Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

Emerson Abbott never had great ambitions for his son. He had seen too many examples of the tragic results the pressure of such expectations in upper-class families could have on the children. He didn’t even need to look far. Not even as far as those public-school friends of his who had failed to achieve the successes expected of them, and who drank until every bottle in the world was dry before plucking up courage for the great leap, from penthouse apartments in Kensington or Hampstead and five floors down to where the asphalt is just as hard as it is in Brixton and Tottenham. Not even as far as Archie, the nephew whom he had last seen among bloodstained sheets and disposable needles in a hotel room in Amsterdam, with the mark of the angel of death’s kiss already shaped on his lips, who had refused to go home with him and carelessly pointed a revolver in his direction in a way that told Emerson Archie didn’t much care which way it was pointing when he pulled the trigger.

No, Emerson didn’t need to look far. Only as far as the mirror.

For nearly thirty years he had been an unhappy publisher who published books written by idiots that were about idiots and that were bought by idiots. But there were enough of these idiots for Emerson in the course of his professional career to have tripled the already considerable family fortune, a fact that gave greater pleasure to his wife Emma than it did to himself. He could well remember that warm summer day in Cornwall when they got married, but he had forgotten why. Perhaps she was just in the right place at the right time, and from the right family, and in a very short while he no longer knew which interested him less: the money, the books or his wife. He had hinted at the possibility of divorce, and three weeks later she had told him, radiant with joy, that she was pregnant. Emerson experienced a deep and sincere happiness that lasted for about ten days. By the time he sat in the waiting room at St Mary’s Hospital he was unhappy again. It was a boy. They named him Ken after Emerson’s father, got a nanny for him, sent him to a boarding school and one day he was standing in his father’s office and asking if he could have a car.

Emerson had looked up in surprise at the young man standing in front of him. He had inherited his mother’s equine features and almost lipless mouth, but the rest came undoubtedly from him. The long, narrow nose with his father’s close-set eyebrows formed a T-shape in the middle of the face with two pale blue eyes on each side. They had expected that his blond hair would gradually turn into his mother’s mousy grey, but that hadn’t happened. Ken had already developed the blasé and the would-be self-irony that gives the British their reputation for charm, and his blue eyes twinkled when he saw his father’s confusion.

Emerson realised that even though he had intended to make ambitious plans for his son he would probably never have had time to realise them. How could his son have become an adult without his having noticed it? Had he been too busy being unhappy, of being the person everyone in his circle thought he ought to be, and if that was the case, why didn’t that include being a father to his only son? It pained him. Or did it? He thought about it. Yes, it really did pain him. He raised his hands impotently aloft.

Maybe Ken had counted on his father’s guilty conscience, and maybe not. At any rate, he got his car.

By the time Ken was twenty he no longer had the car. He lost it in a bet with another student over who could get back to the college fastest from one of those boring Oxford pubs. Kirk was driving a Jaguar, but Ken had still thought he had a chance.

The year after that he lost the equivalent of an annual grant from his father’s educational fund in the course of a single evening’s poker and drinking with the heir to Roland’s fortune. He had three jacks and thought he had a chance.

By the time he turned twenty-four he had thanks to some miracle or other acquired documents showing that he had some knowledge of English literature and history and without any great difficulty got a job as a trainee in an English bank of the old school, meaning that the board knew how to appreciate an Oxford graduate who knew his Keats and his Wilde, and took it for granted that carrying out a credit valuation of a customer or analysing financial transactions were talents people from his social background were born with or could pick up along the way.

Ken ended up in stocks and shares and was an unqualified success. He called the most important investors each day to tell them the latest dirty jokes, took the more important ones out to dinner and strip clubs, and the most important ones of all down to his father’s country place, where he got them drunk and, on the rare occasions when the opportunity arose, screwed their wives.

The board were debating whether to kick him upstairs and make him a head trader when it emerged that he had lost almost £15 million of the bank’s money on unauthorised dealings in futures on the orange juice market. He was summoned to appear before the board where he explained that he had thought he had a chance and was at once kicked not upstairs but out of the bank, the City and the whole of London financial life.

He began drinking but couldn’t quite make it work and instead started going to the greyhound races, though he’d never been able to abide dogs. It was then that the gambling really got out of hand. Not in pounds and pence, because Ken, despite his name, no longer had a credit rating. And anyway, it would have been difficult for him to top that orange juice deal. But the compulsive gambling consumed all his time and all his energy, and before too long he was tumbling headlong down a dark pit and on his way to the bottom. Or presumed bottom. Because so far, the falling hadn’t stopped, and looking on the bright side of things that might well mean there was no bottom.

Ken Abbott funded his accelerating addiction to gambling by turning to the only person he knew who still didn’t seem to have realised what was going on: his father. For the son had discovered that Emerson Abbott had the most wonderful talent for forgetting. Each time he knocked on the door to ask for money his father would stand there, looking at him as though it were for the first time. In fact, looking at him as though it was the first time he had ever stood there at all.

Ken pulls the needle up out through the plastic cork.

‘Do you remember how to do it?’ By now his father’s voice is no more than a hoarse whisper.

Ken tries to smile. He had never been able to stand needles, or else he would never have stopped taking cocaine but gone all the way with it. Not that he wanted to join the 27 Club like Jimi Hendrix, Kurt Cobain and Jim Morrison but, alas, he’s like Oscar Wilde in that he can resist everything except temptation. What he has to resist right now is the desire to throw up at the sight of the needle. But he has no choice. This is a matter of life and death.

‘Remember and remember,’ mumbles Ken. ‘Remind me. I have to locate a vein?’

His father shakes his head. He’s rolled up his trouser leg and points to his leg where two small holes puncture the skin. Blood is beading on one of them.

‘Forget about veins. Just inject the syringe close to the bite. Small injections, three or four pricks. Then one in the thigh.’

‘The thigh?’

Despite his condition the father manages to give Ken one of those exasperated looks he hates so much. ‘So it’s closer to the heart than the bite.’

‘Are you certain it was an Egyptian cobra, Father? It can’t have been one of those thingummies...’

‘Thingummies?’

‘I don’t know... a boomslang or something like that.’

Emerson Abbott tries to laugh but all that comes out is a cough.