Jo Nesbø - Headhunters

I had taken along some poor pictures from the gallery and a bottle of good red wine from the cellar. She had appeared resigned to her fate from the moment she had opened the door to me that warm summer evening.

I had told her amusing stories about my blunders, the kind that seem to put you in a bad light, but actually show that you have enough self-confidence and success to be able to afford self-deprecation. She said she was an only child, had travelled round the world with her parents when she was young and that her father was the chief engineer for an international waterworks company. She didn’t belong to any particular country; Norway was as good as anywhere. That was it. For someone who spoke several different languages she said very little. Translator, I had thought. She preferred other people’s stories to her own.

She had asked me about my wife. Your wife, she said, even though she must have known Diana’s name as she had been invited to the private view. In that sense she certainly made it easier for me. And for herself.

I had told her that my marriage had received a buffeting when ‘my wife’ became pregnant and I didn’t want to have the baby. And, according to her, had persuaded her to have an abortion.

‘Did you?’ Lotte had asked.

‘I suppose so.’

I had seen something change in Lotte’s expression and asked what it was.

‘My parents persuaded me to have an abortion. Because I was a teenager and the child would not have a father. I still hate them for that. Them and myself.’

I had gulped. Gulped and explained. ‘Our foetus had Down’s syndrome. Eighty-five per cent of all parents who go through this experience opt for abortion.’

I had instantly regretted saying that. What had I been thinking? That Down’s syndrome would make my not wanting to have a child with my own wife more understandable?

‘There is a great probability that your wife would have lost the child anyway,’ Lotte had said. ‘Down’s syndrome often goes hand in hand with a heart condition.’

Heart condition, I had thought, and inwardly thanked her for being a team player, for making things simple for me once again. For us. An hour later we had taken off all our clothes and I was celebrating a victory that for a person more accustomed to conquests certainly would have appeared cheap but which put me on cloud nine for days. Weeks. To be more precise, three and a half. I had a lover, nothing less. Whom I left after twenty-four days.

As I looked at her now, in front of me in the hall, it seemed quite unreal.

Hamsun wrote that we humans are soon sated with love. We don’t want anything that is served up in excessively large portions. Are we really so banal? Apparently. But that wasn’t what happened to me. What happened was that I was assailed by a bad conscience. Not because I couldn’t return Lotte’s love but because I loved Diana. It had been an ineluctable realisation, but the final blow came in something of a bizarre episode. It was late summer, the twenty-fourth day of sin, and we had gone to bed in Lotte’s cramped two-room flat in Eilert Sundts gate. Before that we had been talking all evening – or, to be more precise, I had been talking. Describing and explaining life the way I see it. I’m good at that, in a Paulo Coelho kind of way, that is, a way which fascinates the intellectually amenable of us and irritates the more demanding listener. Lotte’s melancholic brown eyes had hung on my lips, swallowed every word, I could literally see her stepping into my world of homespun fantasy, her brain assimilating my reasoning into hers, her falling in love with my mind. As for myself, I had long fallen in love with her love, the loyal eyes, the silence and the low, almost inaudible, moaning during lovemaking that was so different from the whine of Diana’s circular saw. Falling in love had put me in a state of constant wantonness for three and a half weeks. So when I finally stopped the monologue, we just looked at each other, I bent forward, placed my hand on her breast, a shiver ran through her or perhaps me – and we made a charge for the bedroom door and the 101-centimetre-wide IKEA bed with the inviting name of Brekke, or break. This evening the moaning had been louder than usual, and she had whispered something Danish in my ear that I didn’t understand, since from an objective standpoint Danish is a difficult language – Danish children learn to speak later than any other children in Europe – but nonetheless I found it uncommonly erotic and increased the tempo. Usually, Lotte had been somewhat against these increases in tempo, but on this evening she had grabbed my buttocks and pulled me into her, which I interpreted as a wish for a further step-up both in thrust and frequency. I obeyed while concentrating on my father in the open coffin during the funeral, a method that had proved to be effective in preventing premature ejaculation. Or, in this case, any ejaculation at all. Even though Lotte said she was on the pill, the thought of pregnancy gave me palpitations. I didn’t know whether Lotte reached an orgasm when we made love; her quiet, controlled manner suggested to me that an orgasm would only manifest itself as tiny ripples on the surface, which I might simply fail to notice. And she was much too delicate a creature for me to expose her to any stress by asking. That was why I was totally unprepared for what happened. I sensed I had to stop but allowed myself a final hard poke. And sensed that I had hit something deep inside. Her body stiffened as her eyes and mouth were thrust open wide. This was followed by some trembling and for one tiny insane moment I was afraid I had induced an epileptic fit. Then I felt something hot, even hotter than her vagina, enveloping my genitals, and then a tidal wave washed against my stomach, hips and balls.

I levered myself up with my arms and stared in disbelief and horror at the point where our bodies were conjoined. Her lower abdomen was contracting as if she wanted to eject me, she gave a deep groan, a kind of lowing I had never heard before, and then came the next wave. The water poured out of her, spurted out between our hips and ran down into the mattress that still had not succeeded in absorbing the first wave. My God, I thought. I have poked a hole in her. Panicking, my brain searched for causal connections. She’s pregnant, I thought. And I have just poked a hole in that bag containing the foetus, and now all of the crap is soaking into the bed. My God, we’re swimming in life and death, it’s a water child, another water child! Well, I might have read about women’s so-called wet orgasms, OK, I may have seen it in the odd porn film too, but I had considered it a trick, a sham, a male fantasy about having a partner with equal ejaculation rights. All I could think as I lay there was that this was the retribution, the gods’ punishment for my persuading Diana to have an abortion: for my killing another innocent child with my reckless prick.

I struggled onto the floor, pulling the duvet off the bed with me. Lotte gave a start, but I didn’t notice her huddled-up naked body, I just stared at the dark circle still spreading outwards on the sheet. Slowly I realised what had happened. Or, even more important, what by a happy chance had not happened. But the damage was done, it was too late, there was no way back.

‘I have to go,’ I said. ‘This cannot go on.’

‘What are you doing?’ Lotte, barely audible, whispered from her foetal position.

‘I’m terribly sorry,’ I said. ‘But I have to go home and beg Diana for forgiveness.’

‘You won’t get it though,’ Lotte whispered.

I didn’t hear a sound from the bedroom while rinsing the smell of her off my hands and mouth in the bathroom, and I left, closing the front door carefully behind me.

And now – three months later – I was standing in her hall again, and I knew that it was not Lotte but me who had puppy eyes this time.