The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  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 a
im, 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 occ
urred 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.