by Jo Nesbo
She smiled. ‘Is that the first thing you think of?’
‘No.’
‘What’s the first thing, then?’
Her face was so close, her eyes so dark and intense.
I didn’t know I was going to kiss her until I did. I’m not even sure if I was the one who did, or if it was her. But afterwards I wrapped my arms round her, pulled her to me and held her tight, feeling her body, like a pair of bellows as the air hissed out between her teeth.
‘No!’ she groaned. ‘You mustn’t!’
‘Lea . . .’
‘No! We . . . I can’t. Let me go!’
I let go of her.
She struggled out of bed. Stood there breathless in the middle of the floor, staring at me fiercely.
‘I thought . . .’ I said. ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean . . .’
‘Shhh,’ she said quietly. ‘That didn’t happen. And it won’t happen again. Never. Do you understand?’
‘No.’
She let out her breath in a long, trembling groan.
‘I’m married, Ulf.’
‘Married? You’re a widow.’
‘You don’t get it. I’m not just married to him. I’m married to . . . to everything. Everything up here. You and I belong to two different worlds. You make a living from drugs, I’m a sexton, a believer. I don’t know what you live for, but that’s what I live for, that and my son. Nothing else matters, and I’m not going to let a . . . a stupid, irresponsible dream ruin it. I can’t afford to, Ulf. Do you understand?’
‘But I’ve already said I’ve got money. Look behind the plank next to the cupboard there, there’s—’
‘No, no, no!’ She clapped her hands to her ears. ‘I don’t want to hear, and I don’t want any money! I want what I’ve got, nothing else. We can’t see each other again, I don’t want to see you again, it’s ended up . . . ended up all silly and mad and . . . and now I’m going. Don’t come and see me. And I won’t come and see you. Goodbye, Ulf. Have a good life.’
A moment later she was out of the cabin and I had already started to doubt if any of it had actually happened. Yes, she had kissed me, the pain in my cheek wasn’t lying. But then the rest of it must be true as well, the part of it when she said she never wanted to see me again. I stood up and went outside, and saw her running towards the village in the moonlight.
Of course she was running away. Who wouldn’t? I would have done. A long time ago. But then I was the type who ran away. She couldn’t afford to run away, whereas as a rule I ran because I couldn’t afford to stay. What had I been thinking? That two people like us could be together? No, that isn’t what I’d been thinking. Dreaming of, maybe, the way our minds conjure up images and fantasies. Time to wake up now.
There was another rumble of thunder, a bit closer this time. I looked off to the west. Off in the distance banks of lead-grey clouds towered up.
That he’s on his way. That he’s coming to kill us.
I went back inside the cabin and leaned my forehead against the wall. I believed in dreams about as much as I believed in gods. I was more inclined to believe in a junkie’s love of drugs than in people’s love for one another. But I did believe in death. That was a promise I knew would be kept. I believed in a nine-millimetre bullet at a thousand kilometres an hour. And that life was the time between the moment when it left the barrel of the pistol and when it tore through your brain.
I pulled the rope out from beneath the bed and tied it round the door handle. Knotted the other end to the heavy bed-frame that was nailed to the wall so the door couldn’t open outwards. I pulled it tighter. There. Then I lay down and stared at the planks of the bunk above me.
CHAPTER 13
IT WAS IN Stockholm. A long, long time ago, before everything. I was eighteen years old, and had caught the train from Oslo. I walked around the streets of Södermalm alone. Waded through the grass on Djurgården, dangled my legs off a jetty while I looked across at the Royal Palace and knew that I would never swap what they had for the freedom I had. Then I got dressed up as best I could with the little I had, and went to the Royal Dramatic Theatre, because I was in love with a Norwegian girl who was playing Solveig in Peer Gynt.
She was three years older than me, but I had talked to her at a party. That must have been why I was there. Mostly because of that. She was good in the play, she could speak Swedish like a native, or at least that’s how it sounded to me. And she was attractive and unobtainable. All the same, during the course of the performance my infatuation withered away. Maybe because she couldn’t compete with the day I’d had, with Stockholm. Maybe it was just that I was eighteen and had already fallen for the red-haired girl in the row in front of me.
The next day I bought some hash at Sergels torg. I walked down to Kungsträdgården, where I saw the red-haired girl again. I asked if she had enjoyed the play, but she just shrugged her shoulders and showed me how to roll a joint in Swedish. She was twenty, came from Östersund, and had a little flat at Odenplan. Next door was a reasonable restaurant called Tranan, where we ate fried herring and mashed potato and drank medium-strength lager.
It turned out that she wasn’t the girl I’d seen in the row in front of me after all, she’d never been to the Royal Dramatic Theatre. I stayed with her for three days. She went to work while I just wandered about breathing in the summer and the city. On the way home I sat looking out of the window, thinking about what I’d said about going back. And thought, for the first time, the most depressing thought of all: that there was no going back. That now becomes then, now becomes then in an endless fucking sequence, and there’s no reverse gear on this vehicle we call life.
I woke up again.
There was something scraping at the door. I twisted over in bed and saw the door handle move up and down.
She’d changed her mind. She’d come back.
‘Lea?’ My heart was pounding wildly with joy, and I threw off the covers and swung my feet onto the floor.
No answer.
It wasn’t Lea.
It was a man. A strong, angry man. Because the force he was using on the door handle was making the joints of the bed-frame creak.
I grabbed the rifle that was leaning against the wall and aimed it at the door.
‘Who’s there? What do you want?’
Still no answer. But what were they going to say? That they’d come to fix me, so could I please unlock the door? The rope quivered like a piano wire, and the door was now open a crack. Big enough to stick the barrel of a revolver through . . .
‘Answer, or I’ll shoot!’
It sounded like the planks of the bed were screaming in pain as the big nails were pulled out of the frame, millimetre by millimetre. And then I heard a click outside, like a revolver being loaded.
I fired. Fired. Fired. And fired. Three bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber.
Afterwards the silence was even more oppressive.
I held my breath.
Fuck! The scraping sound was still there. There was a crash as the door handle was pulled right through the door and disappeared. Then a loud, plaintive bellow and that same clicking sound. Which I finally recognised.
I got the pistol out from under the pillow, loosened the rope and opened the door.
The buck hadn’t got far. I saw it lying on the heather twenty metres from the cabin, on the side facing the village. As if it were instinctively seeking people rather than the woods.
I went over to it.
It lay there immobile, only moving its head. The door handle was still caught in its antlers. Rubbing. It had been rubbing its horns against the door of the cabin and caught them on the handle.
It lay with its head on the ground and looked at me. I knew there wasn’t really any plea in its eyes, that I was just reading that into them. I raised the pistol. Saw the movement reflected in its wet eyeballs.
What had Anita said? You’re going to shoot the reflection. The lone buck, who had escaped from his flock and found this hiding p
lace, yet had still reached the end of his days – was that me?
I couldn’t bring myself to fire. Of course I couldn’t.
I closed my eyes. Hard. Thought about what came afterwards. About what didn’t come afterwards. No more tears, no more fear, no regret, blame, thirst, longing, sense of loss, of wasting all the chances you’d been given.
I fired. Twice.
Then I walked back to the cabin.
Lay down on the bed. Kiss and death. Kiss and death.
I woke up a couple of hours later with a headache, a rushing sound in my ear, and a feeling that that was that. Gravity was pulling at my body, draining all light and hope. But I hadn’t yet been dragged down so far that I couldn’t pull myself out, if I was quick and grabbed onto a lifebuoy. There was only one way out, and when I sank again, the darkness would be even blacker, last even longer. But I needed that way out now.
In the absence of Prince Valium I grabbed the only lifebuoy I had. I opened the bottle of drink.
CHAPTER 14
PERHAPS THE DRINK washed the worst of the darkness away, but it couldn’t wash Lea from my heart and mind. If I hadn’t realised before, I knew it now. I was stupidly, hopelessly and helplessly in love. Again.
But it was different this time. There was no one in the row in front of me that I’d rather have. Just her. I wanted this inordinately Christian woman with her kid, scar on her lip and recently drowned husband. Lea. The girl with the raven-black hair, a blue shimmer in her eyes, and a sway in her walk. Who talked slowly, thoughtfully, without unnecessary elaboration. The woman who saw you as you were, and accepted it. Accepted me. That alone . . .
I turned towards the wall.
And she wanted me. Even if she had said that she never wanted to see me again, I knew she wanted me. Why else would she have kissed me? She had kissed me, and she wouldn’t have done that unless she wanted to, and nothing had happened after that moment until she suddenly ran off. So unless she thought I was such a bad kisser that she’d dumped me there and then, it was simply a matter of getting her to understand that I was a man she could count on. One who’d look after her and Knut. That she’d got me wrong. That I had got myself wrong. I didn’t want to run away, not this time. Because I had it in me, I just hadn’t had a chance to prove it yet. Creating a home. But now that I thought about it, I liked the idea. Liked the idea of solidity, predictability. Yes, even uniformity and monotony. I had always looked for those things, after all. I just hadn’t found them. Until now.
I laughed at myself. Couldn’t help it. Because there I lay, under sentence of death, drunk, a failed contract killer, planning a long and happy life together with a woman who, the last time I talked to her, had told me in no uncertain terms that I was the last person she wanted to see again.
Then, when I turned back towards the room again and saw that the bottle on the chair in front of me was empty, I knew that one of two things was bound to happen.
I had to see her. Or I had to have more drink.
Before I slipped off into sleep again I heard a distant howl that rose and sank. They were back. They could smell death and decay, and they would soon be here.
Things were getting desperate.
I got up early. The towers of cloud were still off to the west, but they hadn’t come any closer, and, if anything, seemed to have pulled back slightly. And I hadn’t heard any more thunder either.
I washed in the stream. Removed the red silk scarf that was still tied round my head and bathed the wound to my temple. I put on my new underwear, new shirt. Shaved. I was about to rinse the silk scarf when I noticed it still held a little of her scent. I tied it round my neck instead. Muttered the words I was thinking of saying, words I must have changed eight times in the past hour, but I still knew them off by heart. They weren’t supposed to sound elaborate, just honest. And I ended with the words: ‘Lea, I love you.’ Hell, of course it had to end with that. Here I am, and I love you. Throw me out of the door if you must, if you can. But here I stand, holding out my hand to you, and in it lies my beating heart. I rinsed the razor and brushed my teeth, just in case she might want to kiss me again.
Then I started to walk down towards the village.
A swarm of flies rose up from the corpse of the reindeer as I passed. Oddly, it looked as though it had got bigger. There was a stench coming from the animal that I hadn’t noticed until now, even though it was only twenty paces from the cabin. Presumably it had been swept away by the steady west wind. One of its eyes was missing. A bird of prey, probably. But it didn’t look as though a wolf or any other large animal had been at it. Not yet.
I walked on. Quickly and firmly. Past the village, down to the jetty. Before I went to see Lea, I had to sort a couple of things out.
I pulled the pistol from my waistband, took a run-up of a couple of steps, and threw it as far out to sea as I could. Then I went to Pirjo’s shop. I bought a tin of reindeer meatballs, just for the sake of it, and asked where Mattis lived. After trying in vain to tell me in Finnish three times, she led me outside and pointed to a house a couple of pistols’ throw further up the road.
Mattis opened up after I had rung the doorbell three times and was about to walk away.
‘I thought I heard someone out here,’ he said. His hair was sticking in all directions, and he was wearing a wool jumper that was full of holes, and underpants and thick woollen socks. ‘The door’s unlocked, so what are you doing standing here?’
‘Didn’t you hear the doorbell?’
He looked with interest at the object I was pointing at.
‘Look at that, I’ve got a doorbell,’ he declared. ‘Doesn’t seem like it works, though. Come in.’
Mattis evidently lived in a house with no furniture.
‘You live here?’ I asked. My voice echoed off the walls.
‘As little as possible,’ he said. ‘But this is my address.’
‘So who’s your interior designer?’
‘I inherited the house from Sivert. Someone else inherited the furniture.’
‘Sivert was a relative?’
‘Don’t know. Maybe. Actually, I suppose we had a few similarities. He probably thought we were related.’
I laughed. Mattis looked at me blankly, pulled on some trousers and sat down on the floor. Crossed his legs.
I did the same.
‘Forgive me asking, but what happened to your cheek?’
‘I ran into a branch,’ I said, taking the money out of my jacket pocket.
He counted it. Grinned and stuffed it in his own pocket. ‘Silence,’ he said. ‘And drink, nice and cold from the cellar. What sort do you want?’
‘Is there more than one?’
‘No.’ The same grin. ‘Does this mean you’re thinking of staying in Kåsund, Ulf?’
‘Maybe.’
‘You’re safe here now, so why go anywhere else? You’ll be staying up at the cabin?’
‘Where else?’
‘Well . . .’ His grin looked as though it had been painted onto his face. ‘You’ve got to know a couple of the women here in the village. You might perchance feel like warming up a bit now that autumn’s on its way.’
I toyed with the idea of landing a fist right on his brown teeth. Where the hell had he got that from? I forced a smile: ‘Has your cousin been telling you stories, now?’
‘Cousin?’
‘Konrad. Kåre. Kornelius.’
‘He’s not my cousin.’
‘He said he was.’ I tried to unfold my legs again.
‘Did he?’ Mattis raised an eyebrow and scratched his bushy hair. ‘Bloody hell, that would mean . . . Hey, where are you going?’
‘Away from here.’
‘But you haven’t got your drink yet.’
‘I’ll manage without.’
‘Will you?’ he called after me.
I walked between the gravestones up to the church.
The door was ajar, so I slipped in.
She was standing by the altar with her
back to me, arranging some flowers in a vase. I inhaled, trying to keep my breathing calm, but my heart was already out of control. I walked up to her with heavy strides. Even so, she jumped when I cleared my throat.
She spun round. The two steps leading up to the altar meant she was looking down at me. Her eyes were red, narrow slits under the swollen lids. I thought my heart must be visible from the outside, that it was about to start hammering dents in my chest.
‘What do you want?’ Her whispered voice sounded husky from crying.
It was gone.
Everything I had planned to say was gone, forgotten.
All that was left was the last sentence.
So I said it.
‘Lea, I love you.’
I saw her blink, as if horrified.
Encouraged by the fact that she hadn’t immediately thrown me out, I went on: ‘I want you and Knut to come with me. To a place where no one can find us. A big city. One with an archipelago and mashed potato and medium-strength lager. We can fish and go to the theatre. And afterwards we can walk slowly home to our flat on Strandvägen. I can’t afford a big flat if it has to be there, because it’s an expensive street. But the flat would be ours.’
She whispered something as tears filled her already red eyes.
‘What?’ I took a step forward, but stopped when she raised her hands. She was holding a bouquet of withered flowers up protectively in front of her. She repeated herself, louder this time:
‘Is that what you said to Anita as well?’
It was as if someone had tipped a bucket of water from the Barents Sea over me.
Lea shook her head. ‘She came here. To give me her condolences about Hugo, she said. And she had seen you and me in my car, so she wondered if I knew where you were. Seeing as you’d promised to come back.’
‘Lea, I . . .’
‘No need, Ulf. Just get out of here.’
‘No! You know I needed somewhere to hide. Johnny was here looking for me. Anita offered to let me stay, and I had nowhere else to go.’
I thought I could detect a tiny hint of doubt in her voice. ‘So you didn’t touch her?’
I wanted to deny it, but it was as if my jaw muscles were paralysed, and my mouth just gaped open. Knut had been right: I’m no good at lying either.
