Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

The officer looks as though he might be preparing a response, a long and complex response that’s going to require a lot of thought. I continue.

‘I counted on you arresting Henrik Bakke as soon as you had the results of the autopsy. I presumed it would be an easy matter to work out that the cyanide came from the chocolates that Bakke had indisputably brought into the house.

‘But you didn’t, officer. You didn’t manage to connect the poison to the remains of chocolate you found in her stomach because the chocolate had already melted and dissolved. So I began to worry that Henrik Bakke might get away with it.’

I drink what’s left of my coffee. The officer’s cup is still there, untouched.

‘But once a second body arrives on his slab I’m pretty sure the coroner is going to be able work it out, don’t you think? That the murder weapon was right there in front of you the whole time?’

I point to the dish of chocolates and fix him with a smile. No response.

‘One last Twist before I raise the alarm, officer?’ In the ensuing silence I can hear the faint crackling of a banana cream wrapper as it slowly begins to unfold like a yellow-and-green rose on the coffee table in front of him. That beautiful coffee table.

Odd was — seen from the auditorium — standing in the wings on the right-hand side.

He tried to breathe normally.

How many times had he stood like that, dreading the prospect of making his entrance in front of a crowd as he listened to the person who was going to interview him build him up, ratchet up the expectations? And this evening they would already be high, given that tickets to enter cost twenty-five pounds, more than the price of any of his slender books. With the possible exception of English first editions of his debut book, which could no longer be found in the second-hand bookshops and was selling for three hundred pounds on the net.

Was that what made it so difficult to breathe? The fear that, as himself, the actual flesh-and-blood Odd Rimmen, he wouldn’t live up to the hype? Couldn’t live up to the hype. After all, they’d turned him into a kind of superman, a psychic intellectual who hadn’t just analysed the human condition but also predicted sociocultural trends and diagnosed the problems of modern man. Didn’t they understand that it was just writing ?

And yes, naturally, an author’s thought always had a subtext the author himself didn’t necessarily understand or see. That applied even to those authors whom he himself admired. Camus, Saramago — he suspected that even Sartre hadn’t fully plumbed his own depths, being more concerned with the external sex appeal of formulation.

Face-to-face with the page’s — the computer’s — neutral surface and the option of retreat it offered, he could be Odd Rimmen, the man whom the reviewer in the Boston Globe had, with the greatest respect, dubbed Odd Dreamin’, a nickname that had stuck. But in person he was just Odd, a guy waiting to be exposed as a man of average intelligence with a slightly above average gift for language, and a distinctly below average control of his self-criticism and impulses. And he thought it was this latter — his lack of impulse control — that had led him to expose his emotional life so recklessly in front of thousands, indeed hundreds of thousands (not millions) of readers. Because even though the page/screen offered the option of retreat, the opportunity to regret and make changes, he never did so if he saw that it was good. His literary calling took precedence over his personal comfort. He could defy the weakness in his own character and move out of his comfort zone, as long as it all happened on the page, in his imagination, his dreams and his writing which, no matter what the theme or the degree of intimacy, was a comfort zone all its own, securely cut off from the life out there. He could write anything at all, and tell himself it was bound for the bottom drawer of his desk and would never be published. And then, once Sophie, his editor, had read it and massaged his writer’s ego to the point at which he believed her claim that it would be a literary crime to deprive readers of this, it was just a question of closing the eyes, trembling and drinking alone, and letting it all happen.

But not with an interview onstage.

Esther Abbot’s voice reached him like a far-off rumbling, a storm approaching across the stage. She was standing at a podium, with the armchairs they were to sit in ranged behind her. As though the creation of a setting that looked vaguely like a living room could make him feel more relaxed. An electric chair placed in a meadow full of flowers. Screw them.

‘He has given his readers a new vantage point from which to view ourselves, our own lives, the lives of those closest to us, the world about us,’ the voice said.

He could just about make out the English words. He preferred to be interviewed in English rather than his native language, exaggerating his accent so that the audience would suppose his inability to formulate himself clearly was an obvious result of the fact that he had to speak in a foreign language, and not the fact that in every oral encounter, even when speaking his own language, he became a clown who stumbled his way through even the simplest sentences.

‘He is one of the most acute and uncompromising observers of our time, of our society, and ourselves as individuals.’

What rubbish, Odd Rimmen thought, drying the palms of his hands against the thighs of his G-Star jeans. He was a writer who had achieved a commercial breakthrough entirely on the basis of his descriptions of sexual fantasies that balanced so delicately on the edge of what was acceptable that they were described as controversial and brave, but were not so on the edge that they really did shock and upset anyone, at the same time as it was all therapy for any feelings of shame readers might have experienced at having entertained the same fantasies as the author. As he presently realised, the rest of what he wrote rode on the back of these sex descriptions. And Odd Rimmen knew — as did his editor, even though they had never talked about it — that in the books that followed he had gone on to offer variations on these sexual fantasies, despite the fact that they were, thematically speaking, alien elements. They were like long, misplaced guitar solos, with no other relevance than that they were something the public expected, and even demanded of him. A provocation that had become so normal it ought to have occasioned a yawn rather than a gasp, a routine that almost made him throw up, but that he excused by telling himself it was the wheels the rest of the text needed, the element that could deliver his real message to a larger readership than he would otherwise have reached. But he had been mistaken. He had sold his soul, and as an artist he had been damaged by it. Well, then let there be an end to it.

In the novel he was currently working on, and which he had not yet shown to his editor, he had weeded out everything that smacked of a commercial sell-out and cultivated only the poetic, the dreamlike vision, the real. The painful. No more compromises.

Nevertheless, here he was, and in a few seconds he would be brought onstage to deafening applause from a packed Charles Dickens Theatre, an audience that even before he opened his mouth had made up its mind that it loved him, just as it loved his books, as though the two were one and the same thing, as though his writing and his lies had told them all they needed to know about him long ago.

Worst of all was that he needed it. He actually needed their ill-founded admiration and unconditional love. He had become addicted to it, because what he saw in their eyes, the stolen goods he made away with, was like heroin. He knew that it was destroying him, corrupting him as an artist; and yet he had to have it.