Jo Nesbo - The Son

It was the Son. He was standing by the window with his eyes closed and his hand resting on his side, on a bandage. He was naked and smiling. He looked happy. Like Markus on Christmas Eve, just before he unwrapped his presents. No, change that, the next day, when he woke up and remembered the presents he had been given the night before.

The Son took a towel from the cupboard, opened the door and was about to close it when he stopped. He looked to the side, down at the table. Grabbed something lying there. Markus zoomed in.

It was a book. Bound in black leather. The Son opened the book and began reading it. Then he dropped the towel. Sat down on the bed and carried on reading. He sat like this for several minutes. Markus saw his facial expression change and his body stiffen, freeze in a kind of crippled position.

Then he suddenly got up and hurled the book at the wall.

He grabbed the table lamp and subjected it to the same treatment.

He clutched his side, howled and slumped on the bed. Bowed his head, forcing it down with his hands which he had folded behind his neck. He sat with his body shaking as if he was having a fit.

Markus could see that something terrible had happened, but he didn’t know what. He wanted to run over there, say or do something to comfort him. He knew how. He would often cheer his mother up. Talk to her, remind her of the nice things they had done together, did she remember them? There weren’t many to choose between, only the same three or four events, so she always did. She would smile a kind of wistful smile and ruffle his hair. And then things would get better. But he hadn’t done any nice things with the Son. And perhaps the Son preferred to be alone, something Markus could relate to, he was like that himself. When his mother wanted to comfort him because someone had upset him, he would just get irritated; it was as if her kindness weakened him, validated the bullies who called him a sissy.

But the Son was no crybaby.

Or was he?

He had just got up and turned to the window; he was crying. His eyes were red and his cheeks streaked with tears.

What if Markus had been wrong, what if the Son was just like him? Weak, cowardly, someone who fled, ran away to hide, scared of getting a beating? No, no, he wasn’t like that, not the Son! He was big and strong and brave and he helped those who weren’t or who had yet to become strong.

The Son picked up the book, sat down and started writing.

After a while he tore a page out of the book, scrunched it up and threw it in the waste-paper basket by the door. Started on another page. Not for so long this time. He pulled out the page and read what he had written. And then he closed his eyes and pressed the paper to his lips.

Martha put down the carrier bags of groceries on the kitchen worktop. Wiped the sweat from her brow. The shop had been further away than she had expected and she had practically run all the way back. She rinsed the box with strawberries under the tap, picked out the two biggest, juiciest berries and took the bouquet of buttercups she had picked along the roadside with her. Again she felt the sweet sting at the memory of his burning skin under the duvet. The heroin addict who got high from her touch. Because he was her drug now. Hooked after the first fix. She was lost and she loved it!

She sensed it on the stairs as soon as she saw the open bedroom door. Something was wrong. It was far too quiet.

The bed was empty. The lamp lay broken on the floor. His clothes were gone. Under the shards from the lamp she saw the black book she had found under the bed slats.

She called out his name even though she knew there would be no reply. The gate had been open when she came back and she was quite sure she’d closed it when she left. They had come for him, like he’d said. He had clearly struggled, but to no avail. She had left him asleep, she had failed to take care of him, she hadn’t. .

She turned round and spotted the note on the pillow. The paper was yellow and looked like it had been torn from the notebook. It was written with an old pen lying next to the pillow. Her initial reaction was that it must have been his father’s pen. And before she had even read the words, she thought that history was repeating itself. Then she read the note, dropped the flowers and clasped her hand to her mouth, an automatic gesture to hide the ugly way the mouth contorted when the tears welled up.

Dear Martha

Forgive me, but I’m going to disappear now. I love you forever.

Sonny

Markus was sitting on the bed in the yellow house.

After the woman had rushed off, only twenty minutes after the Son had left in a hurry, Markus had waited ten minutes before he realised that they weren’t coming back.

Then he had crossed the road. The key to the house had been put back in its regular place.

The bed had been made and the shards from the lamp placed in the waste-paper basket. He found the scrunched-up piece of paper under the shards.

The words were written in a neat, almost feminine hand.

Dear Martha

My father once told me how he watched a man drown. He had been on patrol, it was the middle of the night and a boy had rung from the harbour at Kongen. The boy’s father had fallen into the sea while they were mooring their boat. He couldn’t swim and was clinging to the gunwale, but the son wasn’t able to pull his father back on board. By the time the patrol car arrived, the boy’s father had given up, let go and gone under. Several minutes had already passed and my father called for divers as the boy sobbed desperately. And while they waited, the man suddenly surfaced, his pale face gasping for air. The son let out a cry of joy. Then the father went under again. My father jumped into the water to rescue him, but it was too dark. When my father resurfaced, he looked straight into the still beaming face of the boy who thought that now everything was OK, his father was alive and the police were here. And my father told me how he had seen the heart torn out of the boy’s chest when he realised that God had merely been toying with him by letting him think he was going to give back the father he had taken from him. My father said that if there was a God, then he was a cruel God. Now I think I understand what he meant, because I have finally found my father’s diary. Perhaps he wanted us to know. Or maybe he was just cruel. Otherwise why keep a diary, but hide it in such an obvious place as under the mattress?

You have your whole life ahead of you, Martha. I think you can do something good with it. I can’t do the same. Forgive me, but I’m going to disappear now.

I love you forever.

Sonny

Markus looked at the table. There was the book which the Son had been reading.

Black leather cover, yellowing pages. He flicked through it.

He realised immediately that it was a diary even though there weren’t entries written for each day. In some places there were months between the entries. Sometimes there would just be a date and a couple of sentences. For example, it said that ‘the troika’ would eventually break up, that something had come between them. A week later that Helene was pregnant and that they had bought their own house. But how hard it was to survive on just a policeman’s salary, what a shame it was that both his and Helene’s parents came from such reduced circumstances that they couldn’t help them. Later on how happy he was that Sonny had started wrestling. Then a page about how the bank had raised interest rates, how they quite simply couldn’t pay the mortgage, how he had to do something before the house was repossessed. Think of something. That he had promised Helene it would be OK. Fortunately, the boy didn’t seem to have noticed that anything was troubling his parents.