Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘I was wondering...’

‘Yes?’ Palle sounded impatient, as if I’d woken him. The evening shift usually wound down around two o’clock, that being an hour after the two bars closed. After that there was just the one taxi on night shift, a shift that was shared around between the cabs.

‘Did Wenche take our taxi yesterday?’

I knew Palle didn’t like it when I called it our taxi when in actual fact it was his, but now and then I forgot.

‘Is it her earring?’ I heard Palle yawn.

‘That’s what I’m wondering. It’s similar.’

‘So why not ring her instead of waking me up?’

‘Well.’

‘Well?’

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

‘It doesn’t?’

‘That’s what people say. Was she in the car yesterday?’

‘Let me think.’ I heard the click of Palle’s lighter at the other end before he continued. ‘Not in my car, but I think I saw her in a taxi queue around one, outside Fritt Fall. I can ask around.’

‘I’m not wondering which taxi Wenche took, I’m wondering who owns the earring,’ I said.

‘Well, can’t help you there, obviously.’

‘You were the one driving.’

‘So what? If it was in the crack between the seats it could have been there for days. And I can’t be expected to remember the name of every fucking fare I pick up. If the earring’s worth something then whoever owns it’ll ring. Did you top up the brake fluid? I nearly ended up in the sea when I started work yesterday.’

‘I’ll do it when things have quietened down a bit,’ I said. It was typical of that miserable bugger Palle to send me to the garage instead of going there himself. As a subcontracted driver I wasn’t paid an hourly rate, all I got was forty per cent of my takings.

‘Remember the hospital pickup at two,’ he said.

‘Sure sure,’ I said and hung up. Studied the earring again. I was hoping like hell I was mistaken.

The rear door opened, and I recognised the smell before I heard the voice. You might think that a taxi driver would get used to the rancid but also sickly-sweet smell that’s a combination of stale and fresh booze once the social security money’s been picked up, a new round of bottles bought, and everything’s set up for a morning session at the home of one of the social security drunks. But the opposite happens. The smell gets worse with each passing year, and nowadays it can really turn my stomach. There was a chinking sound from the off-licence bag and a slurred voice: ‘Nergardveien 12. Chop-chop.’

I turned the key in the ignition. The brake fluid warning light had been blinking for over a week, and you had to press your foot down a little harder on the pedal, but of course Palle was exaggerating when he said he’d almost rolled into the sea, even if the slope down from his garage to the edge of the quay was steep and dangerous in winter. And yes, when I was sick and tired of Palle giving me all the day shifts at the weekends and the night shifts on the weekdays while he helped himself to every shift it was possible to earn good money on, it did happen — when I parked the car outside his garage some winter night and picked up my own car to drive home — that I offered up a silent prayer that he might skid on the ice and I might jump forward one place in the taxi driver’s ticket queue.

‘No smoking in the car please,’ I said.

‘Shut your mouth!’ came a bark from the back seat. ‘Who’s paying for this, you or me?’

That would be me, I thought. I work for forty per cent of the takings, minus forty per cent tax which pays for you to drink yourself to death, and the best I can hope for is that you do it as quickly as possible.

‘What did you say?’ said the voice from the back seat.

‘No smoking,’ I said, and pointed at the sign on the dashboard. ‘There’s a fine of five hundred kroner.’

‘Take it easy, son.’ Cigarette smoke drifted forward between the seats. ‘I’ve got the cash.’

I lowered the windows front and back and thought how that five hundred wouldn’t be on the meter and would go straight into my pocket, because Palle smoked so much there was no chance he would notice the smell. But at the same moment I knew I would actually be a good boy and hand over the five hundred and get nothing myself. Because Palle claimed that it was him who cleaned the inside of the car, something we both knew he never did, that it never happened until it was so filthy inside I ended up doing it because I couldn’t stand it any more.

The meter showed 195 when I pulled up on Nergardveien.

The drunk handed me a 200-krone note. ‘Keep the change,’ he said and was on his way out.

‘Hey!’ I shouted. ‘I want 695.’

‘It says 195.’

‘You smoked in my cab.’

‘I did? Don’t remember. All I remember is that fucking draught.’

‘You were smoking.’

‘Prove it.’

He slammed the door behind him and headed for the entrance to the block to the cheery chinking of the bottles in his bag.

I checked the time. Six hours left of what was already a shitty working day. Then off to my in-laws for dinner. I don’t know which I dreaded more. I took the earring out of my pocket and studied it again. A pin sticking out from the round grey pearl, like a balloon on a string. I was reminded of the time when I was too young to join the National Day parade on 17 May and stood watching it with my grandfather. He had bought a balloon for me, and for just a second I must have lost concentration and let go of the string, because suddenly the balloon was floating high above me, and of course, I bawled. Grandad let me cry myself out, and then he explained why he wouldn’t buy another one for me. ‘It’s to teach you that when you’re lucky enough to get something you wished for, when you’ve been given a chance, you’ve got to hang on to it, because you don’t get second chances here in life.’

And maybe he was right. When I hooked up with Wenche I felt as if I’d been given a balloon I’d been longing for and couldn’t afford but had been given anyway. A chance. And so I’d held on tight. Not slackened my grip, not even for a second. Maybe I held on a little too tight. Now and then it seemed to me I could feel something tugging at the string. Those earrings had been a slightly-too-expensive Christmas gift, at least compared to the Björn Borg underpants she had bought for me. But was this one of those earrings? It looked like it. It actually looked completely identical as far as I could see, but neither this earring nor the ones I had bought had any particular distinguishing marks that would have told me one way or the other. Wenche came home after I fell asleep last night, she’d been on a long-planned pub crawl with two friends, young mothers who’d finally managed to arrange a kid-free night for themselves.

I took the chance to point out to her that it showed you could still have a life, even with kids; but Wenche had just groaned and told me to stop going on, she just wasn’t ready yet. She didn’t specify who it was she wasn’t ready for, me or the kids. She just left it at that. Wenche needed room to breathe, more room than most. I knew that. Yes, I understood. And I really wanted to give it to her, but somehow I just couldn’t. Couldn’t quite manage to slacken my grip on that string enough.

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

If she’s been fooling around with some guy in the back seat with Palle driving she must have been well pissed because she knew he was my employer. But then she could do crazy stuff when she’d been drinking. Like the first time we ever screwed, both of us drunk, two in the morning, and she insisted we do it out on the football pitch, up against one of the goalposts. It was only later I found out she’d had an on — off thing with the goalkeeper and he’d just dumped her.