The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Straighten it.’

  ‘Sounds painful.’

  ‘You’ll have a local anaesthetic.’

  ‘Still sounds painful.’

  Stanley gave a crooked smile.

  ‘On a scale of one to ten?’ I asked.

  ‘A stiff eight,’ said Stanley.

  I smiled back at him.

  After he’d given me the injection he told me it would take a few minutes for the injection to take effect. We sat in silence, something which he seemed more comfortable with than me. The silence went on building until it became deafening, and finally I pointed to the headphones on his desk and asked what he liked to listen to.

  ‘Audio books,’ he said. ‘Anything by Chuck Palahniuk. Have you seen Fight Club?’

  ‘No. What’s so good about him?’

  ‘I didn’t say he was that good.’ Stanley smiled. ‘But he thinks like me. And manages to express it. Are you ready?’

  ‘Palahniuk,’ I repeated and held out my hand. His gaze met mine.

  ‘Just for the record, I don’t buy that explanation about slipping on the fresh snow and trying to break your fall,’ said Stanley.

  ‘OK,’ I said.

  I could feel him place a warm hand around my finger. And there was me hoping it would be completely anaesthetised.

  ‘And speaking of Fight Club,’ he said as he started pulling, ‘it looks to me as though you’ve come straight from a club meeting.’

  A stiff eight was no exaggeration.

  On my way out of the surgery I passed Mari Aas in the waiting room.

  ‘Hi, Roy,’ she said. She was smiling that superior smile of hers, but I could see she was blushing. This business of using a person’s name when you say hello was something she and Carl had started doing when they were going out together. Carl had read about a research project which concluded that people’s positive response increased by forty per cent without their realising it when researchers used their names in addressing them. I hadn’t been part of that research project.

  ‘Hi,’ I said, keeping my hand behind my back. ‘Early for snow.’ See, that’s the way you say hello to someone else from your village.

  * * *

  —

  Back in the car I wondered how I was going to turn on the ignition without using the bandaged and throbbing finger, and why Mari had blushed back there in the surgery. Was there something wrong with her she was ashamed of? Or was she ashamed of the fact that there was anything at all wrong with her? Because Mari wasn’t a blusher. When she and Carl were together, I was the one who blushed if she appeared unexpectedly in front of me. Although actually, yes, I had seen her blush a couple of times. Once was after Carl had bought a necklace for her birthday. Even though it wasn’t flashy, Mari knew Carl was completely penniless and forced him to admit that he had stolen two hundred kroner from the drawer in Uncle Bernard’s desk. I knew about it of course, and when Uncle Bernard complimented Mari on her nice necklace, I’d seen Mari blush so fiercely I was afraid she might burst a blood vessel. Maybe she was the same as me in that regard, that stuff like that – a minor theft, a trivial rejection – you never get over. They’re like lumps in the body that get encapsulated but can still ache on cold days, and some nights suddenly begin to throb. You can be a hundred years old and still feel the blush of shame washing up into your cheeks.

  Julie said she felt sorry for me, that Dr Spind should have given me some stronger painkiller, and that business about Alex was just something she’d made up, she wasn’t really meeting anyone and certainly not going to let anyone kiss her. I only half listened. My hand was throbbing and I should have gone home, but I knew that all I could expect there was more pain.

  Julie leaned into me as she studied my bandaged finger with a concerned expression on her face. I could feel her soft chest against my upper arm and sweet, bubblegum breath on my face. Her mouth was so close to my ear that her chewing sounds were like a cow grazing in a bog.

  ‘You didn’t start to feel just a little jealous?’ she whispered with all the sly innocence of which a seventeen-year-old is capable.

  ‘Start to?’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ve been jealous since I was five years old.’

  She laughed as though I was joking, and I forced a smile to confirm that I was.

  17

  MAYBE I’D BEEN JEALOUS OF Carl since the day of his birth. Maybe even before that, maybe when I saw my mother tenderly stroking her swollen stomach and saying that a brother was on the way. But I was five years old the first time I can remember being confronted by jealousy, when someone gave a name to this painful, jabbing sensation. ‘Don’t be jealous of your little brother.’ I think it was Mum who said that, with Carl sitting on her lap. He’d been sitting there a long time. Mum said later that Carl was given more love because he needed more love. Maybe so, but she didn’t say the other thing she could have said, that Carl was easier to love.

  And I was the one who loved him most of all.

  That’s why I was jealous not just of the unconditional love people around him showed him, but also of those Carl showed love for. Like Dog.

  Like the boy whose family rented a cabin here one summer, who was as good-looking as Carl, and whom Carl hung out with morning, noon and night, while I counted the days until the summer was over.

  Like Mari.

  During the first months they were together I used to fantasise about Mari having an accident, and that I was the one who had to comfort Carl. I don’t know exactly when it was that jealousy turned into love, or if it ever did, maybe the two feelings existed side by side, but at any rate it was love that drowned everything else out. It was like some terrible sickness. I couldn’t eat, sleep or concentrate on a normal conversation.

  I both dreaded and longed for her visits to see Carl, blushed when she gave me a hug or suddenly spoke to me without any warning or looked at me. Naturally I felt deeply ashamed of my feelings, of not being able to let go of them and being grateful for any small crumbs, of sitting in the same room as them, trying to justify my presence by pretending to be what I wasn’t, such as amusing, or interesting. In the end I found my role. It was to be the silent one, the one who listened, who laughed at Carl’s jokes or nodded slowly at something Mari had read, or heard her father, the chairman, say. I drove them to parties where Carl got drunk and Mari did what she could to make sure he behaved. When Mari asked if I thought it was boring always to be sober I said it was fine, I liked driving cars better than drinking alcohol, and sometimes Carl needed two to look out for him, right? She smiled and didn’t ask me again. I think she understood. I think everyone understood. Everyone but Carl.

  ‘Of course Roy must come with us!’ he would say whenever there was talk of going skiing, or a party in town at the weekend, or riding Aas’s old nags. He didn’t give a reason, his happy, open face was argument enough. It said that the world was a good place, with only good people living in it, and everyone should be happy just to be there.

  Naturally, I never made a move, as people say. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that Mari saw in me anything other than a rather silent but self-sacrificing big brother who was always ready to help them out.

  But then one Saturday evening at the village hall Grete came over and told me Mari was in love with me. Carl was in bed at home with the flu I’d had the week before, so I had no driving duties and I’d drunk some of the home brew Erik Nerell always brought with him. Grete was drunk too, and it was dancing in her eyes, that evil witch’s dance. And I knew she was just shit-stirring, trying to fuck things up a bit, because I knew her and I’d seen the way she looked at Carl. All the same, it was like when Armand the preacher in his dance-band Swedish accent boomed out that our redeemer liveth, and there is life after death. If someone says something that is clearly unlikely but that you desperately want to hear, there’s a small part of you – the weak part – that chooses to believ
e it.

  I saw Mari standing over by the entrance. She was talking to a boy, not someone from the village, because boys from round here were too afraid of Mari to come on to her. Not because she was Carl’s girl, but because they knew she was smarter than them, looked down on them, and that when she spurned them it would be very obvious, and in front of everyone, since everyone in Årtun kept half an eye on anything the daughter of the council chairman did.

  But it was OK for me, Carl’s brother, to approach her. OK for me and her at least.

  ‘Hi, Roy.’ She smiled. ‘This is Otto. He’s studying political science in Oslo. He thinks I should do the same.’

  I looked at Otto. He lifted a beer bottle to his lips and was looking off in another direction, probably not wanting me to join the conversation, wanting me to get lost as quickly as possible. I had to struggle not to thump the bottom of his bottle. I concentrated on Mari. I wet my lips.

  ‘Shall we dance?’

  She looked at me in mildly amused surprise. ‘But you don’t dance, Roy.’

  I shrugged. ‘I can learn.’ I was obviously drunker than I had thought.

  Mari laughed loudly and shook her head. ‘Not from me. I need a dancing teacher myself.’

  ‘I can help there,’ said Otto. ‘I actually teach swing in my spare time.’

  ‘Yes please!’ said Mari. She gave him that radiant smile she could turn on just like that, the one that made you feel like you were the only other person in the world. ‘As long as you’re not afraid of people laughing.’

  Otto smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t think it’ll look that bad,’ he said, putting his beer bottle down on the step and making me wish I’d shoved it into his mouth when I had the chance.

  ‘Now that’s what I call a brave man,’ said Mari, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘Is that OK with you, Roy?’

  ‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, looking round for a wall I could butt my head against.

  ‘So two brave men then,’ said Mari, putting her other hand on my shoulder. ‘Teacher and pupil, I’m going to enjoy seeing the two of you on the dance floor together.’

  And with that she left, and it was a couple of seconds before I understood what had happened. This Otto guy and me were left standing there looking at each other.

  ‘Would you rather fight?’ I asked.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. He rolled his eyes, picked up his beer bottle and moved off.

  Fair enough, I was too drunk anyway, but the headache and hangover guilt when I woke up next morning were worse than any beating Otto could have given me. Carl coughed and laughed and coughed again when I told him what had happened, leaving out the bit about what Grete had said.

  ‘You are absolutely the fucking tops! You’ll even dance to keep those other jerks away from your brother’s girl.’

  I grunted. ‘Only with Mari, not with that Otto guy.’

  ‘All the same, let me give you a big kiss!’

  I pushed him off. ‘No thanks – don’t want flu again.’

  I didn’t have an especially guilty conscience about not telling Carl how I felt about Mari. Mostly I was amazed he hadn’t realised it himself. I could have told him everything. I could have, and he would have understood. At any rate said he understood. Put his head on one side, given me a thoughtful look and said things like that happen, things like that pass. I knew that, and that was why I kept my mouth shut and waited for it to pass. I never asked Mari to dance again, neither metaphorically nor literally.

  But Mari asked me.

  It happened a few months after Grete had told Mari about her and Carl having it away, and Mari had dumped Carl. Carl had gone to Minnesota to study, and I was living alone on the farm. One day there was a knock on the door. It was Mari. She gave me a hug, pushing her breasts against my chest, wouldn’t let me go and asked if I wanted to sleep with her. ‘Will you sleep with me?’ were the words she whispered in my ear. And then added ‘Roy’. Hardly because of the research that shows that using a person’s name puts them in a more receptive frame of mind, but more to emphasise that it was me, Roy, she meant.

  ‘I know you want to,’ she said when she noticed my hesitation. ‘I’ve known it all along, Roy.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘You’re mistaken.’

  ‘Don’t lie,’ she said, slipping her hand down between us.

  I pulled myself away from her. Of course I knew why she’d come. Even though she was the one who had broken with Carl, she was the one who felt scorned. Maybe she didn’t even really want to break up but felt she had no choice. Because of course Mari Aas, the chairman’s daughter, couldn’t live with the fact that the son of a mountain farmer had been unfaithful to her, not when Grete had made sure half the village knew about it. But just to send Carl packing, as people say, wasn’t enough. The balance had to be restored. The fact that two months had passed indicated that she’d reached her decision reluctantly. In other words, if we went to bed together now it wouldn’t be a case of me exploiting a woman in a vulnerable situation after a break-up; she would be the one exploiting a brother who had just been abandoned by the person he loved most of all.

  ‘Come on,’ she said. ‘Let me help you.’

  I shook my head. ‘It isn’t you, Mari.’

  She stopped in the middle of the floor and stared at me in disbelief. ‘So then it’s true?’

  ‘What’s true?’

  ‘What people say.’

  ‘Damned if I know what they say.’

  ‘That you’re not interested in girls. That the only things on your mind are...’ She paused. Pretended to be looking for the right words. And then Mari Aas found them: ‘...are cars and birds,’ she said.

  ‘I mean that the problem isn’t you, Mari. It’s Carl. I just don’t think it would be right.’

  ‘Correct. It wouldn’t be.’

  Now I saw it too, that condescending contempt people down in the village thought she viewed them with. But there was something else, as though she knew something she wasn’t supposed to know. What had Carl said?

  ‘Better find some other way to take your revenge,’ I said. ‘Ask Grete for advice. She’s good on stuff like that.’

  And then Mari blushed, and this time she really was lost for words. She marched out and got into her car, gravel flying behind her as she sped down towards Geitesvingen.

  When I saw her in town a few days later she blushed again and pretended not to see me. It happened several times – in a village like ours it’s impossible not to bump into people. But time passed, Mari went to Oslo and studied political science, and when she came back we were able to speak to each other almost like before. Almost. Because we had lost each other. She knew what I knew, that, for her, this was like a cancerous lump inside her body: not that I had rejected her, but that I had seen her. Seen her naked. Naked and ugly.

  As for cancerous lumps of my own, there was probably still one there with Mari’s name on, but it had stopped growing. I’d waited out that crush. It’s funny, but I stopped being in love with Mari at almost exactly the same time it was over between her and Carl.

  18

  TWO DAYS AFTER MY VISIT to Moe the roofer, head office called and offered me the station down in Sørlandet. They sounded disappointed when I said no thanks. They asked for a reason, so I gave them one. I said the station I was running faced some interesting challenges now that the main highway was being rerouted, and that I looked forward to getting to grips with them. They sounded impressed and said it was a pity, they really believed I was the man they needed down there.

  Later that day Kurt Olsen called in at the station.

  He stood, legs apart, in front of the counter, drew his index finger and thumb over his Easy Rider moustache and waited until I had finished serving a customer and the shop was empty.

  ‘Anton Moe has reported you for grievous bodily harm.’

  ‘Th
at’s a cute choice of phrase,’ I said.

  ‘Maybe,’ said Olsen. ‘He told me about the accusations you made, and I’ve had a chat with Natalie. She confirms that her father has never touched her.’

  ‘What did you expect? That she’d say yes, since you ask, my father is actually screwing me?’

  ‘If it was a question of rape, then I don’t doubt—’

  ‘Jesus, I never said it was rape. Not technically. But it’s rape all the same, you must surely see that.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Maybe she thinks she didn’t resist enough, that she should have known it was wrong, even if she was only young when it started.’

  ‘Steady on now, you don’t know—’

  ‘Listen: kids think everything their parents do is right, OK, but she remembers too that she was told to keep it secret. So perhaps some part of her understood that it wasn’t right? And because she’s been party to the secrecy, because loyalty to the family comes before loyalty to God and the sheriff, she takes some of the blame herself. When she turns sixteen maybe it makes the burden easier to bear if she persuades herself that she was a willing participant.’

  Olsen stroked his moustache. ‘Sounds like you’ve just done a course in social studies and been living over at Moe’s while you did it.’

  I didn’t answer.

  He sighed. ‘I can’t force a sixteen-year-old to give evidence against her father, you must realise that. On the other hand she’s old enough to take responsibility for whatever she says.’

  ‘So what you’re saying is, you choose to look the other way because it could be consensual and the girl is no longer legally a minor?’

  ‘No!’ Kurt Olsen looked round to make certain we were still alone and lowered his voice again. ‘Incest in the direct line of descent is punishable by law, regardless. Moe risks six years in jail even if the girl was thirty and it was all a hundred per cent consensual; but how can I prove anything when no one talks? All that happens if I arrest the father is a scandal that will ruin the lives of all those involved. There would be a massive investment of resources in something that wouldn’t lead to a conviction. Plus the village name would be dragged through the mud in the national newspapers.’