by Jo Nesbo
I can’t remember much of what I thought or said when Carl told me he wanted to study. It was actually pretty obvious, not just because of the good marks he used to get at school, or the fact that he wasn’t especially practical, but because Mari was equally obviously destined to be a student. And of course they would be students in the same city. I’d imagined the two of them sharing a little flat in Oslo or Bergen, coming back home to the village together in the holidays and hanging out with the old crowd. And I’d be hanging out with them too.
But then came that business with Grete and Carl at Årtun, Grete telling all to Mari, and suddenly everything was turned upside down.
And when Carl disappeared to Minnesota I was left with the feeling that he’d run out on the whole business. From the little village scandal and Mari Aas. From his responsibilities on the farm. From me, who had become more dependent on him than he was on me. And for all I know, maybe he’d started hearing them again, those screams from Huken.
At least it was quiet after he left.
Damn quiet.
The oil company bought the workshop and the land and suddenly I – a lad in his early twenties – was running a service station. I don’t know if they noticed something I’d never noticed myself, but anyway I worked round the clock. It wasn’t because I was particularly ambitious, that came later. But because I found it harder than expected to deal with being up there on the farm, listening to Huken and to the golden plover’s song of loneliness. A bird on the lookout for company. Not a friend, necessarily, just company. All of that could be dealt with by being at work, having people around me, having sounds, things to do, having my thoughts somewhere they could be put to use, and not just grinding round and round the same old crap.
I’d got Mari out of my system, like a tumour after a successful operation. I realised of course that it was no coincidence it happened at the same time as the break between her and Carl, but I tried not to think about it too much. It was probably complicated, and I had just read Kafka’s Metamorphosis – about a guy who wakes up one day to find he’s turned into a disgusting insect – and had realised that, if I started grubbing around in my subconscious and all that, the chances of finding something I didn’t like were pretty high.
Naturally I bumped into Rita Willumsen now and then. She looked good, the years didn’t seem to have taken their toll on her. But she was always with someone, or there were people around us, so all I got was the general friendly smile between two villagers, and a question about how the station was doing, or Carl over there in the States.
One day I saw her outside by the pumps. She was talking to Markus who was filling her Sonett with petrol. Usually it was Willumsen himself who filled the petrol in their cars, but Markus is a nice-looking lad, quiet and gentle, and for a moment I wondered if Markus was her new project. It was strange, but it didn’t seem to bother me at all, I just wished them both well. When Markus had replaced the petrol cap, as Rita was about to get into the car, she looked over towards the station shop. I doubt she could see, but anyway she lifted her hand almost like she was waving. And I waved back. When Markus came back in he said Willum Willumsen had got cancer but that he was expected to make a full recovery.
The next time I saw Rita was at the annual celebration of Constitution Day on 17 May at Årtun. She looked wonderful in her national costume. And was walking hand in hand with her husband. That was something I’d never seen before. Willumsen was thin, or at least less fat, and if you ask me it didn’t suit him. The skin under his chin dangled and swung about like a lizard. But when he and Rita spoke together, the one leaned in towards the other and listened, as though wanting to catch every word. Smiling, nodding, looking each other in the eyes. Maybe the cancer had been an epiphany, a revelation. Maybe she had discovered that she had learned to love this man who adored her. And who knows, maybe Willumsen hadn’t been as blind as I thought either. Anyway, I realised that that wave from the petrol pump had been a final goodbye. And that was fine, we had meant something to each other at a time when we both needed it. From what I’ve seen, very few affairs have a happy ending, but when I saw the two of them together it seemed to me that, in a way, Rita Willumsen and I were two of the lucky ones. And maybe Willum Willumsen a third.
So I was the golden plover again.
* * *
—
But just one year later I met the woman who would be my secret lover for the next five years. At the dinner following a meeting at head office in Oslo I met Pia Syse. She was the personnel manager and sat on my left, and as such she was not my formal dinner partner, but after a while she turned to me and asked if I would rescue her from the cavalier sitting on her left, a man who had been talking about petrol for the preceding hour, and there really isn’t that much to say about petrol. I’d drunk a couple of glasses of wine and asked if it wasn’t a type of chauvinism – in one direction or the other – to place on a man a greater responsibility to entertain a woman than the other way round. She agreed, so I gave her three minutes to say something that I found interesting, made me laugh, or provoked me. If she couldn’t then she’d have to forgive me if I returned to the formal dinner partner on my right, a bespectacled brunette from Kongsberg who had said her name was Unni, and not much else. And respect to Pia Syse, she met all three challenges, and in well under three minutes.
We danced afterwards, and she said I was the worst dance partner she had ever had.
In the lift on the way up to our rooms we started making out, and she told me I couldn’t kiss either.
And when we woke up in her hotel bed – as personnel manager she’d been allotted one of the suites – she said straight out that the sex was well below average.
But that she had rarely laughed as much as she had done over the last twelve hours.
I told her one out of four was above average for me, and she laughed again. And I spent the next hour trying to do something about that first impression. At least I hope I did. At any rate Pia Syse said she’d be summoning me to head office at some point during the next fourteen days, and that the agenda would be ‘loose’.
Standing in the queue to check out at reception, Unni, my formal dinner partner, asked if I was driving to Os, and if so could she have a lift as far as Kongsberg.
We didn’t talk much on the drive.
She asked about the car, and I said it was a present from my uncle and had sentimental value for me. I could have told her that even if every damn part on it had been replaced at least once, the 240 was a mechanical marvel. That it had for example none of the problems associated with the posher V 70 which often had trouble with the tie rod and the steering arm. And that one day I hoped to be buried in the chassis of my 240. But instead of jabbering on about uninteresting things, I asked about uninteresting things, and she told me she worked in accounts, had two kids and that her husband was headmaster at a secondary school in Kongsberg. She worked from home two days a week, commuted to Oslo, and took every Friday off.
‘What do you do then?’ I asked.
‘Nothing,’ she said.
‘Isn’t that difficult?’ I asked. ‘Doing nothing?’
‘No,’ she said.
And that was the full extent of our conversation.
I turned on J. J. Cale and felt a deep peace stealing over me. It was probably from lack of sleep, Cale’s laid-back minimalism, and realising that Unni’s default mode was silence, same as mine.
When I woke, with a start, staring out at the cars coming towards us, their lights scattered across the windscreen by the rain, my brain reached the conclusion that I had a) fallen asleep at the wheel, b) must have been asleep for more than a couple of seconds since I couldn’t remember the rain or turning on the windscreen wipers, and c) should have stopped for a break long ago. Automatically I raised my hand and put it on the wheel. But instead of the wheel it closed around another warm hand that was already steering.
‘I think you fell asleep,’ said Unni.
‘Kind of you not to wake me,’ I said.
She didn’t laugh. I glanced across at her. There was perhaps the hint of a smile at the corner of her mouth. In time I would learn it was about as far as that face would go when it came to expressing things. And only now did I see for the first time that she was pretty. Not classically beautiful like Mari Aas, or dazzling like Rita Willumsen in the pictures she had shown me of herself when young. Actually, to tell the truth, I don’t know if Unni Holm-Jensen was pretty by any other standards than her own, because what I’m trying to say is that she was – at that moment, in that light, from that angle – prettier than I had seen her looking so far. Not the kind of pretty to fall in love with, I was never in love with Unni Holm-Jensen, and over five years she never fell in love with me either. But just right now she was pretty in the kind of way that makes you want to go on looking at her. And of course I could have done so, she was keeping her eyes on the road, hadn’t let go the wheel, and I realised that here is someone you can actually count on.
It wasn’t until after we’d met a couple of times halfway between us, which is to say at Notodden, and drunk coffee together, and the third time booked in at the Brattrein Hotel, that she told me she’d already made up her mind during the dinner in Oslo.
‘You and Pia liked each other,’ she said.
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘But I liked you better. And I knew you would like me better.’
‘Why is that?’
‘Because you and I are alike, and you and Pia aren’t. And because it isn’t as far to Notodden.’
I laughed. ‘You think I like you better because it isn’t as far to Notodden as to Oslo?’
‘As a rule our sympathies are practical.’
I laughed again and she smiled. Slightly.
Unni wasn’t actually unhappy in her marriage, she said.
‘He’s a fine man and a good father,’ she said. ‘But he never touches me.’ Her body was thin and hard, like a skinny young boy. She worked out a bit, jogging, pumping iron. ‘We all need to be touched,’ she said.
She wasn’t too worried about him finding out she was having an affair. She thought he would understand. It was the kids she was worried about.
‘They have a good, secure home. I can’t let anything destroy that for them. My children will always come first, ahead of that type of happiness. I really like these hours with you, but I’ll give it all up like a shot if it risks the slightest unhappiness or insecurity for my children. Do you understand?’
The question was delivered with a sudden intensity, like when you download a fun app and suddenly a very serious, almost threatening form appears that you have to complete, filled with conditions you have to accept before the fun can begin.
One day I asked her if she, faced with a hypothetical crisis, would be willing to shoot me and her husband if doing so increased the likelihood of her children surviving by forty per cent. That accountant’s brain of hers needed a few seconds before replying.
‘Yes.’
‘Thirty per cent?’
‘Yes.’
‘Twenty?’
‘No.’
What I liked about Unni was that I knew exactly what I was dealing with.
37
CARL SENT ME EMAILS AND pics from his university. It looked and sounded like he was doing fine. White smile and friends who looked as though they’d known Carl all his life. He always was adaptable. ‘Chuck that boy in the water and he’ll grow gills before he’s even wet,’ Mum used to say. I remember that towards the end of that summer when he hung out with that pretty cabin visitor I was jealous of, Carl had learned to speak with an Oslo accent. And now American expressions began to crop up more and more in his emails, more than Dad ever used. It was as though his Norwegian was slowly but surely withering away. And maybe that was what he wanted. Pack everything that had happened here in layers of forgetfulness and distance. When Stanley Spind, the new doctor, heard me refer to the boot of the car as the ‘trunk’, he told me something about forgetting.
‘In Vest-Agder where I grew up, whole villages emigrated to America. Some of them came back. And it turned out that the ones who had forgotten their Norwegian had forgotten almost everything about their old home country. It’s as though language preserves the memories.’
In the days that followed I toyed with the idea of learning a new language, of never speaking Norwegian again, to see if it helped. Because now it wasn’t just screams I heard from Huken. When the silence fell I could hear a low murmuring, as though the dead were talking to each other down there. Planning something. Fucking conspiring.
Carl was hard up, he wrote. He had failed a couple of exams and lost his stipend. I sent money. It was no problem, I had my wage, my outgoings were minimal, I’d even managed to put a little bit aside.
The year after that the college fees went up and he needed more. That winter I equipped a room down in the disused workshop that meant I saved on electricity and petrol. I tried to rent out the farm but there were no takers. When I suggested to Unni that we change our meeting place from the Brattrein to the Notodden Hotel, which was cheaper, she asked if I was short of money. And suggested we could share the cost of the room as she had insisted on doing for a while. I said no, and in the end we carried on meeting at the Brattrein, but the next time we met Unni told me she’d checked the accounts and seen that I was getting a lower wage than station managers with smaller stations than mine.
I rang head office and after a bit of toing and froing was put through to someone I was told could take decisions about pay rises.
The voice that took the call was bright: ‘Pia Syse.’
I hung up.
Before the final semester – at least, he claimed it was the final semester – Carl called in the middle of the night and told me he was short twenty-one thousand dollars, two hundred thousand Norwegian kroner. He’d been banking on the award of a stipend from the Norwegian Society in Minneapolis, but he’d just found out he hadn’t got it, and he needed the school fees before 0900 the next day, or he’d be excluded and not allowed to take his final exams. And without them his whole education was wasted, he said.
‘Business administration is not about what you know but what people think you know, Roy. And what they believe in are exams and diplomas.’
‘Have the school fees really doubled since you started there?’ I asked.
‘It’s really...unfortunate,’ said Carl, slipping into English. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask, but the chairman of the Norwegian Society told me two months ago that there shouldn’t be any problem.’
I was waiting outside the bank when it opened. The bank manager listened as I suggested a loan of two hundred thousand, with the farm as security.
‘You and Carl own the farm and land together, so for that we’ll need both your signature and your brother’s,’ said the bank manager, a man with a bow tie and eyes like a St Bernard. ‘And the processing and documentation take a couple of days. But of course I realise you need this today, and I’ve been authorised by head office to give you a hundred thousand on account of your honest face.’
‘Without security?’
‘We trust people here in the village, Roy.’
‘I need two hundred thousand.’
‘But not that much.’ He smiled, and his eyes grew even more mournful.
‘Carl’s going to be barred at nine o’clock. Four o’clock Norwegian time.’
‘I’ve never heard of universities operating with regimes as strict as that,’ said the bank manager, scratching the back of his hand. ‘But if you say so, then...’ He scratched and scratched away at the back of his hand.
‘Well...?’ I asked impatiently, glancing at my watch. Six and a half hours left.
‘Well, you didn’t hear this from me,
but maybe you should have a word with Willumsen.’
I looked at the bank manager. So it really was true what people said, that Willumsen loaned money to people. With no security and at extortionate rates of interest. No security, that is, other than the certainty that Willumsen, somehow or other, sometime or other, would call in his debt. And if there was any trouble, rumour had it that he brought in that enforcer from Denmark to get the job done. I actually knew that Erik Nerell had borrowed from Willumsen when he bought the Fritt Fall bar, but there was no talk there of strong-arm stuff. On the contrary, Erik said that Willumsen had been patient and waited, and when he asked for an extension, Willumsen had answered: ‘As long as there’s interest coming in, I’ll do nothing, Nerell. Because compound interest, that’s heaven on earth.’
I drove down to Willumsen’s Used Cars and Breaker’s Yard. Knew Rita wouldn’t be there, she hated the place. Willumsen saw me in his office. Above his desk was a stag’s head that looked as if it had butted its way through the wall and was looking in astonishment at the sight that met its eyes. Willumsen sat beneath it and leaned back in his chair, his double chin flopping over his shirt collar, his small, pudgy fingers folded across his chest. Just raised the right hand now and then to flick off ash from his cigar. Put his head on one side and studied me thoughtfully. A process known as credit rating, I realised.
‘Interest rate two per cent,’ he said after I had described my problem and the time limit. ‘Payable monthly. I can call the bank and transfer the money now.’
I took out my snuffbox and pushed a wedge in under my lip as I worked it out in my head.
‘That’s more than twenty-five per cent a year.’
Willumsen removed his cigar. ‘The boy can do his sums. You get that from your dad.’
‘And this time you’ve worked on the assumption that I don’t haggle either?’
Willumsen laughed. ‘Yup, that’s the lowest I can offer you. Take it or leave it. The clock is ticking.’
