Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

Then she laid a hand on my chest. And I could feel that this was different from the ostensibly innocent touching that we both knew was a prelude to a new bout of lovemaking. And I had a premonition when she placed her hand there. It was almost as though she were trying to take hold of my heart. Or no, not take hold of, but feel. She was trying to feel the beating of my heart, and how it would react now when she said what she was about to say.

‘I said earlier today that the hotel was just one of the things I’d come here to tell you about.’

She took a breath, and I held mine.

‘I am pregnant,’ she said.

I still held my breath.

‘By you. Notodden.’

Even though these six words held the answers to all the questions I might conceivably have had about what had happened, an avalanche of thoughts raced through my brain, and each one of them had a question mark attached.

‘The endometriosis…’ I started.

‘That makes it difficult to get pregnant, not impossible,’ she said. ‘I took a pregnancy test and at first I didn’t believe it, but now I’ve been to the doctor and had it confirmed.’

I started breathing again. Stared at the ceiling.

Shannon snuggled into me. ‘I thought of getting rid of it, but I can’t, I don’t want to. Maybe this is the one time in my life when all the planets were aligned in just such a way as to enable this body to get pregnant. But I love you, and the child is as much yours as it is mine. What do you want?’

I lay there in silence, breathing into the dark and wondering whether my heart had given her hand the answers it wanted.

‘I want you to have what you want,’ I said.

‘Are you afraid?’ she asked.

‘Yes.’

‘Are you happy?’

Was I happy? ‘Yes.’

I could tell from her breathing that she was on the verge of crying again.

‘But of course, you’re very confused, and wonder what we should do now,’ she said. Her voice was trembling, and she spoke quickly, as though to finish before her crying started. ‘And I don’t know how to answer you, Roy. I have to stay in Os until the hotel is up. You think maybe that this child is more important than a building, but…’

‘Hush,’ I said, and stroked her soft lips with my finger. ‘I know. And you’re wrong. I’m not confused. I know exactly what I have to do.’

In the darkness I saw the whites of her eyes almost turned on and off as she blinked.

DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE, I thought. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU. DO IT NOW.

As I say, I’m not completely sure whether my mind was made up back there in the staff toilet, or later, in bed with Shannon after she had told me she was carrying my child. And maybe it doesn’t matter too much, maybe the question is academic, as people say.

Anyway, I leaned close to Shannon’s ear and in a whisper told her what had to be done.

She nodded.

I lay awake the rest of that night.

The restart was in fourteen days’ time, the invitation advertising Rod at Årtun afterwards was pinned above the kitchen worktop.

I was already beginning to count down the hours.

I suffered.

The huge black beast was moving. Cruising slowly, almost reluctantly, the gravel crunching beneath its tyres. On the fins sticking out at the back two long, narrow red lights lit up. A Cadillac DeVille. The sun had set, but behind the bend a rim of orange framed Ottertind. And a 200-metre-deep crevice in the mountain, as though split by a blow from an axe.

‘You and me, Roy, we’re all we’ve got.’ That was what Carl used to say. ‘All those others we think we love, the ones we think love us, they’re mirages in a desert. But you and me, we’re one. We’re brothers. Two brothers in a desert. If one checks out, the other one checks out too.’

Yes. And death does not part us. It brings us together.

The beast was rolling faster now. On its way towards that hell for which we are all bound, all those of us with the heart for murder.

RESUMPTION OF WORK ON THE project wasn’t due to kick off until seven o’clock in the evening.

Nevertheless I left Kristiansand at the crack of dawn, and morning sunlight glinted on the county signpost as I drove into Os.

Apart from the dirty grey remnants lining the road after the snowploughs had done their work, the snow was gone. The ice on Lake Budal looked rotten, like sorbet. Here and there I could see surface water.

I’d called Carl a couple of days earlier and told him I was coming, but that I would be busy all day until the opening because the station at Os had been asked to show the books for the preceding five years. Spot checks, routine stuff, I had lied, I was just going to help them go through the figures from my time as boss. I didn’t know how long it would take, a few hours or a couple of days, but if necessary I would sleep down at the workshop. Carl replied that was fine, that anyway he and Shannon would be busy getting things ready for the opening ceremony and the party at Årtun afterwards.

‘But there is something I wanted to talk to you about,’ he said. ‘I can meet you down there at the station if that’s easier.’

‘I’ll let you know if there’s a window and we can have a beer at Fritt Fall,’ I said.

‘Coffee,’ he said. ‘I’ve dropped alcohol completely. My New Year’s resolution was to be boring, and according to Shannon it’s looking good so far.’

He sounded in good spirits. Laughing and joking. A man with the worst behind him.

Unlike me.

I parked the car in front of the workshop and looked up towards Opgard. In the slanting morning sunlight it looked as though the mountain was painted in gold. The open slopes were bare, but snow still lay in the shadows.

On my way into the station I noticed rubbish in the pump areas. And sure enough, Egil was behind the till inside. He was dealing with a customer, and it took me a few seconds to recognise that stooping back. Moe. The roofer. I remained standing in the doorway. Egil hadn’t noticed me, and now he reached up to the shelf behind him. The shelf where the EllaOne morning-after pills were. I held my breath.

‘Was that all?’ asked Egil, placing a packet in front of Moe.

‘Yes thanks.’ Moe paid, turned and came walking towards me.

I stared at the packet in his hand.

Paracetamol.

‘Roy Opgard,’ he said. Stopped in front of me with a broad smile. ‘God bless you.’

I didn’t know what to say. I kept an eye on his hands as he put the packet of headache pills into his coat pocket, but I can read the body language of people whose intention is to harm you, and Moe’s wasn’t talking that language now. My first reaction as he took my hand was to pull away; maybe his relaxed manner and the unhealthy and yet mild light shining in his eyes persuaded me not to. In an almost careful way he squeezed my hand between his own.

‘Thanks to you, Roy Opgard, I am back in the flock.’

‘Oh?’ was all I could say.

‘I was a prisoner of the devil, but you freed me. Me and my family. You thrashed the devil out of me, Roy Opgard.’

I turned and followed him with my eyes. Uncle Bernard said that now and then, when you couldn’t find the solution to a mechanical problem, the best thing to do was take a hammer and hit as hard as you could and the problem would be solved. Now and then. Maybe that was what had happened.

Moe got into his Nissan Datsun pickup and drove off.

‘Boss,’ said Egil behind me, ‘are you back?’

‘As you can see,’ I said, and turned towards him. ‘How are the sausages selling?’

It took him a moment to suspect that maybe I was only joking, and he laughed hesitantly.

At the workshop I opened the bag I had brought from Kristiansand. It contained certain car parts obtained during more than a week of searching through breakers’ yards and vehicle cemeteries. Most of these lay in a sparsely populated area west of the city where for a hundred years they had been worshipping everything American – and cars in particular – as intensely as they worshipped Jesus in their meeting houses.