Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

Julie said she felt sorry for me, that Dr Spind should have given me some stronger painkiller, and that business about Alex was just something she’d made up, she wasn’t really meeting anyone and certainly not going to let anyone kiss her. I only half listened. My hand was throbbing and I should have gone home, but I knew that all I could expect there was more pain.

Julie leaned into me as she studied my bandaged finger with a concerned expression on her face. I could feel her soft chest against my upper arm and sweet, bubblegum breath on my face. Her mouth was so close to my ear that her chewing sounds were like a cow grazing in a bog.

‘You didn’t start to feel just a little jealous?’ she whispered with all the sly innocence of which a seventeen-year-old is capable.

‘Start to?’ I said. ‘Listen, I’ve been jealous since I was five years old.’

She laughed as though I was joking, and I forced a smile to confirm that I was.

MAYBE I’D BEEN JEALOUS OF Carl since the day of his birth. Maybe even before that, maybe when I saw my mother tenderly stroking her swollen stomach and saying that a brother was on the way. But I was five years old the first time I can remember being confronted by jealousy, when someone gave a name to this painful, jabbing sensation. ‘Don’t be jealous of your little brother.’ I think it was Mum who said that, with Carl sitting on her lap. He’d been sitting there a long time. Mum said later that Carl was given more love because he needed more love. Maybe so, but she didn’t say the other thing she could have said, that Carl was easier to love.

And I was the one who loved him most of all.

That’s why I was jealous not just of the unconditional love people around him showed him, but also of those Carl showed love for. Like Dog.

Like the boy whose family rented a cabin here one summer, who was as good-looking as Carl, and whom Carl hung out with morning, noon and night, while I counted the days until the summer was over.

Like Mari.

During the first months they were together I used to fantasise about Mari having an accident, and that I was the one who had to comfort Carl. I don’t know exactly when it was that jealousy turned into love, or if it ever did, maybe the two feelings existed side by side, but at any rate it was love that drowned everything else out. It was like some terrible sickness. I couldn’t eat, sleep or concentrate on a normal conversation.

I both dreaded and longed for her visits to see Carl, blushed when she gave me a hug or suddenly spoke to me without any warning or looked at me. Naturally I felt deeply ashamed of my feelings, of not being able to let go of them and being grateful for any small crumbs, of sitting in the same room as them, trying to justify my presence by pretending to be what I wasn’t, such as amusing, or interesting. In the end I found my role. It was to be the silent one, the one who listened, who laughed at Carl’s jokes or nodded slowly at something Mari had read, or heard her father, the chairman, say. I drove them to parties where Carl got drunk and Mari did what she could to make sure he behaved. When Mari asked if I thought it was boring always to be sober I said it was fine, I liked driving cars better than drinking alcohol, and sometimes Carl needed two to look out for him, right? She smiled and didn’t ask me again. I think she understood. I think everyone understood. Everyone but Carl.

‘Of course Roy must come with us!’ he would say whenever there was talk of going skiing, or a party in town at the weekend, or riding Aas’s old nags. He didn’t give a reason, his happy, open face was argument enough. It said that the world was a good place, with only good people living in it, and everyone should be happy just to be there.

Naturally, I never made a move, as people say. I wasn’t stupid enough to think that Mari saw in me anything other than a rather silent but self-sacrificing big brother who was always ready to help them out.

But then one Saturday evening at the village hall Grete came over and told me Mari was in love with me. Carl was in bed at home with the flu I’d had the week before, so I had no driving duties and I’d drunk some of the home brew Erik Nerell always brought with him. Grete was drunk too, and it was dancing in her eyes, that evil witch’s dance. And I knew she was just shit-stirring, trying to fuck things up a bit, because I knew her and I’d seen the way she looked at Carl. All the same, it was like when Armand the preacher in his dance-band Swedish accent boomed out that our redeemer liveth, and there is life after death. If someone says something that is clearly unlikely but that you desperately want to hear, there’s a small part of you – the weak part – that chooses to believe it.

I saw Mari standing over by the entrance. She was talking to a boy, not someone from the village, because boys from round here were too afraid of Mari to come on to her. Not because she was Carl’s girl, but because they knew she was smarter than them, looked down on them, and that when she spurned them it would be very obvious, and in front of everyone, since everyone in Årtun kept half an eye on anything the daughter of the council chairman did.

But it was OK for me, Carl’s brother, to approach her. OK for me and her at least.

‘Hi, Roy.’ She smiled. ‘This is Otto. He’s studying political science in Oslo. He thinks I should do the same.’

I looked at Otto. He lifted a beer bottle to his lips and was looking off in another direction, probably not wanting me to join the conversation, wanting me to get lost as quickly as possible. I had to struggle not to thump the bottom of his bottle. I concentrated on Mari. I wet my lips.

‘Shall we dance?’

She looked at me in mildly amused surprise. ‘But you don’t dance, Roy.’

I shrugged. ‘I can learn.’ I was obviously drunker than I had thought.

Mari laughed loudly and shook her head. ‘Not from me. I need a dancing teacher myself.’

‘I can help there,’ said Otto. ‘I actually teach swing in my spare time.’

‘Yes please!’ said Mari. She gave him that radiant smile she could turn on just like that, the one that made you feel like you were the only other person in the world. ‘As long as you’re not afraid of people laughing.’

Otto smiled. ‘Oh, I don’t think it’ll look that bad,’ he said, putting his beer bottle down on the step and making me wish I’d shoved it into his mouth when I had the chance.

‘Now that’s what I call a brave man,’ said Mari, laying a hand on his shoulder. ‘Is that OK with you, Roy?’

‘Yeah, sure,’ I said, looking round for a wall I could butt my head against.

‘So two brave men then,’ said Mari, putting her other hand on my shoulder. ‘Teacher and pupil, I’m going to enjoy seeing the two of you on the dance floor together.’

And with that she left, and it was a couple of seconds before I understood what had happened. This Otto guy and me were left standing there looking at each other.

‘Would you rather fight?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ he said. He rolled his eyes, picked up his beer bottle and moved off.

Fair enough, I was too drunk anyway, but the headache and hangover guilt when I woke up next morning were worse than any beating Otto could have given me. Carl coughed and laughed and coughed again when I told him what had happened, leaving out the bit about what Grete had said.

‘You are absolutely the fucking tops! You’ll even dance to keep those other jerks away from your brother’s girl.’

I grunted. ‘Only with Mari, not with that Otto guy.’

‘All the same, let me give you a big kiss!’

I pushed him off. ‘No thanks – don’t want flu again.’