his breath smelled of sick. I inhaled Carl and shivered in close to his glowing body, used the heat he was losing to warm my own carcass. One man’s fever is another man’s hotplate. Living up here makes you practical.

Shannon crossed to the window and looked out. She’d kept her coat tightly buttoned up. She probably thought the house was cold. In September. It didn’t bode well for the winter. I heard Carl come thudding up the narrow staircase with the cases.

‘Carl says you aren’t rich,’ she said. ‘But you and him own everything you can see from here.’

‘That’s right. But it’s just outfield, all of it.’

‘Outfield?’

‘Wilderness,’ said Carl, who stood in the doorway panting and smiling. ‘Grazing for sheep and goats. There’s not a lot you can cultivate up on a mountain farm. You can see for yourself, there aren’t even many trees. But we’ll get something done about the skyline here. Ain’t that right, Roy?’

I nodded slowly. Slowly, the way I had seen the old farmers nodding slowly when I was just a lad and believed so many complex thoughts went on behind those wrinkled brows that it would just take too long and maybe be impossible to express them all using our simple village dialect. And they seemed to have a telepathic understanding of each other, those grown-up, nodding men, the way the slow nodding of one would be answered by the slow nodding of the other. Now I gave that same slow nod, though I hardly understood any more now than I did then.

Of course, I could have asked Carl about all this, but I probably wouldn’t have got the answer. Answers yes, plenty of them, not the answer. Maybe I didn’t need one either. I was just glad to have Carl back and had no intention of bothering him with the question right now: why the hell had he come back?

‘Roy is so kind,’ said Shannon. ‘He’s giving us this room.’

‘Figured you didn’t come back just so you could sleep in the boys’ room,’ I said.

Carl nodded. Slowly. ‘Then this won’t seem like much in return,’ he said, holding up a large carton. I recognised it at once and took it from him. Berry’s. American moist snuff.

‘Dammit, it’s good to see you again, brother,’ said Carl, his voice choked. He came over to me and put his arms round me again. Gave me a real hug this time. I hugged him back. Could feel his body was softer. A little more padding there. The skin of his chin against mine a bit looser, I could feel the rasp of his beard even though he was clean-shaven. The woollen suit jacket felt like good quality, tightly knitted, and the shirt – he never wore a shirt before. Even the way he spoke was different, he talked the city talk him and me used sometimes when we were imitating Mum. But that was fine. He still smelled the same. He smelled of Carl. He stepped back and looked at me. Eyes that were as beautiful as a girl’s glowing. What the hell, mine were glowing too.

‘Coffee’s boiling,’ I said, my voice not too choked up, and headed for the stairs.

In bed that evening I lay listening to the sounds. Did the house maybe sound different now people were living here again? It didn’t. It creaked, coughed and whistled same as always. I listened out too for sounds from the master bedroom. The walls are thin, so even with the bathroom between the two bedrooms I could still hear voices. Were they talking about me? Was Shannon asking Carl if his big brother was always this quiet? If Carl thought Roy had enjoyed the chilli con carne she had made? If his silent brother really had liked the gift she had brought with her, which she’d had so much trouble getting hold of through relatives, a used licence plate from Barbados? Didn’t his big brother like her? And Carl answering that Roy was like that with everybody, she should just give him time. And she said that maybe she thought Roy was jealous of her, that Roy was bound to feel she’d taken his brother from him, the brother that was all he had. And Carl laughing, stroking her cheek and telling her not to worry about things like that after just one day, that everything would work out. And she buried her head in his shoulder and said she was sure he was right, but anyway she was glad Carl wasn’t like his brother. That it was strange how, in a land almost without crime, people go around scowling as though in constant fear of being robbed.

Or maybe they were getting it on.

In Mum and Dad’s bed.

‘Who was on top?’ I should ask at breakfast in the morning. ‘The oldest?’ And see those gaping faces. Head out into the clear morning air, get into the car, release the handbrake, feel the steering wheel lock, see Geitesvingen coming up.

A long, lovely sad note coming from outside. The plover. The mountain’s lonesome bird, skinny and serious. A bird that accompanies you when you’re out walking, looking out for you, but always at a safe distance. As though too afraid to make a friend, and yet still needing someone to listen when it sings of its loneliness.

2

I GOT TO THE SERVICE station at five thirty, half an hour earlier than usual on a Monday. Egil was behind the counter. He looked tired.

‘Morning, chief,’ he said in a flat monotone. Egil was like a plover, he only had the one note.

‘Good morning. Busy night?’

‘No,’ he said, without seeming to realise it was, as people say, a rhetorical question. That I knew it was never busy once the flow of cabin visitors heading back to the city had eased off on Sunday night. That I was asking because the area out round the pumps hadn’t been tidied and cleaned. The rule at other all-night stations is that night-duty attendants working alone don’t leave the building, but I hate mess and with the boy racer gang in their custom cars using the place as a combination fast-food shop, hangout for smokers and a lovers’ lane there’s always a lot of paper, butt ends and, yeah, even the odd used condom. Since the frankfurters, the cigarettes and the blobs all come from the station I don’t want to be driving my boy racer customers away, they’re welcome to sit in their cars and watch the world drive by. Instead I get my night guys to clean up when they get the chance. I’d pinned a notice up in the staff toilet that stares you straight in the face every time you sit on the throne: ‘DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU. DO IT NOW.’ Egil probably thought it was something to do with having a shit. I’d also mentioned this about cleaning up and taking responsibility so many times you would think Egil would get the little joke about a busy night. But then again, Egil wasn’t just tired, he was a simple lad of twenty who’d been the butt of jokes so many times in his life that it didn’t bother him any more. If you want to get by with the minimum of effort then pretending to understand less than you do is not the stupidest tactic to employ. So maybe Egil wasn’t so dumb after all.

‘You’re early, chief.’

A bit too early for you to have cleaned up around the pumps so I would think the place had been shipshape the whole night, I thought.

‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I said. Crossed to the till and punched in the till-shift command. That ended the night and I heard the printer in the office start grinding away. ‘Go home and get some sleep.’

‘Thanks.’

I went into the office and began looking through the takings while the paper was still being spewed out. It looked good. Another busy Sunday. Maybe our main road isn’t the busiest in the country, but with thirty-five kilometres to the next service station in both directions we’d become a bit of an oasis for motorists, especially those with young families, on their way home from the cabin. I’d installed a couple of tables and benches by the birch grove with a view across Lake Budal where they could sit with their burgers and buns and Cokes. Sold almost three hundred buns yesterday. I had less of a guilty conscience about the CO₂ emissions than all the gluten intolerance I was causing the world. I let my eye run down the page and noted the number of frankfurters Egil had thrown away. Fair enough, but there were – as usual – a few too many compared to the sales figures. He’d changed now and was on his way out the door.

‘Egil?’

He stiffened and stopped. ‘Yeah?’

‘Looks like someone’s had fun winding the drying paper round pump number 2.’

‘I’ll fix it, chief.’ He smiled and went out.

I sighed. It isn’t easy to find good workers in a little village like this. The clever ones head for Oslo or Bergen to study, the hard workers to Notodden, Skien or Kongsberg to earn money. If I fired him he’d be straight on the dole, and he wouldn’t be eating any fewer sausages, the only difference being he’d be standing on the other side of the counter and paying for them. They say obesity is mostly a small-town problem, and it’s obvious how easy it is to start comfort eating when you’re working at a service station, and everybody who calls in is heading someplace else, to somewhere you tell yourself has to be better than this, in cars you’ll never be able to afford, with girls you wouldn’t even dare to talk to unless it was at the village hop and you were pissed. But soon I would have to have a word with Egil. Head office wasn’t interested in the likes of him, only in the bottom line. It’s fair enough. In 1969 there were 700,000 cars and more than 4,000 service stations in Norway. Forty-five years on the number of cars had almost quadrupled, but the number of service stations more than halved. It was tough for them and tough for us. I kept abreast of the statistics and knew that in Sweden and Denmark over half the surviving service stations were already automated and unmanned. The widespread pattern of settlements here in Norway means we aren’t there yet, but it’s obvious that even here, petrol pump attendants are a dying breed. In actual fact, we’re already extinct. When was the last time you saw one of us putting petrol in a car? We’re too busy flogging frankfurters, colas, beach balls, barbecue charcoal, windscreen cleaner and bottled water that’s no different from what comes out the tap but comes in by plane and costs more than the videos we’ve got on offer. But I’m not complaining. When the service station chain showed an interest in the car repair workshop I had taken over at the age of twenty-three, it wasn’t because of the two petrol pumps I had out on the forecourt or because the place was doing well financially, but on account of the location. They said they were impressed at how I had held out for so long; local car repair shops had disappeared from the map a long time ago, and they offered me the job of station boss along with a bit of small change for the property. I could maybe have got a little bit more, but we Opgards don’t haggle. Still not thirty, I felt as though I was already finished. I used the small change to have the bathroom built on the farm so I could move out of the bachelor’s bedsit I’d made at the repair shop. There was plenty of room on the site so the chain built a service station next door to the repair shop, which they left up, and modernised the old car-wash.

The door banged shut behind Egil and I recalled that head office had agreed to the automatic sliding doors I had requested. The head of sales who visited every fourteen days was all smiles and bad jokes. Now and then he’d lay a hand on my shoulder and say, as though it were confidential, that they were satisfied. Naturally they were satisfied. They read the bottom line and saw that we were putting up a good and profitable fight against extinction. Despite the fact that the forecourt around the pumps when Egil was on night shift weren’t always spic and span.

Quarter to six. I stood brushing the buns that had defrosted and risen during the night and it got me thinking about the good years when I was down in the grease pit and oiling the cars. Working hard. Knowing that my reward awaited me, assignations up at the mountain cabin, the secret no one must find out. I saw a tractor approaching the car wash. Knew that once the farmer finished washing the monster I would need to wash and hose down the floor. As head of the place I had full responsibility for the hiring and firing, the bookkeeping, the pep talks with staff and all the rest of it; but guess what takes up most of a service station boss’s time? Cleaning up. With baking buns a good number two.

I listened to the silence. Although it’s actually never silent – there’s a steady, rushing symphony of sounds that doesn’t stop until the weekend is over, the cabin folk are back home, and we start closing the place up at night again. There are coffee machines, sausage cookers, freezers, soft-drinks coolers. They each have their own sound, but the most distinctive is the bread warmer we put the hamburger rolls in. It cackles in a warmer way, almost like a well-oiled motor if you close your eyes and dream back in time a little. Last time the head of sales was here he suggested I consider playing low background music in the shop. Said that research showed how the right sounds could stimulate both the desire to spend money and the appetite. I nodded slowly but said nothing. I like the silence. Soon the door will open. Probably a tradesman, it’s generally tradesmen who want petrol or coffee before seven.

I watched the farmer filling up his tractor with the duty-free truck diesel. I knew a splash of that was going to end up in the tank of his own car once he got home, but that was a matter between him and the police, I really didn’t care one way or the other.

My gaze moved on past the pumps, across the road, the cycle and footpath, and landed on one of the wooden houses typical of the village, three floors, built just after the war, a veranda facing out across Lake Budal, window dirty with road dust, a large poster nailed to the wall advertising haircuts and a solarium in a way that probably gave passers-by the impression that the cutting and the sunbathing went on simultaneously, as people say. Something done in the living room of the people who lived there. I’d never seen anyone other than locals going in there, and everyone in the village knew where Grete Smitt lived, so the actual purpose of the poster was unclear. Now I saw Grete standing by the side of the road, freezing in her Crocs and T-shirt, taking a good look left and right before crossing over to our side.

It was only six months ago that a driver from Oslo who claimed he never saw the fifty kilometres an hour speed-limit sign had mown down our Norwegian teacher a little further along the road. There are advantages and disadvantages to running a service station in a village. The advantages are that the locals do their shopping here and that the speed limit of fifty means out-of-town cars can turn into the station on impulse. When I had the repair shop we also contributed to the local economy because any out-of-town customers who needed bigger repair jobs would eat at the cafe and spend the night at one of the camping cabins down by the lakeside. The disadvantage is that it’s only a question of time before you’ll lose the traffic. Motorists want straight roads and speed limits of ninety, they don’t want to be crawling through every little village they pass on the way to their destinations. Plans for a new main road that bypassed Os had been ready for a long time, but so far we had been saved by our geography; it had quite simply been too costly for the transport authorities to drive a tunnel through the mountain. But there will be a tunnel, as surely as the sun will blow our solar system to pieces in two billion years’ time, and it’ll come a lot sooner than that. Ending up in the back of beyond would of course mean the end for all of us who made a living from the through traffic; but for the rest of the village too, the shock waves would be pretty similar to when the sun says goodbye. The farmers would still milk their cows and raise what crops they could up here on the heights, but what would everyone else do without the main road? Cut each other’s hair and tan themselves to a crisp?

The door opened. When we were growing up Grete had been a washed-out grey colour, with flat, dull hair. Now she was still that same grey but with a perm that made her look truly scary, in my opinion. Of course, being pretty isn’t a human right, but the Creator really did skimp on Grete. Back, neck, knees, everything was sort of crooked; even her enormous, crooked nose looked out of place, as though it had been imposed on her narrow face by force. But if the Creator had been prodigal with her nose then He’d been correspondingly mean with the rest of her. Eyebrows, eyelashes, breasts, hips, cheeks – Grete actually had none of these. The lips were thin and resembled earthworms. In her youth she had coated these meaty-coloured worms with a thick layer of bright red lipstick, and it did actually suit her. But then suddenly she stopped wearing make-up. It must have been around the time Carl left town.

OK, so it’s possible others didn’t see Grete Smitt like I did. Maybe she was attractive in her own way, and what I saw when I looked at what was on the outside was coloured by what I knew about the inside. And I’m not saying Grete Smitt was actually evil, I’m sure there’s some psychiatric diagnosis or other that gives a more flattering definition, as people say.

‘It’s sharp today,’ said Grete. By it she presumably meant the north wind. When it came sweeping down through the valley it always carried with it the smell of glacier and a reminder of summer’s evanescence. Grete had grown up in the village, but using a word like it was probably something she had from her parents, who had come here from the north, ran the camping site until it went bust and then lived on social security after both of them had been diagnosed with a rare form of peripheral neuropathy as a result of diabetes. Apparently it makes you feel as though you’re walking on splintered glass. Grete’s neighbour told me neuropathy isn’t contagious in any way, so this must have been a statistical miracle. But statistical miracles happen all the time, and now both parents lived on the top floor, directly above the poster advertising ‘Grete’s Hair and Sun Salon’, although you didn’t see them often.

‘Carl back?’

‘Yes,’ I answered, even though I knew it wasn’t a Yes/No question. It was a statement with a question mark attached asking for further information. I had no intention of providing that. Grete’s relationship with Carl wasn’t healthy. ‘What can I get you?’

‘I thought he was doing so well in Canada.’

‘Sometimes people get the urge to travel home even when things are going well.’

‘I hear the property market out there is very unpredictable.’

‘Yes, it either goes up very quickly or not quite so quickly. Coffee? Custard bun?’

‘Wonder what it is that brings a big shot from Toronto back to our little village.’

‘The people,’ I said.

‘Maybe,’ she said, studying my poker face. ‘But then he’s brought a Cuban with him, I hear?’

Now it might have been easy to feel pity for Grete. Parents on social security, a meteorite crater for a nose, no customers, no eyebrows, no husband, no Carl and apparently no desire for anyone else. But then there was that hidden reef of evil you didn’t notice was there until after you’d seen people scraping up against it. Maybe it was Newton’s law about every action having a corresponding reaction, that all the pain she suffered had to be passed on in turn to others. If Carl hadn’t screwed her beneath a tree when he was young and been drinking at a party, maybe she wouldn’t have turned out that way. Or then again, maybe she would.

‘A Cuban,’ I said, wiping down the counter. ‘Sounds like a cigar.’

‘Yeah, doesn’t it?’ she said and leaned across the counter as though we were sharing forbidden confidences. ‘Brown, nice to puff on and… and…’

Easy to light up, my mind instinctively added, even though what I wanted most was to stuff a custard bun into her mouth to stop the rubbish.

‘…very smelly,’ she finally concluded. That earthworm mouth of hers grinned; she seemed pleased with her analogy, as people say.

‘Only she isn’t from Cuba,’ I said. ‘She’s from Barbados.’

‘Yeah yeah,’ said Grete. ‘Thai, Russian, whatever, a skivvy, I expect.’

I lost it. Couldn’t hide any more how much she was provoking me. ‘Excuse me? What did you just say?’

‘That she’s pretty, I expect.’ Grete grinned triumphantly.

‘What do you want, Grete?’

Grete scanned the shelves behind me. ‘Mum needs new batteries for her remote.’

I doubted that, since her mother had called in and bought batteries two days earlier, picking up her sore feet as though the floor was molten lava. I handed the batteries to Grete and rang it up.

‘Shannon,’ said Grete as she fumbled her card through the terminal. ‘I saw the pictures on Instagram. Is there something wrong with her?’

‘Not that I’ve noticed,’ I said.

‘Come on, you’re not that white if you come from Barbados. And what’s the matter with her eye?’

‘That remote control should go like the clappers now.’

Grete pulled out her card and slipped it back into her purse. ‘See you later, Roy.’

I nodded slowly. Of course we’d see each other later. That goes for everything and everyone in this village. But she was trying to tell me something more, so that’s why I nodded as though I got it, and hoped she wouldn’t bother me with the rest of it.

The door slid shut behind her, but not completely, even though I’d tightened the mechanism. It really was time for a new one. Automatic.

By nine one of the other employees had arrived and I was able to go out and clean up after the tractor. As expected there were huge clumps of clay and dirt on the floor. I had some ready-mixed Fritz heavy-duty cleaner that got rid of most of it and hosed it down, thinking about back when we were teenagers and thought our lives could be turned upside down every single day, and about how our lives were turned upside down every single day, when I felt a prickling between my shoulder blades. Like the heat from one of those red laser beams when the SWAT team has caught you red-handed. So that’s why I wasn’t startled when I heard the low coughing behind me. I turned.

‘Been mud wrestling in here?’ said the sheriff, cigarette twitching between his thin lips.

‘Tractor,’ I said.

He nodded. ‘So your brother’s back?’

Kurt Olsen the sheriff was a thin, bony-cheeked man with a trailer-trash moustache, always with a roll-up in his mouth, tight jeans and the snakeskin boots his father used to wear. In fact Kurt seemed to look more and more like Sigmund Olsen, the old sheriff, who had had long fair hair too, and always made me think of Dennis Hopper in Easy Rider. Kurt Olsen was bow-legged the way certain footballers are, and in his day had been captain of the local team that played in the 4th division. Solid technique, sound tactical sense, could run for the whole ninety minutes even though he smoked like two factories. Everyone said Kurt should have been playing in a higher division. But that would have meant moving to a larger place with the risk of ending up on the bench, and why sacrifice local hero status for that? ‘Carl arrived yesterday,’ I confirmed. ‘How did you know?’

‘This,’ he said, unfurling a poster and holding it up.

I cut off the jet. FOLLOW THE DREAM! was the headline. And below: OS SPA AND MOUNTAIN HOTEL. I read on. The sheriff gave me plenty of time. We were about the same age, so maybe he knew that the class teacher had described me as mildly dyslexic. When the teacher informed my parents of this he mentioned at the same time that dyslexia is often an inherited condition. At this my father had flared up and asked was he insinuating the boy was a bastard? But then Mum reminded him of one of his cousins in Oslo, Olav, who was dyslexic and for whom things hadn’t turned out too well. When Carl heard about the meeting he had offered to be my reading mentor, as he put it. And I know he meant it, that he would gladly have given his time to the task. But I said no. Who wants his kid brother as his teacher? Instead my teacher turned out to be my secret lover, and my school a summer farm cabin high up in the mountains. But that was many years later.

The poster was an invitation to a meeting of investors at Årtun Village Hall. All welcome, it said. Coffee and waffles would be served, and attendance was without further obligation. I got the picture even before I reached the name and signature at the bottom. Here it was. The reason Carl had come home.

There was a title after the name. Carl Abel Opgard. Master of Business. No less.

I didn’t know what to think, only that it smelled like trouble already.

‘This is on all the bus stops and lamp posts along the main road,’ said the sheriff.

So the sheriff wasn’t the only one. Carl had obviously been up early too.

The sheriff rolled the poster up again. ‘Doing so without permission is an infringement of Paragraph 33 of the Highways Act. Can you ask him to take the posters down?’

‘Why not ask him yourself?’

‘I don’t have his phone number and…’ He wedged the poster under his arm, hooked his thumbs into the belt of his tight Levi’s and nodded in the direction of north. ‘Save me the trip if you do. Will you?’

I nodded slowly, looking up in the direction of where the sheriff wanted to save himself a trip. You couldn’t see Opgard from the service station, could just about glimpse the bend at Geitesvingen, and a grey area at the top of the precipice. The house lay out of sight above and behind it, where the land flattened out. But today I saw something there. Something red. And then I knew what it was. A Norwegian flag. Damned if Carl hadn’t hoisted the flag on a Monday. Wasn’t that what the king did, as a signal that he was home? I almost started laughing.

‘He can apply for permission,’ the sheriff said and looked at his watch. ‘And then we’ll see about it.’

‘OK then.’

‘Right.’ Kurt Olsen raised two fingers to the cowboy hat he should have been wearing.

We both knew it would take a day for the posters to come down, and by then the job would be done. Those who hadn’t seen the invitation would have heard about it.

I moved away and turned on the hose pipe again. But it was still there, that heat between the shoulder blades. The way it had been all these years. Kurt Olsen’s suspicion that slowly and surely etched its way through the clothing, through the skin and onto the flesh, stopping short only when it came up against solid bone. Against willpower and stubbornness. Against a lack of proof and hard facts.

‘What’s that there?’ I heard Kurt Olsen say.

I turned, acted surprised at still finding him there. He nodded towards the metal grid in the floor where the water gushed down. At the bits that lay there without being washed away.

‘Huh?’ I said.

The sheriff squatted down. ‘There’s blood coming out of them,’ he said. ‘This is flesh.’

‘Must be,’ I said.

He glanced up at me. All that remained of his cigarette was the glowing tip.

‘Moose,’ I said. ‘Run over. Got caught in the front mesh. They come here to wash the mess away.’

‘I thought you just said it was a tractor, Roy.’

‘I guess it’s from a car last night,’ I said. ‘I can ask Egil, if there’s anything you want to…’ The sheriff jumped back as I directed the stream of water onto the lump of flesh so that it was pulled clear of the mesh and floated out across the cement floor.

‘…investigate.’ Kurt Olsen’s eyes flashed. He wiped off the thighs of his trousers, even though they were dry. I don’t know if he used the word deliberately, it was the same word he had used back then. Investigate. That of course this would have to be investigated. I didn’t dislike Kurt Olsen. He was an OK guy just doing his job. But I had very definitely disliked his investigating, and I doubt whether he’d have dragged these posters along with him if the name Opgard hadn’t been on them.

When I got back to the station shop two teenage girls were standing there. One was Julie who had taken over behind the counter after Egil. The other girl, the customer, was standing with her back to me. Her head was bowed, she was waiting and gave no indication she was about to turn even though the door had opened. All the same I thought I recognised the Moe girl, the roofer’s daughter. Natalie. I saw her now and then with the boy racer gang outside. Where Julie was open, the bubbly type, as people say, there was something sensitive and at the same time something closed off about Natalie Moe’s expressionless face, as though she thought that any feelings she showed would be either mocked or ridiculed. That’s the age she was at. Although, surely she was at high school by now? Whatever, I had got the picture, picked up on the shame and had it confirmed when Julie greeted me at the same time as she nodded towards the shelf with the morning-after pills. Julie’s only seventeen, so she’s not allowed to sell tobacco and medicines.

I stepped behind the counter, resolved to get the Moe girl’s embarrassment over as quickly as possible.

‘EllaOne?’ I asked and placed the little white box on the counter in front of her.

‘Uh?’ said Natalie Moe.

‘Your morning-after pill,’ said Julie mercilessly.

I entered it on the till with my own card, so that it would look as though some presumably responsible adult person had made the purchase. The Moe girl left.

‘She’s having it off with Trond-Bertil,’ said Julie and snapped her bubblegum. ‘He’s over thirty, got a wife and kids.’

‘She’s young then,’ I said.

‘Young for what?’ Julie looked at me. It was strange, she wasn’t a big girl, but everything about her seemed big. The curly hair, the hands, the heavy breasts beneath the broad shoulders. The mouth almost vulgar. And the eyes. Those enormous blue peepers that looked me straight in the eye. ‘To be having it off with someone over thirty?’

‘Young to be making sensible decisions all the time,’ I said. ‘Maybe she’ll learn.’

Julie snorted. ‘That’s not why it’s called a morning-after pill. And just because a girl is young doesn’t mean she doesn’t know what she wants.’

‘I’m sure you’re probably right about that.’

‘But when we put on an innocent face like that one there, then you men all think poor little girl. Just the way we want you to think.’ She laughed. ‘You’re so simple.’

I slipped on a pair of plastic gloves and began to butter some baguettes. ‘Is there a secret society?’ I asked.

‘Eh?’

‘All you women, you think you know how other women think. Do you tell each other how it works, so that you’ve got like a complete internal overview? Because when it comes to other men, all I know is that I don’t know shit. That anything is possible. That at the most forty per cent of what I think I know about a man turns out to be right.’ I added the salami and the egg, delivered ready-sliced to the door. ‘And it’s us who are supposed to be simple. So all I can do is congratulate you on having one hundred per cent insight into the other half of the human race.’

Julie didn’t answer. I saw her swallow. Must have been the lack of sleep last night that made me use heavy artillery like that against a teenage high-school dropout. The kind of girl who gets into all the wrong things too early and none of the right things. Although that could change. She had attitude, as Dad used to say, rebellious, but still, more in need of encouragement than resistance. Needing both of course, but mostly encouragement.

‘So you’re beginning to get the hang of how to change tyres,’ I said.

Despite still being September, it had snowed on the cabins highest up the mountain. And even though we didn’t sell tyres or advertise a tyre-changing service we still got city folk coming in with their SUVs begging for help. Men as well as women. They simply don’t know how to carry out the most basic tasks. They’ll be dead before the end of the week the day a solar storm knocks out all the electrical equipment in the world.

Julie smiled. She looked almost too happy. Changeable weather in there.

‘City folk think the roads are slippery now,’ Julie said. ‘Imagine when it gets really cold, minus twenty, thirty.’

‘Then the roads’ll be less slippery,’ I said.

She looked quizzically at me.

‘Ice is slippier when it’s closer to melting point,’ I said. ‘Slippiest of all when it’s exactly seven degrees below. That’s the temperature they try to keep the ice in ice-hockey stadiums. What we slip on isn’t an invisible thin coating of water on account of the pressure and friction, the way people used to think, but gas that’s formed by loose molecules at those temperatures.’

‘How come you know all this stuff, Roy?’ She gave me a look of undeserved admiration.

That, of course, made me feel like one of those idiots I can’t stand myself, always showing off with random and superficial snippets of knowledge.

‘It’s the kind of stuff you can read in what we sell,’ I said, pointing to the magazine racks where Popular Science was stacked next to magazines about cars, boats, hunting and fishing, True Crime and – at the insistence of the head of sales – a couple of fashion magazines.

But Julie wasn’t going to let me down from my pedestal that easily.

‘Thirty’s not that old if you ask me. At least it’s better than twenty-year-olds who think they’re grown up just because they’ve passed their driving test.’

‘I’m over thirty, Julie.’

‘Are you? Then how old’s your brother?’

‘Thirty-five.’

‘He was in buying petrol yesterday,’ she said.

‘You weren’t working.’

‘I was here with some of my friends sitting in Knerten’s car. It was him said it was your brother. Know what my friends said? They said your brother was a DILF.’

I didn’t reply.

‘But you know what? If you ask me, you’re more of a DILF.’

I gave her a warning glare. She just grinned. Straightened up almost unnoticeably and drew her broad shoulders back. ‘DILF stands for—’

‘Thank you, but I think I know what it stands for. You gonna handle the Asko delivery?’

An Asko truck had pulled into the station. Soda water and sweets.

Julie looked at me with a deeply practised I’m-bored-to-death look. She blew a bubble gum balloon that burst. Tossed her head and marched out.

3

‘HERE?’ I ASKED IN DISBELIEF, looking across our outfields.

‘Here,’ said Carl.

Rocks with heather. Wind-blasted bare mountainside. Fantastic view of course, with blue mountain tops in all directions and the sun glinting on the water down there. But all the same. ‘You’re going to have to build a road up here. Water. Sewage. Electricity.’

‘Right.’ Carl laughed.

‘Carry out maintenance on something that’s on a… on a fucking mountain top.’

‘It’s unique, right?’

‘And lovely,’ said Shannon. She was standing behind us with her arms folded, shivering in her black coat. ‘It’ll be lovely.’

I’d come home early from the station and of course the first thing I did was confront Carl about those posters.

‘Without saying a single fucking word to me?’ I said. ‘Have you any idea how many questions I’ve had today?’

‘How many? Did they seem positive?’ The keen way Carl asked made me understand he really didn’t care a damn about how I felt about being trampled over and ignored.

‘But for chrissakes,’ I said, ‘why didn’t you tell me this was what you were coming back for?’

‘Because I didn’t want you to hear just half the story, Roy.’ Carl laid an arm around my shoulder, gave me that warm damn smile. ‘Didn’t want you wandering about up here thinking up all kinds of objections. Because you’re a born sceptic, and you know it. So now let’s go and have dinner and I’ll tell you the whole story. OK?’

And yes, my mood improved slightly, if for no other reason than that for the first time since Mum and Dad there was a meal cooked and ready on the table when I came home from work. After we’d eaten our fill Carl had shown me the drawings for the hotel. It looked like an igloo on the moon. The only difference being that on this moon a couple of reindeer wandered by. Those reindeer and some moss were all the architect had provided of exterior staffage, apart from that it looked pretty sterile and modernist. The funny thing was that I liked it, but that was probably because I saw something that resembled a service station on Mars and not a hotel where people could relax and enjoy themselves. I mean, surely people want places like that to have a bit more warmth and class, a bit more of Norwegian national romance about them, rose-painted panels, turf roofs, like the palace of some fairy-tale king or whatever.

Then we’d walked the short kilometre from the house to the proposed building site, with the evening sun glowing in the heather and on the polished granite of the peaks.

‘See how it moulds itself into the landscape,’ said Carl as he drew in the air the hotel we had been looking at in the dining room. ‘The landscape and the function are what matter, not people’s expectations of what a mountain hotel should look like. This is a hotel that will change people’s ideas about architecture, not just hum along with them.’

‘OK then,’ I answered, no doubt sounding as sceptical as I thought there was every reason to be.

Carl explained the hotel would be 11,000 square metres and have two hundred rooms. It could be up and running within two years of the first shovel of dirt being shifted. Or the first explosive detonated – there wasn’t a lot of earth up here. Carl’s ‘pessimistic estimate’ was that it would cost four hundred million.

‘How do you propose to get hold of four hundred—’

‘The bank.’

‘Os Savings Bank?’

‘No, no.’ He laughed. ‘They’re too small for this. A city bank. DnB.’

‘And why would they loan you four hundred mil for this…?’ I didn’t actually say lunacy, but it was pretty obvious what I was thinking.

‘Because we’re not going to start a limited company. We’re going to start an SL.’

‘SL?’

‘A Shared Liability company. People in the village don’t have a lot of cash. What they do have are the farms and the land they live on. With an SL they don’t need to put up a single krone to come along for the ride. And everyone who’s in, the great and the small, has the same share and makes the same profit. They can all just sit back and let their property do the work for them. The bankers will be drooling at the mouth for the chance to finance this whole thing because they’ve never been offered better security than a whole bloody village!’

I scratched my head. ‘You mean, if the whole thing goes to hell, then—’

‘Then each investor is liable only for his own share. If there are a hundred of us, and the company goes bankrupt with a debt of a hundred thousand, then all you’re liable for, you and the rest of the investors, is a thousand kroner each. Even if some of the investors can’t manage the thousand, that’s not your problem, it’s the creditors’ problem.’

‘Jesus.’

‘Beautiful, isn’t it? So the more that are involved, the less the individual risk. But of course that also means the less they earn when this thing really takes off.’

It was a lot to take on board. A type of company where you don’t have to lay out a single krone and just rake it in, if everything goes according to plan. And if it all goes to hell, the only thing you’re liable for is your own share.

‘OK,’ I said, trying to figure out where the catch might be. ‘So why invite people to an investors’ meeting when they aren’t going to be investing anything?’

‘Because “investor” sounds a lot more impressive than just “participant”. Don’t you think?’ Carl hooked his thumbs into his belt and put on a funny voice: ‘I ain’t just a farmer, I’m a hotel investor, don’t you know.’ He laughed loudly. ‘It’s pure psychology. When half the village has signed up the rest won’t be able to stand the thought of their neighbours buying themselves Audis and calling themselves hotel owners and not being a part of it themselves. Better to risk losing a few kroner, so long as your neighbour does the same.’

I nodded slowly. He’d probably got the psychology about right there.

‘The project is solid. The tricky bit is to get the train rolling.’ Carl kicked at the ground beneath us. ‘Get the first few to commit, people who can show the others they think the project’s attractive enough to want to be a part of. If we manage that, then everyone will want to climb on board and then the thing will be rolling along under its own steam.’

‘OK. And how are you going to persuade the first to come on board?’

‘When I can’t even manage to convince my own brother, you mean?’ He smiled that fine, open smile with the slightly sad eyes. ‘One’ll do,’ said Carl before I could respond.

‘And that one is…?’

‘The bellwether. Aas.’

Of course. The old council chairman. Mari’s father. He’d been calling meetings to order for more than twenty years, run this solidly Labour commune with a firm hand through good times and bad until one day he’d decided that was enough. Aas had to be over seventy by now and busied himself mostly at home on the farm, although now and then he would write something in the local newspaper, the Os Daily, and people read what he wrote. And even those who didn’t agree with Aas to begin with would start looking at things in a new light. Light shed through the old chairman’s way with words, his wisdom and his undeniable knack of always making the right decisions. People really did believe that the plans for a national highway bypassing the village would never have seen the light of day if Aas had still been chairman, that he would have explained to them how this would ruin everything, deprive the village of the extra income the through-traffic brought them, wipe an entire local community off the map and turn it into a deserted ghost town with just a few subsidised farmers close to retiring age still clinging on. And someone had suggested that Aas – and not the current chairman – lead a delegation to the capital to talk some sense into the transport minister.

I spat. Which, for your information, is the opposite of the good ole boy’s slow nodding of the head and means that you do not agree.

‘So you think Aas is just dying to risk his farm and his land on a spa hotel high up on top of the bare mountain? That he wants to put his fate in the hands of the guy who cheated on his daughter and then ran off abroad?’

Carl shook his head. ‘You don’t get it. Aas liked me, Roy. I wasn’t just his future son-in-law, I was the son he never had.’

‘Everybody liked you, Carl. But when you screw her best friend…’

Carl gave me a warning look and I lowered my voice and checked that Shannon – who was squatting in the heather and studying something – was out of earshot.

‘…then you slip a few places down the hit parade.’

‘Aas never knew about what happened between me and Grete,’ said Carl. ‘All he knows is that his daughter dumped me.’

‘Oh?’ I said in disbelief. And then a little less disbelieving once I thought about it. Mari – always very conscious of appearances – had naturally preferred the official version of her break-up with the village heart-throb, this being that she had dumped him, the unspoken assumption being that she was aiming higher than the mountain farm boy Opgard.

‘Straight after Mari broke up with me, I was summoned by Aas, and he told me how disappointed he was,’ said Carl. ‘He wondered if me and Mari couldn’t make up again somehow. Told me how him and his wife had been through some rough patches too, but they’d stuck it out now for over forty years. I said I would like that too, but right now I needed to get away for a while. He said he understood and gave me a few suggestions. My exam results at school were good, Mari had told him, and maybe he could arrange for a scholarship to a university in the States.’

‘Minnesota? Was that Aas?’

‘He had some contacts with the Norwegian–American Society there.’

‘You never mentioned that.’

Carl shrugged. ‘I was embarrassed. I’d been unfaithful to his daughter and now I was letting him help me in all good faith. But I think he had his reasons, he probably hoped I’d return with a university degree and win back the princess and half the kingdom, like the boy in the fairy story.’

‘So now you want him to help you again?’

‘Not me,’ said Carl. ‘The village.’

‘Naturally. The village. And exactly when was it you started having these heart-warming thoughts about the village?’

‘And just exactly when did you become so cold-hearted and cynical?’

I smiled. I could have told him the date and the hour.

Carl took a deep breath. ‘Something happens to you when you’re sitting on the other side of the world and wondering who you really are. Where you come from. What context you belong to. Who your people are.’

‘So you’ve discovered that these are your people?’ I nodded in the direction of the village a thousand metres beneath us.

‘For good and ill, yes. It’s like an inheritance you can’t give away. It comes back to you, whether you want it to or not.’

‘Is that why you’ve dropped your accent? You turning against your own culture?’

‘No way. This is Mum’s culture.’

‘She talked city talk because she spent so long working as a housekeeper, not because it was her own dialect.’

‘Then put it this way: our heritage is her adaptability. There are a lot of Norwegians in Minnesota, and I was taken more seriously, especially by potential investors, when I spoke naicely.’ He said it through his nose, the way Mum spoke, and with an exaggeratedly posh accent. We laughed.

‘I’ll be back talking in the old way soon enough,’ said Carl. ‘I’m from Os. But even more from Opgard. My real people, Roy – above all, that’s you. If the national highway is routed round the village and nothing else comes along that turns the village into a place to come to then your service station—’

‘It isn’t my station, Carl, I just work there. I can run a service station anywhere, the company has five hundred of them, so you’ve no need to be rescuing me.’

‘I owe you.’

‘I said, I don’t need anything—’

‘Oh yes, you need something. What you really fucking need is to own your own service station.’

I shut my mouth. OK, so he’d hit the nail on the head there. He was my brother, after all. No one knew me better.

‘And with this project you’ll raise the capital you need, Roy. To buy a station here, or wherever.’

I’d been saving up. Saving every damn krone I didn’t need for food and electricity to warm up the king-size pizzas when I didn’t eat my dinner at the station, for petrol for the old Volvo, and to keep the house in a reasonable state of repair. I’d talked to head office about possibly taking over the station, signing a franchise contract. And they weren’t completely negative about it when they realised the main road and all the traffic with it would soon be gone. But the price hadn’t fallen as much as I had hoped it would, which was, paradoxically enough, my own fault, since we were quite simply doing too well.

‘Supposing I did go along with this SL thing…’

‘Yes!’ he yelled. Typical Carl, celebrating as though I was already in.

I shook my head irritably. ‘It’ll still be two years before your hotel is up and running. Plus another two years minimum before it starts earning money. If it doesn’t all go to shit, that is. Whatever, if in the course of the next decade I can buy the service station and need a quick loan, the bank will say “no, you’re in debt up to your chimney pot with this here SL project”.’

Carl couldn’t even be bothered to pick me up on my embarrassingly obvious bullshit. SL or no SL, no bank would give a loan for the purchase of a service station that would be slap bang in the middle of nowhere the way things were shaping up.

‘You’re going to be part of this hotel project, Roy. And what’s more, you’ll have the money for your station even before we start building the hotel.’

I looked at him. ‘What d’you mean?’

‘The SL has to buy the land the hotel is going to be built on. And who owns that?’

‘You and me,’ I said. ‘So what? You don’t get rich selling a few acres of bare mountainside.’

‘That depends who sets the price,’ said Carl.

I’m not usually reckoned to be slow when it comes to logic and practical thinking, but even so it took a few seconds before it dawned on me.

‘You mean…’

‘I mean that I’m responsible for the description of the project, yes. And that means that it’s me who defines the items in the budget that I’m going to present at the investors’ meeting. Of course I won’t lie about the value of the land, but let’s say we set it at twenty million—’

‘Twenty million!’ I slapped the heather with my hand in exasperation. ‘For this?’

‘—then that is relatively speaking such a small sum in comparison with the four hundred million total that it’ll be a small matter to split the price of the property and spread it out over the other items. Item 1, the road and surrounding area; item 2, the parking space; item 3, the actual building site…’

‘And what if someone asks the price per acre?’

‘Then of course we tell them. We’re not thieves.’

‘If we’re not thieves then what…?’ We? How had he suddenly managed to get me into this? Well, OK, this was no time to be splitting hairs. ‘What are we then?’

‘We’re business people who are playing the game.’

‘Playing? These are villagers, people without a clue, Carl.’

‘Country bumpkins you mean? Yes, well, we should know, we’re from round here.’ He spat. ‘Like when Dad bought the Cadillac. That sure bothered people, you bet it did.’

He gave a crooked smile.

‘This project is going to push up land prices here for everybody, Roy. Once the hotel is financed we roll out stage two. The ski lifts, cabins and lodges. That’s where the real money is. So why should we sell at a giveaway price now, when we know prices are guaranteed to go through the ceiling? Especially when we are the ones who made it happen. We’re not tricking anyone, Roy, there’s just no need for us to shout it from the rooftops that the Opgard brothers are scooping in the first millions. So…’ He looked at me. ‘You want the money for the station, or don’t you?’

I chewed it over.

‘Think about it while I take a leak,’ said Carl.

He turned and walked up to the top of the knoll, probably thinking he’d be sheltered on the other side.

So Carl had given me the time it takes to empty a bladder to decide whether I wanted to sell the property that had been in our family’s possession for four generations. For a price that under other circumstances would be considered highway robbery. I didn’t need to think. I don’t give a fuck about generations, at least not as far as this family is concerned, and we’re talking about a wilderness that has no sentimental value whatever nor any other type of value either, unless someone suddenly discovers a rare metal. And if Carl was right and the millions we were about to scoop up were just the icing on a cake that every participant in the village would have a share in in due course, that was fine by me. Twenty million. Ten for me. You could get a bloody nice service station for ten million. Top class, good location, not an øre in debt. Fully automated car wash. Separate restaurant.

‘Roy?’

I turned. Hadn’t heard Shannon approaching because of the wind. She looked up at me.

‘I think it’s sick,’ she said.

For a moment I thought she was referring to herself, she looked so windblown and cold standing there, her big brown eyes looking up from under the old knitted hat I used to wear as a kid. Then I realised she was cupping her hands round something. She opened them.

It was a little bird. Black hood on a white head, light brown throat. Colours so pale it had to be a male. It looked lifeless.

‘A dotterel,’ I said.

‘It was just lying there,’ she said, and pointed to a hollow in the heather where I saw an egg. ‘I nearly stepped on it.’

I squatted down and felt the egg.

‘Yes, the dotterel will stay sitting on the eggs and let itself be trodden on rather than sacrifice the eggs.’

‘I thought birds here hatched in the spring – they do in Canada.’

‘Yes, but this egg never hatched because it’s dead. He obviously didn’t realise, poor thing.’

‘He?’

‘The male dotterel does the brooding and looks after the chicks.’ I stood up and stroked the bird in Shannon’s hands on the breast. Felt its quick pulse beneath my fingertip. ‘He’s playing dead. To distract us from the egg.’

Shannon looked round. ‘Where are they? And where is the female?’

‘The female is probably somewhere having it off with another male.’

‘Having it away?’

‘You know, mating. Having sex.’

She gave me a sceptical look. ‘Do birds have sex outside the mating season?’

‘I’m kidding, but we can always hope so,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s called polyandry.’

She stroked the bird’s back. ‘A male that sacrifices everything for the children, who keeps the family together even when the mother’s unfaithful. That really is something rare.’

‘That’s not actually what polyandry means,’ I said. ‘It’s—’

‘—a form of a marriage in which the woman takes several husbands,’ she said.

‘Oh?’ I said.

‘Yes. You get it in a number of places in the world. Especially in India and Tibet.’

‘Jesus. Why…’ I was about to ask do you know that?, but then changed it to ‘do they do that?’

‘Usually it’s brothers who marry the woman, and the reason is so as not to break up the family home.’

‘I didn’t know that.’

She put her head on one side. ‘Maybe you know more about birds than people?’

I didn’t answer. Then she laughed and threw the bird up high into the air. It spread its wings and flew straight ahead, away from us. I followed its flight until suddenly I detected a movement at the edge of my vision. My first thought was that it was a snake. I turned and saw the dark form winding its way towards us down the rocky slope. Lifted my gaze and saw Carl was standing there up at the top, looking out like some statue of Christ over Rio and still pissing. I stepped aside, coughed, and Shannon saw the stream of urine and did the same. It continued to wind its way on downwards towards the village.

‘What do you think of us selling the land up here for twenty million kroner?’ I asked.

‘Sounds like a lot. Where do you think the nest might be?’

‘That’s two and a half million American dollars. We’re going to build a house with two hundred beds in it.’

She smiled, turned and began walking back the way we had come. ‘That’s a lot. But the dotterel was here first.’

The power went just before bedtime.

I was sitting in the kitchen looking over printouts of the most recent accounts. Working out how head office would discount future profits and price the station in the event of a sale. I had worked out that with ten million I would not only manage to buy a ten-year franchise but the whole shooting match, buildings and land included. Then I would really own my own station.

I stood up and looked down over the village. No light down there either. Good, so that meant the problem wasn’t up here. I took a couple of paces in the direction of the living-room door, opened it and peered out into the pitch darkness.

‘Hello,’ I called out experimentally.

‘Hi,’ came the response in unison from Carl and Shannon.

I fumbled my way to Mum’s rocking chair. Sat down. The rockers creaked against the floor planking. Shannon giggled. They’d had a drink.

‘Sorry about this,’ I said. ‘It isn’t us, it’s… them.’

‘Doesn’t bother me,’ said Shannon. ‘When I was a kid there were power cuts all the time.’

I said into the darkness: ‘Is it poor, Barbados?’

‘No,’ said Shannon. ‘It’s one of the richest Caribbean islands. But where I grew up there were so many people cable hooking… what do you call that in Norwegian?’

‘Actually I don’t think we have a word for it,’ said Carl.

‘They stole electricity by connecting up to the mains. And that made the whole net unstable. I got used to the idea. You know, that everything can disappear, at any time.’

Something told me she wasn’t just talking about electricity. About home and family, maybe? She hadn’t given up until she’d found the dotterel’s nest, and then she’d stuck a twig in the ground so we wouldn’t tread on it the next time.

‘Tell us about it,’ I said.

For a few moments the silence in the darkness was complete.

Then she gave a low laugh, as though excusing herself. ‘Why don’t you tell us instead, Roy?’

What surprised me was that even though she never got the wrong Norwegian word or made a mistake in the syntax, her accent still made you think of her as a foreigner. Or maybe it was that meal she’d made. That mofongo, some Caribbean dish.

‘Yeah, let Roy tell us, he’s good at telling stories in the dark. He used to do it for me when I couldn’t get to sleep.’

When you couldn’t get to sleep because you were crying, I thought. When I climbed down into your bed, after it was over, and put my arms around you, felt your skin so warm against mine, and told you not to think about it, just think about the story I’m telling you and let sleep come. And at the same moment as I was thinking that I realised that it wasn’t the accent or the mofongo, it was the fact that she was here, in the dark, with me and Carl. In the dark in our house, the dark that belonged to him and me and no one else.

4

CARL WAS ALREADY AT THE door, waiting to greet the guests. We heard the first cars struggling up the track towards Geitesvingen, change down, then down again. Shannon gave me a quizzical look when I poured more of the strong stuff into her punchbowl.

‘They like it to taste more moonshine than fruit,’ I said and peered out of the kitchen window.

A Passat stopped in front of the house and six people tumbled out of the five-seater. It was always the same thing; they travelled up in a gang and the women drove. I don’t know why guys think they have priority when it comes to drinking parties like this, or why the girls volunteer to drive even before they’re asked, but that’s the way it is. The lads who came along because they were single or because someone had to stay home and look after the kids did a round of rock paper scissors to decide who drove. When Carl and I were growing up, people drove when they were drunk. Take Dad. But people don’t drink and drive any more. They still beat their wives, but no way would they drink and drive.

There was a banner in the living room with HOMECOMING on it. I thought it was a bit strange because I thought the point of that American custom was that it was family and friends and not the homecoming person himself who was supposed to arrange the party. But Shannon just laughed and said if no one else was going to do it then you had to do it yourself.

‘Let me do the punch,’ said Shannon, who had come up to me as I stood and ladled the mixture of home brew and fruit cocktail into the glasses I’d put out. She was wearing the same outfit as when she arrived, black polo-neck sweater and black trousers. I mean, probably another set of clothes but that looked exactly the same. I don’t know much about clothes, but something told me that hers were of the discreet and exclusive type.

‘Thanks, but I’m quite capable,’ I said.

‘No,’ said the little lady and shoved me aside. ‘Off you go and talk to old friends, while I’ll go round with the glasses and get to know everyone a bit better.’

‘OK,’ I said. I didn’t bother to explain to her that they were Carl’s friends, that I didn’t have friends. But anyway, it was nice to see them all give Carl a hug in the doorway, slap him on the back as though he’d got something stuck in his throat, grin and say some laddish thing they’d worked out on the drive up, a little bit high, a bit shy and ready for a drink.

Me they shook hands with.

Of all things, this was perhaps the biggest difference between my brother and me. These were people whom Carl hadn’t seen for fifteen years, but they’d seen me every other day at the service station, year in and year out. And yet still they felt as though he was the one they knew, not me. Standing there and watching him now, how he relished the warmth and nearness of our friends, things which I had never enjoyed – did I envy him? Well, I guess we all want to be loved. But would I change places? Would I be willing to let people get as close as Carl did? It didn’t seem to cost him anything. But for me the price would have been too high.

‘Hi, Roy. Not often we see you with a beer.’ It was Mari Aas. She was looking good. Mari always looked good, even when she was wheeling her twins around when they had gripe. And I know how much that annoyed the women in town who had been hoping they might finally get to see little Miss Perfect having a hard time of it like the rest of us mere mortals. The girl who had everything. Because as well as the silver spoon in her mouth she was born with, and a brain that got her top marks at school, and the respect that came with her surname Aas, she had the looks to match it all. From her mother Mari Aas inherited the dark glow in her skin and feminine curves, and from her father the blonde hair and the cold, blue, vulpine eyes. And maybe it was those eyes, her sharp tongue and air of superiority and coolness that had kept the boys at an oddly respectful distance.

‘Funny we don’t run into each other more often,’ said Mari. ‘So how are you, really?’

That really was a signal that she didn’t want the standard just-fine-thanks answer, but that she cared, she wanted to know. And I think she really meant it. By nature Mari was friendly and helpful towards people. But still she gave this impression of looking down on you. Of course that might be on account of the fact that she was 180cm tall, but I do remember one time when the three of us were in the car driving home after a dance – me driving, Carl drunk, Mari angry and pissed off – and her saying, ‘Carl, I can’t have a boyfriend who drags me down to the level of everyone else in this town, you do see that?’

But even if she wasn’t happy about the level, it was obvious that it was here she wanted to be. Though she’d been even smarter than Carl at school, she didn’t have the same drive as him, that burning desire to head on out and be somebody. Maybe because she was already up there, floating around on the surface in the sunshine. So it was mostly about staying there. Maybe that was why – after it was over with Carl – she’d just taken a short course in political science – or poshlitical science as the locals called it – and then come straight back home with Dan Krane and an engagement ring. And while he started work as editor of the local Labour Party newspaper, she was apparently still working away on a final paper she was clearly never going to finish.

‘Doing OK,’ I said. ‘Did you come alone?’

‘Dan wanted to look after the boys.’

I nodded. Knew that the grandparents next door would have been delighted to help out with the babysitting but that Dan had insisted. I’d seen his expressionless, ascetic face at the service station when he pumped up the tyres on the costly-looking bike he was going to use in the Birken long-distance race. Pretended he didn’t know who I was but his animosity was palpable, simply because I shared a lot of DNA with the guy who’d slept with the woman who was now his lawful wedded wife. Oh no, Dan probably didn’t entertain any burning desire to come up and celebrate the return of a home-town boy who was also his wife’s ex.

‘Have you met Shannon?’ I said.

‘No,’ said Mari, scanning the already packed room where we’d shoved all the furniture to one side and everyone was standing. ‘But Carl is so fixated on looks she’s bound to be so pretty you can’t mistake her.’

From the way she said this it was obvious what she thought of all talk about appearances. When Mari gave the speech on behalf of the school-leavers for her year the headmaster had introduced her by saying that she ‘wasn’t only intelligent but also a striking beauty’. Mari had started her speech by saying: ‘Thank you, headmaster. I wanted to say a few words of thanks for all you’ve done for us these past three years, but I didn’t know quite how to express myself, so let’s just say that you have been remarkably lucky in your appearance.’ The laughter had been isolated, the line delivered with a little too much venom, and as the daughter of the chairman it wasn’t really clear whether she’d been kicking upwards or downwards.

‘You must be Mari.’

Mari looked round before she looked down. And there, three heads below her, Shannon’s white face and white smile smiling up at us. ‘Punch?’

Mari raised an eyebrow. Looked as though she thought this slight-built figure had challenged her to a boxing match until Shannon lifted the tray higher.

‘Thanks,’ said Mari. ‘But no thanks.’

‘Oh no. You lost at rock paper scissors?’

Mari looked blankly at her.

I coughed. ‘I told Shannon about the custom of driving and the—’

‘Oh that,’ Mari interrupted with a thin smile. ‘No, my husband and I don’t drink.’

‘Aha!’ said Shannon. ‘Because you’re alcoholics or because it’s not good for your health?’

I saw Mari’s face stiffen. ‘We aren’t alcoholics, but on a worldwide basis alcohol kills more people annually than wars, murders and drugs put together.’

‘Yes, and thank goodness for that,’ said Shannon, smiling. ‘That there aren’t more wars, murders and drugs, I mean.’

‘What I’m trying to say is that alcohol isn’t necessary,’ said Mari.

‘I’m sure it isn’t,’ said Shannon. ‘But at least it’s got the people who’ve come here tonight talking a bit more than when they arrived. Did you drive up?’

‘Of course,’ said Mari. ‘Don’t the women drive where you come from?’

‘Sure they do, but only on the left.’

Mari gave me an uncertain look, as though asking if there was some joke here she didn’t get.

I coughed. ‘They drive on the left in Barbados.’

Shannon laughed loudly, and Mari smiled tolerantly as at a child’s embarrassing little joke.

‘You must have put a lot of time and effort into learning your husband’s language. Did you never consider him learning your language instead?’

‘That’s a good question, Mari; but English is the language of Barbados. And of course, I want to know what you’re all saying behind my back.’ Shannon laughed again.

I don’t always understand what women are saying when they talk, but even I could see that this was a catfight, and my only job was to stay well out of the way.

‘Anyway I prefer Norwegian before English. English has the worst written language in the world.’

‘Prefer Norwegian to English, you mean?’

‘The idea behind the Arabic alphabet is that the symbols reflect the sounds. So when for example you write an a in Norwegian, German, Spanish, Italian and so on, then it’s pronounced a. But in English a written a can be anything at all. Car, care, cat, call. ABC. And the anarchy just goes on. As early as the eighteenth century Ephraim Chambers was of the opinion that English orthography is more chaotic than that of any other known language. While I found out that without knowing even a single word of Norwegian I was able to read aloud from Sigrid Undset – Carl understood every word!’ Shannon laughed and looked at me. ‘Norwegian ought to be the world language, not English!’

‘Hmm, maybe,’ said Mari. ‘But if you’re serious about sexual equality then you shouldn’t be reading Sigrid Undset. She was a reactionary anti-feminist.’

‘Well, I’m inclined to think of Undset more as a sort of early second-wave feminist, like Erica Jong. Thanks for the advice about what not to read, but I also try to read writers with some of whose viewing points I don’t agree.’

‘Viewpoints,’ corrected Mari. ‘I see you spend a lot of time thinking about language and literature, Shannon. You’d probably be better off talking to Rita Willumsen, or our doctor, Stanley Spind.’

‘Instead of…?’

Mari gave a thin smile. ‘Or perhaps you should think about doing something useful with your knowledge of Norwegian. Like looking for a job? Contributing to the community here in Os?’

‘Fortunately I don’t need to look for a job.’

‘No, I’m sure you don’t,’ said Mari, and I could see she was on the offensive again. That contemptuous, patronising look, the one Mari thought she kept so successfully hidden from the other villagers, was there in her eyes as she said: ‘After all, you do have a… husband.’

I looked at Shannon. People had taken glasses from the tray as we stood there and she moved the ones that were left to restore the balance. ‘I don’t need to look for a job because I already have one. A job I can do from home.’

Mari looked surprised, and then almost disappointed. ‘And that is?’

‘I draw.’

Mari brightened up again. ‘You draw,’ she repeated in an exaggeratedly positive way, as though someone with a job like that would naturally need encouragement. ‘You’re an artist,’ she announced with a pitying derision.

‘I’m not too sure about that. On a good day maybe. What do you do, Mari?’

Mari suffered a moment’s disorientation before she composed herself enough to say: ‘I’m a political scientist.’

‘Brilliant! And are they much in demand around here in Os?’

Mari gave the kind of quick smile people do when they feel a pain somewhere. ‘Right now I’m a mother. To twins.’

‘No! Really?’ cried Shannon in enthusiastic disbelief.

‘Yes. I wouldn’t lie ab—’

‘Pictures! Do you have any pictures?’

Mari gave a sideways look down at Shannon. Hesitated. Maybe those vulpine eyes thought for a moment about resisting. A scrawny little one-eyed fledgling of a woman; how dangerous could that be? Mari pulled out a phone. Tapped away. Held the picture up to Shannon who gave vent to one of those long-drawn-out aahhhs that are supposed to express how adorable something is, before handing me the tray with glasses so that she could take hold of Mari’s phone, the better to feast her eyes on the twins.

‘What d’you have to do to get two like that, Mari?’

I don’t know if Shannon was just flattering her, but if she was, it was a brilliant bit of play-acting. Good enough anyway for Mari Aas to drop the hostile look on her face.

‘Any more?’ asked Shannon. ‘Can I look?’

‘Er, sure.’

‘Can you serve the guests, Roy?’ Shannon said, without taking her eyes off the screen.

I made a circuit with the tray, pushing my way between guests, but the glasses disappeared without my having to get involved in small talk. When the tray was empty I returned to the kitchen where it was just as crowded.

‘Hi, Roy. I saw you had your little silver tin of tobacco out – can you spare me a wedge?’

It was Erik Nerell. He stood leaning against the fridge with a beer in his hand. Erik pumped iron and his head was so small on his thick, muscular neck you could hardly see the join; it looked like a tree trunk that just grew out the top of his T-shirt. On top of it all was a yellow crew cut, tight as a bundle of uncooked spaghetti, with shoulders sloping down the sides towards two biceps that always looked as if they’d just been inflated. And who knows, maybe they had been. He’d been a paratrooper, and now he ran what was actually the village’s only real bar, Fritt Fall. It had been a cafeteria and he’d taken the place over and turned it into a bar with a disco, karaoke, bingo every Monday and quiz every Wednesday.

I fished the tin of Berry’s snuff out of my pocket and handed it to him. He stuffed a wedge under his upper lip.

‘Just want to see what it tastes like,’ he said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone else using American snuff. Where d’you get hold of it?’

I shrugged. ‘Here and there. Get people who are going out there to bring some back.’

‘That’s a neat tin,’ he said as he handed it back. ‘Ever been in the States yourself?’

‘Never.’

‘Something else I’ve always wondered about,’ he said. ‘How come you put the snuff inside your lower lip?’

‘The American way,’ I said in English. ‘That’s the way Dad did it. He always used to say only Swedes put it under the upper lip, and everyone knows how the Swedes chickened out during the war.’

Erik Nerell laughed, his upper lip bulging. ‘Nice bit of stuff your brother’s picked up.’

I didn’t answer.

‘It’s almost freaky how good her Norwegian is.’

‘You’ve spoken to her?’

‘Just asking if she danced.’

‘You asked if she danced? Why?’

Erik shrugged. ‘Because she looks like a ballerina. Tiny dancer, right? And then she’s from Barbados. Calypsos and that… what d’you call it again? Soca!’

There must have been something in the look on my face that made him laugh.

‘Take it easy, Roy, she was cool with it, said she’d teach it to us later on tonight. You ever seen soca? Fucking sexy stuff.’

‘OK,’ I said, and thought that was probably pretty good advice. Take it easy.

Erik took a swig from his bottle of beer and belched discreetly into his hand. I guess that’s what living with a woman does to you. ‘Know if there are a lot of rockfalls in Huken at the moment?’ he said.

‘Dunno,’ I said. ‘Why d’you ask?’

‘Has nobody told you?’

‘Told me what?’ I felt a chill, like cold air wafting through the rotting window putty.

‘The sheriff wants us to check the wall with a drone and if it looks OK we’re going to rappel down to the wreck. A few years ago I’d’ve done it like a shot, but now, what with Thea sitting at home with a bun in the oven, things look a bit different.’

No, not just a breath of cold air. An injection, a hypo dispensing ice-cold water. The wreck. The Cadillac. It had been lying there for eighteen years. I shook my head. ‘Well, it probably looks OK, but then I do hear stones falling. It happens all the time.’

Erik gave me a sort of calculating look. I don’t know whether it was the danger of the falling stones or my own trustworthiness he was wondering about. Maybe it was both. He must have heard the story of what happened when they were going to recover Mum’s and Dad’s bodies from Huken. Two men from the mountain rescue team climbed down there and when they started hoisting up the stretchers with the bodies, the stretchers banged against the rock face, but no stones came loose. The accident happened as the men were on the way back up themselves. A rock dislodged by the person on the rope struck the man below securing it and crushed his shoulder joint. Me and Carl had been standing on Geitesvingen, behind the ambulance, the rescue crew and the sheriff, and what I remember most clearly are the screams through the cold, still evening air of the climber who was out of sight. They were tossed back and forth between the rock faces down there. Slow and controlled, almost as if they were measuring the pain, like the raven’s calm cry of alarm.

‘Hey, come on, speech!’ exclaimed Erik.

I heard Carl’s voice coming from the living room and saw people pushing their way in. I found somewhere to stand in the doorway. Even though Carl was a head taller than most people he’d still clambered up onto a chair.

‘My dear, dear friends,’ his voice boomed. ‘It’s just so fucking great to see you all again. Fifteen years…’ He let it hang there for us to savour. ‘Most of you have been seeing each other every day, so you haven’t noticed the gradual changes, that we’ve actually got older. So let me just make one thing very clear, that when it comes to you guys…’ He took a breath, looked round with his cheeky, teasing smile. ‘I seem to be wearing a lot better than you.’

Laughter and loud protests.

‘Oh yes, oh yes!’ Carl shouted. ‘And it’s even more remarkable when you realise I’m the only guy here who had any looks to lose.’

More laughter, whistles and jeers. Someone tried to pull him down off the chair.

‘But,’ said Carl, as someone helped him stay steady on the chair, ‘when it comes to the ladies, it’s the other way round. You look a lot better now than you did back then.’

Cheers and applause from the women.

A man’s voice: ‘Watch it now, Carl!’

I turned and looked for Mari. It was automatic, I had never got out of the habit. Shannon was sitting on the worktop in the kitchen to get a better view. Her back arched. Erik Nerell was standing by the fridge studying her. I left the room and headed up the stairs to the boys’ room, closed the door and lay down on the upper bunk. Heard Carl’s voice in through the kitchen and up through the hole around the stovepipe. I couldn’t hear every word, but I got the gist of it. I heard my own name, and then a pause.

A man’s voice: ‘He’ll be in the bog.’ Laughter.

Shannon’s name. Heard her deep, masculine tone. A sparrow with the song of an owl. A few words, then polite and restrained applause.

I took a swig of beer, stared at the roof. Closed my eyes.

When I opened them again, it was quieter. And I realised I had slept through the party, that the last of the guests were leaving. Engines starting, revving up. The chatter of gravel beneath tyres. Red lights on the curtains as they braked heading into Geitesvingen.

And then the silence was almost complete. A few padding footsteps and low voices coming from the kitchen. Adult voices in normal, everyday conversation, about small, practical matters. The sounds I had fallen asleep to as a child. Safe sounds. A safety you think will last because it feels so right, so good, so unchanging.

I had dreamed. About a car that for an instant floats off into the air and looks as if it’s heading on into outer space. But then gravity and the real world get hold of it, and slowly the heavier front end, with the engine, starts to dip downwards. Into the darkness. Into Huken. There’s a scream. It’s not Dad’s. And not Mum’s. And not the climber’s. It’s my scream.

I hear Shannon giggle and whisper ‘No!’ outside my door, and then Carl’s drunken ‘Roy just thinks it’s cosy. Now I’m going to show you what it was like for us.’

I stiffened, even though I probably realised he wouldn’t do it. Show her what it was really like for us.

The door opened.

‘You asleep, bro?’ I felt Carl’s boozy breath against my face.

‘Yes,’ I answered.

‘Let’s go,’ whispered Shannon, but I felt the bed shake as Carl lay down on the lower bunk and pulled her down with him.

‘We missed you at the party,’ said Carl.

‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘I needed a little timeout and then fell asleep.’

‘Takes some doing to sleep through the racket from that rånergjengen.’

‘Yeah,’ I answered.

‘What’s a rånergjengen?’ asked Shannon.

‘A boy racer gang. Noisy bastards with simple pleasures,’ sniggered Carl. ‘Burning up tyres in their souped-up cars and sleepers.’ I heard him take a swig from a bottle down there. ‘But the ones who were here tonight, their old ladies don’t let them do it any more. The ones who keep the tradition going are the kids who hang out at Roy’s station.’

‘So then a råne is a what?’ asked Shannon

‘It means a pig.’ I said. ‘A male pig. Hot and dangerous.’

‘Does it have to be dangerous?’

‘Well, you can castrate it. Then it becomes a galte.’

‘Galte,’ she echoed.

‘So strictly speaking, what we had up here tonight wasn’t actually a rånegjeng but a galtegjeng.’ Carl chuckled. ‘Married, settled, castrated, but obviously still capable of reproducing.’

‘Galtegjeng. And some of them drive American cars, which you call Amcars.’ I could see how every Norwegian word we said went straight into that linguist’s brain of hers.

‘Shannon loves American cars,’ Carl went on. ‘She was driving her own Buick from the age of eleven. Ouch!’

I heard Shannon’s whispered protest from below.

‘Buick,’ I said. ‘Not bad.’

‘He’s lying, I didn’t drive,’ said Shannon. ‘My grandma let me hold the steering wheel of this rusty old car she inherited from my great-uncle Leo. He was killed in Cuba, fighting with Castro against Batista. The car and Leo both came back from Havana in pieces, and Grandma put the car back together by herself.’

Carl laughed. ‘But Leo she couldn’t put back together?’

‘What type of Buick was it?’ I asked.

‘A Roadmaster ’54,’ said Shannon. ‘When I was at university in Bridgetown, Grandma drove me there in that car every single day.’

I must have been tired, or else still groggy from the punch and the beer, because I almost said that those vintage Buick Roadmasters were the most beautiful cars ever in my view.

‘Shame you slept through the whole party, Roy,’ said Shannon.

‘Oh, he doesn’t mind,’ said Carl. ‘See, Roy doesn’t really like people. Apart from me, that is.’

‘Is it true you saved his life, Roy?’ asked Shannon.

‘No,’ I said.

‘Oh yes!’ said Carl. ‘That time we bought the second-hand diving gear from Willumsen and didn’t have enough money to pay for the course, so we tested it out without knowing a fucking thing about it.’

‘It was my fault,’ I said. ‘I was the one who said it was just simple, practical logic.’

‘Says he. Of course, he managed it all right,’ said Carl. ‘And when it was my turn I got water inside the mask, I panicked and spat out the mouthpiece. If it hadn’t been for Roy…’

‘No, no, I just leaned over the side of the boat and pulled you to the surface,’ I said.

‘That same evening I sold my share in the diving equipment. Never wanted to set eyes on it again. How much did you give for it? Hundred, was it?’

I could feel the corners of my lips widening. ‘All I remember is that for once I thought I got a good price from you.’

‘It was a hundred too much!’ cried Shannon. ‘Did you ever do anything in return for your big brother?’

‘No,’ said Carl. ‘Roy’s a far better brother than I am.’

Shannon gave a sudden laugh and the bunk beds swayed; I think he must have been tickling her.

‘Is that true?’ Shannon hiccupped.

There was no answer, and I realised it was me she was asking.

‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s lying.’

‘Is he? How did he help you then?’

‘He corrected my homework for me.’

‘No I did not!’ protested Carl.

‘The nights before I had to hand in my essays he used to get up from where you are now, sneak over to my satchel, take my exercise book out to the toilet and correct all the misspellings. Then put the book back and crept back into his bed again. Never said a word about it.’

‘That happened maybe once!’ said Carl.

‘Every time,’ I said. ‘And I never said anything about it either.’

‘Why not?’ Shannon’s whisper had the same dark quality as the darkness in the room.

‘I couldn’t have people knowing that I quite happily let my kid brother sort things out for me,’ I said. ‘But on the other hand I needed a pass mark in Norwegian.’

‘Twice,’ said Carl. ‘Maybe three times.’

We lay in silence. Shared the silence. I heard the sound of Carl’s breathing, so familiar it was like hearing my own. Now there was a third person breathing in the room, and I felt a stab of jealousy. That it wasn’t me lying down there with my arms around him. There was a chill cry; it sounded like it came from the outfields. Or from Huken.

I heard muttering from the bunk below.

‘She’s asking what kind of animal that was,’ said Carl. ‘A raven, wasn’t it?’

‘That’s right,’ I said and waited. The raven – at least the one that lived up here – usually called twice, but this time not.

‘Does it mean danger?’ asked Shannon.

‘Could be,’ I said. ‘Or it’s answering another raven, one we can’t hear, that’s half a dozen kilometres away.’

‘Do they have different calls?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s a different call if you get too close to the nest. The females call most. Sometimes a whole choir at it for no reason you can figure out.’

Carl chuckled. I love that sound. It spread warmth, goodness. ‘Roy knows more about birds than anything else. Apart from cars maybe. And service stations.’

‘But not about people,’ said Shannon. From the way she said it you couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement.

‘Precisely,’ said Carl. ‘So instead he gives people bird names. Dad was the mountain lark, Mum the wheatear. Uncle Bernard was the bunting because he was training to be a priest before he became a car mechanic, and the reed bunting has a white collar.’

Shannon laughed. ‘And what were you, darling?’

‘I was… what was I again?’

‘The meadow pipit,’ I said quietly.

‘I presume the meadow pipit is handsome, strong and intelligent then,’ chuckled Shannon.

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘It was because it flies higher than all the others,’ said Carl. ‘And on top of that it’s a big-mouthed big head that practises… what d’you call it again?’

‘Fluktspill,’ I said.

‘Fluktspill,’ Shannon said. ‘That’s a nice word. What does it mean?’

I sighed as though it was a lot of bother for me to explain everything. ‘It’s a sort of winnowing display. Once it’s flown as high as it can it starts to sing, so that everyone can see how high up it is. Then it floats down with wings outstretched, showing off all the tricks and acrobatics it can do.’

‘Carl to a P!’ cried Shannon.

‘To a T,’ said Carl.

‘To a T,’ she repeated.

‘But even though the meadow pipit likes to show off, it’s not an unprincipled con man,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s pretty easy to trick. That’s what makes it a favourite when the cuckoo’s looking for someone else’s nest to lay eggs in.’

‘Poor Carl!’ said Shannon, and I heard a big wet kiss. ‘Roy, what kind of bird would you say I was?’

I thought about it. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on,’ said Carl.

‘I don’t know. Hummingbird? I only really know mountain birds.’

‘I don’t want to be a hummingbird!’ Shannon protested. ‘They’re too small and they like sweet stuff. Can’t I be like the one I found. The dotterel?’

I thought of the dotterel’s white face. Dark eyes. The cap that almost looks like a crew cut.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’re the dotterel.’

‘And you, Roy, what are you?’

‘Me? I’m not anything.’

‘Everybody’s something. Come on.’

I didn’t respond.

‘Roy’s the storyteller who tells us who we are,’ said Carl. ‘So that makes him everyone and no one. He’s the mountain bird that has no name.’

‘The solitary mountain bird with no name,’ she said. ‘What kind of song does a nameless male like you sing to attract a mate?’

Carl laughed. ‘Sorry, Roy, but this one here won’t stop until you’ve revealed your entire life to her.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘A characteristic of the male mountain bird is that he doesn’t sing for the female. He thinks it’s a load of flash nonsense and anyway up here in the mountains there are no trees for him to sit in and sing. So what he does instead is build a nest to impress her.’

‘Hotels?’ she asked. ‘Or service stations?’

‘Looks like hotels work best,’ I said.

They both laughed.

‘Now let’s give the mountain thrush up there a bit of rest,’ said Carl.

They climbed out of the bunk.

‘Goodnight,’ said Carl and stroked my head.

The door closed behind them and I lay there listening.

He remembered. That once, a long time ago, I’d told him I was the mountain thrush, the ring ouzel. A shy and cautious bird that hides away among the rocks. He’d said there was no need for me to do that, there was nothing out there to be afraid of. And I had answered that I knew that, but that I was still afraid anyway.

I slept. Dreamed the same dream, as though it had just been paused and was waiting for me. When I woke to the scream of the climber getting hit by the rock I realised it was Shannon screaming. She screamed again. And again. Carl was fucking her well. Good for them. But of course, hard to sleep through a racket like that. I listened for a bit, thought she’d reached her climax, but it didn’t stop, so I put a pillow over my head. After a while I took it away again. It was quiet in there now. They were probably sleeping, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. Tossed and turned and the bed creaked as I thought about what Erik Nerell had said about the sheriff wanting to send climbers down into Huken to check the Cadillac.

And finally it came.

The raven’s second call.

And I knew that this time it warned of danger. Not some immediate danger, but a fate that was out there, waiting somewhere. That had been waiting a long time now. Patient. Never forgetting. Trouble.