Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Come on, you’re making this up,’ I said.

Pijus shrugged. ‘Remember up by Storo?’

‘Storo?’

‘The freezing rain. We’d reversed up to the wall and were about to empty the bins there.’

He looked at me. I shook my head.

‘Come on, Ivar. The truck was on a slope, and it began to slide down?’

I just shook my head again.

‘Ivar, I was standing with my back to the truck and I would have been crushed to death if you hadn’t lightning-quick turned the biggest wheelie bin up on its side between the truck and the wall.’

‘Oh, that. Well, you wouldn’t exactly have been crushed to death.’

‘My point is that you showed you are capable of reacting both spontaneously and rationally at the same time. It is not the case that you have to lose your head when you feel the rush of adrenaline and testosterone. Don’t worry, you’re smarter than you think, Ivar. So call her. Use your testosterone to show empathy. And calculation.’

Well, I’ll be damned. So I did call her.

No answer.

‘She’s probably asleep,’ said Pijus.

I looked at my watch. Eight. Of course it could be that she was on the bus on the way to work, she wouldn’t take the call then. I sent a text message. My feet were beating like drumsticks against the floor as I waited. The sun rose and was shining through the windscreen. It was going to be a hot day. A hot day in hell, I thought as I pulled off my jacket.

‘We better get moving,’ said Pijus and turned the key in the ignition.

I met Lisa at a party at a friend’s place when I was at training college.

I had a go at this guy from Ljan who thought there was something he could teach me about respect. I knew he’d provoked me because he’d heard I was easy to wind up and I knew he did it because he was a good fighter and wanted to show off in front of the girls there. But knowing all that is no help at all, not when the guy in question came out with the type of stuff that was just asking for a sock on the jaw. To make a short story even shorter, the guy beat me up. Lisa wiped the blood from my nose with a toilet roll, helped me to my feet and walked home with me to the students’ lodgings I had in Sogn. And stayed the night. And the next day. And the next week. In a word, she stayed.

We never had time to fall in love, never had time for the painful but at the same time wonderful uncertainty about whether or not the other one really does want you. The game, the doubt, the ecstasies — we gave it all a miss. We were a couple. Say no more. Some thought I’d got a woman who was too good for me, at least that’s what they thought as time went by, because Lisa was actually in those early days quiet and sort of mousy, without the figure she acquired later when she put on a few kilos, and without that radiance that others besides me noticed she had once she got over the worst of her shyness.

They said she was good for me, that I’d quietened down, that I didn’t seem so volatile, as the child psychiatrist called it, since he didn’t dare call me unstable. And it’s true, Lisa knew how to calm me, it was when she wasn’t around or if I’d had one too many that things spiralled out of control. I was done once or twice for grievous bodily harm, but only served a couple of short stretches. And as I say, I had never laid a hand on Lisa. Never had any reason to. Not until now. I don’t think she was ever scared of me, not once in her life. Scared for others maybe, friends and relations, if they said the wrong thing to me. And I suspect she was halfway relieved when the doctor told us we couldn’t have kids. Shit, I was relieved myself, but of course I didn’t say that. But Lisa was never afraid for her own safety, and that was probably why she’d dared to admit that stuff about Ludvigsen. But how could she kid herself she knew my limits when I didn’t bloody know them myself and was sitting here wondering exactly what the fuck I might have done?

When I was ten years old my big brother and me were each given a glass of lemonade before our parents went out on a Saturday night. But the moment they were out the door my big brother spat in them both, two big, slimy blobs, and probably figured that now both drinks were his. But the thing is, you can’t drink out of a glass with a busted jaw, and at the hospital all he got through the straw was water.

Anyway, what had happened now was that Lisa was like one of those glasses of lemonade. Spat on, spoiled. There was no other way I could look at it. I’d lost what I’d been given, and all that was left after that was useless retaliation, the levelling out of the pressure. Fuck you. Fuck me.

And now I felt it coming back. The pulsing in my temples.

Maybe because we were in Kjelsåsveien and had just passed number 600.

As we moved between houses and bins I was sometimes in and out of the cab, sometimes standing on the ladder at the back. Checking the mobile every time.

Maybe she was at a meeting.

With Ludvigsen.

OK, I mustn’t think like that. And anyway, she wasn’t. I don’t know how come I was so certain about that, but I was.

And then there we were, Kjelsåsveien 612.

It was a villa, no more and no less flashy than any of the others in that area. The kind you don’t have to be rich to live in if you’d inherited it from your parents, and they didn’t need to have been rich either. But if you wanted to buy one now, it would set you back a few hundred thousand. Orchards cost money, even in the east end of town, where I live.

I noticed that the outside light above the porch was on. Either Stefan Ludvigsen didn’t care about the cost of electricity, or he was the forgetful type. Or maybe he wasn’t at work but still at home. Was that what had my pulse hammering away as I walked towards the garage? That he was going to come out, tell me that he hadn’t been able to get hold of Lisa on the phone and that he’d called the police and they were on their way to our place? And it wasn’t just the pounding of my heart that told me, I knew it with a sudden and absolute certainty: I’d done a murder last night. I felt it not just in my aching forearms, in my fingertips, in the thumbs that had pressed against the little larynx, but deep inside me. I was a killer. I saw the bulging eyes, the pleading, dying gaze up at me in resignation and despair before out they went, like red warning lights when the current’s turned off.

Did he know, Ludvigsen? Was he sitting behind a window somewhere in there, looking at me? Maybe he didn’t dare come out but was just sat there waiting for the police to arrive? I listened out through the quiet of the summer morning for the sound of sirens before opening the unlocked door to the garage where his four-wheel bin was. And there was a car. A spanking-new black BMW. Villains drive BMWs, right? Only I was the villain here. I wheeled the bin out; it was so heavy the wheels sank into the gravel and I had to push hard. I hooked it onto the hydraulics and met Pijus’s gaze in the mirror. He shouted something, but it was lost beneath the whirring of the lift.

‘Eh?’ I shouted back.

‘Isn’t that your car?’ I heard him say.

‘I don’t have any bloody BMW.

‘Not that one!’ shouted Pijus. ‘That one.’

I saw he was pointing further up the road. And there, fifty metres in front of us, stood a white Corolla. A car due any time now its EU check. A car that had a prominent dent in the bonnet from where a fist had landed to emphasise a point in a discussion with a traffic warden.

It dawned on me. I think ‘dawned’ is the right word, because it means something that happens very slowly. It happened slowly because it was so hard for me to understand that Lisa would do something like that to me. There was the BMW that Ludvigsen should’ve gone to work in, and there was the Corolla that should’ve been at home in my garage. In other words Lisa had got up, seen the car was in the garage and driven it up here to where Ludvigsen was waiting for her.