Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘Probably wasn’t back then, I guess,’ I said.

‘And what about now? How come you don’t have a girlfriend?’

‘I did have,’ I said as I finished washing off the food trays. Business had been good, but now the weekend visitors were all up at their cabins and we wouldn’t be seeing them again until they headed home. ‘Got married when we were nineteen. But she drowned on our honeymoon.’

‘Eh?’ exclaimed Julie, even though she knew I was making it up.

‘Tumbled overboard from my sailing boat in the Pacific. Bit too much champagne probably. Gurgled that she loved me and then down she went.’

‘Didn’t you dive in after her?’

‘A sailing boat like that moves faster than you can swim. We would both have drowned.’

‘But all the same. You did love her.’

‘Yes, so I threw her a lifebuoy.’

‘Oh well, that’s all right then.’ Julie sat leaning forward, the palms of her hands on the counter. ‘But could you still go on living, after you lost her?’

‘It’s amazing what we can manage without, Julie. Just wait and see.’

‘No,’ she said tonelessly. ‘I’m not going to wait and see. I’m going to get everything I want.’

‘OK. And what do you want?’

The question came automatically. Lazy and unfocused, I had just batted the ball back across the net. I could have bitten off my tongue when I saw that veiled gaze fasten on mine, and that flushed grin.

‘Then I guess you watch a lot of porn. Since your dream girl drowned. Seeing she was nineteen, do you search for Nineteen? With big boobs?’

I took too long to come back at her, and realised of course that she took this to mean she’d hit the nail on the head. It left me fumbling even more for my words. The conversation had already left the rails. She was seventeen, I was the boss she had persuaded herself she wanted, and now here she was a little tipsy, a bit too bold, playing a game she thought she could control because it worked with the boys sitting out there in their cars waiting for her. I could have said all this to her and salvaged my own pride, but that would have been kicking a champagne-tipsy teenager off my sailing boat. So instead I looked for the lifebuoy, hers and mine.

The lifebuoy arrived in the form of the door opening. Julie at once slid down from the counter.

A man stood in the doorway. I couldn’t immediately place him, but no car had pulled in to the forecourt so he had to be a local. His back was stooped, and the hollow cheeks gave his face the shape of an hourglass. A few wisps of hair across his otherwise bald head.

He stopped there in the doorway. Stared at me, looked as though most of all he wanted to turn and leave. Maybe it was somebody I’d once beaten up on the grass outside Årtun, somebody I’d made my mark on, somebody who hadn’t forgotten. He crossed hesitantly to the rack of CDs. Flipped through them, now and then glancing over at us.

‘Who’s that?’ I whispered.

‘Natalie Moe’s dad,’ whispered Julie.

The roofer. Of course. He’d changed. Looked a bit reduced, as people say. Maybe he was sick. He reminded me of my uncle Bernard, near the end.

Moe approached us and put a CD on the counter. Roger Whittaker’s Greatest Hits . Bargain-basement price. He looked a little sheepish, as though he wasn’t proud of his own taste.

‘Thirty kroner,’ I said. ‘Card or…’

‘Cash,’ Moe said. ‘Isn’t Egil working today?’

‘Not well,’ I said. ‘Anything else I can get you?’

Moe hesitated. ‘No,’ he said, took his change, picked up the CD and left.

‘Jesus,’ said Julie and pulled herself up onto the counter again.

‘Jesus what?’

‘Didn’t you see? He pretended not to know me.’

‘All I noticed was that he seemed stressed, and it sounded like he wished it had been Egil here. Whatever it was he wanted to buy from him.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘No one leaves their house and comes here on a Friday night because all of a sudden the most important thing in the world is to hear Roger Whittaker. It wasn’t the choice of music he was embarrassed about, he just chose the cheapest one.’

‘Then he probably wanted condoms and chickened out.’ She laughed. She made it sound as though she’d been there herself. ‘He’s probably having a fling with someone. It’s in the family.’

‘Give over,’ I said.

‘Or else some antidepressants because he’s gone bankrupt. Didn’t you see him staring at the pills on the shelf behind you?’

‘You mean he thinks we might have something stronger than headache pills? I didn’t know he’d gone bankrupt.’

‘Jesus, Roy, I mean, you don’t talk to people, so of course they don’t tell you anything, either.’

‘Maybe so. Aren’t you off out to celebrate your youth this evening?’

‘Youth!’ she snorted, and went on sitting. Looked like she was racking her brain for an excuse to stay. A gum bubble oozed out in front of her face. Burst like a starting pistol. ‘Simon says the hotel looks like a factory. He says no one will invest in it.’

Simon Nergard was Julie’s uncle. I knew for sure I’d left my mark on him. He was a rough type, in the year above me, and he’d taken boxing lessons, even fought a couple of bouts in town. Carl danced with a girl Simon fancied, and that was enough. A crowd had gathered round where Simon was holding Carl by the scruff of his neck when I arrived and asked what the trouble was. I’d wrapped a scarf around my fist and swung at him as he opened his mouth to answer. Felt the soft pressure of teeth giving way. Simon staggered, spat blood and stared at me, amazed rather than afraid. Guys that train for martial arts think there are rules, so that’s why they lose. But give Simon his due, he didn’t give up. He started skipping about in front of me, fists raised in a guard in front of his chin. I kicked him in the knee, and he stopped the skipping. I kicked him in the thigh and saw his eyes widen with shock at the effect. He’d probably never considered what happens when muscles as big as that start to bleed internally. He couldn’t move any more, just stood there and waited to be slaughtered, like a platoon surrounded but determined to fight to the last man. But I didn’t even leave him the dubious honour of a getting a real thrashing. Instead I turned my back, looked at my watch and – as though I had an appointment and plenty of time left to keep it – sauntered off. The crowd urged Simon to get after me, they didn’t know what I knew, that Simon wasn’t capable of taking a single step. So instead they began shouting at him, mocking and ridiculing him, and that, and not those two, overly white teeth the dentist put in, that was the mark I left on Simon that night.

‘So your uncle thinks he’s seen the drawings?’

‘He knows someone who works at the bank in town who’s seen them. He says it looks like a cellulose factory.’

‘Cellulose,’ I said. ‘Above the treeline. That’s interesting.’

‘Eh?’

Outside an engine roared and another one responded.

‘The testosterone boys are calling you,’ I said. ‘Watch the carbon emissions drop once you go out and join them.’

Julie groaned. ‘They’re so childish, Roy.’

‘Then go home instead and listen to this,’ I said and handed her one of the five copies of J. J. Cale’s Naturally which I’d finally had to remove from the CD rack. I’d ordered them specially, convinced that people in the village were bound to go for Cale’s subdued blues and minimalist guitar solos. But Julie was right, I didn’t talk to people, didn’t know them. She took the CD, slipped sulkily down off the counter and walked towards the door, gave me the finger at the same time as she wiggled her arse in outrageous invitation, with all the cold and calculating innocence only a seventeen-year-old can muster.