Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

A few weeks later Mari suddenly moved from Os to the city. Although she claimed that had been the plan all along, to go there to study.

And a few weeks after that – just as unexpectedly – Carl revealed that he had been granted a scholarship to study finance and business administration in Minnesota, USA.

‘Well, it’s obvious, you can’t turn that down,’ I said and swallowed.

‘I guess maybe I can’t,’ he said, as though doubtful. But of course, he couldn’t fool me, I realised he had made up his mind a long time ago.

The next few days were busy. I had plenty to keep me going at the service station, and he was fully preoccupied getting ready to leave, so we didn’t have much time to talk it over. I took him to the airport, a drive of several hours, but strangely enough we didn’t talk much about it then either. It poured with rain and the sound of the windscreen wipers camouflaged the silence.

When we stopped outside the Departures entrance and I turned off the engine I had to cough to get my voice going again. ‘Are you coming back?’

‘What? Of course,’ he lied with a warm, beaming smile and put his arms around me.

The rain kept on all the way back to Os.

It was dark by the time I parked in the yard and went back to the ghosts inside the house.

CARL WAS HOME AGAIN. IT was Friday evening and I was alone at the service station. Alone with my thoughts, as people say.

When Carl left for the USA I had thought that of course it was to make use of his good exam results from school and his talents, and to get out of this dump, broaden his horizons. I had also thought that it was as much about getting away from the memories, the shadows that lay so heavy and oppressive over Opgard. Only now, now that he was back, did it occur to me that it might have had something to do with Mari Aas.

She’d dumped Carl because he’d had it away with her best friend, but wasn’t there just the faintest possibility that it had given her the chance to get out too? She was aiming higher, after all, than a country boy, an Opgard. Her choice of husband seemed to confirm that. Mari and Dan Krane had met each other at university in Oslo. Both were active members of the Labour Party, and he came from an extremely comfortable home in the city’s west end. Dan got the job as editor of the Os Daily . He and Mari had two kids now and extended their place until it was bigger than the main house where Mari’s parents lived. She’d silenced that gleefully malicious gossip about her apparently not being good enough for Carl Opgard. She’d had her revenge, and more besides.

Whereas Carl’s problem remained: how to regain his lost sense of honour and his local prestige? Was that what the homecoming was all about? To show off his trophy wife, his Cadillac, to build a hotel bigger than anyone around here had ever seen?

Because it really was an insane and almost desperate project. In the first place because of his insistence that the hotel be built above the treeline, which meant several kilometres of road had to be built. Solely so that it wouldn’t be a lie when they advertised it as a ‘mountaintop hotel’, the way other hotels below the treeline so blithely did. And in the second place: who heads for the mountains to sit in a steam-bath and bathe in piss-warm water? Isn’t that the kind of thing people in the cities and towns down below do?

And in the third place: he would never manage to persuade a handful of farmers to risk their farms and land for a castle in the air – how the hell do you do that in a place where scepticism towards anything new from the outside – unless it’s a Ford car or a Schwarzenegger film – is something you ingest with your mother’s milk, as people say?

And finally there was, of course, the question of his motives. Carl said it was to build a spa and mountaintop hotel resort that would put the village on the map and rescue it from a slow and silent death.

But wouldn’t people here see through that? Realise that what he really wanted was to put himself – Carl Opgard – on a pedestal? Because that’s why people like Carl return home, people who have made it out in the big wide world, while back in their old home town they’re still just the randy bastard who got dumped by the chairman’s daughter and ran off. There’s nothing like being acknowledged in your own home town, the place where you think everyone misunderstood you, and at the same time the place where you are understood in such a consuming and liberating way. ‘I know you,’ as they would say, half threatening, half comforting, meaning that they know who you really are. That you can’t always hide behind lies and appearances.

My gaze traced the main road in towards the square.

Transparency. That’s the curse and the glory of all little villages. Sooner or later, everything will be revealed. Everything. That was a risk Carl was willing to take for the chance of getting his statue in the square, the sort of posterity that is usually reserved for chairmen, preachers and dance-band singers.

My thoughts were interrupted as the door opened and Julie came in.

‘Are you working nights now?’ she asked loudly, rolling her eyes, overdoing the surprise. Chewed hard on her gum, swaying from one foot to the other. She was dressed up a bit, short jacket on top of a tight-fitting T-shirt, arms folded, more make-up than she usually wore. She hadn’t expected me to be there, and it made her self-conscious to realise I was seeing her in this particular role – a babe, out on a Friday night with her boy racer crowd. It was all OK by me, evidently not so OK for her.

‘Egil’s not well,’ I said.

‘Then you should ring one of the others,’ she said. ‘Me for example. You’re not supposed to be the one who—’

‘Short notice,’ I said. ‘It’s OK. What can I get you, Julie?’

‘Nothing,’ she said, adding a full stop by bursting a gum bubble. ‘Just called in to say hi to Egil.’

‘OK, I’ll give him the message, tell him you were here.’

She looked at me, chewed. Her eyes were glazed. She’d regained her composure, superficially at least, and now she was Julie the tough girl again.

‘What did you used to do Friday nights when you were kids, Roy?’ She slurred her words slightly and it occurred to me she’d had a drop out in one of the cars.

‘Dance,’ I said.

She opened her eyes wide. ‘You danced?’

‘That’s one way of describing it.’

Outside a car engine revved. Like the growling of some nocturnal beast of prey. Or a mating call. Julie glanced over her shoulder towards the door with a look of pretended irritation. Then she turned her back to the till, put her hands onto the counter behind her so that the short jacket rode up, took a breath and jumped, sliding her arse up onto the counter.

‘Did you get a lot of girls, Roy?’

‘No,’ I said, and checked the security cameras by the pumps. When I tell people that every weekend at least one motorist a day fills up with petrol and drives off without paying they’re shocked and say those cabin owners are a bunch of thieves. I say on the contrary, it’s because the cabin owners are rich and don’t think about money. That nine times out of ten when we send reminders to the address we get from the number plates they pay up in full and with a note of genuine apology saying that they quite simply forgot. Because they had never, like Dad, Carl and me, stood and watched the counters while filling up a Cadillac, seen those hundreds of kroner flashing by and along with them all the other things they could have bought with the money: CDs, a new pair of trousers, that road trip across the USA their father had always talked about.

‘Why not?’ said Julie. ‘I mean, you’re really hot, you know?’ She giggled.