The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

by Jo Nesbo

  He’d seen it in films, read it in books, had even himself declaimed Hamlet’s thoughts on suicide (to be or not to be) when a secondary school student, when he had given a remarkably unsuccessful reading from the play. The hesitation, the doubt, the interior monologue that drags you this way and that. But Odd Rimmen no longer felt any such doubt. One way or another, all roads had been leading here, and this was the right, the only way to end it. So right it wasn’t even sad but quite the opposite. A storyteller’s last triumph. Put your gun where your pen is. And let other so-called writers sit there onstage and bathe in the audience’s bargain-price love, lying to themselves and to everyone else there.

  Odd Rimmen released the safety catch and pressed the pistol against his temple.

  Already he could see the headlines.

  And after that: his place in the history books.

  No, Nothing. The novel’s place.

  Like that.

  He closed his eyes and pressed his index finger against the trigger.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Odd Rimmen!’

  It was Esther’s voice.

  He hadn’t heard her come, but now she was calling his name. She wasn’t far away. Maybe up in the living room. And strangely enough calling his full name, as though she wanted all of him to step forward and show himself.

  Odd fired. There was a crackling sound, like the roaring of a fire. As though time was distended by his senses he could hear the powder ignite and burn in superslow motion, the sounds rising to a crescendo of applause.

  Odd Rimmen opened his eyes. At least, he thought he opened his eyes. Leastways, he saw it.

  The light.

  Head for the light. Sophie’s words. The editor he had listened to and trusted all his writing life.

  And then he walked towards the light. It blinded him. He saw no one in the darkness behind the light, heard only the crackling applause as it grew even louder.

  He bowed slightly and sat down in the chair beside Esther Abbot, the journalist who, despite her rough and almost masculine manner, had a softness about the eyes that he had noticed in the dressing room a few minutes earlier.

  ‘Let’s get straight to the point, Mr Rimmen,’ said Esther Abbot. ‘I’m sitting here with a copy of The Hill in my hands and we’ll be talking about that. But first: do you think you’ll ever be able to write such a good book again?’

  Odd Rimmen peered out across the auditorium. He could make out a few individual faces on the first rows. They stared at him, some half smiling, as though they had already discounted any possibility that he might say something funny or brilliant. And he knew that no matter what he said, he would be given the benefit of every doubt. It was like playing on an instrument that half played itself. All you had to do was touch the keys, open your mouth.

  ‘You’re the ones who decide what is and isn’t good,’ he said. ‘All I can do is write.’

  A sort of sigh passed through the audience. As though they were concentrating in order to penetrate to the real depths of what each individual word meant. Jesus Christ.

  ‘And that’s exactly what you do, you’re Odd Dreamin’,’ said Esther Abbot as she shuffled her papers. ‘Do you write all the time, make things up all the time?’

  Odd Rimmen nodded. ‘All the time. Every spare moment I get. I was writing just now. Just before I walked out onto the stage.’

  ‘Really? And are you writing this now?’

  The audience’s laughter dwindled to an expectant silence as Odd Rimmen turned and looked out towards them. Smiled slightly. Waited. These trembling, breathless, holy moments…

  ‘I hope not.’

  There was a wave of laughter. Odd Rimmen tried not to smile too broadly. But of course it’s hard not to, not when you can feel unconditional love being injected directly into your heart.

  THE EARRING

  ‘ouch!’

  I looked in the mirror. ‘Something wrong?’

  ‘This,’ said the fat lady in the back seat, and held up something between her thumb and forefinger.

  ‘What is it?’ I asked as I switched my gaze back to the road.

  ‘Can’t you see? An earring. I sat down on it.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘A passenger must have lost it.’

  ‘Well, of course I realise that. But how?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘An earring doesn’t just fall off while you’re sitting up straight.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, braking as we approached a red light at the only junction in town. ‘You’re my first passenger today, I’ve only just taken over the car.’

  With the cab at a standstill I glanced again at the mirror. The lady was studying the earring. It has probably been lying in the crack between the seats and got squeezed up when her huge arse pressed down the cushions on both sides.

  I looked at the earring. And something struck me. I tried to dismiss it at once, because there must have been at least a thousand different varieties of a simple earring like that.

  The lady looked up and met my eyes in the mirror. ‘It’s genuine,’ she said, and handed the earring to me. ‘You better try to trace the owner.’

  I held it up against the grey morning light. The pin was gold. Jesus. I turned it, and sure enough, there was no engraved logo and no manufacturer’s name. Told myself not to draw any hasty conclusions, one pearl earring looks pretty much like any other pearl earring.

  ‘It’s green,’ said the lady.

  * * *

  —

  Palle – who owned the taxi – had taken the night shift, so I waited until ten and the cab was parked up at the rank next to the kiosk steps before I phoned him. Twenty years ago Palle had come here from playing second division football for Grenland to help get our team up out of the third tier. If he didn’t manage that then he did manage – at least by his own account – lo bed every available female in the town between the ages of eighteen and thirty.

  ‘I think we can safely say I was the team’s top scorer,’ he said once in the pub, stroking his magnificent blond moustache between thumb and forefinger. Maybe so, I was just a kid in his playing days and knew only that he’d married one of the more obviously available. She was the daughter of the foreman in the taxi owners’ union, and when Palle retired from football he got his taxi driver’s licence without the waiting period others had to go through. As a subcontracted driver for Palle I’d been waiting five years now with still no sign of that golden ticket.

  ‘Something wrong?’ Palle asked in that threatening tone he always used whenever I called him during my shift. He was terrified I might have had a crash or that there was a problem with the car, something I knew he’d halfway blame me for, even if it was someone else crashed into me or some mechanical fault in the worn-out old Mercedes that Palle was too mean to book in for regular servicing.

  ‘Has anyone called in about an earring?’ I asked.

  ‘Earring?’

  ‘In the back seat. In the crack between the cushions.’

  ‘No, but I’ll let you know if I hear anything.’

  ‘I was wondering…’

  ‘Yes?’ Palle sounded impatient, as if I’d woken him. The evening shift usually wound down around two o’clock, that being an hour after the two bars closed. After that there was just the one taxi on night shift, a shift that was shared around between the cabs.

  ‘Did Wenche take our taxi yesterday?’

  I knew Palle didn’t like it when I called it our taxi when in actual fact it was his, but now and then I forgot.

  ‘Is it her earring?’ I heard Palle yawn.

  ‘That’s what I’m wondering. It’s similar.’

  ‘So why not ring her instead of waking me up?’

  ‘Well.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘An earring doesn’t just fall of
f. Not while you’re sitting up straight,’ I said.

  ‘It doesn’t?’

  ‘That’s what people say. Was she in the car yesterday?’

  ‘Let me think.’ I heard the click of Palle’s lighter at the other end before he continued. ‘Not in my car, but I think I saw her in a taxi queue around one, outside Fritt Fall. I can ask around.’

  ‘I’m not wondering which taxi Wenche took, I’m wondering who owns the earring,’ I said.

  ‘Well, can’t help you there, obviously.’

  ‘You were the one driving.’

  ‘So what? If it was in the crack between the seats it could have been there for days. And I can’t be expected to remember the name of every fucking fare I pick up. If the earring’s worth something then whoever owns it’ll ring. Did you top up the brake fluid? I nearly ended up in the sea when I started work yesterday.’

  ‘I’ll do it when things have quietened down a bit,’ I said. It was typical of that miserable bugger Palle to send me to the garage instead of going there himself. As a subcontracted driver I wasn’t paid an hourly rate, all I got was forty per cent of my takings.

  ‘Remember the hospital pickup at two,’ he said.

  ‘Sure sure,’ I said and hung up. Studied the earring again. I was hoping like hell I was mistaken.

  The rear door opened, and I recognised the smell before I heard the voice. You might think that a taxi driver would get used to the rancid but also sickly-sweet smell that’s a combination of stale and fresh booze once the social security money’s been picked up, a new round of bottles bought, and everything’s set up for a morning session at the home of one of the social security drunks. But the opposite happens. The smell gets worse with each passing year, and nowadays it can really turn my stomach. There was a chinking sound from the off-licence bag and a slurred voice: ‘Nergardveien 12. Chop-chop.’

  I turned the key in the ignition. The brake fluid warning light had been blinking for over a week, and you had to press your foot down a little harder on the pedal, but of course Palle was exaggerating when he said he’d almost rolled into the sea, even if the slope down from his garage to the edge of the quay was steep and dangerous in winter. And yes, when I was sick and tired of Palle giving me all the day shifts at the weekends and the night shifts on the weekdays while he helped himself to every shift it was possible to earn good money on, it did happen – when I parked the car outside his garage some winter night and picked up my own car to drive home – that I offered up a silent prayer that he might skid on the ice and I might jump forward one place in the taxi driver’s ticket queue.

  ‘No smoking in the car please,’ I said.

  ‘Shut your mouth!’ came a bark from the back seat. ‘Who’s paying for this, you or me?’

  That would be me, I thought. I work for forty per cent of the takings, minus forty per cent tax which pays for you to drink yourself to death, and the best I can hope for is that you do it as quickly as possible.

  ‘What did you say?’ said the voice from the back seat.

  ‘No smoking,’ I said, and pointed at the sign on the dashboard. ‘There’s a fine of five hundred kroner.’

  ‘Take it easy, son.’ Cigarette smoke drifted forward between the seats. ‘I’ve got the cash.’

  I lowered the windows front and back and thought how that five hundred wouldn’t be on the meter and would go straight into my pocket, because Palle smoked so much there was no chance he would notice the smell. But at the same moment I knew I would actually be a good boy and hand over the five hundred and get nothing myself. Because Palle claimed that it was him who cleaned the inside of the car, something we both knew he never did, that it never happened until it was so filthy inside I ended up doing it because I couldn’t stand it any more.

  The meter showed 195 when I pulled up on Nergardveien.

  The drunk handed me a 200-krone note. ‘Keep the change,’ he said and was on his way out.

  ‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘I want 695.’

  ‘It says 195.’

  ‘You smoked in my cab.’

  ‘I did? Don’t remember. All I remember is that fucking draught.’

  ‘You were smoking.’

  ‘Prove it.’

  He slammed the door behind him and headed for the entrance to the block to the cheery chinking of the bottles in his bag.

  I checked the time. Six hours left of what was already a shitty working day. Then off to my in-laws for dinner. I don’t know which I dreaded more. I took the earring out of my pocket and studied it again. A pin sticking out from the round grey pearl, like a balloon on a string. I was reminded of the time when I was too young to join the National Day parade on 17 May and stood watching it with my grandfather. He had bought a balloon for me, and for just a second I must have lost concentration and let go of the string, because suddenly the balloon was floating high above me, and of course, I bawled. Grandad let me cry myself out, and then he explained why he wouldn’t buy another one for me. ‘It’s to teach you that when you’re lucky enough to get something you wished for, when you’ve been given a chance, you’ve got to hang on to it, because you don’t get second chances here in life.’

  And maybe he was right. When I hooked up with Wenche I felt as if I’d been given a balloon I’d been longing for and couldn’t afford but had been given anyway. A chance. And so I’d held on tight. Not slackened my grip, not even for a second. Maybe I held on a little too tight. Now and then it seemed to me I could feel something tugging at the string. Those earrings had been a slightly-too-expensive Christmas gift, at least compared to the Björn Borg underpants she had bought for me. But was this one of those earrings? It looked like it. It actually looked completely identical as far as I could see, but neither this earring nor the ones I had bought had any particular distinguishing marks that would have told me one way or the other. Wenche came home after I fell asleep last night, she’d been on a long-planned pub crawl with two friends, young mothers who’d finally managed to arrange a kid-free night for themselves.

  I took the chance to point out to her that it showed you could still have a life, even with kids; but Wenche had just groaned and told me to stop going on, she just wasn’t ready yet. She didn’t specify who it was she wasn’t ready for, me or the kids. She just left it at that. Wenche needed room to breathe, more room than most. I knew that. Yes, I understood. And I really wanted to give it to her, but somehow I just couldn’t. Couldn’t quite manage to slacken my grip on that string enough.

  An earring doesn’t just fall off, not while you’re sitting up straight.

  If she’s been fooling around with some guy in the back seat with Palle driving she must have been well pissed because she knew he was my employer. But then she could do crazy stuff when she’d been drinking. Like the first time we ever screwed, both of us drunk, two in the morning, and she insisted we do it out on the football pitch, up against one of the goalposts. It was only later I found out she’d had an on–off thing with the goalkeeper and he’d just dumped her.

  I got her number up onto the screen, stared at it for a moment, then dropped the phone into the console between the seats and turned up the radio.

  * * *

  —

  I parked outside Palle’s garage at five. By five thirty I’d showered, changed and was in the hall waiting for Wenche, who was in the bathroom putting on make-up and talking on the phone.

  ‘Yeah yeah yeah!’ she said irritably as she emerged and caught sight of me. ‘We’ll only be even later if you start going on at me.’

  I hadn’t said a word and knew that the only thing to do was carry on like that. Keep my mouth shut and keep hold of the string of that balloon.

  ‘Do you have to stand there like that?’ she groaned as she struggled into her long black boots.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘With your arms folded.’

  I unfolded them
.

  ‘And don’t look at your watch,’ she said.

  ‘I’m not loo—’

  ‘Don’t even think about it! I’ve told them we’ll be there when we’re there. Christ, you do get on my nerves.’

  I went outside and sat in the car. She followed, checked her lipstick in the mirror, and for a while we drove in silence.

  ‘Who were you talking to on the phone?’ I asked her.

  ‘Mamma,’ said Wenche, drawing an index finger beneath her lower lip.

  ‘For so long and just five minutes before you’re due to meet?’

  ‘Is there a law against that?’

  ‘Anyone else coming today?’

  ‘Anyone else?’

  ‘Besides your parents and us? Since you’re all dolled up.’

  ‘No harm in trying to look smart if you’re invited out to dinner. You, for example, you could have worn that black blazer instead of looking like someone off for a holiday in his cabin.’

  ‘Your dad’ll be wearing his knitted sweater, so I’m doing the same.’

  ‘He’s older than you. It won’t do you any harm to show a bit of respect.’

  ‘Respect, yeah,’ I said.

  ‘What?’

  I shook my head to say it was nothing. Keep a hold of that string.

  ‘Nice earrings,’ I said, without taking my eyes off the road.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said, in a tone almost of surprise, and from the corner of my eye I saw she automatically raised one hand to her ear.

  ‘But why aren’t you wearing the ones I gave you for Christmas?’ I asked.

  ‘I wear those all the time.’

  ‘Yes, so why not now?’

  ‘Christ, you do go on.’

  I could see she was still fiddling with her earrings. Silvery things.

  ‘I got these from Mum, so maybe she’ll think it’s nice to see me wearing them. OK?’

  ‘Sure sure,’ I said. ‘I only asked.’

  She sighed, shook her head and didn’t have to say it again: I was getting on her nerves.