Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘Maybe,’ I said.

‘It was because it flies higher than all the others,’ said Carl. ‘And on top of that it’s a big-mouthed big head that practises… what d’you call it again?’

‘ Fluktspill ,’ I said.

‘ Fluktspill ,’ Shannon said. ‘That’s a nice word. What does it mean?’

I sighed as though it was a lot of bother for me to explain everything. ‘It’s a sort of winnowing display. Once it’s flown as high as it can it starts to sing, so that everyone can see how high up it is. Then it floats down with wings outstretched, showing off all the tricks and acrobatics it can do.’

‘Carl to a P!’ cried Shannon.

‘To a T,’ said Carl.

‘To a T,’ she repeated.

‘But even though the meadow pipit likes to show off, it’s not an unprincipled con man,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s pretty easy to trick. That’s what makes it a favourite when the cuckoo’s looking for someone else’s nest to lay eggs in.’

‘Poor Carl!’ said Shannon, and I heard a big wet kiss. ‘Roy, what kind of bird would you say I was?’

I thought about it. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Come on,’ said Carl.

‘I don’t know. Hummingbird? I only really know mountain birds.’

‘I don’t want to be a hummingbird!’ Shannon protested. ‘They’re too small and they like sweet stuff. Can’t I be like the one I found. The dotterel?’

I thought of the dotterel’s white face. Dark eyes. The cap that almost looks like a crew cut.

‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’re the dotterel.’

‘And you, Roy, what are you?’

‘Me? I’m not anything.’

‘Everybody’s something. Come on.’

I didn’t respond.

‘Roy’s the storyteller who tells us who we are,’ said Carl. ‘So that makes him everyone and no one. He’s the mountain bird that has no name.’

‘The solitary mountain bird with no name,’ she said. ‘What kind of song does a nameless male like you sing to attract a mate?’

Carl laughed. ‘Sorry, Roy, but this one here won’t stop until you’ve revealed your entire life to her.’

‘Fine,’ I said. ‘A characteristic of the male mountain bird is that he doesn’t sing for the female. He thinks it’s a load of flash nonsense and anyway up here in the mountains there are no trees for him to sit in and sing. So what he does instead is build a nest to impress her.’

‘Hotels?’ she asked. ‘Or service stations?’

‘Looks like hotels work best,’ I said.

They both laughed.

‘Now let’s give the mountain thrush up there a bit of rest,’ said Carl.

They climbed out of the bunk.

‘Goodnight,’ said Carl and stroked my head.

The door closed behind them and I lay there listening.

He remembered. That once, a long time ago, I’d told him I was the mountain thrush, the ring ouzel. A shy and cautious bird that hides away among the rocks. He’d said there was no need for me to do that, there was nothing out there to be afraid of. And I had answered that I knew that, but that I was still afraid anyway.

I slept. Dreamed the same dream, as though it had just been paused and was waiting for me. When I woke to the scream of the climber getting hit by the rock I realised it was Shannon screaming. She screamed again. And again. Carl was fucking her well. Good for them. But of course, hard to sleep through a racket like that. I listened for a bit, thought she’d reached her climax, but it didn’t stop, so I put a pillow over my head. After a while I took it away again. It was quiet in there now. They were probably sleeping, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. Tossed and turned and the bed creaked as I thought about what Erik Nerell had said about the sheriff wanting to send climbers down into Huken to check the Cadillac.

And finally it came.

The raven’s second call.

And I knew that this time it warned of danger. Not some immediate danger, but a fate that was out there, waiting somewhere. That had been waiting a long time now. Patient. Never forgetting. Trouble.

CARL. HE’S THERE IN ALMOST all my childhood memories. Carl in the lower bunk. Carl whom I crept in beside in January, when the thermometer dropped to minus fifteen, or when the other situation demanded it in some way. Carl, my kid brother, with whom I quarrelled until he sobbed with anger and lashed out at me, and with the same result every time: I got him down easily, sat astride him so his arms were pinioned, pinched his nose. When he stopped struggling and just sobbed I could feel how his weakness and his giving up irritated me. Until at last he gave me that helpless kid brother look, and I got a lump in my throat, let him up and put an arm around him and promised him something or other. But the lump in the throat and the guilty conscience were still there long after Carl had dried his tears. Once Dad had seen us fighting. He hadn’t said a word, just let us get on with it, the way those of us who live up on the mountain let nature take its brutal course without interfering, unless our own goats were involved. It ended with me and Carl sitting on the sofa, me with my arm round him, both of us tearful. He just shook his head in exasperation and left the room.

And I remember when I was twelve years old and Carl eleven, when my uncle Bernard turned fifty. He did something that, from Mum and Dad’s reaction, we realised was something really big time; he invited everyone to the city – the big city – to celebrate at the Grand Hotel. Mum said it had a swimming pool, and Carl and I were just crazy with excitement. And when we got there, it turned out there was no swimming pool, never had been, and I was pretty pissed off. But it didn’t seem to bother Carl that much, and when one of the people working there offered to show the eleven-year-old around the hotel I saw the bulge in Carl’s jacket pocket where he’d stuffed his swimming trunks. When he got back he went on about all the incredible things he’d seen, said the hotel was a bloody palace, and that one day he was going to build himself a fucking palace just like it. He said. Minus the swearing. And in the years that followed he always swore he’d had a swim in the pool at the Grand Hotel that evening.

I think that was something Carl and Mum had in common, that the dream could top the reality, the packaging beat the contents. If things weren’t exactly like you wanted them to be, then you just reimagined them until they were, and remained more or less blind to things that shouldn’t have been there. For example, Mum always used the English word ‘hall’ to refer to the passageway in our house that stank of dung and stables. The haaall – that was how she said it. She’d worked as a maid and housekeeper for a shipping family from when she was a teenager and liked things to sound English and upper class.

Dad was the opposite. He called a stable shovel a shite shovel, and he wanted everything around him to be, sound and feel American. And not big-city American but Midwest American, like Minnesota, where he had lived from the age of four until he was twelve, with the father whom we had never met. America was and remained the promised land for Dad, along with Cadillacs, the Methodist Church and the pursuit of happiness , always expressed in English. Originally he had wanted to name me Calvin, after the American president Calvin Coolidge. A Republican, naturally. Unlike his more charismatic predecessor Warren Harding – who had left in his wake a trail of scandals that all began with a c : chicks, cards, corruption and cocaine – Calvin was a hard-working man, serious, slow, taciturn and gruff, a man who, according to my father, hadn’t rushed things but climbed the career ladder one rung at a time. But Mum had protested, so they compromised on Roy, with Calvin as a middle name.