Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

Next day I apologised to her, laid the blame on Greek social norms for my use of exaggeratedly harsh words, and promised to party less and study more.

For a while I kept that promise. I even dropped a weekend in the Peak District to catch up on my studies. It was tough, but it had to be done, the exam was just round the corner and I knew my father was expecting results at the very least the equal of my older brother’s, who he had got into Yale and who was now sat on the board of the family business. All the same, this enforced swotting made me almost hate the things I actually loved, literature in particular. I envied Monique and Trevor their days off and was almost relieved when they came back early on the Saturday evening because of the rain and said that they’d hardly climbed a metre.

I continued to give priority to my studies, so much so that at one point Monique complained. It pleased me, but it was a strange pleasure, and had an even stranger side effect. From the start I felt Monique had more power over me than I had over her. It was something I accepted and attributed to the fact that she was a greater catch for me than I was for her. So I came out on top there too. What was interesting now was that the less time I spent with her, the more that seemed to even out the balance of power between us. So I buried myself again, redoubled my studies, and when the day of the big exam came along and I left the exam room after five hours, I knew that what I had handed in was something that would make not just my tutor and father proud, but Monique too. I bought a bottle of cheap champagne and ran to her room on the first floor of her hall of residence. Led Zeppelin’s ‘Whole Lotta Love’ was playing so loudly when I knocked that she didn’t hear me. Overjoyed — because it was I who had given her that record, and if there was anything I felt at that moment it was a whole lotta love! — I ran round to the back. Even with the bottle of champagne in one hand I easily climbed the tree that was outside her window. Once I was high enough to see inside I waved the bottle and was on the point of calling her name and telling her I loved her, but the words stuck in my throat.

Monique was always thrillingly vocal when we made love, and the walls between the rooms so thin we used to play music to cover the sounds.

I saw Monique, but she didn’t see me, her eyes were closed.

Trevor didn’t see me either because he had his back to me. That milky-white, now muscular back. His hips were moving, pumping up and down almost in time to ‘Whole Lotta Love’.

I remained in a trance until I heard a crash and, looking down, saw the champagne bottle had smashed against the cobblestones below. Shards of glass protruded from a white, bubbling puddle. I don’t know why the thought that someone might see me caused me to panic, but I slid rather than climbed down, and the moment my feet hit the ground I ran, I fled.

I ran all the way back to the shop where I had bought the champagne, bought two bottles of Johnnie Walker with the last of the money my mother had sent me and ran to my hall of residence. Locked myself in my room and began to drink.

It was dark outside when Monique knocked on my door. I didn’t open, called out that I was in bed, could it wait until tomorrow? She said there was something she had to talk to me about, but I said I didn’t want to take the chance of her catching what I had. Terrified of infection as she was she left, after asking me, through the door, how the exam had gone.

Trevor knocked on my door too. When I called out that I was ill, and he asked if there was anything I needed, I whispered ‘a friend’, turned over in bed and called out ‘No thanks’.

‘Hope you’ll be better for our climbing trip on Friday,’ said Trevor.

Friday. That gave me three days. Three days to dive down into a darkness I didn’t even know existed. Three days in the grip of jealousy. Each time I breathed out it tightened its grip a little more, made it harder to breathe in fresh air. Because that’s what jealousy is, it’s a boa constrictor. When I was a kid and my father took me to the cinema to see the Disney version of The Jungle Book, I got very confused because in the Rudyard Kipling book my mother read to me so many, many times Kaa the snake was nice! My father explained that all creatures have two faces, it’s just that we can’t always see the other one, not even in ourselves. But I had begun to see my other face. Because as the lack of oxygen over these three days destroyed my brain I began to think thoughts I had no idea were inside me, but which must have been there all the time, in the dregs of my personality. And I saw the other face of the good snake Kaa. The jealousy that tempted, manipulated, hypnotised with wild fantasies of revenge that sent thrilling shivers through the body and needed only another swig of whisky to keep it going.

When Friday came along and I shook off my depression, pronounced myself recovered and rose as though from the dead, I was no longer the same Nikos Balli. No one could see it in me, not even Trevor and Monique when I greeted them at lunch as though nothing had happened and said the weather forecast for the weekend looked great, we would have a fantastic weekend. As we ate I didn’t listen to Trevor and Monique as they spoke in codes they thought I couldn’t understand, instead I listened to a couple of girls on the other side of the table who were talking about one of their friends’ new boyfriend. I listened to the words they chose, the adjective that was a little too strong, the slightly too pleased response when one spoke disapprovingly to the other of their mutual friend, the anger that made the sentences shorter, more biting, without the flow that comes with calm thought. They were jealous. It was so simple. And I was not basing my new instinct on psychoanalysis but on pure, concrete verbal analysis. No, I was no longer the same. I had been somewhere. I had seen things there. Seen and learned. I had become the Jealousy Man.

‘Pretty sad story that,’ said Victoria Hässel as she pulled on her panties and started looking round for the rest of her clothes. ‘Did the two of them become a couple?’

‘No,’ I said. I turned in the bed and lifted first an empty then an almost empty bottle of Ouzo 12 from the bedside table and filled the dram glass. ‘It was Monique’s last year and her final exam was just a few days away. She didn’t do very well, but after that she went back home to France, and neither Trevor nor I ever saw her again. She married a Frenchman, had kids, and as far as I know lives somewhere in Brittany.’

‘And you — who studied literature and history — you became a policeman?’

I shrugged. ‘I had a year left at Oxford, but when I went back for the autumn the partying thing got out of hand again.’

‘Broken heart?’

‘Maybe. Maybe it was just that the closeness of the memories was too strong. Whatever, the only thing that seemed to matter was to keep getting smashed. Once I even thought of flight nine nineteen.’

‘Sorry?’

‘When things were at their worst I would squeeze this stone I had picked up from the ground somewhere in the Peak District.’ I held up a clenched fist to demonstrate. ‘Concentrated on transferring the pain into the stone, let it suck it all out.’

‘Did that help?’

‘At least I didn’t take flight nine nineteen.’ I emptied the dram glass. ‘Instead I dropped out in the middle of the autumn term and took a flight to Athens. Worked for a while in my father’s firm, and then enrolled at the Police Academy. My father and the rest of the family thought it was some kind of delayed adolescent rebellion. But I knew that I had been given something, a gift, or a curse, something that might possibly be of some use to me. And the discipline and training at the Academy helped keep me away from...’ I nodded towards the bottle of ouzo. ‘But that’s enough about me. Tell me about yourself.’