Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

With me it was the other way round. I despised my promiscuous inclinations but couldn’t resist them. Despite the fact that I was shy, creepy in the opinion of some, and with my rather rigid and stiff formality could seem more English than Greek, my appearance was obviously attractive to members of the opposite sex. English girls especially fell for what they called my Cat Stevens looks, meaning the dark curls and brown eyes. But in addition to that — and I think it was this more than my appearance that caused them to open both their hearts and bedroom doors to me — was the fact that I had the ability to listen. Or more accurately, I was interested in listening. For me, who lived and breathed for all stories save my own, it was no great sacrifice to listen to young women’s long monologues on privileged upbringings, the difficult relationship with Mother, doubts about their sexual orientation, the most recent unhappy love story, the flat in London she couldn’t use any more now that Father had installed his young lover there, fake dilemmas and those hideous backstabbing friends who had gone off to St-Tropez without telling her. Or else — if I was a little luckier — about the longing to commit suicide, the existential compulsive-obsessive thoughts and the secret ambitions to write. Afterwards many of them wanted to have sex with me, especially if I had hardly opened my mouth. It was as though silence always worked to my advantage, being interpreted in the most favourable way possible. But these sexual intermezzos did nothing to improve my self-confidence. On the contrary, they only heightened my self-contempt. These girls went to bed with me because my silence meant that they could imagine me in whatever way they wanted. I had everything to lose by revealing who I was; a shy whoremonger devoid of self-confidence, substance or spine, just a pair of brown eyes and long ears. And before long they noticed how my gloominess, my natural darkness, extinguished the light in the room so that they had to get out, away. I can’t blame them.

With Monique all that changed. I was changed. For example, I began to talk. From the moment we helped each other to drink that first nasty-tasting Guinness we had conversations, with the accent on we, and not those monologues I had grown used to. And the topics were different too. We talked about matters outside ourselves, like the self-preserving mechanisms of poverty, like the human belief that morality — meaning, in particular, one’s own morality — represented some kind of permanent quality. Or how we more or less consciously avoid learning anything that might upset our political and religious convictions. Books we’d read, we’d not read, ought to read because they were good. Or overrated. Or simply bad but useful.

In the degree to which we spoke of ourselves and our own lives, it was always related to the general, to an idea or a conception, to la condition humaine, as Monique called it, referring not to my own favourite French writer André Malraux but to the political philosopher Hannah Arendt. We tossed these and other writers at each other not in any competitive sense but as a way of testing out one’s own original thinking on a person you trusted enough to dare to be mistaken, and to admit as much. The sparks could really fly, and it was after one such furious disagreement that she, late one night and after a few glasses of wine in her room, took a swipe at me, and then put her arms around me, and for the first time we kissed.

The following day she gave me an ultimatum. If I wouldn’t be her boyfriend then we couldn’t go on meeting. It wasn’t because she was desperate or in love with me, but because an arrangement such as that involved a mutual sexual exclusivity, something that was a non-negotiable demand for her, in that she was pathologically frightened of sexual diseases, so afraid, in fact, that there was a fair chance the fear would spoil and shorten her life sooner than any sexual disease. I laughed, she laughed, and I accepted her ultimatum.

It was Monique who introduced me to climbing. She had a father who from an early age would take her to classic modern sports climbing locations in Verdon and Céüse.

In all honesty in England there isn’t much climbing, and certainly not in and around Oxford, but my fellow Led Zeppelin fan Trevor Biggs, the slightly chubby, good-natured, red-haired son of a factory worker from Sheffield, told me of friends that climbed in the Peak District close to his home town. Trevor turned into a kind of regular wingman for me. With his outgoing manner and warm sense of humour he attracted people — guys as well as girls — who would join us at our table. Often it was these girls who, after a time, turned their attention to me. Trevor also owned a run-down but still functioning Toyota HiAce van, the outstanding virtue of which was that it had seat warmers. When I suggested to him that he could combine climbing with visits to his parents and in addition share the petrol costs with two others he went for the idea immediately.

That was the start of three years of weekend trips and climbing. The drive didn’t take more than two and a half hours, but to get as much climbing as possible out of the weekends we spent the nights in a tent, in the van or — if the weather was particularly bad — at Trevor’s parents’ house.

In the course of that first year I soon became better than Trevor, perhaps because I was more dedicated and more concerned to impress — or at least not to disappoint — Monique. She was and remained far superior to us. Not because she was particularly strong, but that small, neat body flew up the walls with the technique, balance and footwork of a ballet dancer. She understood climbing in a way that Trevor and I could only dream of. I, and in due course Trevor, did not really begin to get going until we were able to find sites where the climbing was done in handholds and ledges, where what was needed was brute physical strength. But it was Monique’s advice, her encouragement and her ability to share in our joys and minor triumphs that kept me and Trevor going. And the sound of her sparkling, happy laughter echoing between the rock faces because Trevor or I had once again fallen and dangled there at the end of a rope, cursing in frustration and asking to be lowered. Not because we wanted to give up but so we could attempt the whole thing once again, from the bottom up.

At times — perhaps because Monique felt he needed it more than me — it seemed as though she were a touch more enthusiastic in her praise when it was Trevor who managed something new rather than me. But that was fine. The fact that she was like that was one of the reasons I loved her so much.

It was in our third year that I realised Trevor had begun to take his climbing seriously. I had mounted a so-called fingerboard above the door to strengthen my fingers. Trevor never touched it. But now, quite often, I would see him dangling there. Sometimes it almost felt as though I caught him doing it red-handed, as though he didn’t want me to know that he was practising as much as he was. But his body betrayed him. When the sun shone and it became so hot on those Peak District rock faces that Trevor and I pulled off our T-shirts, I could see that his formerly chubby upper body was still a dazzling milk-white, but now all the fat was gone. Well-defined muscles rippled like steel cables under his skin when he, in his almost robotic way, forced a way up the overhangs on routes where even Monique herself had to admit defeat. I still had the advantage on him on the vertical routes because I had been careful to study Monique’s technique, but there was no doubt about it, the competition between Trevor and me had grown much more even. Because that’s what it had become: a competition.

It was also around this time that I began partying a little too much. Meaning, of course, I did too much social drinking. My father was a recovering alcoholic. It was something I had known about since childhood, and he had tried to warn me off it. But his warning had been to avoid drink when I was feeling bad, not happy, like I was now. Whatever it was, the combination of a lot of climbing, a lot of Monique and a lot of ‘partying’ began to affect my studies. Monique was the first to point it out, and this became the occasion of our first quarrel. Which I won. Or at least, she was crying when she left because I’d got the last word.