The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Pretty smart,’ I said.

  ‘Mari thought of it because Grete told her Rita Willumsen once had a similar arrangement at her cabin with a young lover.’

  ‘Jesus. She keeps herself pretty well informed, that Grete Smitt.’ I could feel my voice was dry. I hadn’t asked Carl if he remembered telling Grete about Dad that time he’d been drinking at Årtun.

  ‘Something wrong, Roy?’

  ‘No. Why d’you ask?’

  ‘You’ve gone all pale.’

  I shrugged. ‘I can’t tell you. I swore on your soul.’

  ‘Did you say mine?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah, that was lost a long time ago. Come on.’

  I shrugged. I couldn’t remember if I’d sworn to keep silent for all eternity back then – after all I was only a teenager; or just to serve out a period of quarantine. ‘That young lover of Rita Willumsen’s,’ I said. ‘That was me.’

  ‘You?’ Carl stared at me, eyes wide open in astonishment. ‘You’re kidding.’ He slapped his thigh and laughed loudly. Clinked his bottle against mine. ‘Tell,’ he ordered.

  I told. In rough outline at least. Sometimes he laughed, and sometimes he was serious.

  ‘And you’ve been keeping this secret from me ever since you were a teenager?’ he said when I finished, his head shaking from side to side.

  ‘Well, we’ve had plenty of practice at doing that in this family,’ I said. ‘Now your turn to tell me about Mari.’

  Carl told me. At that very first reunion they’d ended up in the hay, as people say. ‘I mean, she’s had plenty of practice when it comes to seducing me,’ he said with an almost melancholic smile. ‘She knows what I like.’

  ‘So you think you had no chance,’ I said, and could hear it sounded more accusing than I had intended.

  ‘I take my share of the blame, but it’s obvious that’s what her aim was.’

  ‘To seduce you?’

  ‘To prove both to herself and to me that she would always be my first choice. To show me I was prepared to risk everything. That Shannon and anyone like her were and always would be substitutes for Mari Aas.’

  ‘Betray everything,’ I said, taking out my snuffbox.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘You said risk everything.’ This time I really couldn’t bring myself to even try to hide the accusatory tone.

  ‘Whatever,’ said Carl. ‘We carried on seeing each other.’

  I nodded. ‘All those evenings you said you had meetings and Shannon and I waited at home.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘I’m no better than I should be.’

  ‘And that time you said you were at Willumsen’s, but you’d seen Erik Nerell and his wife out for an evening walk?’

  ‘Yeah, I nearly gave myself away there. Of course, I was on my way back from the cabin. Maybe I wanted to give myself away. It’s no fucking picnic walking around with a guilty conscience all the time.’

  ‘But you managed to survive,’ I said.

  He acknowledged the barb, just lowered his head. ‘After we’d met a few times, Mari probably felt that she’d made her point and dumped me. Again. But it was OK by me too. It was just...nostalgia. We haven’t seen each other again since.’

  ‘Well, you’ve seen each other in town.’

  ‘Yes, it happens, of course. But she just smiles as if she’s won at something.’ Carl smirked contemptuously. ‘Shows Shannon the kids in the pram which is of course being wheeled by her newspaper guy, he trips along behind her like a fucking coolie. I’m sure he suspects something. Behind that straight, snobbish mug of his I see a guy that wants to kill me.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘Yes. If you ask me he’s definitely asked Mari, and she’s – quite deliberately – given him an answer that leaves room for doubt.’

  ‘Why would she do that?’

  ‘Keep him on his toes. That’s what they’re like.’

  ‘Who’s they?’

  ‘Oh, you know. The Mari Aases and Rita Willumsens. They suffer from queen syndrome. That’s to say it’s us, the male drones, who suffer. Of course even queens want their physical needs satisfied, but the most important thing is for them to be loved and worshipped by their subjects. So they manipulate us like puppets in their fucking schemes. You get so fucking tired of it.’

  ‘Aren’t you exaggerating a bit?’

  ‘No!’ Carl put his beer bottle down hard on the windowsill and two of the empties toppled over and fell to the floor. ‘Real love doesn’t exist between a man and a woman who aren’t related, Roy. There has to be blood. The same blood. The only place you find real, selfless love is in the family. Between brothers and sisters and between parents and their children. Outside of that...’ He gestured expansively, knocked over another bottle and I realised he was drunk. ‘Forget it. It’s jungle law. Every man is his own best friend.’ By now he was snuffling. ‘You and me, Roy, we’re all we’ve got. Nobody else.’

  I wondered where that left Shannon, but I didn’t ask.

  * * *

  —

  Two days later I drove back south.

  As I passed the county sign I glanced in the rear-view mirror. It looked as though it said OZ.

  43

  IN AUGUST I GOT A text message.

  My heart almost stopped beating when I saw it was from Shannon.

  I read it over and over again during the next few days before finally figuring out what it meant.

  That she wanted to meet me.

  Hi Roy, it’s been a while. I’ll be in Notodden, meeting a possible client, on 3 September. Can you recommend a hotel? Hugs, Shannon.

  When I first read the message I thought it had to mean that she knew I used to go there and meet Unni at a hotel. But I had never told her about that, and I couldn’t remember telling Carl about it either. Why hadn’t I mentioned it to Carl? I don’t know. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of having an affair with a married woman. And hardly that the taciturn Cain in me had kept quiet about it. I don’t know. Maybe it was just something I came to understand at a certain point. That Carl didn’t tell me everything either.

  Shannon probably just figured I would have some idea about good places to stay in the vicinity of Os, I thought. And studied that text message – even though of course I knew it off by heart – one more time. Told myself not to read things into a text that consisted of three everyfuckingday sentences.

  But all the same.

  Why get in touch with me after a year’s silence and ask about hotels in Notodden? In reality there were two, at the most three hotels to choose between, and Tripadvisor had of course more relevant and up-to-date information than I could provide. I knew that, having checked online the day after receiving the text message. And why tell me the date when she was going to be there? And that she was meeting a potential client, which was another way of telling me she would be travelling alone. And as people say, last but not least: why spend the night there when it was just a two-hour drive home?

  OK, so maybe she didn’t fancy driving those roads in the pitch-dark. Maybe her and the client were having dinner together, and she wanted to be able to have a glass of wine. Or maybe it was simply that she looked forward to spending the night at a hotel as a change from staying on the farm. Maybe she even wanted a short break from Carl. Maybe that’s what she was trying to tell me with that slightly laboured text message. No, no! It was just an ordinary text message, a slightly feeble opportunity to re-establish normal communications with her brother-in-law after he’d blown the whole thing by telling her he was in love with her.

  I replied the same evening I received the message.

  Hi – yes, long time. Brattrein’s pretty good. Got great views. Hugs, Roy.

  Every single bloody syllable had, of course, been carefully considered. I had to force myself not to send anything with a
question mark, along the lines of how are you? Or anything else that seemed to beg for a continuation. An echo of her own message, nothing more, nothing less, that’s what it had to be. I got a reply an hour later.

  Thanks for the help. Big hug.

  There was nothing you could read into that, and anyway, all she could do was relate to my own short and inhibited reply. So that sent me back to her initial message: was that an invitation to go to Notodden?

  Over the next two days I tormented myself. Even counted the words and saw that she had sent 24, I had answered with 12, and then she had sent 6. Was this halving accidental, or should I now send 3 words and see if she replied with one and a half? Ha ha.

  I was going crazy.

  I wrote:

  Enjoy the journey.

  The reply came as I lay there trying to sleep.

  Thanks. X

  One and a half words. I knew of course that x was the symbol for a kiss, but what kind of kiss? I googled it the next morning. No one knew, but some thought the x stemmed from the days when letters were sealed with an x and a kiss on top of it. Others suggested that the x – as an ancient symbol of Christ – made it a religious kiss, like a kiss of blessing. But the explanation I liked best was that the x shows two pairs of lips meeting.

  Two pairs of lips that meet.

  Was that what she meant?

  No, for chrissakes, she couldn’t possibly have meant that.

  I looked at the calendar and began counting the days to 3 September until I realised what I was doing.

  Lotte popped her head in the door to say that the display on pump number 4 had gone out and asked what my calendar was doing on the floor.

  * * *

  —

  At a bar in Kristiansand one evening, just as I was getting up to leave, a woman approached me.

  ‘Going home already?’

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, and looked at her. It would be an overstatement to say she was pretty. Maybe one day she had been. No, not beautiful, but all the same one of the first girls in class who got the boys’ attention. Because she was sassy, a bit cheeky, a lot of front. Promising, as people used to say. And maybe she’d kept her promise a little too quickly, given them what they wanted before they’d earned it. Thought she’d get something in return. A lot had happened since then, and most of it she wished hadn’t, the things she’d done to herself, as well as the things that had been done to her.

  Now she was a bit tipsy and looking hopefully for someone she knew deep down would disappoint her again. But if you abandon hope, what’s left?

  So I bought her a beer, told her my name, my marital status, where I worked and lived. Then I asked the questions and let her do the talking. Let her pour bile over all the men she’d met who’d ruined her life. Her name was Vigdis, she worked at a garden centre, at the moment she was off sick. Two children. Each with its respective father that week. Only a month ago she’d kicked a third man out of the house. I wondered whether it was during that eviction she’d got that bruise on the forehead. She said he drove around outside her house at night to check whether she was bringing anyone home with her so it was best if we went to my place.

  I considered it. But her skin wasn’t pale enough, and her body too big. Even if I closed my eyes, that metallic voice of hers – which I already knew wouldn’t be silent for long – would destroy the illusion.

  ‘Thanks, but I have to go to work tomorrow,’ I said. ‘Some other time.’

  Her mouth twisted into an ugly grimace. ‘You’re no great catch yourself, if that’s what you were thinking.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking that,’ I said, emptied my glass and left.

  Out in the street I heard heels clacking against the asphalt behind me and knew that it was her. Vigdis linked arms with me and blew smoke from a freshly lit cigarette into my face.

  ‘At least take me home in a taxi,’ she said. ‘I live in the same direction as you.’

  I hailed a taxi and let her out after the first bridge, outside a house in Lund.

  I had seen someone in one of the cars parked by the pavement, and as the taxi pulled away I turned and saw a man climb out of the car and walk quickly towards Vigdis.

  ‘Stop,’ I said to the driver.

  The taxi slowed, and I saw Vigdis fall to the pavement.

  ‘Back up,’ I said.

  If the driver had seen the same as me he probably wouldn’t have done it. I jumped out of the taxi and felt in my pockets for something to wrap round my right hand as I walked towards the man who was standing over Vigdis and yelling something that was lost among the echoes from the blind, silent walls of the houses along the street. I guessed it must be curses, and it wasn’t until I got up close I could hear the words:

  ‘I love you! I love you! I love you!’

  I walked up to him and lashed out as he turned his tearful face towards mine. I felt the skin of my knuckles tear. Fuck. Hit him again, in the nose, which is softer, and didn’t know if the blood that spurted out was his or mine. Hit him a third time. The idiot stood there swaying in front of me without trying to defend himself or avoid the punches, forcing himself to stay on his feet so that he could go on being hit, as though it was something he welcomed.

  I hit him quickly and methodically, the same way I hit the punchbag. Not hard enough to do more damage to my knuckles, but enough to make him bleed and the fluid run under the skin of his face until gradually it began swelling up like a fucking lilo.

  ‘I love you,’ he said between two flurries of punches, not to me, but in a whisper, as though to himself.

  His knees buckled, and then buckled again, and I had to aim gradually lower, he was like the Black Knight in that Monty Python sketch, the one who gets his legs cut off but refuses to give up, until he becomes a torso hopping round on the ground.

  I drew my shoulder back to give him one last punch, but my arm got caught up in something. It was Vigdis. She was on my back.

  ‘Don’t!’ that metallic voice of hers screeched in my ear. ‘Don’t! Don’t hurt him, you bastard!’

  I tried to shake her off, but she wouldn’t let go. And on the tearful, swollen face of the man in front of me I saw an insane smile start to spread.

  ‘He’s mine!’ she screamed. ‘He’s mine, you bastard!’

  I looked at the man. He looked at me. I nodded. Turned and saw that the taxi had left and started to walk towards Søm. Vigdis clung on for ten or fifteen metres before she let go, and I heard the clacking of her shoes as she ran back, heard her words of comfort, and the sobbing of the man.

  I carried on walking eastwards. Through sleeping streets, towards the E18. It began to rain. And for once it was proper rain. My shoes were squelching as I set off across the half-kilometre of the Varoddbro Bridge over to Søm. Halfway across it occurred to me that there was actually an alternative. And I was already soaking wet. I peered over the edge at the greeny-black waters down below. Thirty metres? But already I must have started to doubt, even before my head began telling me I would probably survive the drop, and the survival instinct would kick in and I would splash my way to shore, almost certainly with a few broken bones and damaged organs that wouldn’t mean a shorter life, just an even more shitty life. And even if I was lucky enough to die in the water down there, was there really anything to be gained in being dead? Because I had just remembered something. The answer I gave when the former sheriff asked why we should go on living when we didn’t enjoy it. ‘Because being dead may be even worse.’ And once I’d recalled that, I remembered what Uncle Bernard had said when he had been diagnosed with cancer: ‘When you’re up to your neck in shit, best not to hang your head.’

  I laughed. Like a madman I stood there alone on the bridge and roared with laughter.

  And then walked on towards Søm, my footsteps lighter, and after a while I even began whistling that Monty Python song, the one
where Eric Idle is hanging on the cross. When the Vigdises of this world manage to go on hoping, hoping for miracles, why shouldn’t I?

  * * *

  —

  On 3 September, at two o’clock in the afternoon, I rolled into Notodden.

  44

  A HIGH, MILKY-BLUE SKY. still some lingering summer warmth, the smell of pine trees and new-mown grass, but also a bite in the gusts of wind, a sharpness that was quite absent down in the soft south of the country. The drive from Kristiansand to Notodden had taken three and a half hours. I drove slowly. Changed my mind several times along the way. But in the end concluded that only one thing would be more pathetic than what I was now embarked upon, and that would be to drive halfway to Notodden and then turn back.

  I parked in the town centre and began to trawl the streets looking for Shannon. When we were growing up, Notodden had seemed to us big, alien, almost threatening. Now – perhaps because I had spent so much time in Kristiansand – it seemed strangely small and provincial.

  I kept an eye out for the Cadillac, though I guessed she would have hired a car from Willumsen. Glanced in at the cafes and restaurants I passed. I headed down towards the water, passed the cinema. Finally I entered a small cafe, ordered a black coffee, sat so that I had a view of the door and looked through the place’s newspapers.

  Notodden didn’t have many cafes and bars and the perfect scenario was obviously if it was Shannon who found me and not the other way round. That she came in, I looked up, our eyes met, and in that gaze I could read that I wouldn’t be needing the cover story I’d dreamed up, that I was here to take a look at a service station that was for sale. That I remembered she was going to be in Notodden, but not that it was today. That if she wasn’t busy with her client the whole day, maybe we could meet for a drink after dinner? Or even meet for dinner if she didn’t have other plans?