Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

And then came the rainy season. He would never forget that first time. He fell asleep to the first rain at night, and when he looked out across the plain the next morning it looked as though some insane painter had gone berserk on the grey and yellow canvas. Within a day or two the plain was transformed into a billowing field of pungent smells, wildly psychedelic colouring and insects that flashed low above a carpet of petals and the swelling brown waters of the river.

And he thought: where else could he possibly want to be?

Six months after his arrival he sent a letter home to Ken, and then, having waited six months for a reply, a second letter. He concluded his monologue the year after with a Christmas greeting and, since he’d heard in a roundabout way that Ken hadn’t settled to anything meaningful in London, the offer of a job on the farm.

He wasn’t expecting an answer and he didn’t get one either. Not until three years later.

Ken liked almost everything about cocaine. He liked the effect it had on him, the people around him liked the effect it had on him, he didn’t get hangovers, and he didn’t notice any signs of dependency. The only thing he didn’t like was the price.

That was the reason, after two terrible weeks at the dog track had brought on a minor financial crisis, he’d turned to the poor man’s version — amphetamines. And he met Hilda Bronkenhorst. An ugly and surprisingly stupid health freak he’d slept with a few times in the hope that she’d loan him some of her father’s money. Each time he watched her open her legs and demand to be served he thought that at the very least he would have earned the money. Anyway, she was the one who told Ken that amphetamine is a synthetic product. That the body never manages to completely break down synthetic products. Meaning: once you’ve taken amphetamine there will always be traces of it in your system. And since there were two words that put Ken in an absolute panic — never and always — he stopped at once. He swore that from that time onwards he would never take anything but healthy, organic compounds like cocaine, and realised that he needed money. And quickly.

His chance came when he called in at the office of a former colleague in the City with the intention of refreshing the friendship so that the next time they met he could ask him for a loan. Just for fun Ken’s former colleague showed him an illegal betting ring on the World Cup final between France and Brazil which a couple of the big stockbrokers were running though their own encrypted pages on the Reuters screens. When his ex-colleague left the room to get more tea without logging out Ken didn’t hang about. He closed his eyes, saw an image of Ronaldo’s dinosaur-thick thighs, typed in his own name and address, navigated across to the stakes column, closed his eyes again, saw Brazil’s gold-clad heroes raising the trophy aloft and wrote ‘£1 million sterling’. Enter. He held his breath as he waited for a response, knew his name wasn’t registered, that the stake was too high, but also that in the Reuters world people dealt every second with obligations for ten times that amount without asking who was at the other end. He thought he had a chance. And the message came back: ‘CONFIRMED’.

If only Ronaldo hadn’t suffered an epileptic fit that night following a protracted PlayStation session then Ken might not have had to worry about how he was going to keep on paying for his cocaine habit nor — as the situation then unfolded — felt any anxieties concerning the immediate state of his health. Two days later, early in the morning, which in Ken’s case meant shortly before eleven o’clock, his doorbell rang and a man was standing there wearing a black suit and sunglasses and carrying a baseball bat and explaining to Ken the consequences for him if he wasn’t able to get his hands on a million pounds within the next fourteen days.

Four days afterwards, late in July, Emerson Abbott received a telegram in which his son returned his Christmas greetings, accepted the offer of a job and asked him to meet him at the airport in Gaborone in five days’ time. Plus details of the bank account for the money for the plane ticket, to be transferred as soon as possible. Emerson was delighted with this turn of events and annoyed only that it meant he would have to go back to Gaborone again.

Ken looked at his watch, a Raymond Weil in South African gold that ticks its way towards Judgement Day with Swiss precision.

This day had started the same as the twenty-six others. Ken woke up wondering where the hell he was and why. He remembered why first. Money. Which should have turned his thoughts in the direction of his creditors in London but which instead turned them to that white powder, which was now like a woman he was no longer quite so sure he had a platonic and no-strings-attached relationship with. The symptoms were classic, but it seemed to him the irritation and the bouts of sweating were just as likely the effects of being in this godforsaken place full of poisonous bugs, insects that were everywhere, and the disrespectful Blacks who seemed to have forgotten long ago just who it was that colonised and attempted to civilise this land. But the depressions were new. Those sudden, dark hours when he seemed to lose his grip on reality, the floor vanished beneath him and he fell down into a bottomless pit, and all he could do was wait until it passed.

‘Snake hunt,’ said his father at breakfast.

‘Fantastic,’ replied Ken.

Ken had tried to show an interest, he really had. For twenty-six days he’d sat up straight in his seat as his father lectured him. About everything you should and shouldn’t do when dealing with snakes, about which snakes produced which venom, the mortality rates associated with each one and the various symptoms. This last thing was important if one didn’t know the type of snake the patient had been bitten by and had to be able to choose the right kind of serum among the forty that were kept on the farm. But if Ken were being honest — something he tried as far as possible to avoid — the poisons, the serums and the symptoms all got jumbled up into one big litany of terrible ways in which to die. Though at least he’d understood that the test tubes of serum had codes and blue caps, and the ones containing the poisons codes and red caps. Or was that the other way round?

When Ken’s concentration failed, when his thoughts drifted off and his pen ceased to take notes, then his father would just glower at him.

After breakfast they drove for thirty minutes along something that was vaguely reminiscent of a road, passing variously from thick green scrubland to mudholes half a metre deep and through a desiccated and yellowish lunar landscape. At a certain point, that seemed to Ken to be quite arbitrarily chosen, his father stopped, jumped out and retrieved three cloth sacks and a long pole with a metal loop at the end.

‘Put these on.’ His father tossed a pair of swimming goggles to him.

Ken gave him a baffled look.

‘Spitting cobra. Nerve poison. Can hit you in the eye from eight metres away.’

Then they started searching. Not along the ground but up in the trees.

‘Pay attention to the birds,’ said his father. ‘If you hear them screeching or see them hopping from branch to branch you can be pretty sure there’s a boomslang or a green mamba close by.’

‘I don’t think—’

‘Shh! Hear those clicking sounds? Those are polecats, hunting. Come on!’

His father ran in the direction of the sounds with Ken reluctantly trailing along behind him. Suddenly he stopped and signalled for Ken to come closer and be careful. And there — on a large flat rock — sure enough, a long black brute of a thing lay basking in the sun. Ken guessed it must be at least two metres and, maybe, thirteen centimetres long. He wished he could have placed a bet on it. His father made his way stealthily around the rock until he was directly behind it, lifted the pole up high and looped the wire carefully down over the snake’s small, distinctive head. Then he tightened it. The snake gave a jerk and opened its jaws wide as though yawning in some incredibly dangerous way. Ken stared in fascination down into the pink gullet and was at once reminded of Hilda Bronkenhorst.