by Jo Nesbo
‘Question is, can you save me, Baywatch man? I need twenty euros to get to Pamplona.’
‘I’ve got it, but I need the money myself,’ I said, which was the truth.
I looked at the crowd of people further up the beach and noticed a middle-aged woman wearing an outfit that outdid the Scotsman’s: hijab and bikini. She was standing bent over the doctor and Peter, whom I could just glimpse between the crowd of people as he knelt beside the girl. The woman alternated between sobbing and scolding, but no one seemed to be paying any attention to her. When I turned back to the Scotsman he was already on his way towards some of the other bathers. I walked over to join the crowd.
‘How is…?’
‘She’s breathing,’ said Peter without looking up at me. ‘We’re waiting for an ambulance.’
He stroked the girl’s face with his hand, partially obscuring it from me, so that all I could see was her forehead. On it, directly below her glistening black hairline, small downy tufts of soft hair that were already dry stirred in the slight breeze.
I felt a hand close around my arm and the woman in the bikini and the hijab spoke to me. It sounded Arabic, or Persian maybe, or perhaps Turkish. Or maybe I just thought that because she looked as though she came from that part of the world. Anyway, I didn’t understand a word of what she said.
‘English, please,’ I said.
‘Russkii?’ she asked.
I shook my head.
‘Daughter,’ she said and pointed to the girl. ‘Miriam.’
‘Ambulance,’ I said. She looked at me uncomprehendingly, reeled off several more words in the same foreign tongue and then squeezed my arm, as though the language barrier could be surmounted if only I concentrated hard enough.
‘Hospital,’ I tried, and mimed someone driving, but still got no response.
A distant siren sounded and faded on the breeze, and I pointed in the direction of the sound. The woman’s face lit up.
‘Aha, hospital,’ she said, though I couldn’t hear much difference from the way I had just said the word. The woman disappeared and came back carrying two bags just as the ambulance personnel came running with the stretcher from the ambulance parked in front of the line of bars. The doctor and the girl’s mother walked alongside the stretcher. Peter and I stood watching them. Then, without a word, Peter grabbed up his phone from the towel and ran over to the ambulance. And there, to my great surprise, I saw him starting to talk to the mother. He entered something on the keypad, showed it to her, and she nodded in confirmation. Then the woman kissed him on the cheek and got into the ambulance which immediately drove off, this time without the siren.
‘How did you communicate with her?’ I asked Peter when he returned.
‘I heard her ask if you spoke Russian.’
‘Do you speak Russian?’
‘A bit,’ he smiled. ‘Optional choice at my school.’
‘And you chose Russian because…?’
‘Because at least half of all the really good research being done in physics is written in Russian.’
‘Of course.’
‘They’re from Kyrgyzstan. Everyone from there over forty speaks a little Russian.’
‘Anyway, she seemed pleased you could speak it.’
‘Perhaps.’
‘She kissed you.’
Peter laughed. ‘My Russian is atrocious. From what I said she got the impression that I was the one who had rescued her daughter, and I –’
‘You?’
Peter smiled again. He was a good-looking boy, but in the course of our trip – probably owing to what was, for him, an unusually spartan diet – his face had lost some of its childish rotundity, and the muscles were visible on the suntanned body that had, until recently, been slightly chubby.
‘I didn’t correct her.’
‘Why not?’ I asked, although I already had some idea.
‘That girl’s face,’ he said, still smiling. ‘And those eyes. When she regained consciousness and opened them…’ His voice had a dreamy quality that was quite unlike the Peter I knew who had, by his own account, no time for sentimentality. ‘You should have seen her eyes, Martin.’
‘I did,’ I said. ‘She opened them for a second or two while we were under the water.’
Peter wrinkled his brow. ‘D’you think she saw you? I mean, d’you think she would recognise you as the man who saved her?’
I shook my head. ‘Faces are very different underwater. I don’t know if I would recognise her either.’
Peter turned his face up to the sun like a man who wanted to be dazzled. ‘Do you have any objection, old chap?’
‘To what?’
‘To our pretending that I was the one who swam out to her.’
I didn’t reply, because I wasn’t sure what to answer.
‘What an idiot I am,’ said Peter, eyes closed and with that smile that seemed unwilling to leave his face. ‘What does one dream of when one swims day in and day out, year after year, knowing that one will never be a world champion? Of course – that some day one will save someone from drowning and be celebrated as a hero. Perhaps even be awarded a medal so that, one day, one can tell one’s children the story of how it was won. Am I right?’
I shrugged. ‘Somewhere deep down inside there’s probably some such stupid dream, yes.’
‘And when at last it comes true, I ask you to let me take the credit. And all because of a pair of lovely eyes. Some friend I am!’ He laughed, shaking his head. ‘I must have got a touch of sunstroke. I asked the mother for her phone number so that I could call and make sure everything turned out all right the way the doctor said it would.’
‘Jesus. You –’
‘Yes, Martin! I must see those eyes again. Those eyebrows. That forehead. Those pale lips. And that body…my God, the girl’s an absolute nymphet.’
‘Exactly. A little too young for you, maybe?’
‘Are you crazy? We’re twenty-five. Nothing is too young for us!’
‘I doubt she’s more than sixteen years old, Peter.’
‘In Kyrgyzstan they get married when they’re fourteen.’
‘You’d marry her if she was fourteen?’
‘Yes!’ He put his hands on my shoulders and shook me, as if I was the one who had gone mad. ‘I’m in love, Martin. Do you know how many times that’s happened to me?’
I thought about it. ‘Two and a half. If you’ve been telling me the truth.’
‘Never!’ he said. ‘Not that I was lying. I just thought I knew what love was. Now I know.’
‘OK then,’ I said.
‘OK then what?’
‘It’s OK, you can be the one who saved her.’
‘You mean that?’
‘Yes, and if you’ll stop shaking me and leave her alone if she’s under eighteen then we’ve got a deal.’
‘And you swear that you’ll never, never tell her, or her mother, or anyone else?’
I laughed. ‘Never,’ I said.
* * *
—
That night I dreamed a strange dream.
Peter and I shared a room in one of the little hotels in old town, and the voices and laughter from the restaurants on the pedestrian street just below our open window, along with all the other street sounds and Peter’s steady breathing from the bed on the other side of the room, mingled together and wove the stuff of which dreams are made.
I was – not surprisingly – underwater and had my arms around something I thought was a person, but when it opened its eyes I found myself looking into a pair of dark, bloodshot fish-eyes, like the ones Peter had been looking at on the fish counter outside the restaurant where we had eaten earlier in the evening. He had told me how the eyes told you most of what you needed to know about the fish we chose, but he was careful to squeeze the body, to get some idea of how fresh
it was and its fat content, and then scrape his fingernail across the skin, because it seems that if they’re factory fish, the scales flake off when you do that. Peter had taught me all sorts of elementary things about restaurant food such as this, and about wine too. Before meeting him it had never struck me that the background from which I came wasn’t a particularly cultured one. I mean, in my family home we knew plenty about the latest trends in art, music, film and literature; but when it came to the classics and drama – which Peter had systematically made his way through since the age of twelve – he was way ahead of me. He could quote long passages from Shakespeare and Ibsen, although sometimes he showed a lack of understanding of their content and meaning. It was as though he employed the methodology of science to dissect even the most intensely emotional and aesthetically advanced texts.
I jumped when I saw the girl’s fish-eyes; and as that slippery fish-body glided out of my arms, and she swam down into the darkness beneath us, I saw that the bathing cap was not pink but red.
* * *
—
I was woken by a light that came and went, as though someone were playing a torch back and forth across my eyelids. When I opened my eyes I saw that it was sunlight slipping between the curtains as they swayed in the morning breeze.
I got up, feeling the cool of the wooden floor against my feet in the large, sparsely furnished room, and pulled on my trousers and a T-shirt as I spoke to Peter’s motionless back in the other bed.
‘Breakfast time. You coming?’
The grunted reply suggested the after-effects of the wine the previous evening. Peter had no head for alcohol, or at any rate tolerated it worse than me.
‘Want me to bring you something?’
‘A double espresso,’ he whispered hoarsely. ‘I love you.’
I emerged into the sunshine and found an open pavement restaurant which, to my surprise, offered a good breakfast, unlike the usual tasteless Eurocrap you get in tourist joints.
I glanced through a Basque newspaper someone had left behind, looking maybe for some mention of the heroics on the beach the previous day, but since Basque is a language unlike any other I couldn’t make out a word of it. Maybe Kyrgyz was too? Because that’s what it would be called, wouldn’t it? Kyrgyz or something like that? On the other hand, people say Pakistani, they don’t say Pakis. Once I’d thought all this through without reaching any conclusion, eaten my breakfast and got a triple espresso to go in a paper cup, I returned to the hotel.
As I let myself into the room and put the cup down on the table beside Peter’s empty bed I noticed that the rug on the floor was gone.
‘Where’s the rug?’ I called in the direction of the bathroom where I could hear the unmistakable sound of Peter brushing his teeth. In case it contained the secret to white teeth, I had once considered making a closer study of his technique.
‘Had to chuck it out, I puked up on it,’ I heard from the bathroom.
Peter appeared in the doorway. And he did indeed look terrible. His face was grey, as though his tan had been washed off with chlorine, and there was a hint of dark rings around both eyes. He looked ten years older than the euphoric boy who had declared himself to be in love for the first time only a day earlier.
‘Was it the wine?’
He shook his head. ‘The fish.’
‘Really?’ I checked, but my own stomach seemed in good shape. ‘Think you’ll be better by this evening?’
Peter made a face. ‘I don’t know.’
We had booked the table at the Arzak four months ago. It had been a last-minute thing. We’d downloaded the menu and on the train through Europe eagerly planned our meal from start to finish in several different versions. It’s no exaggeration to say I’d been really looking forward to it.
‘You look as though you’ve just died,’ I said. ‘Come on, Lazarus, don’t let a bit of rotten fish –’
‘It’s not only the fish,’ he said. ‘Miriam’s mother just called.’
The serious expression on his face wiped the smile off mine.
‘Apparently things aren’t going as well as expected and she asked me to come to the hospital. No one there understands a word of Russian.’
‘Miriam? Is she…?’
‘I don’t know, Martin. But I’ve got to go over there at once.’
‘I’ll come with you.’
‘No,’ he said firmly as he stuck his bare feet into the kind of soft loafers people from his end of our town usually wore.
‘No?’
‘They only let visitors in one at a time, so they asked me to come alone. I’ll call you when I know more.’
I was left standing in the middle of the floor, on the pale rectangle left by the rug, wondering whether he meant more about Miriam, or about our restaurant visit.
* * *
—
On my way out I saw the end of the rolled-up rug sticking out of a rubbish bin in the parking space behind the hotel. Thought of the stink of puked-up fish and hurried on by. I spent the day wandering aimlessly through the streets of San Sebastián. It was clearly a town for the rich. Not the Russian vulgarians, the importunate Arabs, the bellowing Americans or the smug nouveau riche from my own country. It was a town for those who take their wealth for granted, knowing at the same time that they are privileged. Who are neither proud nor ashamed of their position, who feel the need neither to hide nor to display the fact that they are wealthy. They drive cars that look like other people’s cars and, in case you’re interested, cost twice as much. In San Sebastián and other holiday towns they live in a kind of shabby, relaxed elegance in large summer houses hidden behind tall hedges, with rusting wrought-iron gates and facades that look as if they could use another coat of paint. Their clothes look comfortable and, to the uninitiated, nondescript, yet they have a discreet and timeless stylishness, bought in shops that Peter knows about, and can’t understand that I don’t, and that anyway I couldn’t afford. The upper class can know a lot about the working class and the poor, and feel a deep fascination for them, especially if they can boast of great-grandparents who started out there. But they are often wholly ignorant of the upper-middle classes, those who are so keen to gain a foothold on the ladder that leads up to their own class. They’re like city dwellers ignorant of even the most elementary aspects of life in their own immediate vicinity but fully conversant with all that is remote and exotic.
I walked through San Sebastián’s broad streets, hearing the voices around me speaking Spanish, Basque, French and something that was possibly Catalan. But no Nordic languages. So I moved through the town as an outsider, the same way I had moved through Peter’s social circle. His friends treated me with a courteous friendliness and hospitality and held open the doors to rooms they pretended not to know I had no right to enter.
‘You must come to our Autumn Ball, Martin, absolutely everyone’s going to be there!’
The Stop signs began with what was correct ‘attire’. The word simply means what you wear; but in their context it means not just a dinner jacket but the right dinner jacket. How to wear it, and all the other small and secret details that can – and do – expose you as the outsider you really are. The way that their glances – despite the welcoming exterior – can and do reveal that little touch of contempt they feel for outsiders whom, without thinking too much about it, they regard as pushy candidates to join their ranks, on the automatic assumption that everyone wants to be one of them. Because they know where their place is, and that is at the top of the food chain. That’s to say, there’s always room for someone even higher up, and that is where their attention is concentrated, on that next step up.
In that respect Peter was probably a little more laid-back than his friends. Not that he wasn’t competitive once he’d set himself a goal. But he didn’t seem driven by social ambition, more by curiosity and genuine enthusiasm. Of course, a person who is already
accepted feels less need to be accepted, and I think that was what made Peter so classy and easy to like. Or so hard to dislike. And as his chosen one, some of this dripped onto me.
The girls in Peter’s circle seemed to like me particularly. His accreditation was my entry ticket, at the same time as I was regarded as ‘exciting’, even a bit ‘dangerous’, which would have made the boys who knew me in my old neighbourhood laugh out loud. Though it was mild and pretty much smoothed out I still spoke with an East End accent, and Peter described me as an artist without the prefix ‘wannabe’ the word actually deserved. I’d spent a night or three with some of these girls without breaking any hearts. They seemed as satisfied with the no-strings brevity of things as I was. I’m guessing they referred to it as a ‘fling’ when they talked about it to their friends. Because that’s exactly what it was: a slight sidestep away from their ordinary everyday reality. Because naturally they wouldn’t want to get seriously involved with someone as unserious as a would-be artist from the East End of town, regardless of how cute and likeable he might be.
One of them had been an old flame of Peter’s, a girl with an interest in horses. At a party at Peter’s place she had – when I told her how I used to ride the old nag on my grandparents’ farm – invited me to go riding with her. I told her I would have to ask Peter first if he thought it was OK.
Peter had just laughed. ‘Go for it,’ he said, giving me a punch on the upper arm. So I had. Perhaps at some point it had occurred to me that a romp in the hay with an upper-class girl wearing riding gear was an erotic cliché, but that didn’t make it any the less enjoyable. Probably the opposite. But once I started enthusiastically relating what had happened to Peter I realised I had misjudged the situation. A slight tightening of the facial muscles, an almost imperceptible stiffness in his smile. So I lied, said I’d tried but that it hadn’t worked out. I don’t know why that seemed to make him like me better, because the way I told the story I hadn’t had any qualms about trying to seduce my best friend’s first girlfriend. I could only hope that she wouldn’t say anything about that little ‘fling’ of ours. Because in that fraction of a second I had seen something, something in that stiff smile, something unknown and yet somehow also known, a Peter I didn’t recognise, but who in some way or other I knew was there.
