Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

I sat in the passenger seat next to Pijus. Rubbed my hands together in front of the heater. Even thought it was July and summer holidays, Oslo at six o’clock in the morning was still so cold that I didn’t ride outside on the ladder until I’d built up a bit of body heat. And anyway, Pijus was a guy you could talk to and that isn’t always the case with the other guys on the trucks. Mostly it’s Estonian, Latvian, Romanian, Serbian, Hungarian and all that, with maybe just a smattering of English. But Pijus spoke Norwegian. He claimed he’d worked as a psychologist before moving to Norway, but we’ve heard that one before. But whatever he used to do, the truth was he was smarter than the rest of us (Pijus called it having a higher level of intellectual ambition ), and he had a vocabulary as big and stiff as a lexicon. But it was Norwegian, and that was probably why the boss had us working together on the same truck. Not that there’s really all that much needs to be said on a garbage truck, you both know what the job involves, but the boss thought there would be less arguing and misunderstandings if the lads at least spoke the same language. And he probably also thought Pijus would be able to keep me out of trouble.

‘What is the cause of the wound on your forehead?’ Pijus asked in his stilted but somehow unimpeachable Norwegian.

I glanced at myself in the mirror. The cut ran like a crack in the ice directly above one eyebrow.

‘Dunno,’ I said, which was the truth. As I say, I have trouble with blackouts and I couldn’t remember a thing about last night, only that I woke up in bed with my wife lying with her back to me. I must have forgotten to set the alarm, just woken up out of habit but a bit later than usual, realised I was still too drunk to drive the Corolla to work and just thrown on my clothes and off out the house to catch the first bus. So obviously, I hadn’t had time to peruse my ugly mug in the bathroom mirror.

‘Have you been brawling again, Ivar?’

‘No, I spent last night at home with the missus,’ I said, running a finger over the cut. Damp. Fresh. I did remember me and the missus having a couple of drinks. Or no, actually, Lisa decided she was going to give up drinking altogether. So I had had a couple of drinks. And then a couple more, apparently.

Pijus stopped the truck and we jumped down. At this address there were two big four-wheeled bins to go out, and that needed two of us. Otherwise it’s the driver who’s the boss, he can sit and relax behind the wheel with his HGV driving licence and his wage packet three grades higher than the mate’s. But Pijus is well aware of the fact that when he came here from his shit little country I was the one who was doing the driving, and he was the driver’s mate. I lost my licence, but that’s another long and boring story about booze and a loudmouth traffic cop with a breathalyser who turned up in court with a black eye and claimed it was completely unprovoked.

I pulled out the enormous bunch of keys and found the right one. Apparently there are around 7,000 keys covering the whole of Oslo at the depot. I hope they take good care of them.

‘So you were fighting with your little wife,’ said Pijus.

‘Eh?’

‘Why were you fighting? Unfaithful? Women who have been cheated on can be just as aggressive as men. Especially if they have children. But in that case they usually turn on the intruder. That’s the way oxytocin works. The woman gets pregnant and the chemistry makes them more monogamous, more empathic and kinder. But at the same time they get more hostile in the face of potential threats.’

‘Wrong, wrong and wrong again,’ I said, and began pushing one of the bins in the yard towards the gate. ‘We don’t have kids, and I haven’t screwed anyone. And women aren’t monogamous.’

‘Aha, so she’s the one who’s been unfaithful.’

‘What the hell are you talking about?’ I let go of my bin right in front of the gate and Pijus had to stop his to avoid crashing into me.

He shrugged. ‘That’s why you were fighting. You felt your position was threatened. Your amygdala was activated. Fight, flight or freeze. She’s small, so you chose to fight. It’s only natural.’

I could already feel the blood sort of tightening in my head. It’s a much too familiar feeling. The pressure rises and to stop my head exploding I need to open a valve, find some other way out, because otherwise it’ll burst open and little yellow bits of brain go whirling through the air and land on walls and bicycles, prams and letter boxes and some little guy trying to kid people into believing he’s a fucking psychologist.

As a rule the solution is to open my mouth and even out the pressure that way, same as when you’re on a plane. I just have to roar. Roar something.

‘My amagy...’ I began. I was calm. Pretty calm. OK, I raised my voice a bit.

‘Amygdala,’ said Pijus with a little and very fucking irritating grin. ‘Think of it like a woman’s name, Amy G—’

That did it for me.

‘Don’t talk to me like that, you fucking nazibastardcunt!’ I pushed the container as hard as I could so the bloody Latvian was sandwiched between the two bins, and I was on my way round to give him a good kicking when a voice cut through the morning air in the yard.

‘We are trying to sleep!’

I looked up. There was a woman standing on a second-floor balcony. She was probably only in her forties but she’d let herself go and looked more like fifty. I can say that because she was completely naked.

‘Shut up and put some clothes on, you dirty old slag!’ I yelled. ‘OK?’

The woman laughed, a piercing wail of a sound, raised both arms in the air, lifted one knee and twisted her hip into a grotesque glamour-model pose. ‘I’ll ring your boss!’ she shrieked. ‘This time tomorrow, gentleman, you’ll both be on the dole!’

And through the red curtain of my rage I could see it all. The boss giving me the message he’d been waiting so long for the opportunity to give me: Svendsen, you are so fucking fired!

I could feel the bin against my stomach. Pijus was pushing at the other end, nodding towards the gate, signalling that we should get out.

‘Think she’ll do it?’ I asked as the wheels rattled across the asphalt outside.

‘Yes,’ said Pijus.

‘Very fucking inconvenient,’ I said.

‘Oh yes?’

‘The Corolla’s due for its EU test and I’ve promised the missus a holiday in the Canaries this Christmas. What about you?’

Pijus shrugged. ‘I send money to my parents. They get by, but without the money they won’t eat well and they won’t be able to pay for the electricity.’

I helped him hook the container onto the hydraulics. ‘I shouldn’t complain, is that what you’re saying?’

‘No, I’m just saying we all have our problems, Ivar.’

Maybe we do. My problem was that when I got angry I couldn’t keep things separate any more. I should have had optical detectors that did it for me, like they have at the dump out at Klementsrud. We just offloaded into this sort of unmanned factory of a place and all the trash waltzes off on a conveyor belt with robots sorting out the big bits from the little bits and sending the organic stuff to the incinerators, the glass, plastic and metal for recirculating, and so on. If only I could learn to just let some things go.

I calmed down, and as we emptied the containers tried again to remember. What the fuck actually happened last night? All I knew was that it must have been a lot, because when I woke up I wasn’t just hung-over, I felt like I’d just run two marathons. Did I fight with Lisa? Had I — who in all the thirty years of our marriage never laid a hand on her — had I done something to her? She was lying on her side in the bed with her back to me when we woke up. That was in itself a bit weird because usually she slept flat on her back. But a fight, a fist fight? I couldn’t see that. But what I did see now, now that I thought about it, was that we had quarrelled. It was as if the echo of harsh and ugly words was only just now reaching me from the night before. And I’d used one of them again just a couple of minutes ago. Slag. I’d called Lisa a couple of things over the years, but never slag.