Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Well, you say you’re Peter’s best friend, so yes,’ she said.

I smiled. ‘Say? You mean a real best friend doesn’t tell his pal’s girlfriend that he’s in love with her?’

‘Peter and I aren’t a couple.’

‘Or his chosen one.’

‘I don’t like to be chosen.’

‘But maybe they’re right this time, those voices whispering in your ear that, after all, you have been lucky, and there’s no need for tears. Peter’s a nice lad. And he’s rich enough to be able to help you and your mother.’

She stopped, turned towards the river and looked across to the other side.

‘It’s not that simple,’ she said.

‘I know it isn’t,’ I said. ‘You’ve got a responsibility to your mother as well as to yourself. It’s a moral dilemma. If you want his help you have to give him hope that there might be something between the two of you. In other words you need to lie.’

She snorted. ‘Why is that lying? I can’t know right now whether or not I can love him.’

‘Oh yes, you know.’

‘Oh?’

‘Because you love me.’

She laughed, shook her head and carried on walking. I quickly caught up with her.

‘You do,’ I said. ‘You just don’t know it yet.’

‘You know what the difference is between you in the West and us out here? We can’t get enough of romantic books and films, but where you come from you think they’re true.’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘But now and then you get a story like that which actually turns out to be true. And this is one of those stories.’

‘How many girls have you used that on, Martin?’

‘A couple. I probably wasn’t lying, but I was mistaken, they weren’t one of those stories. This time I’m not mistaken. We’re not mistaken.’

‘ We ? You know nothing about me, Martin. Do you realise how long we’ve known each other?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I’ve thought about that, but I don’t know. Do you?’

She slackened her pace. Then stopped completely. ‘What do you mean?’

I shrugged. ‘From the first time I saw you, the first time I spoke to you, I’ve had this constant feeling of déjà vu. It’s as though everything that’s happening has happened before.’

‘Oh yeah? So what’s going to happen now?’

‘Now you’re going to ask me about this, and I’m going to reply that my advance knowledge is so short that it’s like when you sing a song you don’t know the words to if you think about it — all you know is that the words will come to you just before you get to them, all you need is the music to lead you along. And even before I said this I knew just before I said it that I would say it.’

‘Air, nothing but hot air, not good enough,’ she said with a wave of her hand. ‘You’re just talking it away. Give me something concrete.’

‘We’ll sleep together tonight.’

‘You wish!’ she exclaimed and took a swipe at me.

‘No, not like that,’ I said. ‘With our clothes on. We won’t even kiss each other.’

‘Exactly. So now you’re giving me an excuse to say yes to sleeping with you? Thanks, but I’ve met boys like you before. You’re so creepy.’

The phone in my pocket vibrated and I knew it was Peter trying once again to get in touch with me. I hadn’t answered because I didn’t know what to tell him, at least not now that I wouldn’t be coming back this evening. Before leaving for San Sebastián I had planned to explain my absence by saying that I had simply got caught up in Pamplona’s noisy moveable feast and hadn’t realised the phone had been ringing.

Miriam folded her arms and shivered. The wind hadn’t dropped and now the cloud cover was so dense it completely blotted out the evening sun.

‘I have to get back to Mamma,’ she said.

‘Are you sure? I was going to offer you dinner as a way of thanking you for the room tonight.’

She gave an exasperated little groan and shook her head.

‘I can’t afford to take you anywhere like the Arzak,’ I said. ‘But if the tapas in that bar is anywhere near as good as the breakfast then you’ll be missing out on something.’

She put her head on one side, pulled the hair back from her gorgeous eyes and looked at me. ‘Missing out?’ There was something about the way she looked at me, as though she was searching for something. Or recognised something.

‘I might be exaggerating,’ I admitted. ‘But it’s probably... a pretty good meal.’

She nodded.

‘Yes?’ I said in disbelieving surprise.

‘I’m very hungry,’ she said. She had already turned and was on her way back.

Over dinner I told her everything I could think of about myself. About my impracticality, my indiscipline, my limited capacity for analytical thinking. About my slightly too vivid imagination and my desire to be creative, at the same time as I doubted that my artistic talents matched my ambitions. About how clumsy I was in matters of the heart. About my fling with Peter’s girlfriend when we were younger. As though it was important for me to put it all out there, the good and the bad, while I had the chance.

‘So then, in a nutshell, you’re stupid and egotistical,’ she said, and took a sip of her red wine. She sat with her long thin legs twined around each other, her back bowed and the narrow shoulders projecting forwards, as though she was mildly disabled. A while ago it had seemed to me she was less beautiful than when I had seen her at the Arzak. Now I thought she was even more beautiful. Maybe it was the softer light. Maybe because she was more relaxed. Or perhaps it was me.

‘Yes, I am stupid and egocentric,’ I confirmed.

‘Are you saying that because you think it makes you more interesting? Because I’m not seeing a bad boy here, Martin.’

‘So then what do you see?’

‘A boy who’s actually quite nice.’

‘How come you make that sound as though it’s you that’s five years older than me and not the other way round?’

‘We’re the same age.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Peter told me you two are the same age.’

‘I see. What else did he say about me?’

‘Not a lot, actually. Your name didn’t come up until I asked if he was really travelling completely alone to San Fermín.’

‘And did he say he was?’

‘No, not in as many words, but it’s as if he wanted to give me that impression. That you didn’t exist. At any rate, he avoided talking about you.’

‘Strange,’ I said, lifting my own glass.

‘Not if he’s made up his mind that he’s going to have me, and the two of you usually end up liking the same women.’

‘And you still think I’m a nice boy?’

‘I think you do things you know are wrong, but at least you have a guilty conscience afterwards.’

‘Yes, well, that’s always something. And what about your bad sides?’

‘I steal,’ she answered without hesitating.

‘You steal?’

‘Yes. It’s a kind of habit. I’m not a kleptomaniac, but I think I need the excitement. That’s probably why I mostly steal things I don’t really need.’

‘Like the hearts of naive boys?’

‘That’s cheap,’ she laughed, and we toasted each other.

It had grown dark and there were ominous rumblings from the clouds as we ate the last pieces of tapas and she talked to me about herself. About the boyfriends she’d had in Moscow, about her plans to move to Singapore, maybe get a job as a journalist on an English-language newspaper. But nothing about why she had swum out into the waves and almost drowned. At one point she picked up her phone; the screen lit up her face in the dark and she frowned.

‘Your mother?’ I asked as she laid it aside without answering.