Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

When the pandemic started I was head of the legal department of Colin’s IT company. The virus came from the east, from the other end of the country, but it swept over us — the majority, the safe middle class — before we had time to react.

When Colin first showed me Rat Island five years earlier, a tiny prison island of no more than a hundred hectares not far from the airport, I’d teased him about being a doomsday prepper, one of those paranoid wackos who spends all their time preparing for the worst, for the day when they have no one but themselves to rely on. The reason there are so many of them in our country probably has something to do with the culture of individual liberty here. You make your own luck and no one’ll stop you, but no one’ll help you either.

‘It’s just common sense,’ was his reply when I suggested that it was bordering on the paranoid. ‘I’m an engineer and a programmer, and people like us aren’t hysterics who go around thinking the end is nigh. We just reckon on the likelihood of something unlikely happening, same as we do in our work. Because there’s one thing you can be sure of, and that is that, given enough time, everything — but absolutely everything — that can happen will happen. The likelihood of the breakdown of society in my lifetime isn’t great, but then it isn’t negligible either. When I multiply that likelihood by what it would cost me, financially and in terms of quality of life, what that gives me is the price I should be willing to pay for my insurance. This—’ he gestured with his hand in the direction of the barren and rocky island with the empty concrete buildings that had once been built to keep killers in, not out — ‘is a small price to pay if I want to sleep better at night.’

At that time I was not aware that he already had cabinets full of weapons there. Nor that the reason he and several of his director friends had undergone laser surgery to correct near-sightedness had not been cosmetic but from the knowledge that in a world without law and order it would be difficult to get hold of either spectacles or contact lenses, and that clear eyesight would be critical in a struggle to survive that would have brought us a step closer to the Stone Age.

‘No reason not to be prepared, Will. If only for your family’s sake.’

But I had not been prepared.

It is not the case that the looting started when the authorities decided to open the prisons which had, in effect, become chambers of death in which isolation was impossible and the virus spread unhindered. The numbers of prisoners released in this way was not sufficient in itself to account for the chaos. It was the feeling it created. A feeling that the authorities were losing control, that law and order were suspended, that soon we would have to grab whatever we could before others grabbed it first. Nor was it that we failed to see or understand what was happening. It was not an irrational fear. We knew that if we could just put this pandemic behind us — and in some countries it was already on the wane — we would be able to return to our normal lives. But we also saw that fear had grown stronger than the common sense of the herd. It wasn’t mass hysteria but the lack of a shared common sense. So people made individual choices that were rational and sensible for themselves and those they loved, but catastrophic for the rest of society.

Some became looters and turned to violence out of sheer necessity.

Others — like Colin’s son Brad — did so because they wanted to.

Brad Lowe’s relationship with his father was complicated. As his firstborn, Brad was the one Colin expected to take over the business after him. But it wasn’t something Brad was cut out for. He lacked his father’s intellect and his capacity for work, had neither his vision nor his desire to change the world, and none of his charm or his ability to enthuse others. What he had inherited from his father was an egotism that was at times infinite, and a willingness to sacrifice everything and everyone in pursuit of his goal. It might involve Brad using his father’s money to bribe the trainer to pick him for the college football team ahead of others with more talent. Or persuading his father to give him money for a project he and his friends had started to help less fortunate students but which, as it turned out, went towards drugs, women and wild parties in the off-campus house they rented. The final straw that made Colin remove his son from college was when the dean informed him that Brad had physically threatened him after it was discovered he had forged documents to make it look as though he had passed certain exams he had not even taken.

Brad came back home the ultimate loser that summer. And I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. For years our families used to spend mountain holidays in an enormous two-storey cabin we rented together until Colin bought the place. The bad relationship between father and son made it hard for the rest of us to be around Brad. Because he wasn’t a boy without feelings. Quite the contrary, in fact; he had way too many of them. He loved and admired his father. It had always been that way and was something people could see clearly. A lot more clearly than the fact that the father loved his son. Now Brad’s emotions veered wildly between despair, anger, an apathetic indifference and an aggression directed against everyone who didn’t do what he wanted them to, whether one of his family, one of ours, or one of the employees at the cabin. And that was when I discovered the other Colin inside Brad. The one who appeared when Colin’s seductive intelligence and contagious enthusiasm failed to persuade people: the threatening person. The Colin who could almost on a whim buy up some troublesome little competitor, strip its assets and put the workers out of a job. On the couple of occasions when I had trashed Colin’s plan on legal grounds he had become so angry that I know he was within a whisker of firing me. I know because I recognised from childhood the black look that came into his eyes when he didn’t get his way.

And stayed there until he did.

And I think that’s what Brad had discovered. That you can — by the simple act of abandoning a few inhibitions — get your own way through the use of violence, threats and brute force. The way he got the Winston brothers from the neighbouring cabin to join him in setting fire to Ferguson’s old garage. Because if they hadn’t done so — as the brothers explained later to the police — Brad had threatened to set fire to the Winston cabin while the family was sleeping.

Brad’s hapless attempt to court my daughter Amy further demonstrated that he was a boy given to strong feelings. He had been in love with her since they were small children, but instead of growing out of it as is usually the case with childhood infatuations his feelings just seemed to get stronger each summer when they met. Of course it might have been because Amy grew more lovely with each year that passed, but just as likely it was because his feelings weren’t reciprocated and her persistent rejection only spurred him on. He seemed to feel as though he had a right to her.

One night I was awoken by the sound of Brad’s voice in the corridor outside Amy’s room. He was trying to get her to let him in and she was obviously refusing. I heard him say: ‘This is our cabin, everything in here is mine, so let me in or else we’ll throw you out and your father will lose his job.’

I never told Colin about this — I’ve done and said a few stupid things myself in the grip of a romantic rejection — and I suspected Colin might come down too hard on his son as a way of showing he wouldn’t tolerate that kind of thing. So it wasn’t the threats made to Amy but the burning of the garage that tipped things over for Colin. Brad got off with a conditional sentence and the award of hefty damages to Mr Ferguson, paid for by his father, after which Colin put him under house arrest. Two days later Brad left for town on the motorcycle he had been given as an eighteenth birthday present. He took a large amount of cash from his father’s safe, and the keys to an apartment in Downtown.