Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

He didn’t respond, just stood staring at me, a cold, dead look in his eyes.

‘This is another way; I’ll kill you if Natalie doesn’t move to Notodden. She’ll spend her weekends there and you will not visit her. Her mother, yes, but not you. Not one single visit. When Natalie is at home for Christmas you will invite your own parents or your in-laws to celebrate and stay with you.’ I smoothed my hand over a crease in the gingham check cloth on the table. ‘Questions?’

A fly buzzed and buzzed against the windowpane.

‘How would you propose killing me?’

‘By smiting you, I was thinking. That’s probably appropriately…’ I smacked my lips. Mind games . ‘…appropriately biblical?’

‘Well, you certainly had a reputation for hitting people.’

‘Are we agreed, Moe?’

‘You see that Bible verse up there, Opgard?’ He pointed to one of the embroideries above us and I spelled my way through its convoluted lettering. The lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.

I heard a soft thump and howled as the pain ran up my arm from my right hand. Moe was holding the Roofer of the Year hammer aloft ready to bring it down again and I just about managed to withdraw my left hand before the hammer struck the table. My right hand was so painful that I felt dizzy as I rose, but I used my speed to throw a left uppercut. I struck his chin, but with the table between us the angle was too great for me to get enough power in the blow. He swung the hammer at my head and I ducked and stepped away. He came rushing towards me, the table legs scraped and chairs went flying. I feinted, he fell for it and my left fist met his nose. He howled, swung the hammer again. He might have been Roofer of the Year back in 2017, but he messed up this time. I moved in close to his body while he was still off balance and used my left to deliver three quick punches to his right kidney. I heard him gasp with pain and when I followed up by lifting my foot and bringing it down hard on his knee I felt something snap and give and I knew that he was finished. He collapsed to the floor, then whipped round on the grey linoleum and fastened his arms around my legs. I tried to stay upright by holding on to the cooker with my right hand, but realised Moe’s hammer must have damaged something there, I couldn’t get a purchase. I fell onto my back and moments later Moe was on top of me, his knees holding my arms and the handle of the hammer pressed across my larynx. In vain I gasped for air, could feel myself blacking out. His head was right next to mine and he hissed into my ear:

‘Who do you think you are, coming into my house, threatening me and mine? I’ll tell you who you are, you filthy mountaintop heathen.’

He gave a low laugh and leaned forward so that the weight of his body pressed the last of the air out of my lungs and I felt the onset of a delicious dizziness, like the moment before you fall asleep in the back seat, entangled in the soft, sleeping body of your little brother, you see stars in the sky through the rear window and your parents are talking and laughing in low voices in front of you. And you let go, let yourself tumble backwards into yourself. I could feel coffee and cigarette breath on my face, and spittle.

‘You’re a bow-legged, dyslexic, goat-fucking queer,’ Moe hissed.

Like that, I thought. That’s the way he talks to her.

I tensed my stomach muscles, made a bridge of my back, tensed again and then swung. Hit something, usually it would be the nose, but whatever it was, it was enough to relieve the pressure on my larynx for a moment and I was able to drag enough air into my lungs to fill the rest of my musculature with oxygen. I jerked my left hand free of his knee and hit him hard in the ear. He lost his balance, I tipped him off me and hit out again with my left. And again. And again.

By the time I was done a little stream of blood was running from Moe’s nose as he crouched there in a foetal position on the linoleum. The blood stopped as it reached the seat of one of the upended chairs.

I leaned over him, and I don’t know whether he heard me, but anyway I whispered it into his bloodied ear:

‘I am not fucking bow-legged.’

‘The bad news is that the inner joint is probably shattered,’ said Stanley Spind from behind his desk. ‘The good news is that your blood alcohol test from the other day gave a reading of zero.’

‘Shattered?’ I said and looked down at my middle finger. It was sticking out at a strange angle and had swollen to twice its normal size. The skin was split, and where it wasn’t it had assumed a darkly livid colour that made me think of the plague. ‘You sure?’

‘Yes. But I’ll write you a referral so you can have it X-rayed at the hospital in town.’

‘Why should I, if you’re so sure?’

Stanley shrugged. ‘You’ll probably need an operation.’

‘And if I don’t…?’

‘Then I can guarantee you’ll never be able to move that finger again.’

‘And with the operation?’

‘In all probability you’ll never be able to move that finger again.’

I looked at the finger. Not good. But obviously much worse if I’d still been working as a mechanic.

‘Thanks,’ I said and stood up.

‘Wait, we’re not finished,’ said Stanley, moving his roller chair over to a bench with a paper sheet covering it. ‘Sit here. That finger is out of position, we need to repone it.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘Straighten it.’

‘Sounds painful.’

‘You’ll have a local anaesthetic.’

‘Still sounds painful.’

Stanley gave a crooked smile.

‘On a scale of one to ten?’ I asked.

‘A stiff eight,’ said Stanley.

I smiled back at him.

After he’d given me the injection he told me it would take a few minutes for the injection to take effect. We sat in silence, something which he seemed more comfortable with than me. The silence went on building until it became deafening, and finally I pointed to the headphones on his desk and asked what he liked to listen to.

‘Audio books,’ he said. ‘Anything by Chuck Palahniuk. Have you seen Fight Club ?’

‘No. What’s so good about him?’

‘I didn’t say he was that good.’ Stanley smiled. ‘But he thinks like me. And manages to express it. Are you ready?’

‘Palahniuk,’ I repeated and held out my hand. His gaze met mine.

‘Just for the record, I don’t buy that explanation about slipping on the fresh snow and trying to break your fall,’ said Stanley.

‘OK,’ I said.

I could feel him place a warm hand around my finger. And there was me hoping it would be completely anaesthetised.

‘And speaking of Fight Club ,’ he said as he started pulling, ‘it looks to me as though you’ve come straight from a club meeting.’

A stiff eight was no exaggeration.

On my way out of the surgery I passed Mari Aas in the waiting room.

‘Hi, Roy,’ she said. She was smiling that superior smile of hers, but I could see she was blushing. This business of using a person’s name when you say hello was something she and Carl had started doing when they were going out together. Carl had read about a research project which concluded that people’s positive response increased by forty per cent without their realising it when researchers used their names in addressing them. I hadn’t been part of that research project.

‘Hi,’ I said, keeping my hand behind my back. ‘Early for snow.’ See, that’s the way you say hello to someone else from your village.

Back in the car I wondered how I was going to turn on the ignition without using the bandaged and throbbing finger, and why Mari had blushed back there in the surgery. Was there something wrong with her she was ashamed of? Or was she ashamed of the fact that there was anything at all wrong with her? Because Mari wasn’t a blusher. When she and Carl were together, I was the one who blushed if she appeared unexpectedly in front of me. Although actually, yes, I had seen her blush a couple of times. Once was after Carl had bought a necklace for her birthday. Even though it wasn’t flashy, Mari knew Carl was completely penniless and forced him to admit that he had stolen two hundred kroner from the drawer in Uncle Bernard’s desk. I knew about it of course, and when Uncle Bernard complimented Mari on her nice necklace, I’d seen Mari blush so fiercely I was afraid she might burst a blood vessel. Maybe she was the same as me in that regard, that stuff like that – a minor theft, a trivial rejection – you never get over. They’re like lumps in the body that get encapsulated but can still ache on cold days, and some nights suddenly begin to throb. You can be a hundred years old and still feel the blush of shame washing up into your cheeks.