Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

The house lay dark and silent and waited for him.

He let himself in.

All was as silent as the grave.

He went upstairs, undressed and showered. He thought of Ryan dying on the living-room floor and went to the toilet. He didn’t want to be found with his pants full of excrement and piss. Then he put on his best suit, the one he had been wearing that evening at the Charles Dickens Theatre.

He went down into the cellar. It smelled of apples and he stood still in the middle of the floor, the neon tube in the ceiling blinking on and off as though unable to make up its mind.

Once it had stabilised he crossed to the stove, opened the door and took out the pistol.

He’d seen it in films, read it in books, had even himself declaimed Hamlet’s thoughts on suicide ( to be or not to be ) when a secondary school student, when he had given a remarkably unsuccessful reading from the play. The hesitation, the doubt, the interior monologue that drags you this way and that. But Odd Rimmen no longer felt any such doubt. One way or another, all roads had been leading here, and this was the right, the only way to end it. So right it wasn’t even sad but quite the opposite. A storyteller’s last triumph. Put your gun where your pen is. And let other so-called writers sit there onstage and bathe in the audience’s bargain-price love, lying to themselves and to everyone else there.

Odd Rimmen released the safety catch and pressed the pistol against his temple.

Already he could see the headlines.

And after that: his place in the history books.

No, Nothing. The novel’s place.

Like that.

He closed his eyes and pressed his index finger against the trigger.

‘Odd Rimmen!’

It was Esther’s voice.

He hadn’t heard her come, but now she was calling his name. She wasn’t far away. Maybe up in the living room. And strangely enough calling his full name, as though she wanted all of him to step forward and show himself.

Odd fired. There was a crackling sound, like the roaring of a fire. As though time was distended by his senses he could hear the powder ignite and burn in superslow motion, the sounds rising to a crescendo of applause.

Odd Rimmen opened his eyes. At least, he thought he opened his eyes. Leastways, he saw it.

The light.

Head for the light. Sophie’s words. The editor he had listened to and trusted all his writing life.

And then he walked towards the light. It blinded him. He saw no one in the darkness behind the light, heard only the crackling applause as it grew even louder.

He bowed slightly and sat down in the chair beside Esther Abbot, the journalist who, despite her rough and almost masculine manner, had a softness about the eyes that he had noticed in the dressing room a few minutes earlier.

‘Let’s get straight to the point, Mr Rimmen,’ said Esther Abbot. ‘I’m sitting here with a copy of The Hill in my hands and we’ll be talking about that. But first: do you think you’ll ever be able to write such a good book again?’

Odd Rimmen peered out across the auditorium. He could make out a few individual faces on the first rows. They stared at him, some half smiling, as though they had already discounted any possibility that he might say something funny or brilliant. And he knew that no matter what he said, he would be given the benefit of every doubt. It was like playing on an instrument that half played itself. All you had to do was touch the keys, open your mouth.

‘You’re the ones who decide what is and isn’t good,’ he said. ‘All I can do is write.’

A sort of sigh passed through the audience. As though they were concentrating in order to penetrate to the real depths of what each individual word meant. Jesus Christ.

‘And that’s exactly what you do, you’re Odd Dreamin’,’ said Esther Abbot as she shuffled her papers. ‘Do you write all the time, make things up all the time?’

Odd Rimmen nodded. ‘All the time. Every spare moment I get. I was writing just now. Just before I walked out onto the stage.’

‘Really? And are you writing this now?’

The audience’s laughter dwindled to an expectant silence as Odd Rimmen turned and looked out towards them. Smiled slightly. Waited. These trembling, breathless, holy moments...

‘I hope not.’

There was a wave of laughter. Odd Rimmen tried not to smile too broadly. But of course it’s hard not to, not when you can feel unconditional love being injected directly into your heart.

‘Ouch!’

I looked in the mirror. ‘Something wrong?’

‘This,’ said the fat lady in the back seat, and held up something between her thumb and forefinger.

‘What is it?’ I asked as I switched my gaze back to the road.

‘Can’t you see? An earring. I sat down on it.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘A passenger must have lost it.’

‘Well, of course I realise that. But how?’

‘Sorry?’

‘An earring doesn’t just fall off while you’re sitting up straight.’

‘I don’t know,’ I said, braking as we approached a red light at the only junction in town. ‘You’re my first passenger today, I’ve only just taken over the car.’

With the cab at a standstill I glanced again at the mirror. The lady was studying the earring. It has probably been lying in the crack between the seats and got squeezed up when her huge arse pressed down the cushions on both sides.

I looked at the earring. And something struck me. I tried to dismiss it at once, because there must have been at least a thousand different varieties of a simple earring like that.

The lady looked up and met my eyes in the mirror. ‘It’s genuine,’ she said, and handed the earring to me. ‘You better try to trace the owner.’

I held it up against the grey morning light. The pin was gold. Jesus. I turned it, and sure enough, there was no engraved logo and no manufacturer’s name. Told myself not to draw any hasty conclusions, one pearl earring looks pretty much like any other pearl earring.

‘It’s green,’ said the lady.

Palle — who owned the taxi — had taken the night shift, so I waited until ten and the cab was parked up at the rank next to the kiosk steps before I phoned him. Twenty years ago Palle had come here from playing second division football for Grenland to help get our team up out of the third tier. If he didn’t manage that then he did manage — at least by his own account — lo bed every available female in the town between the ages of eighteen and thirty.

‘I think we can safely say I was the team’s top scorer,’ he said once in the pub, stroking his magnificent blond moustache between thumb and forefinger. Maybe so, I was just a kid in his playing days and knew only that he’d married one of the more obviously available. She was the daughter of the foreman in the taxi owners’ union, and when Palle retired from football he got his taxi driver’s licence without the waiting period others had to go through. As a subcontracted driver for Palle I’d been waiting five years now with still no sign of that golden ticket.

‘Something wrong?’ Palle asked in that threatening tone he always used whenever I called him during my shift. He was terrified I might have had a crash or that there was a problem with the car, something I knew he’d halfway blame me for, even if it was someone else crashed into me or some mechanical fault in the worn-out old Mercedes that Palle was too mean to book in for regular servicing.

‘Has anyone called in about an earring?’ I asked.

‘Earring?’

‘In the back seat. In the crack between the cushions.’

‘No, but I’ll let you know if I hear anything.’