Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘Egil?’

He stiffened and stopped. ‘Yeah?’

‘Looks like someone’s had fun winding the drying paper round pump number 2.’

‘I’ll fix it, chief.’ He smiled and went out.

I sighed. It isn’t easy to find good workers in a little village like this. The clever ones head for Oslo or Bergen to study, the hard workers to Notodden, Skien or Kongsberg to earn money. If I fired him he’d be straight on the dole, and he wouldn’t be eating any fewer sausages, the only difference being he’d be standing on the other side of the counter and paying for them. They say obesity is mostly a small-town problem, and it’s obvious how easy it is to start comfort eating when you’re working at a service station, and everybody who calls in is heading someplace else, to somewhere you tell yourself has to be better than this, in cars you’ll never be able to afford, with girls you wouldn’t even dare to talk to unless it was at the village hop and you were pissed. But soon I would have to have a word with Egil. Head office wasn’t interested in the likes of him, only in the bottom line. It’s fair enough. In 1969 there were 700,000 cars and more than 4,000 service stations in Norway. Forty-five years on the number of cars had almost quadrupled, but the number of service stations more than halved. It was tough for them and tough for us. I kept abreast of the statistics and knew that in Sweden and Denmark over half the surviving service stations were already automated and unmanned. The widespread pattern of settlements here in Norway means we aren’t there yet, but it’s obvious that even here, petrol pump attendants are a dying breed. In actual fact, we’re already extinct. When was the last time you saw one of us putting petrol in a car? We’re too busy flogging frankfurters, colas, beach balls, barbecue charcoal, windscreen cleaner and bottled water that’s no different from what comes out the tap but comes in by plane and costs more than the videos we’ve got on offer. But I’m not complaining. When the service station chain showed an interest in the car repair workshop I had taken over at the age of twenty-three, it wasn’t because of the two petrol pumps I had out on the forecourt or because the place was doing well financially, but on account of the location. They said they were impressed at how I had held out for so long; local car repair shops had disappeared from the map a long time ago, and they offered me the job of station boss along with a bit of small change for the property. I could maybe have got a little bit more, but we Opgards don’t haggle. Still not thirty, I felt as though I was already finished. I used the small change to have the bathroom built on the farm so I could move out of the bachelor’s bedsit I’d made at the repair shop. There was plenty of room on the site so the chain built a service station next door to the repair shop, which they left up, and modernised the old car-wash.

The door banged shut behind Egil and I recalled that head office had agreed to the automatic sliding doors I had requested. The head of sales who visited every fourteen days was all smiles and bad jokes. Now and then he’d lay a hand on my shoulder and say, as though it were confidential, that they were satisfied. Naturally they were satisfied. They read the bottom line and saw that we were putting up a good and profitable fight against extinction. Despite the fact that the forecourt around the pumps when Egil was on night shift weren’t always spic and span.

Quarter to six. I stood brushing the buns that had defrosted and risen during the night and it got me thinking about the good years when I was down in the grease pit and oiling the cars. Working hard. Knowing that my reward awaited me, assignations up at the mountain cabin, the secret no one must find out. I saw a tractor approaching the car wash. Knew that once the farmer finished washing the monster I would need to wash and hose down the floor. As head of the place I had full responsibility for the hiring and firing, the bookkeeping, the pep talks with staff and all the rest of it; but guess what takes up most of a service station boss’s time? Cleaning up. With baking buns a good number two.

I listened to the silence. Although it’s actually never silent – there’s a steady, rushing symphony of sounds that doesn’t stop until the weekend is over, the cabin folk are back home, and we start closing the place up at night again. There are coffee machines, sausage cookers, freezers, soft-drinks coolers. They each have their own sound, but the most distinctive is the bread warmer we put the hamburger rolls in. It cackles in a warmer way, almost like a well-oiled motor if you close your eyes and dream back in time a little. Last time the head of sales was here he suggested I consider playing low background music in the shop. Said that research showed how the right sounds could stimulate both the desire to spend money and the appetite. I nodded slowly but said nothing. I like the silence. Soon the door will open. Probably a tradesman, it’s generally tradesmen who want petrol or coffee before seven.

I watched the farmer filling up his tractor with the duty-free truck diesel. I knew a splash of that was going to end up in the tank of his own car once he got home, but that was a matter between him and the police, I really didn’t care one way or the other.

My gaze moved on past the pumps, across the road, the cycle and footpath, and landed on one of the wooden houses typical of the village, three floors, built just after the war, a veranda facing out across Lake Budal, window dirty with road dust, a large poster nailed to the wall advertising haircuts and a solarium in a way that probably gave passers-by the impression that the cutting and the sunbathing went on simultaneously , as people say. Something done in the living room of the people who lived there. I’d never seen anyone other than locals going in there, and everyone in the village knew where Grete Smitt lived, so the actual purpose of the poster was unclear. Now I saw Grete standing by the side of the road, freezing in her Crocs and T-shirt, taking a good look left and right before crossing over to our side.

It was only six months ago that a driver from Oslo who claimed he never saw the fifty kilometres an hour speed-limit sign had mown down our Norwegian teacher a little further along the road. There are advantages and disadvantages to running a service station in a village. The advantages are that the locals do their shopping here and that the speed limit of fifty means out-of-town cars can turn into the station on impulse. When I had the repair shop we also contributed to the local economy because any out-of-town customers who needed bigger repair jobs would eat at the cafe and spend the night at one of the camping cabins down by the lakeside. The disadvantage is that it’s only a question of time before you’ll lose the traffic. Motorists want straight roads and speed limits of ninety, they don’t want to be crawling through every little village they pass on the way to their destinations. Plans for a new main road that bypassed Os had been ready for a long time, but so far we had been saved by our geography; it had quite simply been too costly for the transport authorities to drive a tunnel through the mountain. But there will be a tunnel, as surely as the sun will blow our solar system to pieces in two billion years’ time, and it’ll come a lot sooner than that. Ending up in the back of beyond would of course mean the end for all of us who made a living from the through traffic; but for the rest of the village too, the shock waves would be pretty similar to when the sun says goodbye. The farmers would still milk their cows and raise what crops they could up here on the heights, but what would everyone else do without the main road? Cut each other’s hair and tan themselves to a crisp?