The Kingdom

5

CARL. HE’S THERE IN ALMOST all my childhood memories. Carl in the lower bunk. Carl whom I crept in beside in January, when the thermometer dropped to minus fifteen, or when the other situation demanded it in some way. Carl, my kid brother, with whom I quarrelled until he sobbed with anger and lashed out at me, and with the same result every time: I got him down easily, sat astride him so his arms were pinioned, pinched his nose. When he stopped struggling and just sobbed I could feel how his weakness and his giving up irritated me. Until at last he gave me that helpless kid brother look, and I got a lump in my throat, let him up and put an arm around him and promised him something or other. But the lump in the throat and the guilty conscience were still there long after Carl had dried his tears. Once Dad had seen us fighting. He hadn’t said a word, just let us get on with it, the way those of us who live up on the mountain let nature take its brutal course without interfering, unless our own goats were involved. It ended with me and Carl sitting on the sofa, me with my arm round him, both of us tearful. He just shook his head in exasperation and left the room.

And I remember when I was twelve years old and Carl eleven, when my uncle Bernard turned fifty. He did something that, from Mum and Dad’s reaction, we realised was something really big time; he invited everyone to the city – the big city – to celebrate at the Grand Hotel. Mum said it had a swimming pool, and Carl and I were just crazy with excitement. And when we got there, it turned out there was no swimming pool, never had been, and I was pretty pissed off. But it didn’t seem to bother Carl that much, and when one of the people working there offered to show the eleven-year-old around the hotel I saw the bulge in Carl’s jacket pocket where he’d stuffed his swimming trunks. When he got back he went on about all the incredible things he’d seen, said the hotel was a bloody palace, and that one day he was going to build himself a fucking palace just like it. He said. Minus the swearing. And in the years that followed he always swore he’d had a swim in the pool at the Grand Hotel that evening.

I think that was something Carl and Mum had in common, that the dream could top the reality, the packaging beat the contents. If things weren’t exactly like you wanted them to be, then you just reimagined them until they were, and remained more or less blind to things that shouldn’t have been there. For example, Mum always used the English word ‘hall’ to refer to the passageway in our house that stank of dung and stables. The haaall – that was how she said it. She’d worked as a maid and housekeeper for a shipping family from when she was a teenager and liked things to sound English and upper class.

Dad was the opposite. He called a stable shovel a shite shovel, and he wanted everything around him to be, sound and feel American. And not big-city American but Midwest American, like Minnesota, where he had lived from the age of four until he was twelve, with the father whom we had never met. America was and remained the promised land for Dad, along with Cadillacs, the Methodist Church and the pursuit of happiness, always expressed in English. Originally he had wanted to name me Calvin, after the American president Calvin Coolidge. A Republican, naturally. Unlike his more charismatic predecessor Warren Harding – who had left in his wake a trail of scandals that all began with a c: chicks, cards, corruption and cocaine – Calvin was a hard-working man, serious, slow, taciturn and gruff, a man who, according to my father, hadn’t rushed things but climbed the career ladder one rung at a time. But Mum had protested, so they compromised on Roy, with Calvin as a middle name.

Carl had been given the middle name Abel, after Secretary of State Abel Parker Upshur, an intelligent and charming man, according to Dad, as well as a man who dreamed big. So big that he arranged the annexation of Texas to the USA in 1845 and in so doing made it in one night a much bigger country. As part of the deal Abel accepted that Texas could continue with slavery. But under the circumstances that was, according to Dad, a mere detail.

It could be that Carl and I matched pretty well the two we were named for. No one in the village – apart from maybe the old chairman Aas – knew anything about the original Calvin and Abel. They just said that I was most like Dad, and Carl most like Mum. But people down in Os don’t know what they’re talking about, they just talk.

I was ten years old the time Dad came driving home in a Cadillac DeVille. Willum Willumsen at Willumsen’s Used Car and Breaker’s Yard had boasted about this beautiful specimen the owner had imported from the USA but found he couldn’t afford the import duty and had had to sell. In other words the car, a 1979 model, had done nothing but drive along dead straight highways through bone-dry Nevada deserts, so no rust to worry about there. Dad probably nodded his head slowly. He hadn’t a clue about cars, and my own interest still lay in the future. He made the deal without even haggling over the price, and after it had to be taken back to the repair shop less than two weeks later it was obvious it had as many pirated parts and faults as any of those wrecks you see balanced on breeze blocks on the streets of Havana. In the end the repairs set him back more than the car had. The locals laughed themselves silly about it and said that was what you get for not knowing the first thing about cars, one up for Willumsen, that wily old horse-trader. But I got a new toy. No, it was more than that, it was an education. A gadget in a thousand mechanical pieces, from which I learned that if you just took the time to understand the construction, and used your brain and your fingers then it was actually possible to mend things.

I started spending more time at Uncle Bernard’s car repair shop. He allowed me to ‘help him out’, as he put it, though to begin with I was more of a hindrance than a help. And Dad taught me to box. Around that time Carl is a little hazy for me. This was before he shot up. At first it looked as though I was going to be the taller of us, and for a while back then he had some terrible pimples. He did well at school, but he was quiet, had few friends, and kept himself to himself most of the time. And once he started at secondary school and I was spending more and more time at the repair shop it was often bedtime before we saw each other.

I remember one evening talking about how much I was looking forward to turning eighteen, coming of age, getting a driving licence, and Ma shed a little tear and asked if the only thing I thought about was jumping into the car and getting away from Opgard.

And of course, looking back, it’s easy to say that would have been best. But things had already started falling apart, and I couldn’t just run off. I had to fix them. Repair them. Anyway: where would I go?

Then came the day Mum and Dad died, and Carl is back in all of those memory-pictures. I was almost eighteen, him not yet seventeen. Him and me sit watching as the Cadillac heads away from the yard and down in the direction of Geitesvingen. Even now it’s still like a film I can watch and discover new details in every time.

Two tons of machinery from the General Motors factory, rolling along and gradually gathering speed. Now it’s so far away from me I can no longer hear the gravel crunch beneath the tyres. Silence, silence and the red rear lights. I can feel my heart beating, the speed increasing there too. Another twenty metres to Geitesvingen. The Highways Maintenance Department had been on the point of erecting a crash barrier when the council discovered that the last hundred metres up to the farm were private road and Opgard’s responsibility. Ten metres to go. The brake lights – like two bars, two hyphens running between the lid of the boot and the shiny bumper bar – lit up for a moment. Then they were gone. Everything was gone.

6

‘NOW LET’S SEE, ROY. YOU were standing outside the house on the evening of the accident at half past…’ Sheriff Sigmund Olsen sat with his head bent as he looked through the documents. His thick mane of blond hair made me think of the mop in the gym at school. The hair hanging down was the same length at the front, the sides and the back. He had one of those thick walrus moustaches too, probably had the mop and the moustache ever since the seventies. Because he could. There wasn’t a trace of baldness on his bent head. ‘…seven. And you saw your parents go over the edge?’

I nodded.

‘And you say you saw the brake lights go on?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re sure it wasn’t just the rear lights? You know they’re both red?’

‘The brake lights are brighter.’

He looked up at me quickly.

‘You’ll soon be eighteen, right?’

I nodded again. Maybe it was in his papers, maybe he remembered I’d been a class ahead of his son Kurt at junior school.

‘Secondary school?’

‘I work at my uncle’s car repair shop.’

The sheriff bent over the desk again. ‘Good, then you’ll understand why we think it’s odd we didn’t find any skid marks. And even if the blood test shows your Dad had had a drink, it was hardly enough for him to forget about the bend, or put his foot down on the wrong pedal, or fall asleep at the wheel.’

I said nothing. He’d dispensed with three possible explanations in one blow. And I didn’t have a fourth to offer.

‘Carl told us you were going to visit your uncle Bernard Opgard at the hospital. That’s who you work for?’

‘Yes.’

‘But we’ve talked to Bernard, and he says he never heard about any planned visit. Did your parents usually make unannounced visits?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘And not announced ones either.’

The sheriff nodded slowly. Again he studied his papers. Seemed like that’s what he was most comfortable doing. ‘Was your father depressed, do you think?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘You sure? Other people we’ve talked to thought he seemed very down.’

‘You want me to say he was depressed?’

Olsen raised his eyes again. ‘Now what do you mean by that, Roy?’

‘That maybe that would make the case simpler. If you can say he killed himself and my mum.’

‘Why do you think that makes it simpler?’

‘No one liked him.’

‘That’s not true, Roy.’

I shrugged. ‘OK then, I’m sure he was depressed. He spent a lot of time alone. Sat most of the time inside the house and didn’t talk much there either. Drank beer. That’s what depressed people do.’

‘People who suffer from depression can be very clever at hiding it.’ Sheriff Olsen’s gaze worked to hold mine, and once he’d managed it, he had a job keeping it steady. ‘Did your father ever say anything about… about not liking being alive?’

Not liking being alive. Once he’d said the words, it was as though Sigmund Olsen had got over the worst of it. His gaze rested calmly on me.

‘Who the hell likes being alive?’ I asked.

For a moment Olsen looked shocked. He put his head on one side and his long hippy hair dangled down on his shoulder. Maybe it was a mop. I knew that hidden behind the desk he had an enormous belt buckle with a white buffalo skull on it and a pair of snakeskin boots. We dress ourselves in death.

‘Why live if you don’t like it, Roy?’

‘Isn’t it obvious?’

‘Is it?’

‘Because being dead may be even worse.’

My eighteenth birthday was just around the corner, but according to the stupid rules Carl and I still needed a guardian. The county governor appointed my uncle Bernard as our guardian. Two women from the social services in Notodden came and checked Uncle Bernard’s set-up and evidently found everything adequate. Bernard showed them the bedroom we had been given and promised to have regular discussions with the school about how Carl was doing.

Once the social services women had gone I asked Uncle Bernard if it was OK if Carl and I spent a couple of nights up at Opgard, there was so much damn noise from the main road outside the bedroom window down here in the village.

Bernard said it was OK and gave us a big pot of lapskaus to take with us.

And after that we never moved back down again, although officially our address was with Uncle Bernard. That didn’t mean he didn’t look out for us, and the money he got from the state as guardian he gave straight to us.

A couple of years later, quite a while after what I began to think of as the Fritz night, Uncle Bernard was admitted to hospital again. It turned out the cancer had spread. I sat sobbing beside his bed as he told me.

‘You know there’s not long to go when the vultures move into your house without asking,’ he said.

Meaning his daughter and her husband.

Uncle Bernard always said she’d never done him any harm, he just didn’t like her much, but I knew who he was thinking of when he explained to me what a wrecker was. People who lit fake flares for ships in the night, and plundered them once they’d run aground.

She visited him at the hospital twice. Once to find out how long he had left, and the second time to pick up the key to the house.

Uncle Bernard lay a hand on my shoulder and told one of those old soppy Volkswagen jokes, probably trying to make me laugh.

‘You’re going to die!’ I shouted out. I was pretty angry.

‘You too,’ he said. ‘And this is the right order for dying in. Right?’

‘But how can you lie here and tell jokes?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘when you’re up to your neck in shit, the thing to remember is to keep your head up.’

And then I just couldn’t help laughing anyway.

‘I’ve got a last request,’ he said.

‘A smoke?’

‘That too. The other is that you take the theory exam as a working apprentice this autumn.’

‘Already? Don’t I need five years’ practical?’

‘You’ve got five years’ practical. With all the overtime you’ve put in.’

‘But that doesn’t count—’

‘It counts for me. I would never let an unqualified mechanic take the theory exam, you know that. But you’re the best mechanic I’ve got. So for that reason there’s documentation in that envelope on the table there that says you’ve worked for me for five years. Never mind the dates on it. Is that clear?’

‘Clear as muck,’ I said.

It was a joke we shared. A mechanic who worked for Uncle Bernard didn’t understand the expression but used it all the time, and Bernard never corrected him. That was the last time I heard Uncle Bernard laugh.

By the time I had passed the theory exam, and the practical exam a few months later, Uncle Bernard was already in a coma. And after his daughter told the doctors to turn off the life-support machine that was keeping him alive, in effect it was me, a lad of twenty-one, who ran the car repair shop. All the same it came as a shock… no, that’s too strong, it came as a surprise when his will was read out and it turned out Uncle Bernard had left the business to me.

His daughter protested, naturally, claiming that during the hours when I’d been sitting with her poor father I’d been manipulating him. I said I couldn’t be bothered arguing, that Uncle Bernard hadn’t given me the repair shop to make me rich but so that it would stay in the family. So if she wanted, I’d buy the place from her at her asking price, that way at least his wishes would be respected. So she named her price. I told her that we Opgard people never haggled, but that the price was more than I could afford, and that it was way out of proportion to the income from the repair shop.

She put the business on the open market, got no buyers though she lowered the price again and again, and in the end came back to me. I paid what I’d offered in the beginning, she signed the contract and marched furiously out of the workshop as though she was the one who had been cheated.

I ran the business as best I could. Which isn’t saying much, since I didn’t have the experience or the market trend with me. But didn’t do too badly either, since the other repair shops in the area began closing down and the work came to me. Enough of it for me to keep Markus on part-time. But when I sat down in the evenings and went through the accounts with Carl – who was doing a business course and knew the difference between debit and credit – it was obvious that the two petrol pumps out front of the greasing station were bringing in more than the repair shop.

‘The Public Roads Administration people were here checking,’ I said. ‘If I’m to keep my licence we need to upgrade the equipment.’

‘How much?’ asked Carl.

‘Two hundred thousand. Maybe more.’

‘You’re not going to get that here.’

‘I know that. So what do we do?’

I said ‘we’ because the workshop was keeping us both. And asked Carl, even though I knew the answer, because I preferred it to be him who said it out loud.

‘Sell the repair shop and keep the pumps,’ said Carl.

I rubbed the back of my neck where Grete Smitt had used the shaver and felt the prickling of the stubble on my fingertips. A crew cut, she called it. Not the fashion, but a classic, meaning that when I looked at photos ten years from now I wouldn’t squirm with embarrassment. Afterwards people said that I looked more like my father than ever, the very image of him, and I hated it, because I knew they were right.

‘I know you prefer fixing cars to filling them,’ said Carl after a long silence, during which I neither nodded nor spat.

‘That’s OK. There’s less and less fixing to do anyway,’ I said. ‘They don’t make cars like they used to anyway, and most of the jobs we get an idiot could do. You don’t need a feeling for the job nowadays.’ I was twenty-one and sounded like a sixty-year-old.

The following day Willum Willumsen came up and looked over the repair shop. Willumsen was a naturally fat man. In the first place, the proportions required it, so much for the stomach, so much for the thighs and chin, for the whole thing to balance out and make the complete man. In the second, he walked, talked and gesticulated like a fat man, though I’m not sure exactly how to explain that. But OK, let me try: Willumsen waddled around with his feet splayed out, like a duck. He spoke in a loud and uninhibited voice, and illustrated what he was saying with expansive gestures and grimaces. In sum: Willumsen took up a lot of room. And in the third place: he smoked cigars. Unless your name is Clint Eastwood, you can’t be fat and hope to be taken seriously as a cigar smoker. Even Winston Churchill and Orson Welles would have had a hard time doing that. Willumsen sold used cars and stripped those he couldn’t fool anyone into buying. Now and then I bought parts from him. He sold other second-hand stuff as well, and rumour had it that if you were trying to get rid of stolen goods then Willumsen might be the man to approach. Same thing if you needed a quick loan but didn’t enjoy the confidence of your bank. But God help you if you didn’t make the payments on time. Then he had a Danish enforcer come up from Jutland with a pair of pliers and other tools of the trade that would soon persuade you to pay what you owed even if it meant robbing your own mother. As it happens no one had ever actually seen this enforcer, but the rumour had really taken off in our imaginations as young kids when we one day saw a white Jaguar E-Type with Danish plates parked outside Willumsen’s Used Car and Breaker’s Yard. The Danish enforcer’s white car. That was all we needed.

Willumsen went through all the gear, the tools, anything that could be screwed down or taken apart before making his offer.

‘That’s not much,’ I said. ‘You know enough about the business to know that this is all top-quality gear.’

‘You said it yourself, Roy. The equipment needs to be upgraded to keep the accreditation.’

‘But you won’t be running an authorised repair shop, Willumsen. All you’ll be doing is just enough repairs so those wrecks you sell will keep running for a week after you’ve sold them.’

Willumsen gave a hearty laugh. ‘I’m not pricing the stuff on what it’s worth to you, Roy Opgard, I’m pricing it on what it’s not worth to you.’

I was learning something new every day.

‘On one condition,’ I said. ‘You take Markus as part of the deal.’

‘Part of the deal as the troll that comes with the barn? Come on, that Markus is more of a troll than a mechanic.’

‘That’s the deal, Willumsen.’

‘Really don’t know if I can use a little troll like Markus, Roy. National insurance. Social outlays.’

‘Yeah yeah, I know all that. But Markus will make certain the cars you sell aren’t actually a danger to traffic. Which is more than you do.’

Willumsen plucked at the lowest of his chins and looked as if he was working out the cost. He looked at me with one of his big octopus eyes and then offered an even lower price.

I couldn’t stand it any more. Said OK and Willumsen straight away held out his hand, probably to make sure I wouldn’t change my mind. I looked at those five spread, small grey-white fingers, like a latex glove filled with water. Shuddered as I took it.

‘I’ll be over tomorrow to pick it all up,’ said Willumsen.

Willumsen sacked Markus after three months, in the middle of his trial period so he didn’t have to give Markus paid notice. He told Markus it was because he’d been turning up late, been given a warning, and then turned up late again.

‘And is that right?’ I had asked Markus when he came to me looking for a job at what was now my one-man service station, the place where I was spending twelve hours every working day.

‘Yes,’ said Markus. ‘Ten minutes in September. And four minutes in November.’

So with that there were three guys living off two petrol pumps. I’d installed a dispensing machine with soft drinks and snacks in the old repair shop, but for the locals the Co-op was nearer and had more choice.

‘It’s not going to work,’ said Carl, pointing to the balance sheet we had drawn up together.

‘Further up the valley they’re selling cabins on three new sites,’ I said. ‘Just wait for the winter – we’ll have all the new cabin owners driving past here.’

Carl sighed. ‘You’re a hell of an obstinate bugger.’

One day an SUV pulled up in the forecourt. Two guys got out and wandered off round the repair shop building and the car wash as though looking for something.

‘If you’re looking for the toilet, it’s in here,’ I called out.

They walked over to me, each gave me his card, from which I learned that they were from what was definitely the biggest chain of service stations in the country, and asked if we could have that talk. I asked ‘What talk?’, and then realised Carl must have been in touch with them. They said they were impressed by how much I had got out of so little, and explained how much I could get with just a little bit more.

‘Franchise agreement,’ they said. ‘Ten years.’

They had also heard about the massive investment in new cabins further up the valley and the traffic prognosis for our main road.

‘What did you say to them?’ asked Carl excitedly when I got home.

‘I said thanks,’ I answered, and slumped down at the kitchen table. Carl had heated up some meatballs.

‘Thanks?’ said Carl. ‘As in…’ He read my face as I tucked in. ‘As in no thanks? What the fuck, Roy!’

‘They wanted to buy everything,’ I said. ‘The buildings, the land. Lots of money, of course, but I guess I like owning it. Must be the farmer in me.’

‘But for chrissakes, it’s all we can do just to keep our heads above water here.’

‘You should’ve told me they were coming.’

‘You would have said no even before hearing what they had to say.’

‘That’s probably true.’

Carl groaned and put his head in his hands. Stayed like that for a while. Sighed. ‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘I shouldn’t get involved. Sorry. I was only trying to help.’

‘I know that. Thanks.’

He opened the fingers of one hand and looked at me through one eye. ‘So you got nothing out of the visit at all?’

‘Sure did.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘They had a long drive back, so they had to fill up the tank.’

7

EVEN THOUGH DAD HAD TAUGHT me a bit of boxing, I don’t really know if I was that good a fighter.

There was a dance at Årtun. Same band as usual, all in tight-fitting white suits, playing hits from Sweden. The vocalist, a skinny guy everyone called Rod because his ambition was to sound like Rod Stewart and score as many girls, got things going, howling away in a mixture of Norwegian and Swedish that made him sound like Armand, the travelling preacher who passed through the village now and then preaching about the great wave of awakening that was breaking over the land, and how it was good, because the Day of Judgement was nigh. If he’d been in Årtun that evening the preacher would have realised there was quite a bit of work still to do. People of all ages and both sexes, off their heads on home brew that would have been confiscated if they tried to take it inside, staggering around on the grass in front of the village hall, couples propping each other up as Rod sang about those golden-brown eyes. Until they too had had enough and spilled out onto the grass for another swig or else to copulate among the birch trees, puke or take a crap. Some didn’t even bother to head for the trees. People talked about the time our very own Rod invited a diehard female fan up onstage to join him in singing one of the band’s own compositions, ‘Are You Thinking of Me Tonight’. It was so like Eric Clapton’s ‘Wonderful Tonight’ that it was a miracle he was able to keep a straight face. After two verses he got the guitarist to play an extra-long solo, disappeared into the wings with the girl and the microphone, and when it was time for the third verse it came somewhat breathlessly from offstage. Halfway through the verse Rod came strutting out again, alone this time, winked at a couple of girls in front of the stage and, noticing the horrified looks on their faces, glanced down and saw the smeared blood on his white trousers. He sang the last verse, put the microphone back in the stand, and with a sigh and a smile and a ‘well well well…’ counted in the next number.

Long, light summer nights. As a rule the fighting didn’t start before ten o’clock. Two boys, and the cause was almost always a girl. A girl somebody had spoken to, or danced with a bit too often, or a bit too closely. Maybe the story started way before that particular Saturday evening at Årtun, but it was now, fuelled by alcohol and urged on by spectators, that the thing came to a head. Sometimes the girl was just a handy excuse for boys who wanted to fight, and there were plenty of those. Guys who thought they were good at fighting and maybe not much else, and who used the dances at Årtun as their stage.

And of course there were other times when the jealousy was real. This was usually the case whenever Carl was involved, though he himself was never the one who started a fight. The new Carl was too disarming for that, too charming, and too little of a benchmark for the hard cases to bother with. Those who attacked Carl did so in the heat of the moment. Sometimes Carl hadn’t even done anything, just made the girls laugh, been a bit more romantic than their own beaux could manage, had some girl’s eyes meet his own blue gaze but done nothing about it. Because Carl had a girlfriend, the council chairman’s daughter no less. He shouldn’t have been a threat, but things probably looked different through the fog of whisky, and they wanted to teach the silver-tongued lover boy a lesson. They started swinging, got even more provoked by Carl’s genuine and almost patronising surprise when the first punch landed, and wound up even more by the way he wouldn’t defend himself.

Which is where I came in.

I think my talent lay more in disarming people, in stopping them from doing damage, the same way you disarm bombs. I’m practical. I understand how things function. Maybe that’s why. Understood the centre of gravity, mass, speed, stuff like that. So I did what was necessary to stop those who were trying to beat up my little brother. What was necessary, no more and no less. But of course, more was sometimes necessary. A nose broken, the occasional rib, and at least one jaw. That was an out-of-town guy who had punched Carl hard on the nose.

I was there quick. I remember the bleeding knuckles, the blood on my shirtsleeves, and someone saying: ‘That’s enough now, Roy.’

But no, it wasn’t enough. One more punch of that bloody face below me. One more punch and the problem would be permanently solved.

‘The sheriff’s coming, Roy.’

I lean down and whisper into the ear with blood running down both sides of it.

‘You don’t touch my brother again, understand?’

A glassy-eyed stare, emptied by drink and pain, is fastened on me, but staring inwards. I raise my arm. The head below me nods. I stand up, dust off my clothes, walk over to the Volvo 240 with its engine running and the driver’s door open. Carl is already stretched out in the back seat.

‘Don’t get any blood on my fucking seat covers,’ I say as I release the clutch and accelerate so hard bits of the lawn fly up in the air around us.

‘Roy,’ says a groggy voice once we’re through the first few corners on the drive up the mountain.

‘No,’ I said. ‘I won’t say anything to Mari.’

‘That’s not it.’

‘You gonna be sick?’

‘No. I want to tell you something.’

‘Why not try instead to—’

‘I love you, bro.’

‘Carl, don’t—’

‘Yes! I’m a fool and an idiot, but you, you don’t let that bother you, you come along and you bail me out every time.’ Tearful now. ‘Roy, listen… you’re all I’ve got.’

I look at the bloodied fist holding the wheel. I’m wide awake and the blood is pounding pleasurably through my body. I could have hit him one last time. The guy on the ground beneath me was just a jealous nobody, a loser, it really wouldn’t have been necessary. But Jesus, how I had wanted to.

It turned out that the guy whose jaw I broke had a reputation for turning up at parties where people didn’t know how good he was at fighting, provoking someone and then giving them a good kicking. After I heard about the jaw I was expecting a summons, but it never came. Or rather, I heard the guy had gone to the sheriff, and the sheriff advised him to drop it since Carl had suffered a broken rib, which was actually not true. Afterwards I realised that jaw had been a good investment. It gave me a reputation, so that it was often enough for me just to square up to someone if Carl got in trouble and they would back off.

‘Shit,’ Carl snuffles, choked up and drunk, as we lie in our beds afterwards. ‘I’m just a peaceful guy. Make the girls laugh. But the guys get all pissed off, and then you come along and sort it all out for your brother, and I’ve made you a lot of new enemies. Shit.’ He snuffled again. ‘Sorry.’ He hits the planks under my mattress. ‘You hear? I’m sorry.’

‘They’re idiots,’ I say. ‘Go to sleep now.’

‘Sorry!’

‘I said sleep.’

‘Yeah yeah, OK. But, Roy…’

‘Mm.’

‘Thanks. Thanks for… for…’

‘Just shut up, all right?’

‘…for being my brother. Goodnight.’

Silence. Then, the steady breathing of the one in the bunk bed below me. Safe. Nothing is as good as the sound of a little brother who is safe.

But at the party that led to Carl leaving town, and leaving me, not a single blow was struck. Carl had been drunk, Rod had been hoarse, and Mari had gone home. Had he and Mari quarrelled? Maybe. Mari being the chairman’s daughter it was probably not surprising she was more concerned with appearances than Carl was, but she was maybe tired of Carl always drinking too much at parties. Or perhaps Mari had to get up early, go to church with her parents, or study for her exams. No, she wasn’t that prim and proper. Decent yes, but not prim and proper. She just didn’t like looking out for Carl when he was pissed, and gave that job instead to her best friend Grete, who was a little too happy to do it. You would need to be pretty short-sighted not to see that Grete was in love with Carl, but of course it was quite possible Mari hadn’t noticed, and she certainly never saw what was coming. That Grete – having supported Carl out on the dance floor as Rod ended the evening as usual with ‘Love Me Tender’ – had dragged Carl up into the birch trees. They’d had it away standing up against a tree trunk. He hadn’t really known what was going on, he said, and only woke up at the sound of her down jacket scraping up and down against the bark. A sound that abruptly ceased when the cloth gave way and feathers like miniature angels were floating in the air around them. That’s how he referred to them. As miniature angels. In the silence he realised that Grete herself hadn’t made a single sound, either because she didn’t want to break the spell or because she wasn’t getting too much out of it. So that’s when he stopped.

‘I said I’d buy her a new jacket,’ said Carl from the lower bunk next morning. ‘But she said it was OK, she could repair it. Then I asked…’ Carl groaned. His boozy breath hung in the air. ‘I asked if she wanted me to help her with the sewing.’

I had laughed until I was crying in the top bunk and heard him pull the duvet over his head. Leaned out:

‘So what you gonna do now, Don Juan?’

‘Don’t know,’ from beneath the duvet.

‘Anyone see you?’

No one had seen them. At any rate, a week passed and we hadn’t heard any village gossip about Grete and Carl. Neither had Mari, apparently. It was beginning to look as though Carl was home free.

Until later in the day when Grete came visiting. Carl and me were sitting in the winter garden and saw her coming round Geitesvingen on her bicycle.

‘Shit,’ said Carl.

‘She’s probably looking for her climbing jacket,’ I said. ‘Meaning you.’

Carl pleaded with me and in the end I went out and said Carl had a terrible cold. Very contagious. Grete had stared at me, almost like she was taking aim, along her enormous sweaty, shiny nose. Then she’d turned and left. Back at the bike she’d put on the down jacket she had fastened to the carrier. The stitches were like a scar running down the back of it.

She came back the following day. Carl opened the door and before he could say anything she told him she loved him. And he replied that it was a mistake. That he’d done something really stupid. That he regretted it.

The next day Mari phoned and said Grete had told her everything and that she couldn’t be with someone who was unfaithful to her. Carl told me afterwards that Mari had cried, but otherwise been calm, and that he couldn’t figure it out. Not that Mari had broken up with him, but that Grete had told her what had happened up in the birch trees. He could understand that Grete was pissed off with him, about the jacket and everything. Revenge. Fair enough. But to lose the only friend she had into the bargain, wasn’t that like shooting yourself in the foot, as people say?

I didn’t have much to say about that, but thought of that story Uncle Bernard had told about the wreckers, those people in the old days of sailing ships who gave false signals to sailors and lured them onto underwater reefs so that they could plunder the wrecks. That was when I began to think of Grete as an underwater reef. Lying there, invisible, just waiting for the chance to rip open a hull. In a way I felt sorry for her, caught up in the passion of her own feelings, but she had betrayed Mari every bit as much as Carl had. I sensed something in that woman that Carl hadn’t seen. A hidden wickedness. That the pain you get from ruining things for yourself is less than the joy it brings to drag others down with you. The psychology of mass shootings in schools. The difference here being that this particular school shooter was still alive. Or at least still existing. To burn people up. Cut off their hair.

A few weeks later Mari suddenly moved from Os to the city. Although she claimed that had been the plan all along, to go there to study.

And a few weeks after that – just as unexpectedly – Carl revealed that he had been granted a scholarship to study finance and business administration in Minnesota, USA.

‘Well, it’s obvious, you can’t turn that down,’ I said and swallowed.

‘I guess maybe I can’t,’ he said, as though doubtful. But of course, he couldn’t fool me, I realised he had made up his mind a long time ago.

The next few days were busy. I had plenty to keep me going at the service station, and he was fully preoccupied getting ready to leave, so we didn’t have much time to talk it over. I took him to the airport, a drive of several hours, but strangely enough we didn’t talk much about it then either. It poured with rain and the sound of the windscreen wipers camouflaged the silence.

When we stopped outside the Departures entrance and I turned off the engine I had to cough to get my voice going again. ‘Are you coming back?’

‘What? Of course,’ he lied with a warm, beaming smile and put his arms around me.

The rain kept on all the way back to Os.

It was dark by the time I parked in the yard and went back to the ghosts inside the house.

8

CARL WAS HOME AGAIN. IT was Friday evening and I was alone at the service station. Alone with my thoughts, as people say.

When Carl left for the USA I had thought that of course it was to make use of his good exam results from school and his talents, and to get out of this dump, broaden his horizons. I had also thought that it was as much about getting away from the memories, the shadows that lay so heavy and oppressive over Opgard. Only now, now that he was back, did it occur to me that it might have had something to do with Mari Aas.

She’d dumped Carl because he’d had it away with her best friend, but wasn’t there just the faintest possibility that it had given her the chance to get out too? She was aiming higher, after all, than a country boy, an Opgard. Her choice of husband seemed to confirm that. Mari and Dan Krane had met each other at university in Oslo. Both were active members of the Labour Party, and he came from an extremely comfortable home in the city’s west end. Dan got the job as editor of the Os Daily. He and Mari had two kids now and extended their place until it was bigger than the main house where Mari’s parents lived. She’d silenced that gleefully malicious gossip about her apparently not being good enough for Carl Opgard. She’d had her revenge, and more besides.

Whereas Carl’s problem remained: how to regain his lost sense of honour and his local prestige? Was that what the homecoming was all about? To show off his trophy wife, his Cadillac, to build a hotel bigger than anyone around here had ever seen?

Because it really was an insane and almost desperate project. In the first place because of his insistence that the hotel be built above the treeline, which meant several kilometres of road had to be built. Solely so that it wouldn’t be a lie when they advertised it as a ‘mountaintop hotel’, the way other hotels below the treeline so blithely did. And in the second place: who heads for the mountains to sit in a steam-bath and bathe in piss-warm water? Isn’t that the kind of thing people in the cities and towns down below do?

And in the third place: he would never manage to persuade a handful of farmers to risk their farms and land for a castle in the air – how the hell do you do that in a place where scepticism towards anything new from the outside – unless it’s a Ford car or a Schwarzenegger film – is something you ingest with your mother’s milk, as people say?

And finally there was, of course, the question of his motives. Carl said it was to build a spa and mountaintop hotel resort that would put the village on the map and rescue it from a slow and silent death.

But wouldn’t people here see through that? Realise that what he really wanted was to put himself – Carl Opgard – on a pedestal? Because that’s why people like Carl return home, people who have made it out in the big wide world, while back in their old home town they’re still just the randy bastard who got dumped by the chairman’s daughter and ran off. There’s nothing like being acknowledged in your own home town, the place where you think everyone misunderstood you, and at the same time the place where you are understood in such a consuming and liberating way. ‘I know you,’ as they would say, half threatening, half comforting, meaning that they know who you really are. That you can’t always hide behind lies and appearances.

My gaze traced the main road in towards the square.

Transparency. That’s the curse and the glory of all little villages. Sooner or later, everything will be revealed. Everything. That was a risk Carl was willing to take for the chance of getting his statue in the square, the sort of posterity that is usually reserved for chairmen, preachers and dance-band singers.

My thoughts were interrupted as the door opened and Julie came in.

‘Are you working nights now?’ she asked loudly, rolling her eyes, overdoing the surprise. Chewed hard on her gum, swaying from one foot to the other. She was dressed up a bit, short jacket on top of a tight-fitting T-shirt, arms folded, more make-up than she usually wore. She hadn’t expected me to be there, and it made her self-conscious to realise I was seeing her in this particular role – a babe, out on a Friday night with her boy racer crowd. It was all OK by me, evidently not so OK for her.

‘Egil’s not well,’ I said.

‘Then you should ring one of the others,’ she said. ‘Me for example. You’re not supposed to be the one who—’

‘Short notice,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. What can I get you, Julie?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, adding a full stop by bursting a gum bubble. ‘Just called in to say hi to Egil.’

‘OK, I’ll give him the message, tell him you were here.’

She looked at me, chewed. Her eyes were glazed. She’d regained her composure, superficially at least, and now she was Julie the tough girl again.

‘What did you used to do Friday nights when you were kids, Roy?’ She slurred her words slightly and it occurred to me she’d had a drop out in one of the cars.

‘Dance,’ I said.

She opened her eyes wide. ‘You danced?’

‘That’s one way of describing it.’

Outside a car engine revved. Like the growling of some nocturnal beast of prey. Or a mating call. Julie glanced over her shoulder towards the door with a look of pretended irritation. Then she turned her back to the till, put her hands onto the counter behind her so that the short jacket rode up, took a breath and jumped, sliding her arse up onto the counter.

‘Did you get a lot of girls, Roy?’

‘No,’ I said, and checked the security cameras by the pumps. When I tell people that every weekend at least one motorist a day fills up with petrol and drives off without paying they’re shocked and say those cabin owners are a bunch of thieves. I say on the contrary, it’s because the cabin owners are rich and don’t think about money. That nine times out of ten when we send reminders to the address we get from the number plates they pay up in full and with a note of genuine apology saying that they quite simply forgot. Because they had never, like Dad, Carl and me, stood and watched the counters while filling up a Cadillac, seen those hundreds of kroner flashing by and along with them all the other things they could have bought with the money: CDs, a new pair of trousers, that road trip across the USA their father had always talked about.

‘Why not?’ said Julie. ‘I mean, you’re really hot, you know?’ She giggled.

‘Probably wasn’t back then, I guess,’ I said.

‘And what about now? How come you don’t have a girlfriend?’

‘I did have,’ I said as I finished washing off the food trays. Business had been good, but now the weekend visitors were all up at their cabins and we wouldn’t be seeing them again until they headed home. ‘Got married when we were nineteen. But she drowned on our honeymoon.’

‘Eh?’ exclaimed Julie, even though she knew I was making it up.

‘Tumbled overboard from my sailing boat in the Pacific. Bit too much champagne probably. Gurgled that she loved me and then down she went.’

‘Didn’t you dive in after her?’

‘A sailing boat like that moves faster than you can swim. We would both have drowned.’

‘But all the same. You did love her.’

‘Yes, so I threw her a lifebuoy.’

‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’ Julie sat leaning forward, the palms of her hands on the counter. ‘But could you still go on living, after you lost her?’

‘It’s amazing what we can manage without, Julie. Just wait and see.’

‘No,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I’m not going to wait and see. I’m going to get everything I want.’

‘OK. And what do you want?’

The question came automatically. Lazy and unfocused, I had just batted the ball back across the net. I could have bitten off my tongue when I saw that veiled gaze fasten on mine, and that flushed grin.

‘Then I guess you watch a lot of porn. Since your dream girl drowned. Seeing she was nineteen, do you search for Nineteen? With big boobs?’

I took too long to come back at her, and realised of course that she took this to mean she’d hit the nail on the head. It left me fumbling even more for my words. The conversation had already left the rails. She was seventeen, I was the boss she had persuaded herself she wanted, and now here she was a little tipsy, a bit too bold, playing a game she thought she could control because it worked with the boys sitting out there in their cars waiting for her. I could have said all this to her and salvaged my own pride, but that would have been kicking a champagne-tipsy teenager off my sailing boat. So instead I looked for the lifebuoy, hers and mine.

The lifebuoy arrived in the form of the door opening. Julie at once slid down from the counter.

A man stood in the doorway. I couldn’t immediately place him, but no car had pulled in to the forecourt so he had to be a local. His back was stooped, and the hollow cheeks gave his face the shape of an hourglass. A few wisps of hair across his otherwise bald head.

He stopped there in the doorway. Stared at me, looked as though most of all he wanted to turn and leave. Maybe it was somebody I’d once beaten up on the grass outside Årtun, somebody I’d made my mark on, somebody who hadn’t forgotten. He crossed hesitantly to the rack of CDs. Flipped through them, now and then glancing over at us.

‘Who’s that?’ I whispered.

‘Natalie Moe’s dad,’ whispered Julie.

The roofer. Of course. He’d changed. Looked a bit reduced, as people say. Maybe he was sick. He reminded me of my uncle Bernard, near the end.

Moe approached us and put a CD on the counter. Roger Whittaker’s Greatest Hits. Bargain-basement price. He looked a little sheepish, as though he wasn’t proud of his own taste.

‘Thirty kroner,’ I said. ‘Card or…’

‘Cash,’ Moe said. ‘Isn’t Egil working today?’

‘Not well,’ I said. ‘Anything else I can get you?’

Moe hesitated. ‘No,’ he said, took his change, picked up the CD and left.

‘Jesus,’ said Julie and pulled herself up onto the counter again.

‘Jesus what?’

‘Didn’t you see? He pretended not to know me.’

‘All I noticed was that he seemed stressed, and it sounded like he wished it had been Egil here. Whatever it was he wanted to buy from him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No one leaves their house and comes here on a Friday night because all of a sudden the most important thing in the world is to hear Roger Whittaker. It wasn’t the choice of music he was embarrassed about, he just chose the cheapest one.’

‘Then he probably wanted condoms and chickened out.’ She laughed. She made it sound as though she’d been there herself. ‘He’s probably having a fling with someone. It’s in the family.’

‘Give over,’ I said.

‘Or else some antidepressants because he’s gone bankrupt. Didn’t you see him staring at the pills on the shelf behind you?’

‘You mean he thinks we might have something stronger than headache pills? I didn’t know he’d gone bankrupt.’

‘Jesus, Roy, I mean, you don’t talk to people, so of course they don’t tell you anything, either.’

‘Maybe so. Aren’t you off out to celebrate your youth this evening?’

‘Youth!’ she snorted, and went on sitting. Looked like she was racking her brain for an excuse to stay. A gum bubble oozed out in front of her face. Burst like a starting pistol. ‘Simon says the hotel looks like a factory. He says no one will invest in it.’

Simon Nergard was Julie’s uncle. I knew for sure I’d left my mark on him. He was a rough type, in the year above me, and he’d taken boxing lessons, even fought a couple of bouts in town. Carl danced with a girl Simon fancied, and that was enough. A crowd had gathered round where Simon was holding Carl by the scruff of his neck when I arrived and asked what the trouble was. I’d wrapped a scarf around my fist and swung at him as he opened his mouth to answer. Felt the soft pressure of teeth giving way. Simon staggered, spat blood and stared at me, amazed rather than afraid. Guys that train for martial arts think there are rules, so that’s why they lose. But give Simon his due, he didn’t give up. He started skipping about in front of me, fists raised in a guard in front of his chin. I kicked him in the knee, and he stopped the skipping. I kicked him in the thigh and saw his eyes widen with shock at the effect. He’d probably never considered what happens when muscles as big as that start to bleed internally. He couldn’t move any more, just stood there and waited to be slaughtered, like a platoon surrounded but determined to fight to the last man. But I didn’t even leave him the dubious honour of a getting a real thrashing. Instead I turned my back, looked at my watch and – as though I had an appointment and plenty of time left to keep it – sauntered off. The crowd urged Simon to get after me, they didn’t know what I knew, that Simon wasn’t capable of taking a single step. So instead they began shouting at him, mocking and ridiculing him, and that, and not those two, overly white teeth the dentist put in, that was the mark I left on Simon that night.

‘So your uncle thinks he’s seen the drawings?’

‘He knows someone who works at the bank in town who’s seen them. He says it looks like a cellulose factory.’

‘Cellulose,’ I said. ‘Above the treeline. That’s interesting.’

‘Eh?’

Outside an engine roared and another one responded.

‘The testosterone boys are calling you,’ I said. ‘Watch the carbon emissions drop once you go out and join them.’

Julie groaned. ‘They’re so childish, Roy.’

‘Then go home instead and listen to this,’ I said and handed her one of the five copies of J. J. Cale’s Naturally which I’d finally had to remove from the CD rack. I’d ordered them specially, convinced that people in the village were bound to go for Cale’s subdued blues and minimalist guitar solos. But Julie was right, I didn’t talk to people, didn’t know them. She took the CD, slipped sulkily down off the counter and walked towards the door, gave me the finger at the same time as she wiggled her arse in outrageous invitation, with all the cold and calculating innocence only a seventeen-year-old can muster.

A thought struck me – not quite sure why – that in fact it was probably slightly less innocent than the sixteen-year-old she’d been when she first started working here. What the fuck was the matter with me? I’d never thought of Julie that way before, not ever. Or had I? No. It must have been when she put her arms out behind her to hoist herself up onto the counter, the way her jacket fell open, out past her breasts, with the nipples pressing, clearly visible through the bra and the T-shirt. But for chrissakes, the girl had had big boobs since she was thirteen years old and I’d never given them a second thought, so what was this now? I wasn’t a tit man or hot for teenage girls either, I never searched for either big boobs or nineteen.

And that wasn’t the only mystery.

There was that shameful expression on the face. Not Julie’s, when she thought I’d caught her out in her Friday version with the boy racer crowd. No. The roofer’s face. Moe’s gaze flitting about like a moth. Trying to avoid mine. Julie said it had been dancing over the shelves behind me. I turned and scanned them. A suspicion crossed my mind, I dismissed it at once. But it returned, like that white dot tennis ball thing Carl and I played with that time when the village got its first and only slot machine, next to the ice-cream dispenser at the coffee bar. Dad used to drive us there, we’d wait in line, and he’d have a look on his face as though he’d taken us to Disneyland.

I had seen that shame before. At home. In a mirror. I recognised it. It couldn’t be more profound. Not just because the sin committed was so despicable and unforgivable, but because it would be committed again. Despite the fact that your mirror swears to you this is the last time, it happens, over and over again. Shame at the act, but more than that, shame at one’s own weakness, at doing what you don’t want to do. If it was something that you wanted to do, then at least you could lay the blame on the pure, unadulterated evil of your own nature.

9

SATURDAY MORNING. MARKUS HAD TAKEN over at the station, and I drove up the hill in second gear. Stopped in front of the house and revved the engine to let them know I was back.

Carl and Shannon were sitting in the kitchen, studying the plans for the hotel and discussing the presentation.

‘According to Simon Nergard no one’s going to invest,’ I said with a yawn, leaning against the door jamb. ‘He heard that from a bank guy who’s seen the plans.’

‘And I have talked to at least a dozen people who love the plans,’ said Carl.

‘Here in the village?’

‘In Toronto. People who know what they’re talking about.’

I shrugged. ‘The people you have to convince don’t live in Toronto and they don’t know what they’re talking about. Good luck. I’m off to bed.’

‘Jo Aas has agreed to a meeting with me today,’ said Carl.

I stopped. ‘Really?’

‘Yes. I asked Mari at the party if she could set it up.’

‘Excellent. Was that why you invited her?’

‘Partly. And I wanted her and Shannon to meet. If we’re going to be living here then best if those two don’t have to walk around scowling at each other. And you know what?’ He rested a hand on Shannon’s shoulder. ‘I think my girl melted the ice queen.’

‘Melted?’ said Shannon and rolled her eyes. ‘Sweetie, that woman hates me. Am I right, Roy?’

‘Hmm,’ I said. ‘A bit less than she would otherwise have done had you not pulled that trick with the picture of the twins.’

For the first time since coming in I looked directly at Shannon. She was wearing a large white dressing gown and her hair was still wet from the shower. She hadn’t displayed so much skin before, always the black pullovers and trousers, but now I could see that the skin on her slender legs and in the neck of the dressing gown was as white and unblemished as her face. The wet hair was darker and less glossy, almost a rust red, and I discovered something I hadn’t noticed before, the scattering of pale freckles around her nose. She smiled, but there was something in her expression, something wounded. Had Carl said the wrong thing? Had I said the wrong thing? Of course it could have been that I more than hinted that she had been cynical in pretending to find the twins so fantastic, but something told me she wouldn’t have a problem admitting that kind of cynicism. That a girl like Shannon did what she had to without asking anyone’s pardon.

‘Shannon says she wants to cook us something Norwegian this evening,’ said Carl. ‘I thought—’

‘I’ve got to work tonight too,’ I said. ‘Someone’s off sick.’

‘Oh?’ Carl raised an eyebrow. ‘Don’t you have five other people who could cover for him?’

‘No one can manage it,’ I said. ‘It’s the weekend, and short notice.’ Spread my arms as though to say such is the fate of the boss of a service station, got to cover for everybody. I could see Carl didn’t believe me for a moment. That’s the problem with brothers, they pick up every bloody false note, but what the hell else could I say? That I wasn’t getting any sleep because of all their screwing?

‘I’m going to get some shut-eye.’

I was woken by a noise. It wasn’t that it was particularly loud, but in the first place, there aren’t that many sounds up here in the mountains, and in the second, it didn’t belong up here, which was probably the reason my brain hadn’t filtered it out.

It was a kind of hissing hum, somewhere between a wasp and a lawnmower.

I looked out the window. Got up, dressed quickly, hurried down the steps and then walked slowly over towards Geitesvingen.

Sheriff Kurt Olsen was there with Erik Nerell and a guy who was holding a remote control with antennae. They were all looking up at the thing that had woken me, a white drone about the size of a dinner plate that was hovering a metre above their heads.

‘OK,’ I said, and they became aware of my presence. ‘Are you looking for posters for the investors’ meeting?’

‘Good morning, Roy,’ said the sheriff without touching the ciggy that bounced around in time to his words.

‘This is a private road, you know.’ I was buckling my belt, which I had forgotten in my hurry. ‘So that’s all right then, isn’t it?’

‘Well, there’s private, and then there’s private.’

‘Oh yeah?’ I said, and then realised I had better calm down. That if I wasn’t careful I was going to get too wound up. ‘If it was a public road then the traffic authorities might have coughed up for a safety barrier, don’t you think?’

‘True enough, Roy. But the whole area round here is a designated wilderness, so it’s all public right of way.’

‘I’m talking about the posters, not whether or not you’ve got the right to be standing where you are, sheriff. I’ve just got off a night shift, so if you were planning to wake me up with that drone you might have warned me.’

‘Might have done,’ said Sheriff Olsen. ‘But we didn’t want to disturb anyone, Roy. This won’t take long, just a few pictures. If we decide it’s safe enough for us to come back and lower people down there, then of course we’ll let you know in advance.’ He looked at me. Not coldly, just observing me, as though he was taking snapshots of me, like the drone, which by now disappeared beneath the edge of the ridge and was snapping away for dear life down there in Huken. I nodded, tried to keep my face expressionless.

‘I’m sorry,’ Olsen went on. ‘I know this business is… sensitive.’ He lingered over the word, like a priest. ‘I should have warned you, I didn’t remember how close to the house the ridge was. What can I say? You can be glad your taxpayer’s money is being used to establish exactly how the accident really did happen. That’s something we all want to know.’

All? I roared inwardly. You, don’t you mean? It’s that same old damned imperative, Kurt Olsen, you want to sort out something your father couldn’t sort out.

‘Fine,’ I said instead. ‘And you’re right, it’s a sensitive matter. Carl and I know the big picture of what happened, so our focus has been more on trying to forget than on getting to the bottom of every little detail.’ Calm down. Like that, yeah. Like that.

‘Naturally,’ said Olsen.

The drone appeared over the edge again. Stopped, just hovering in the air, nagging at the ears. Then it navigated in towards us, and landed in the hand of the guy with the remote control, like those trained falcons I’d seen on YouTube landing on their owner’s glove. It was unpleasant, like something from a science-fiction film set in a Big Brother Sees You fascist state, and you know that the guy with the drone has bundles of electric cable running under his skin.

‘That was a quick trip,’ said the sheriff, dropping his cigarette to the ground and stepping on it.

‘The thin air is a drain on the batteries,’ said the drone guy.

‘But did it get any pictures?’

The drone guy touched the screen of his phone and we huddled round him.

Lacking light and sound the video imagery was grainy. Or maybe there was sound recording and it was just that silent down there. The wreck of Dad’s Cadillac DeVille looked like a beetle that had landed on its back and died there, legs helplessly flailing in the air until a passer-by inadvertently trod on it. The rusting and partly overgrown chassis and wheels facing upwards were undamaged, but the rear of the coupé was crimped flat as though it had been through Willumsen’s car-crusher. Maybe because of the stillness and darkness down there the pictures reminded me of a documentary film I had seen about divers going down to the Titanic. Maybe it was the sight of the Cadillac, another wreck with beautiful lines from a vanished age, another narrative of sudden death turned into a tragedy and related so often that in my imagination and the imagination of others it had, with the years, come to seem like something that had to be there, that it was written in the stars. The physical and metaphorically spectacular, the presumed invincibility of the machine exposed as it plummeted to the depth. Presentations of how it must have been, the fear of the passengers as it dawns on them that here it is now: death. Not just any old death, not a lived life gradually breaking down, but an unannounced and sudden departure, the murderous coincidences. I shuddered.

‘Quite a few loose boulders on the slope,’ Erik Nerell remarked.

‘They could have fallen down there a thousand years ago, or a hundred,’ said Kurt Olsen ‘There’s none on top of the car. And I don’t see any marks or dents in the chassis either, so for all we know not a single bloody rock has fallen down there since the one that hit the climber.’

‘He’s not climbing any more,’ said Nerell as he peered at the screen. ‘His arm just dangles by his side and it’s only half the size it used to be. He’s been on painkillers for years. Doses big enough to knock a horse out.’

‘At least he’s still alive,’ Olsen interrupted impatiently. His face was flushed. When he said ‘alive’, did he mean, unlike those who had been sitting in the Cadillac? No, it was just something he came out with. And yet there was something else there. Was it the old sheriff he was talking about? Sigmund Olsen, his own father?

‘Most of what falls down into this chute is bound to hit the car,’ said Olsen and pointed to the screen. ‘And yet it’s overgrown with moss. Not a mark on it. That tells us its history. History is something we can learn from. Lines that can be traced backwards can be traced forwards too.’

‘Until you get a rock on your shoulder,’ I said. ‘Or your head.’

I saw Erik Nerell nodding slowly as he scratched his chin. Olsen flushed even more.

‘As I said, we hear loose rocks down in Huken all the time.’ I was looking directly at Olsen, but my words were obviously directed at Erik Nerell. He was the one who was about to become a father. He was the one responsible for an expert assessment of whether or not it was justifiable to send a crew down there to investigate the wreck. Clearly Olsen couldn’t ignore his advice without losing his job should something happen. ‘Maybe the rocks don’t hit the wreck directly,’ I said. ‘But they land beside it. Presumably that’s where your people will be standing?’

I didn’t need to hear Olsen’s reply. Out of the corner of my eye I could see that particular battle had already been won.

I stood on Geitesvingen as the sound of their cars faded. Watched a raven glide by, waited until everything was silent once again.

Shannon, dressed as usual in black, was leaning against the worktop when I came in. Again it struck me that despite an outfit that accentuated the almost boyish skinniness of her body, there was something distinctively feminine about her. Her small hands warmed themselves around a steaming cup with the string of a tea bag dangling over the rim.

‘Who was that?’ she asked.

‘The sheriff. He wants to examine the wreckage. He thinks he needs to find out why Dad went over the edge into Huken.’

‘And doesn’t he?’

I shrugged. ‘I saw it all. He didn’t brake until it was too late. You have to brake in time.’

‘You have to brake in time,’ she repeated with a slow, farmer’s nod of the head. Looked like she was already picking up our body language too. It made me think of those science-fiction films again.

‘Carl said it’s not possible to retrieve the wreckage. Does it bother you having it there?’

‘Apart from the pollution aspect? No.’

‘No?’ She lifted the mug with both hands again, took a sip of tea. ‘Why not?’

‘If they’d died in the double bed we wouldn’t have thrown that out either.’

She smiled. ‘Is that being sentimental or being unsentimental?’

I smiled too. Hardly noticed that lazy eyelid of hers any more. Or maybe it didn’t hang as low as it did when she arrived and was still tired from all the travelling.

‘I think the practical circumstances dictate more of our emotional lives than we realise,’ I said. ‘Even though novels are about unattainable love, nine out of ten fall in love with someone they know they can have.’

‘You sure?’

‘Eight out of ten,’ I said.

I stood beside her and noticed that she watched me as I used the yellow measuring spoon to spoon the coffee powder into the pot.

‘Practical in death and love,’ I said. ‘That’s the way it is when things are tight the way they are for the people round here. It’s probably not normal for you.’

‘Why should it not be normal?’

‘Barbados is a wealthy island, you said. You drove a Buick, went to university. Moved to Toronto.’

She seemed to hesitate for a moment before replying. ‘It’s called social mobility.’

‘Are you saying you grew up poor?’

‘Yes and no.’ She took a deep breath. ‘I’m a redleg.’

‘Redleg?’

‘You’ve probably heard of the lower-class whites in the Appalachian mountains in the USA. What people call hillbillies?’

‘Deliverance. Banjos and incest.’

‘That’s the stereotype, yes. Unfortunately some of it’s accurate, just as it is with the redlegs, the lower-class whites in Barbados. The redlegs are the descendants of the Irish and the Scots who came to the island in the seventeenth century, a lot of them transported convicts, same as in Australia. In practice they were slaves, and it was they who made up the workforce until Barbados began to import slaves from Africa. But once slavery was abolished and the descendants of the Africans began to move up in society, most of the white redlegs got left behind. Most of us live in our own shanty town. Rønner, I think that’s what you say in Norwegian. We’re a society on the outside of society, stuck in a poverty trap. Zero education, alcoholism, incest, sickness. The redlegs in St John on Barbados rarely own anything, apart from the few who have farms and small shops serving the wealthier blacks. Other redlegs live off the state, financed by the black and brown Bajanere. Know how you can recognise us? The teeth. If we have any then they’re usually brown from… decay?’ she concluded, using the English word.

‘Råte,’ I supplied in Norwegian. ‘But your teeth are…’

‘I had a mother who made sure I got proper food and brushed my teeth every day. She was determined that I should have a better life. When she died, my grandmother took over the job.’

‘Jesus.’ I couldn’t think of anything else to say.

She blew on her tea. ‘If nothing else, we redlegs are proof that it’s not just the blacks and Latinos who never manage to escape the poverty trap.’

‘At least you got out.’

‘Yes, and I’m racist enough to believe that it was my African genes that got me out.’

‘You? African?’

‘My mother and grandmother were both Afro-Bajanere.’ She laughed when she saw my incredulous expression. ‘My hair and skin are from an Irish redleg who drank himself to death before I was three years old.’ She shrugged her narrow shoulders. ‘Even though both my grandmother and my mother lived in St John and were married respectively to an Irishman and a Scot, I was never reckoned to be a proper redleg. Partly because we owned a little land, but especially after I matriculated at the University of the West Indies in Bridgetown. I wasn’t just the first from my family to go to university, I was the first in the whole neighbourhood.’

I looked at Shannon. It was the longest speech I’d heard her make about herself since she came here. Maybe the reason was simple: I hadn’t asked for her story. Or at least not since that time she and Carl were in the bunk beneath me, and she said she’d rather hear me talk. Maybe she wanted to check me out first. And now she had.

I coughed. ‘Must have been quite something to make a choice like that.’

Shannon shook her head. ‘It was my grandmother’s decision. She got the whole family, uncles and aunts and all, to spill my school fees.’

‘Split your school fees.’

‘Split my school fees, and later on for my studies in Toronto. The reason my grandmother drove me back and forth to the university was that we couldn’t afford for me to live in the city. One lecturer told me I was an example of the new social mobility in Barbados. I told him that even after four hundred years redlegs were still sloshing about in social cement, and I have my family to thank, not social reformers. I’m a redleg girl who owes everything to her family, and I always will be. So even though I’ve lived better in Toronto, Opgard is still luxury to me. You understand?’

I nodded. ‘What happened to the Buick?’

She looked at me as if to check I wasn’t trying to be funny. ‘Not “what happened to your grandmother”?’

‘She’s alive and doing well,’ I said.

‘How d’you know that?’

‘Your voice when you talk about her. It’s steady.’

‘So, car mechanic and psychologist?’

‘Car mechanic,’ I said. ‘The Buick’s gone, am I right?’

‘By mistake my grandmother left the gear lever in drive when she parked outside our house. It rolled off an incline and was smashed to pieces in the rubbish dump below. I cried for days. Did you hear that in my voice when I was talking about it?’

‘I did. A Buick Roadmaster 1954. I can understand that.’

She dipped her head from one side to the other as though she was studying me from several angles, as though I were a bloody Rubik’s cube.

‘Cars and beauty,’ she said, almost to herself. ‘You know, last night I dreamed about a book I read a long time ago. I’m sure it was because of that wreck down in Huken. Crash, it was called. J. G. Ballard. About people getting turned on by car crashes. By the crashes, and the injuries. Their own and others’. Did you ever see the film?’

I tried to think.

‘David Cronenberg,’ she said, trying to help me out.

I shook my head.

She hesitated. As though regretting she had started a conversation about something that couldn’t possibly interest a guy who worked at a service station.

‘I prefer books to films,’ I said to help her out. ‘But that’s one I haven’t read.’

‘In the book there’s a description of a blind corner on Mulholland Drive where cars drive over the edge at night and fall down the cliff into a wilderness. It’s too expensive to salvage the cars so a sort of car cemetery has built up down there which gets higher every year. In time there won’t be any drop there at all, anyone driving over the edge will be saved by the mountain of wrecks.’

I nodded slowly. ‘Saved by a car wreck. Maybe I should read it. Or see the film.’

‘Actually I prefer the film,’ she said. ‘The book is a first-person narrative and that makes it perverse in a way that’s subjective and…’ She stopped. ‘How do you say intrusive in Norwegian?’

‘Sorry, we’ll need to ask Carl for that,’ I said.

‘He’s gone to have a word with Jo Aas.’

I looked at the kitchen table. The plans were still lying there, and Carl hadn’t taken his laptop with him either. Perhaps he thought he had a better chance of convincing Aas that the village needed a spa hotel if he didn’t swamp him with material.

‘Påtrengende?’ I suggested.

‘Thanks,’ she said. ‘The film isn’t as påtrengende. As a rule the camera is more objective than the pen. And Cronenberg managed to get hold of the essence of it.’

‘Which is?’

A sort of spark flared in her good eye, and her voice became animated now she realised I was genuinely interested.

‘The beauty of a thing spoiled,’ she said. ‘The partially destroyed Greek statue is extra beautiful because from what isn’t damaged we can see how beautiful it could have been, should have been, must have been.’ She pressed the palms of her hands against the worktop as though about to hoist herself up onto it, sit there with her back arched the way she had at the party. Tiny dancer. Christ.

‘Interesting,’ I said. ‘I should try to get back to sleep.’

The spark in her eye went off like an indicator.

‘What about your coffee?’ she said, and I could hear the disappointment in her voice. Now that she’d finally got someone to talk to. They probably talk to each other all the time over there in Barbados.

‘I need another couple of hours, I can feel it,’ I said, turned off the hot plate and pulled the pan off the heat.

‘Of course,’ she said, and took her hands off the worktop.

I lay in bed for half an hour. Tried to sleep, to think of nothing. Heard the tapping of the laptop keyboard up through the hole, the rustle of paper. Not a chance.

I repeated the ritual. Got up, dressed, hurried out. Called out ‘See you!’ before the door slammed shut behind me. It must have sounded as though I was running from something.

10

‘OH, HI,’ SAID EGIL AS he opened the door. He looked ashamed. Must have been because he knew I could hear the sounds of a war game and the excited voices of his pals from the living room. ‘Yeah, actually I’m better now,’ he said quickly. ‘I can work tonight.’

‘Take as long as you need to get well,’ I said. ‘That’s not why I came.’

He seemed to be searching his conscience to find out what that might possibly be. Clearly there were a couple of things to choose between.

‘What does Moe come in to buy?’ I asked.

‘Moe?’ Egil said it as though he’d never heard the name.

‘The roofer,’ I said. ‘He asked after you.’

Egil smiled, but there was fear in his eyes.

‘What does he come in for?’ I repeated, as though I thought Egil might have forgotten the question.

‘Nothing special,’ said Egil.

‘Tell me anyway.’

‘Hard to remember.’

‘But he pays cash?’

‘Yes.’

‘If you can remember that then you can remember what it is he buys. Come on.’

Egil stared at me. And in that sheep-like gaze I saw a prayer for permission to confess.

I sighed. ‘This is something that’s been eating away at you, Egil.’

‘Eh?’

‘He’s got something on you, is that it? Is he threatening you in some way?’

‘Moe? No.’

‘Then why are you covering up for him?’

Egil stood there blinking. Behind him, in the living room, a war was raging. I saw chaos behind that desperate look.

‘He… he…’

I really didn’t have the patience for this, but for added effect I lowered my voice. ‘Now don’t make anything up, Egil.’

The boy’s Adam’s apple bobbed up and down like a lift and he’d taken a half-step back into the hallway, looked almost ready to slam the door shut in panic, but then stopped. Maybe he saw something in my eyes, something his brain connected to what he’d heard about guys getting their lights punched out in Årtun. And he gave in.

‘He let me keep the change for whatever it was he bought.’

I nodded. Naturally I had told Egil when he started working for me that we don’t accept tips, that if the customer insisted then we punch the amount into the till and leave the money out for the times when one of us made a mistake and handed over too much change. Usually that would be Egil, but he might have forgotten, and right now I wasn’t about to tell him; what I wanted was to have my suspicions confirmed.

‘And what did he buy?’

‘We didn’t do anything illegal,’ said Egil.

I didn’t bother to tell him that him using the imperfect like that told me he understood that whatever arrangement he might have had with Moe was as of now over, and was therefore unlikely to have been legit. I waited.

‘EllaOne,’ said Egil.

So that was it. The morning-after pill.

‘How often?’ I asked.

‘Once a week,’ said Egil.

‘Did he ask you not to tell anyone?’

Egil nodded. He was pale. Pale and stupid, but not mentally defective, as people call it. I mean, they change the words like they change dirty underwear, so probably they call it something else now, but anyway: Egil had probably managed to put two and two together, even if Moe had gambled he wouldn’t. I saw it now, that he wasn’t just ashamed of himself, he was totally mortified. There’s no heavier punishment than that. And I say that as someone who’s drunk cup after cup of that bitter stuff. Someone who knows that there’s nothing a judge could do that would add to that shame.

‘Then let’s say you’re sick today and good tomorrow,’ I said. ‘OK?’

‘Yes,’ he said, at the second time of trying to get sound into his voice.

I didn’t hear the door close behind me. He was probably still standing there watching me. Wondering what was going to happen now.

I entered Grete Smitt’s hair salon. It was like emerging from a time machine that had landed in the USA straight after the war. There was an enormous and much patched red leather barber’s chair in one corner. According to Grete, Louis Armstrong had once sat in it. The other corner housed a salon hairdryer from the 1950s, one of those helmets on a stand that the old biddies sit under while reading magazines and gossiping in old American movies, though it always makes me think of Jonathan Pryce and the lobotomy scene in Brazil. Grete uses that helmet for something she calls a shampoo and set, which is when you first wash the hair with a special shampoo, put in the curlers and then dry the hair slowly by sticking your head up inside this helmet, preferably with a headscarf so you don’t touch any of the elements which in her fifties version look like the glowing insides of a toaster. According to Grete, a shampoo and set was now retro-hip and on its way back in again. The thing is, here in Os it had probably never really been away in the first place. Anyway, if you ask me, Grete herself was probably the most frequent user of that helmet, to maintain those rat-brown permed curls that hung from her head.

Pictures of old American film stars hung on the walls. The only thing that wasn’t American must have been that famous pair of salon scissors Grete used, a stainless-steel affair which she told anyone who would listen was a Japanese Niigata 1000 that cost fifteen thousand kroner and came with a lifetime guarantee.

Grete looked up, but the Niigata went on cutting.

‘Olsen,’ I said.

‘Hi, Roy. He’s sunning himself.’

‘I know that, I saw his car. Where’s the sun?’ I watched as the Japanese superscissors snipped dangerously close to the customer’s earlobe.

‘I don’t think he wants to be disturbed…’

‘In there?’ I pointed towards the other door in the room. There was a poster on it showing a sun-bronzed and desperately smiling girl in a bikini.

‘He’ll be finished in…’ She glanced down at a remote control on the table next to her. ‘Fourteen minutes. Can’t you wait outside?’

‘Could do. But even men can manage to do two things at once if all that’s involved are sunning yourself and speaking.’ I nodded to the lady in the barber’s chair who was staring at me in the mirror, and opened the door.

It was like entering a lousy horror film. The room was in darkness apart from a bluish light that seeped out from the crack along the side of a Dracula’s coffin, one of two sunbeds that were all the room contained, apart from a chair over the back of which hung Kurt Olsen’s jeans and his light leather jacket. A threatening, juddering sound came from the lamps inside, heightening the sense that something terrible was about to happen.

I pulled the chair up to the side of the sunbed. Heard music buzzing from a couple of earphones. For a moment I thought it was Roger Whittaker and that this really was a horror film, before recognising John Denver’s ‘Take Me Home, Country Roads’.

‘I’ve come to warn you,’ I said.

I heard movement from inside, something hit the lid of the coffin so it shook and there was a low cursing. The buzzing of the music stopped.

‘It’s about a possible case of sexual assault,’ I said.

‘Oh yeah?’ Olsen’s voice sounded as if he was talking inside a tin can, and I couldn’t tell if he recognised my voice on the outside.

‘A person having sexual relations with someone in his own immediate family,’ I said.

‘Go on.’

I stopped. Maybe because it suddenly struck me that the situation had bizarre similarities to the Catholic confessional. Apart from the fact that it wasn’t me who was the sinner. Not this time.

‘Moe – the roofer – is buying morning-after pills once a week. As you know, he has a teenage daughter. She bought morning-after pills the other day.’

I waited as I left it up to Sheriff Olsen to reach the obvious conclusion.

‘Why once a week, and why here?’ he asked. ‘Why not bulk-buy in town? Or put the girl on the contraceptive pill?’

‘Because he thinks that every time is the last time,’ I said. ‘He thinks he can manage to stop.’

I heard the clicking of a lighter from inside the sunbed. ‘How do you know that?’

I searched for the right way to answer as the cigarette smoke seeped out of Dracula’s coffin, dissipated in the blue light and vanished into the darkness. Felt the same urge as Egil had felt: to confess. To drive over the edge. To fall.

‘We all like to believe that we’ll be a better person tomorrow,’ I said.

‘It isn’t easy to keep something like that quiet in a village like this for any length of time,’ said Olsen. ‘I’ve never heard anyone suspect Moe of anything.’

‘He’s gone bankrupt,’ I said. ‘Hangs around at home with nothing to do.’

‘But he’s still a teetotaller,’ said Olsen, showing that at least he was following my train of thought. ‘Not everyone starts fucking his own daughter when things begin to go a little wrong for him.’

‘Or purchase morning-after pills once a week,’ I said.

‘Maybe it’s because he doesn’t want his wife to get pregnant again. Or maybe the daughter’s having it away with some lad and Moe is just a concerned father.’ I heard Olsen take a drag on his cigarette in there. ‘He doesn’t want her on anything more permanent, because then he’s worried she might start having it away all the time with whoever. Moe’s a Pentecostal, you know.’

‘I didn’t know that, but that doesn’t exactly diminish the possibility of a little incest.’

I sensed a reaction beneath the coffin lid when I used the i-word.

‘If you’re going to make a serious accusation like that you should have a bit more to go on than the person in question buying contraception,’ said Olsen. ‘Do you?’

What could I say? That I had seen the shame in his eyes? A shame so powerful that for me it was stronger proof than anything?

‘So now you know,’ I said. ‘I suggest you have a chat with the daughter.’

Maybe I should have dropped the ‘suggest’. Maybe I should have known it sounded as though I was telling Olsen how to do his job. On the other hand, maybe I knew all this and went ahead and did it anyway. Whatever, Olsen’s voice went up a semitone and a decibel.

‘And I suggest you leave this to us, although I can tell you straight off we’ll probably go on prioritising more pressing cases.’ His tone of voice left room for my name at the end of his sentence, but he left it there. Churning through his brain was probably the thought that if I later turned out to be right and the sheriff’s office had done nothing then it would be easier for him if he could claim the tip-off that came in was anonymous. Anyway, I fell for it.

‘And what pressing cases might that be?’ I asked, and could have bitten my tongue off.

‘None of your business. In the meantime I suggest you keep this small-town gossip to yourself. We don’t need that type of hysteria here.’

I had to swallow and before I could say anything else John Denver was back.

I stood up and went back into the salon. Grete and her customer had moved to the washbasin where they were rinsing her hair and chatting away. I thought they always washed your hair before they cut it, but this here was clearly something different, some sort of chemical warfare was being waged against the hair, at any rate there were several tubes on the rim of the basin and they were too busy to notice me. I picked up the remote that was next to the door. Looked like Olsen had ten minutes to go. I pressed an upward-pointing arrow until the display showed twenty. Pressed the key above FACIAL TANNER and a display appeared showing a scale with one dot. Three taps on the arrow and it was on maximum. Those of us who work in the service industries know how important it is for people to feel they’re getting value – and plenty of it – for their money.

As I passed Grete and the customer I picked up the words: ‘…jealous now, because of course he was in love with his little brother.’

Grete’s face stiffened when she noticed me, but I merely nodded and pretended not to have heard.

Out in the fresh air I thought how this was like a fucking repeat. Everything had happened before. Everything would happen again. And with the same result.

11

NOT EVEN THE VILLAGE’S ANNUAL fete ever attracted such a crowd. We’d placed six hundred chairs in the main function room at the village hall and still some people had to stand. I turned in my seat and looked towards the back of the hall, pretending to be looking out for someone. Everyone was there. Mari with her husband Dan Krane, who was scanning the place himself with his journalist’s eye. Willum Willumsen the used-car dealer with his tall, elegant wife Rita, who towered a full head above him even when they were seated. The new chairman Voss Gilbert, who also refereed Os Football Club’s home games, not that it seemed to do any good. Erik Nerell with his very pregnant wife Thea. Sheriff Kurt Olsen too, his scorched face glowing like a red lantern. His hate-filled gaze met mine. Grete Smitt had brought along Mr and Mrs Smitt, I could just see them shuffling speedily across the car park on their way in. Natalie Moe was sitting between her parents. I tried to catch her father’s eye, but he had already looked away. Maybe because he suspected I knew. Or maybe because he knew that everyone knew that his roofing business had gone bust and that if he invested in the hotel project it would be an insult to every one of his creditors in the village. But he could probably get away with just turning up at the meeting. Most of those present had probably come out of curiosity, not out of any desire to invest. Yes, Jo Aas the old council chairman hadn’t seen the place so packed since the seventies, when Preacher Armand was making the rounds. Aas was standing at the podium looking out at the gathering. Tall, and thin and skinny as a flagpole. His upward-arching birch-white eyebrows seemed to reach higher and higher with each passing year.

‘There was a time when entertainment such as talking in tongues and the healing of the sick and lame was every bit as popular as the films on show at the village cinema,’ said Aas. ‘And what’s more it was free.’

The laughter duly came.

‘Now you haven’t come here to listen to me, but to one of our own homecoming sons, Carl Abel Opgard. I don’t know whether his sermon will bring salvation and life everlasting to the village, you’ll have to make up your own minds about that. I have agreed to introduce this young man and his project because this village, at this moment in time, in the situation in which we find ourselves, should welcome any and every fresh initiative. We need new thinking. We need commitment. But we also need old thinking. The thinking that has stood the test of time, and has enabled us to go on living out here in these barren but beautiful villages. And so I ask you to listen with a mind both open and fair to a young man who has proved that a simple farm boy from these parts can also succeed in the big wide world. Carl, the stage is yours!’

Thunderous applause, though it was noticeably muted by the time Carl reached the podium and was probably more for Aas than him. Carl was wearing a suit and tie, but he’d taken off the jacket and rolled up his sleeves. He’d modelled the outfit at home, asked for our opinions. Shannon wondered why he wouldn’t wear the jacket, and I explained it was because Carl had seen American presidential candidates trying to be folksy when addressing factory workers on the campaign trail.

‘They wear windjammers and baseball caps,’ said Shannon.

‘It’s a question of finding just the right balance,’ said Carl. ‘We don’t want to seem stuffy and pompous, we’re from round here, after all, where people drive tractors and walk around in rubber boots. But at the same time we need to appear serious and professional. You don’t turn up for a confirmation here not wearing a tie, and if you do it’s obvious you don’t get it. That I have a jacket, but have taken it off, is a way of signalling that I respect the task ahead and take it seriously, at the same time as I’m keen, fired up, ready to get cracking.’

‘Not scared to get your hands dirty,’ I said.

‘Exactly,’ said Carl.

On the way out to the car Shannon had whispered to me with a chuckle in her voice: ‘You know what, I thought the expression was to get dirt under your nails. Is that completely wrong?’

‘Depends what you were trying to say,’ I answered.

‘What I’d like to say,’ said Carl, resting both hands on the podium, ‘…before I start speaking about the adventure I’m inviting you all to join me on, is that simply standing here on this stage in front of so many old friends and faces is really quite something for me. It’s really quite moving.’

I noticed the air of cautious expectation. Carl had been well liked. At least by those whose ladies hadn’t liked him a little too well. And certainly Carl as he was when he had left town. But was he still Carl? The lively mischief-maker and fun guy with the bright smile, the kind, thoughtful boy with a friendly word for everyone, men and women alike, children as well as adults. Or had he turned into what he described himself as on the invitation: a Master of Business? A mountain bird able to fly at heights where others couldn’t breathe? Canada. Property magnate. An exotic and educated wife from the Caribbean sitting there a little too well made up. Would a normal girl from around these parts be too dull for him now?

‘Wonderful and moving,’ Carl said once again. ‘Because now, finally, I get a taste of what it must have been like to stand here and be…’ An artful pause as he looked out over the gathering and adjusted his tie. ‘…Rod.’

A brief moment. And then came the laughter.

Carl’s white smile. Sure now, sure that he had them. He rested his long arms along the sides of the podium as though he owned it.

‘Fairy tales usually begin with Once upon a time, but this fairy tale hasn’t been written yet. But when the time comes for it to be written, it will begin Once upon a time there was a village that had a meeting at Årtun village hall where they talked about a hotel they were going to build. And we are talking about this hotel…’

He tapped on the remote. The plans appeared on the giant screen behind him. There was a gasp, but I could see that Carl had expected a bigger gasp. Saw it because he’s my brother. Or more accurately: a more positive gasp. Because as I said: I think that in general people prefer the comfort of hearth and home to an igloo on the moon. On the other hand, it had undeniably a certain elegance. There was something about the proportions and the lines, there was a universal beauty about them, like that of an ice crystal, a white-topped breaker, or a pristine mountain face. Or even a service station.

Carl could see that he had a job to do to convince the gathering. I could see him regrouping, as people say. Mobilising himself. Gathering himself for the next assault. He went through the plans and explained what was what. The spa section, the gym, the pool, the kids’ playroom, the different classes of hotel room, the reception and lobby, the restaurant. Stressing that everything here would be top of the range, that their main target group was going to be guests with high expectations. In other words: people with fat wallets. The hotel’s name would be the same as the village. The Os Spa and Mountain Hotel. A name that would be promoted across all media platforms. The village’s name would become a byword for quality, he said. Something exclusive. But not excluding. It should be possible for a family on a normal income to spend a weekend here. But it would have to be something they saved up for, something they looked forward to. The village name should be associated with joy. Carl smiled, showed them a little of that joy. It seemed to me that he was beginning to get the crowd on board. I’d even say that the gathering was starting to show signs of enthusiasm, and that’s not something you get every day around these parts. All the same, the next gasp wasn’t until people heard the total cost.

Four hundred million.

A gasp. The temperature in the room plummeted.

Carl had expected the gasp. But, as I saw from his expression, not quite such a big one.

He began speaking faster, afraid now that he was losing them. Said that for landowners in the area the rise in property prices because of the hotel and the cabin developments by itself would be enough to make investment profitable. The same went for those who ran shops and service businesses, as the hotel and the cabins would bring with them a stream of paying customers. Because these were people who had money, and liked to spend it. In fact, taken separately, the village would probably profit more from this than the hotel itself.

He paused for a few moments. People sat silent and unmoving. Everything seemed to be in the balance. From where I sat in the fifth row I saw something move. Like a flagpole in a stiff wind. It was Aas, sitting in the front row. His white head towering above the others. He nodded. Nodded slowly. Everyone saw it.

And then Carl played his ace.

‘But the precondition of all this is that the hotel is built, and that it opens for business. That people are willing to make the necessary effort. That certain people are willing to accept a degree of risk and finance this project. For the good of the others. Of everyone in the village.’

On average the people round here are less educated than those in the cities. They aren’t as quick to get the point in clever films and urbane sitcoms. But they get the subtext. Because the ideal in Os is not to say more than is necessary, people have a developed understanding of what remains unexpressed. And what remained unexpressed here was that if you didn’t join the ranks of the certain people who invested in the project, then that made you one of the others. Those who would profit from the secondary benefits, without having contributed themselves.

I saw more slow nodding. It seemed to spread.

But then a man raised his voice. Willumsen, the man who had sold Dad the Cadillac.

‘If this is such a good investment, Carl,’ said Willumsen, ‘why do you need all of us? Why not keep the whole cake for yourself? Or as much of it as you can handle alone and get a couple of other big shots to cover the rest?’

‘Because,’ said Carl, ‘I’m not a big shot. And not too many of you are either. I could have taken a bigger share, sure, and I’ll happily take what’s left over if the investment isn’t fully covered. But my vision when I came home with this project was that everyone should have the chance to take part, not just those with money to spare. That’s why I’m seeing this as an SL company. Shared Responsibilty. It means that none of you need to put anything up front at all to become part-owners of this hotel. Not one single øre!’ Carl pounded the podium.

Pause. Silence. I could feel what they were thinking. What kind of fucking hocus pocus is that? Is this Preacher Armand all over again?

Then Carl read them the Good News gospel. About how you can own without paying. And as the Master of Business spoke, they listened.

‘That means,’ he said, ‘that the more who invest, the less the risk at the individual level. If everyone signs up, none of us risks any more than what we might pay for a car. At least, not if we bought it second-hand from Willumsen here.’

Laughter. Even some applause from the back of the hall. Everyone knew the story of the car sale, and right at that moment no one seems to have been thinking about what happened to that car later. A smiling Carl pointed to someone with a raised hand.

A man stood up. Tall, as tall as Carl. I could see that it was only now Carl recognised him. Maybe he regretted inviting the guy to speak. Simon Nergard opened a mouth in which two teeth were noticeably whiter than the others. I could be wrong, but it seemed to me I could still hear a whistling from his nostrils when he spoke, from the bone that didn’t mend right.

‘Since this hotel is going to be on land you and your brother own…’ He took his time, let it hang for a moment.

‘Yes?’ said Carl in a loud, firm voice. Probably no one else besides me noticed it was a bit too loud and firm.

‘…it would be interesting to know how much you intend to ask for it.’

‘Ask for it?’ Carl scanned the gathering with his eyes. His head didn’t move. The place was silent again. It sounded undeniably – and it was probably not just me that thought it – as though Carl was playing for time. Simon at least had heard it, because when he spoke next there was almost a note of triumph in his voice.

‘Perhaps the Master of Business will understand better if I say what price,’ he said.

Scattered laughter. An expectant silence. People had raised their heads, like animals at the watering hole that see the lion approaching, although still a safe distance away.

Carl smiled. He bent over the documents in front of him and his shoulders shook as though he were laughing at a comradely kick in the shins from an old pal. Sorted his papers into a neat pile and seemed to be taking a break as he worked out how best to formulate his answer. I felt it, and from a quick look round realised that so did everyone else. That this was it. The moment of decision. I saw a straight back straighten further still two rows in front of me. Shannon. Looking up at the podium I saw Carl’s gaze fastened on me. I read something into it. An apology. He had lost. Screwed up. Screwed things up for the family. Both of us knew it. He wouldn’t be getting his hotel. And I wouldn’t be getting my service station.

‘We don’t want anything for it,’ said Carl. ‘Roy and I are donating the land.’

At first I thought I had heard wrong, and I could see Simon thought the same. But then I heard the murmuring that spread through the hall, and realised that people had heard the same as me. Someone started to clap.

‘No, no,’ said Carl, holding up his hands. ‘We’ve still got a long way to go. What we need now is for enough people to sign a preliminary document of intention to join, so that when we apply to the council for permission they can see this is a serious project. Thank you!’

The applause swelled. It grew and it grew. Soon everyone was clapping. Apart from Simon. And maybe Willumsen. And me.

‘I had to!’ said Carl. ‘It was the make-or-break moment. Couldn’t you tell?’

He followed me half running back out to the car. I opened the car door and got behind the wheel. It was Carl who had suggested we drive to the meeting in my grey-and-white Volvo 240 rather than his flashing dollar sign of a car. I turned the ignition, put my foot down and slipped the clutch even before he’d closed the passenger door.

‘For fuck’s sake, Roy!’

‘For fuck’s sake what?’ I yelled and adjusted the mirror. Saw Årtun disappearing behind us. Saw Shannon’s silent, frightened face in the rear seat. ‘You promised! You said you’d tell them what the land cost if they asked, you prick.’

‘Oh, give me a break, Roy! You felt the mood as well. Don’t lie, I could see it on you. You know that if I had said well, yes, now that you ask, Simon, Roy and I are actually asking forty million for that lump of rock, that would have been end of story. And there’s no way you would have got the money for your station.’

‘You lied!’

‘I lied, yes. So you’ve still got the chance to get your own service station.’

‘What fucking chance?’ I put my foot down, felt the grunt of the tyres as they bit down into the gravel as I spun the wheel and we skidded out onto the main road. The tyres squealed before the rubber sucked down onto the asphalt and from the back seat came a little squeal too. ‘The one in ten years’ time when the hotel has started to give some returns?’ I spat as I floored the pedal. ‘The point is you lied, Carl! You lied and you gave them 320 acres of my… my land – for nothing!’

‘Not ten years, jughead. You’ll get your chance in a year at the most.’

In our vocabulary jughead was not far off a term of endearment, and I realised he was asking for a truce.

‘Yes, one year and then what?’

‘And then the plots of land for the cabins come up for sale.’

‘Plots of land for the cabins?’ I punched the steering wheel. ‘Jesus Christ, forget the cabins, Carl! Haven’t you heard? The council has voted to stop any more cabin developments.’

‘They have?’

‘There’s no money for the council in cabins, only expenses.’

‘Is that right?’

‘Cabin owners pay taxes where they live, and when they’re only here for an average of six weekends a year they don’t leave enough money to cover what those fucking cabins cost the community. Water, sewage, collecting the rubbish, clearing the snow. Cabin owners fill up with petrol, they buy hamburgers from me, and that’s good for the station and a few of the other businesses, but for the council it’s a drop in the ocean.’

‘I really didn’t know that.’

I glanced over at him. He grinned back at me, the prick. Of course he knew.

‘What we do with the council,’ said Carl, ‘is we sell them warm beds. As opposed to cold beds.’

‘Come again?’

‘Cabins are cold beds, empty nine weekends in ten. Hotels are warm beds. Filled every night all year round with people who spend money without costing the council anything. Warm beds are the wet dream of every local council, Roy. Never mind what the regulations say – they chuck planning permissions at you. That’s the way it is in Canada and that’s the way it is here. It isn’t the hotel that’s going to make the big bucks for you and me. It’s when we get permission to sell cabin plots. And we will, because we’ll offer the council a thirty–seventy deal.’

‘Thirty–seventy?’

‘We offer them thirty per cent warm beds in exchange for building permission for seventy per cent cold beds.’

I eased off on the speed. ‘And you think they’ll go for it?’

‘Normally they’ll only accept a deal the other way round. With seventy per cent warm. But think of the council meeting next week where they’ll also be discussing the consequences of the rerouting of the main road and I present this project and we offer them a hotel that the entire village has voted for this evening. And they glance over at the spectators’ benches and there sits Abraham Lincoln and he’s nodding his head, this is good stuff.’

Lincoln was the nickname Dad had given Jo Aas. And yes, I could see it. They would give Carl exactly what he was asking for.

I glanced in the mirror. ‘What do you think?’

‘What do I think? I think you drive like a pig in heat.’

Our eyes met and we began to laugh. Soon all three of us were laughing, me so hard that Carl had to put a hand on the wheel to steer for me. I took the wheel back again, changed down and turned along the gravel lane and the hairpin bends that led up to our farm.

‘Look,’ said Shannon.

And we looked.

A car with a blue flashing light in the middle of the road. We slowed down and the headlights picked out Kurt Olsen. He was lounging against the bonnet of his Land Rover with arms folded. I didn’t stop until my bumper almost touched his knees, but he didn’t move a muscle. He walked up to the side of the car and I wound down the window.

‘Breathalyser test,’ he said and shone a torch beam straight into my face. ‘Get out of the car.’

‘Out?’ I asked, shading my face with one hand. ‘Can’t I just blow into the bag sitting here?’

‘Out,’ he said. Hard, calm and cold.

I looked at Carl. He nodded twice. The first time to tell me to do what Olsen said, the second that, yes, he would hold the fort from here on in.

I climbed out.

‘You see that?’ said Olsen and shone his torch on a more or less straight furrow in the gravel. I realised he had made it with the heel of his cowboy boot. ‘I want you to walk along that.’

‘You’re joking, right?’

‘No, I don’t make jokes, Roy Calvin Opgard. Start here. Go ahead.’

I did as he said. Just to get it over with.

‘Uh-oh, careful, carefully now,’ said Olsen. ‘And again, slowly. Think of it as a line. Put your foot down on the line every time.’

‘What sort of line?’ I asked as I set off again.

‘The type you suspend across a gulch. For example a ravine with rocks so loose that people who claim to know about such things write, in a report, that they advise against any investigation of the location. One false step along that line, Roy, and down you go.’

I don’t know whether it was having to parade along like a fucking male model or the flickering light from his torch, but it had actually become extremely bloody difficult to keep my balance.

‘You know I don’t drink,’ I said. ‘So what is this?’

‘You don’t drink, no. It means your brother can drink for two. Which makes me think that you’re the one to watch out for. People who are always sober are hiding something, don’t you think? They’re afraid they’ll reveal their secrets if they get drunk. So they stay away from people, and parties.’

‘If you’re turning over stones, Olsen, turn over Moe the roofer. Have you done that yet?’

‘Put a sock in it, Roy. I know you’re trying to distract me.’ His voice was starting to lose its controlled calm.

‘You think trying to stop sexual abuse is a distraction? You think breathalysing teetotallers is a better use of your time?’

‘Oops, you stepped over the edge there,’ said Olsen.

I looked down. ‘Fucking well didn’t.’

‘Look there, see?’ He shone the torch on a footprint outside the line. It was the print of a cowboy boot. ‘You better come with me.’

‘Fucking hell, Olsen, get out the fucking breathalyser!’

‘Someone buggered it up. Pressed the wrong keys and ruined it,’ he said. ‘You failed the balancing test and so that’s what we’re going to have to rely on. As you know, we have a comfortable cell at the sheriff’s office where you can wait until the doctor arrives to take a blood sample.’

I gave him a look of such disbelieving astonishment that he pushed the torch up under his chin and shouted ‘Boo!’, and then gave a ghostly chuckle.

‘Careful with that light,’ I said. ‘Looks like you’ve had enough radiation to be going on with.’

He didn’t seem particularly pissed off. Still laughing, he uncoupled the handcuffs from his belt.

‘Turn around, Roy.’