The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  30

  I REMEMBER ONLY SNATCHES OF the funeral.

  Uncle Bernard was on his feet again, they had decided not to operate, and he and Carl were the only ones I saw crying. The church was full of people that – as far as I know – Mum and Dad had almost no connection with apart from what is absolutely unavoidable in a village like Os. Bernard said a few words and read out the condolences on the wreaths. The biggest was from Willumsen’s Used Cars and Breaker’s Yard, which probably meant he could charge it to customer services for tax purposes. Neither Carl nor I had expressed any wish to say anything, and the priest didn’t press us, I think he appreciated the elbow room when he had such a large audience. But I don’t remember what he said, don’t actually think I was listening. The condolences came afterwards, an endless row of pale, grief-stricken faces, like sitting in a car at a level crossing and watching the train pass by, faces staring out, seemingly at you, but actually on their way to quite other places.

  Many people said they felt for me, but then of course I couldn’t tell them that in that case they weren’t feeling too bad.

  I remember Carl and me standing in the dining room up at the farm the day before we were due to move down to Uncle Bernard’s. We didn’t know, of course, that it would only last a few days and that we would move back to Opgard. It was so bloody quiet in there.

  ‘This is all ours now,’ said Carl.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But is there anything you want?’

  ‘That,’ said Carl, pointing to the cupboard where Dad kept his crates of Budweiser and bottles of bourbon. I took the carton of tins of Berry’s moist snuff, and that’s how I began using the stuff. Not too often, because you never know when you’re going to be able to get hold of Berry’s next time, and you don’t want to be using that Swedish shite, not once you’ve known the taste of properly fermented tobacco.

  Even before the funeral we’d both been interrogated by the sheriff, though he referred to it as ‘just a chat’. Sigmund Olsen wondered why there were no braking marks on Geitesvingen and asked if my father was depressed. But Carl and I stuck to our story that it had looked like an accident. Maybe driving a little too fast and a momentary lapse of attention as he glanced in the rear-view mirror to check that we were following. Something like that. And finally the sheriff appeared to be satisfied. But it struck me too that it was lucky for us these were the only two theories he had: accident or suicide. I knew that punching a couple of holes in the brake hoses and draining off enough brake fluid to significantly reduce the car’s braking power would not in itself be enough to arouse suspicion if it was discovered. Air in the braking system is something you get all the time in old cars. It would be worse if they found out that the set screw holding the steering column had been loosened so the steering didn’t work. The car had landed on its roof and not been the total wreck I’d been expecting. If they went over the car they might have come to the conclusion that anything that’s fixed can also work loose, even set screws. But loose screws as well as holes in the brake hoses? And why no traces of leaking brake fluid on the ground beneath the car? As I say, we had been lucky. Or more accurately, I had been lucky. Of course I knew that Carl knew that somehow or other I had been behind the accident. He had instinctively realised that at any cost he and I must not ride in the Cadillac that evening. And then there was the promise I had given him, that I would fix things. But he never asked exactly how I’d done it. He probably realised it was the brakes, because he’d seen the brake lights go on without the Cadillac slowing down. And when he never asked, why would I tell him? You can’t be punished for something you don’t know about, and if I did get done for the murder of our parents I could take the fall alone, I didn’t need to have Carl beside me, not the way Dad had had Mum. Because unlike them, Carl could easily live without me. Or so I thought.

  31

  CARL WAS BORN EARLY IN the autumn, I was born during the summer holidays. It meant that on his birthday he got presents from his classmates and even had a birthday party, whereas mine passed by without celebrations. Not that I ever really complained. That’s why it took a couple of seconds before I realised that the words being sung were actually being sung for me.

  ‘Happy eighteenth birthday!’

  I was on a break and sitting out in the sun on a couple of pallets, my eyes closed and listening to Cream on my headphones. I looked up and pulled out the earbuds. Had to shade my eyes. Not that I didn’t remember that voice. It was Rita Willumsen.

  ‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling my face and ears start to glow as though I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t be doing. ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘Coming of age,’ was all she said. ‘The right to vote. Driving licence. And they can put you in jail.’

  The Saab Sonett was parked behind her, just the way it had been all those months ago. But at the same time something felt different, as though she’d given me a promise back then and had come now to keep it. I felt my hand shaking slightly as I pushed the headphones into the back pocket. I was no longer completely unkissed and I’d fumbled a bit under a bra behind the village hall at Årtun, but I was very definitely still a virgin.

  ‘There’s funny sounds coming from the Sonett,’ she said.

  ‘What kind of sounds?’ I asked.

  ‘Maybe we should take a drive and you can hear them for yourself.’

  ‘Sure thing. Just a moment.’ I went into the office.

  ‘I’ll be away for a while,’ I said.

  ‘OK,’ said Uncle Bernard without looking up from ‘that damned paperwork’, as he used to call it, and which now surrounded him in enormous piles after his stay in hospital. ‘When are you back?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He took off his reading glasses and looked at me. ‘OK.’ He said it like a question, like, was there something else I wanted to tell him? And if I didn’t want to, fine by him, he trusted me.

  I nodded and went back out into the sunlight.

  ‘On a day like this we ought really to have had the roof back,’ said Rita Willumsen as she drove the Sonett out onto the main highway.

  I didn’t ask why we didn’t.

  ‘What kind of sounds are you hearing?’ I asked.

  ‘People round here ask if I bought this car because the roof goes back. Here where the summer only lasts a month and a half, they’re probably thinking. But do you know what the reason is, Roy?’

  ‘The colour?’

  ‘Quite the male chauvinist.’ She laughed. ‘It was the name. Sonett. Know what that is?’

  ‘It’s a Saab.’

  ‘It’s a verse form. A type of love poem with two quartets and two trios, fourteen lines in all. The master sonneteer was an Italian named Francesco Petrarch who was madly in love with a woman named Laura who was married to a count. Altogether he wrote 317 sonnets to her. Quite a lot, don’t you think?’

  ‘Pity she was married then.’

  ‘Not at all. The key to passion is that you never wholly and completely get the one you love. We human beings are made rather impractically when it comes to things like that.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  ‘You’ve a lot to learn, I can hear that.’

  ‘Maybe so. But I don’t hear any strange noises from the car.’

  She glanced in the mirror. ‘It’s there when I start it in the morning. It goes once the engine heats up. We’ll park for a while, give the engine a chance to cool down properly.’

  She indicated and turned down a wooded track. She’d obviously driven here before, and after a while she turned down an even narrower track and stopped the car under some low-hanging pine-tree branches.

  The sudden silence as she turned off the engine took me by surprise. I knew instinctively that silence had to be filled with something, because it was more charged than anything I could think of to say. I – who was already a killer – didn’t dare
to either move or look at her.

  ‘So tell me, Roy. Have you met any girls since the last time we spoke?’

  ‘A few,’ I said.

  ‘Anyone special?’

  I shook my head. Glanced from the corner of my eye. She was wearing a red silk scarf and a loose-fitting blouse, but I could see the outlines of her breasts clearly. Her skirt had glided up and I could see her naked knees.

  ‘Anyone you’ve...done it with, Roy?’

  I felt a sweet surge in my stomach. I thought of lying, but what had I to gain by that?

  ‘Not everything, no,’ I said.

  ‘Good,’ she said and slowly pulled off the silk scarf. The three top buttons of her blouse were undone.

  I was hard, felt it straining in my trousers and laid my hands in my lap to hide it. Because I knew my hormones were so disturbed right there and then that I couldn’t be sure I hadn’t misinterpreted the situation completely.

  ‘Let’s see if you’re any better at holding a woman’s hand,’ she said and put her right hand on top of mine in my lap. It was as though the heat radiated straight down through the hand and down into my sex, and for a moment I was afraid I was going to come right there.

  I let her take my hand, pull it towards her, saw her loosen her blouse slightly and draw my hand inside it, onto the bra over her left breast.

  ‘You’ve waited a long time for this, Roy.’ She gave a cooing laugh. ‘Take firm hold of me, Roy. Squeeze the nipple a bit. Those of us who aren’t young girls like it a bit harder. Easy, easy, that’s a little too much. That’s it. You know what, Roy, I think you’re a natural.’

  She leaned over towards me, held my chin between her thumb and forefinger and kissed me. Everything about Rita Willumsen was big, including the tongue as it coiled itself rough and strong like an eel round mine. And there was so much more taste to her than the two girls I had French-kissed with before. Not better, but more. Maybe even a bit too much – my senses were electrified, overloaded. She ended the kiss.

  ‘We’ve still got some way to go there.’ She smiled as she slid a hand under my T-shirt and stroked my chest. And even though I was so hard I could have broken stones with it I felt myself growing calmer. Because not much was being asked of me, she was the one at the wheel, she was in charge of the speed and where we were going.

  ‘Let’s take a walk,’ she said.

  I opened the door and stepped out into the intense shrill chirping of birds in the quivering summer heat. For the first time I noticed the blue trainers she was wearing.

  We followed a track that curved upward over a hill. It was the summer holidays, fewer people in the village and on the roads, and up here the chances of meeting someone were minimal. All the same she asked me to stay fifty metres behind her so I could slip behind a tree if she gave a signal.

  Near the top of the hill she stopped and beckoned to me.

  She pointed down at the red-painted cabin below us.

  ‘That’s the sheriff’s,’ she said. ‘And that one there...’ She pointed up at a small summer farmhouse ‘...is ours.’

  I wasn’t sure whether by ‘ours’ she meant hers and mine, or hers and her husband’s; but at least I knew that was where we were going.

  She unlocked the door and we stepped inside a sun-warm and stuffy room. She closed the door behind me. Kicked off her trainers and put her hands on my shoulders. Even without shoes she was taller than me. We were both breathing heavily, we’d walked the last stretch quickly. So heavily we panted in each other’s mouths when we kissed.

  Her fingers unbuckled my belt as if that was all she’d ever done, while I dreaded loosening the fastener on her bra, which I figured would be my job. But apparently it wasn’t, because she led me into what had to be the main bedroom, where the curtains were drawn, pushed me down on the bed and let me watch as she undressed herself. Then she came to me and her skin was cold with dried sweat. She kissed me, rubbed herself against my naked body, and soon we were sweating again, slipping around each other like two wet seals. She smelled good and strong and moved my hands away when I was being too intimate. I veered between being too active and intolerably passive, and in the end she got hold of me and guided me in.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said, sitting motionless on top of me. ‘Just feel it.’

  And I felt it. And thought that now it’s official. Roy Opgard is no longer a virgin.

  * * *

  —

  ‘I thought it was tomorrow,’ said Uncle Bernard when I got back that afternoon.

  ‘What was?’

  ‘That you were taking your driving test.’

  ‘It is tomorrow.’

  ‘You don’t say? Judging by that grin on your face I thought you must’ve gone and taken it now.’

  32

  UNCLE BERNARD GAVE ME A Volvo 240 for my eighteenth birthday present.

  I was speechless.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that, lad,’ he said in embarrassment. ‘It’s second-hand, no big deal. And you and Carl need a car up there, you can’t be riding your bikes all through the winter.’

  The thing about the Volvo 240 is that it’s the perfect car for tinkering about on, the parts are easy to come by even though they stopped production in ’93, and if you look after it nicely you can keep it all your life. The bearings and the bushings on the front suspension were a little worn, as was the spider joint on the intermediate shaft, but the rest of it was in great condition, no trace of rust.

  I sat behind the wheel, put my newly acquired driving licence in the glove compartment, turned on the ignition, and as I glided along the main road and passed the sign with Os on it I realised something. That the road went on. And on. That a whole world lay in front of that red bonnet.*

  * * *

  *

  It was a long, hot summer.

  Every morning I drove Carl down to the Co-op where he had a summer job before heading on to the workshop.

  And in the course of those weeks and months I became not just a useful driver but also, according to Rita Willumsen, a satisfactory if not expert lover.

  We usually met in the late mornings. We each drove our own car, and I parked in a different farm track from her so that no one would connect us.

  Rita Willumsen made just one condition.

  ‘As long as you’re with me, I don’t want you going with other girls.’

  There were three reasons for her condition.

  The first was that she didn’t want to catch any of the sexually transmitted diseases that she knew from working at the surgery were rife in the village, and the girls people like me have it away with are always tarts. Not that she was scared stiff of a dose of chlamydia or crabs, that could be quickly sorted out by a doctor in Notodden, but because now and then Willumsen still demanded his conjugal rights.

  The second reason was that even tarts can fall in love, and analyse every word the boy says, take note of every evasion, ask questions about every undocumented trip to the woods, until they end up knowing things they shouldn’t know, and suddenly you’ve got a full-blown scandal.

  The third reason was that she wanted to hang on to me. Not because I was in any way unique, but because the risk of changing lovers in a little place such as Os was too great.

  In simple terms, the condition was that Willumsen mustn’t find out. And the reason was that Willumsen – like the canny businessman he was – had insisted on a prenup agreement, and fru Willumsen owned nothing beyond her physical attributes, as people say. She was dependent on her husband if she wanted to go on living the life she had become accustomed to. And that was fine by me, because suddenly I had a life that was worth living.

  What fru Willumsen did have was culture, as she herself referred to it. She came from a good family over in the east of the country, but after her father squandered the family fortune she chose security over in
security and married the charmless but wealthy and hard-working used-car salesman and for twenty years persuaded him that she wasn’t using contraception and that there must be something wrong with his swimmers. And all the fine words, the useless knowledge of painting and the equally useless knowledge of literature that she didn’t manage to force-feed him, got handed on to me instead. She showed me paintings by Cézanne and van Gogh. Read aloud from Hamlet and Brand. And from Steppenwolf and The Doors of Perception, which up until then I had thought were bands, not books. But best of all she liked to read Francisco Petrarch’s sonnets to Laura. Usually in a refined New Norwegian translation, and usually with a slight quivering in her voice. We smoked hash, though Rita would never say where she got it from, and listen to Glenn Gould playing the Goldberg Variations. I could say that the school I went to during the time Rita Willumsen and I had those secret meetings up at her cabin gave me more than any university or academy would have done; although that would probably be a serious exaggeration. But it had the same effect on me as the Volvo 240 did that time I drove it out of the village; it opened my eyes to the fact that there was a whole other world out there. One that I could dream about making mine, if only I could learn the esoteric codes. But that would never happen, not to me, the dyslexic brother.

  * * *

  —

  Not that Carl seemed to have any urge to travel the world either.

  Rather the opposite. As summer turned to autumn and winter, he isolated himself more and more. When I asked what he was brooding about, if he wouldn’t take a drive with me in the Volvo, he just looked at me with a vague, mild smile, almost as though I wasn’t there.