Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

My eighteenth birthday was just around the corner, but according to the stupid rules Carl and I still needed a guardian. The county governor appointed my uncle Bernard as our guardian. Two women from the social services in Notodden came and checked Uncle Bernard’s set-up and evidently found everything adequate. Bernard showed them the bedroom we had been given and promised to have regular discussions with the school about how Carl was doing.

Once the social services women had gone I asked Uncle Bernard if it was OK if Carl and I spent a couple of nights up at Opgard, there was so much damn noise from the main road outside the bedroom window down here in the village.

Bernard said it was OK and gave us a big pot of lapskaus to take with us.

And after that we never moved back down again, although officially our address was with Uncle Bernard. That didn’t mean he didn’t look out for us, and the money he got from the state as guardian he gave straight to us.

A couple of years later, quite a while after what I began to think of as the Fritz night, Uncle Bernard was admitted to hospital again. It turned out the cancer had spread. I sat sobbing beside his bed as he told me.

‘You know there’s not long to go when the vultures move into your house without asking,’ he said.

Meaning his daughter and her husband.

Uncle Bernard always said she’d never done him any harm, he just didn’t like her much, but I knew who he was thinking of when he explained to me what a wrecker was. People who lit fake flares for ships in the night, and plundered them once they’d run aground.

She visited him at the hospital twice. Once to find out how long he had left, and the second time to pick up the key to the house.

Uncle Bernard lay a hand on my shoulder and told one of those old soppy Volkswagen jokes, probably trying to make me laugh.

‘You’re going to die!’ I shouted out. I was pretty angry.

‘You too,’ he said. ‘And this is the right order for dying in. Right?’

‘But how can you lie here and tell jokes?’

‘Well,’ he said, ‘when you’re up to your neck in shit, the thing to remember is to keep your head up.’

And then I just couldn’t help laughing anyway.

‘I’ve got a last request,’ he said.

‘A smoke?’

‘That too. The other is that you take the theory exam as a working apprentice this autumn.’

‘Already? Don’t I need five years’ practical?’

‘You’ve got five years’ practical. With all the overtime you’ve put in.’

‘But that doesn’t count—’

‘It counts for me . I would never let an unqualified mechanic take the theory exam, you know that. But you’re the best mechanic I’ve got. So for that reason there’s documentation in that envelope on the table there that says you’ve worked for me for five years. Never mind the dates on it. Is that clear?’

‘Clear as muck,’ I said.

It was a joke we shared. A mechanic who worked for Uncle Bernard didn’t understand the expression but used it all the time, and Bernard never corrected him. That was the last time I heard Uncle Bernard laugh.

By the time I had passed the theory exam, and the practical exam a few months later, Uncle Bernard was already in a coma. And after his daughter told the doctors to turn off the life-support machine that was keeping him alive, in effect it was me, a lad of twenty-one, who ran the car repair shop. All the same it came as a shock… no, that’s too strong, it came as a surprise when his will was read out and it turned out Uncle Bernard had left the business to me.

His daughter protested, naturally, claiming that during the hours when I’d been sitting with her poor father I’d been manipulating him. I said I couldn’t be bothered arguing, that Uncle Bernard hadn’t given me the repair shop to make me rich but so that it would stay in the family. So if she wanted, I’d buy the place from her at her asking price, that way at least his wishes would be respected. So she named her price. I told her that we Opgard people never haggled, but that the price was more than I could afford, and that it was way out of proportion to the income from the repair shop.

She put the business on the open market, got no buyers though she lowered the price again and again, and in the end came back to me. I paid what I’d offered in the beginning, she signed the contract and marched furiously out of the workshop as though she was the one who had been cheated.

I ran the business as best I could. Which isn’t saying much, since I didn’t have the experience or the market trend with me. But didn’t do too badly either, since the other repair shops in the area began closing down and the work came to me. Enough of it for me to keep Markus on part-time. But when I sat down in the evenings and went through the accounts with Carl – who was doing a business course and knew the difference between debit and credit – it was obvious that the two petrol pumps out front of the greasing station were bringing in more than the repair shop.

‘The Public Roads Administration people were here checking,’ I said. ‘If I’m to keep my licence we need to upgrade the equipment.’

‘How much?’ asked Carl.

‘Two hundred thousand. Maybe more.’

‘You’re not going to get that here.’

‘I know that. So what do we do?’

I said ‘we’ because the workshop was keeping us both. And asked Carl, even though I knew the answer, because I preferred it to be him who said it out loud.

‘Sell the repair shop and keep the pumps,’ said Carl.

I rubbed the back of my neck where Grete Smitt had used the shaver and felt the prickling of the stubble on my fingertips. A crew cut , she called it. Not the fashion, but a classic, meaning that when I looked at photos ten years from now I wouldn’t squirm with embarrassment. Afterwards people said that I looked more like my father than ever, the very image of him, and I hated it, because I knew they were right.

‘I know you prefer fixing cars to filling them,’ said Carl after a long silence, during which I neither nodded nor spat.

‘That’s OK. There’s less and less fixing to do anyway,’ I said. ‘They don’t make cars like they used to anyway, and most of the jobs we get an idiot could do. You don’t need a feeling for the job nowadays.’ I was twenty-one and sounded like a sixty-year-old.

The following day Willum Willumsen came up and looked over the repair shop. Willumsen was a naturally fat man. In the first place, the proportions required it, so much for the stomach, so much for the thighs and chin, for the whole thing to balance out and make the complete man. In the second, he walked, talked and gesticulated like a fat man, though I’m not sure exactly how to explain that. But OK, let me try: Willumsen waddled around with his feet splayed out, like a duck. He spoke in a loud and uninhibited voice, and illustrated what he was saying with expansive gestures and grimaces. In sum: Willumsen took up a lot of room. And in the third place: he smoked cigars. Unless your name is Clint Eastwood, you can’t be fat and hope to be taken seriously as a cigar smoker. Even Winston Churchill and Orson Welles would have had a hard time doing that. Willumsen sold used cars and stripped those he couldn’t fool anyone into buying. Now and then I bought parts from him. He sold other second-hand stuff as well, and rumour had it that if you were trying to get rid of stolen goods then Willumsen might be the man to approach. Same thing if you needed a quick loan but didn’t enjoy the confidence of your bank. But God help you if you didn’t make the payments on time. Then he had a Danish enforcer come up from Jutland with a pair of pliers and other tools of the trade that would soon persuade you to pay what you owed even if it meant robbing your own mother. As it happens no one had ever actually seen this enforcer, but the rumour had really taken off in our imaginations as young kids when we one day saw a white Jaguar E-Type with Danish plates parked outside Willumsen’s Used Car and Breaker’s Yard. The Danish enforcer’s white car. That was all we needed.