Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

He turns to the woman behind him. ‘Hey, missus — OK by you if I do a bit of shopping?’

The woman stares open-mouthed at the knife and looks as though she’s trying to say something, but not a sound comes out. Instead she nods, quick as a woodpecker, and makes noises like she’s having trouble breathing. Above the mask her glasses mist over.

The boy turns back to me. ‘There, see? Come on.’

I take a deep breath. Maybe I’ve underestimated the boy. At least he’s street-smart enough to know that the CCTV cameras in 7-Eleven shops record pictures but not sound, so that in a court case there would be no indisputable proof that he’d actually said ‘nignog’ or anything like it that could be called hate speech. Unless the elderly lady behind him has better hearing than I think. And there’s no law against filing your nails.

I turn slowly and take down the packet of snuff, thinking the situation over.

As I say, I’ve been standing in lines since I was born and I can remember them all. The food lines I stood in with Mamma when I was little. The line around the UN lorries when the fighting first started. The line at the health station where my sister was diagnosed with tuberculosis. The staff line at the university toilets because the chemistry department didn’t have separate toilets for female students. The line of refugees leaving town when the war broke out. My sister and me in the line to board the boat and take the places for which Mamma had sold everything we owned. More food lines in a refugee camp where the chances of being raped were about as high as they were back home in the war zone. The line and the waiting to be sent to another country, to a refugee centre that held out hopes of a better life. The line to be allowed to leave the centre, get a job and contribute to this country that has taken us in and that I love. I love it so much that one of the three pictures hanging above the bed in the little flat my sister and I share was of the king and queen, along with Mamma and Madame Curie, my two other heroes.

I put the tin of snuff in the counter and the boy holds his credit card over the card reader.

As we wait for the card reader to confirm the purchase I open a drawer on my side of the counter. Inside is a box of fresh masks. I open the little bottle standing beside the box, take out a mask and drip a drop onto it. While doing this I’m thinking about my sister. She took down the picture of the royal couple yesterday. She said they’d cut in line. A newspaper wrote that the king and queen had already had the vaccination the rest of the country was waiting for. Without going public about it the government had offered the royal couple first place in the lifeboats, before it was their turn according to the rules that applied for the rest of the population.

And the two in the picture had accepted. Two people whose only real duty was to be symbols, to unite the country in times of war and crisis, had been given the opportunity to perform that duty in a really meaningful way, by showing a good example to people when it came to following the call from the authorities to show solidarity and discipline and to wait patiently in line. But the royals, the privileged royals, didn’t take the opportunity. Instead they took the opportunity to jump the line. I asked my sister whether she wouldn’t have done the same thing. She said yes. But that she wasn’t the ship’s captain. I said perhaps the royals did it to show a good example, to show people it was safe to be vaccinated. My sister said I was naive, that this was the same excuse the Algerian captain had used when the boatload of refugees capsized and he was the first into the lifeboat.

The card reader confirms the purchase.

I take the mask out of the drawer and offer it to him.

He looks at me uncomprehendingly as he stuffs the tin of snuff into his jacket pocket.

‘You’ll need it on the train,’ I say. ‘It’s mandatory now.’

‘I don’t have time to—’

‘It’s free.’

With a mocking smile the boy grabs the mask and runs off.

‘Now it’s us,’ I say with a smile to the elderly lady.

It’s almost eleven in the evening by the time I get home to our one-room flat. It’s ice-cold, because I only turn the radiators on at night, when I’m home, and when the electricity is cheaper.

I’m tired and I don’t turn on any of the lights, just the little TV set. I keep the sound low. I don’t see my sister, but she’s sitting somewhere in the dark and her voice fills the room. She says it’s dangerous where I work. That two months ago a woman died on the train and in her blood they found traces of an organophosphorus compound used in insect sprays, not unlike sarin. And now the same thing has happened to this boy. My sister points to the TV screen where a news anchor looks gravely into the camera.

As I follow her desultory thoughts I make myself something to eat, by which I mean I warm up the leftovers from yesterday. I don’t make anything for her. My sister hasn’t eaten since she was ten years old and died of tuberculosis while waiting in a line of patients who had been promised treatment. Last year as many people in the world died of tuberculosis as of this new infection. But of course, there’s nothing about tuberculosis on the news, because that’s not a problem here in the wealthy world.

‘Poor thing,’ says my sister with a sob as the TV shows a photograph of the boy, taken on a summer’s day aboard a sailing boat with some friends. He’s smiling broadly and I notice he doesn’t have a dark stain on his front tooth.

‘Look at him,’ she snuffles. ‘It’s so meaningless when someone dies so young.’

‘Yes,’ I say as I unfasten the top buttons of my coat. ‘Even there he’s cutting in line.’

Someone has to do the cleaning up.

Apart from the fact that I pick up the garbage here in the city I can’t think why that sentence occurred to me on that particular morning. I had the feeling it was something that came to me during the night; but I get blackouts sometimes when I’ve had too much and last night was one of those nights.

The garbage truck stopped with a wheeze and I jumped down from the rear ladder. Saw one of Pijus’s eyes in the mirror before I walked across to the bin outside the apartment block. In the old days I always used to run. That was when the bosses at head office didn’t much care if we got through the round well before the end of the stipulated time between six and one thirty and went home an hour or two early. Or if we managed the round for the whole week in four days so that we could have Friday off. But that was before. Now we had to follow the Oslo municipal council’s rules for regular hours of work, so if you finished early you just had to have a cup of coffee or play with your mobile phone in the office, you couldn’t just go home and screw the wife or cut the grass, if you get my meaning.

So I didn’t run, didn’t even jog, I walked. Walked shivering in the summer dawn towards the green wheelie bin, a lightweight two-wheeler, rolled it over to the truck, hitched it to the bin tipper and watched the plastic bin rise up into the air accompanied by the repetitive hymn of the hydraulics and electricity, followed by the thud as the container was whipped over and the trash hit the metal floor and the compactor began compressing it. Then I wheeled the bin back into place, being careful it was well out the way of the garage door, there had been complaints before from the residents. Fuck you, as far as I’m concerned, but recently there’d been a few too many. Not that it’s all that easy to get sacked as what they call a refuse disposal officer, but some people say I’ve got an anger management problem. OK, so I’ve got an anger management problem. So I’m worried that if the boss turns up one more time in the mess room and gives me a bollocking in front of the other guys (OK, there’s one girl, out of 150 employees) I just might punch his lights out. And that would mean my job, no two ways about it.