Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘Well,’ I said as I pulled on my shoes, ‘since you saw me, it’s a little hurtful of you to ask if everything’s all right.’

‘Stop being silly, I said. You were crying.’

‘No. But it’s not unusual to get water on your face when you’re showering. You’re not supposed to be working this evening.’

‘I’m not. I was sitting in one of the cars and I needed to pee. I didn’t want to go into the trees, so can I use yours?’

I hesitated. I could have suggested she use the station toilet, but we’d told the boy racers it was bad enough them using our parking space as a meeting place without having them running in and out of the station toilet. And now that she’d asked I couldn’t exactly tell her to go behind a tree either.

I finished dressing and she padded after me through the workshop.

‘Cosy,’ she said after she’d finished in the toilet. She glanced round the walls of my room. ‘Why is there a wet wetsuit hanging out there in the corridor?’

‘For it to dry,’ I said.

She pouted. ‘Can I have a cup?’ She crossed uninvited to the coffee maker, took a clean mug from the drying rack and filled it.

‘They’ll be waiting for you,’ I warned her. ‘Soon they’ll start searching the woods.’

‘No way,’ she said, and sat down on the bed beside me. ‘I quarrelled with Alex, so I think they went home. What do you do here? Watch TV?’

‘That kind of thing.’

‘What’s that?’ She pointed to the licence plate I’d mounted on the wall above the kitchen alcove. I’d looked it up in my licence-plate book, Vehicle Registration Plates of the World , and found that the J stood for the parish of St John. Four numbers followed the letter. There was no flag or anything else to denote nationality, like the Monaco plates on the Cadillac. Maybe that was because Barbados was an island and the cars registered there would probably never cross an international border. I’d also googled redlegs and found out that St John was the parish in which most of them lived.

‘It’s a car registration plate from Johor,’ I said. Finally my body was feeling warm. Warm and relaxed. ‘A former sultanate in Malaysia.’

‘Shit,’ she said in an awed tone that referred to the plate or the sultanate or me. Julie was sitting so close her arm touched mine and now she turned her head towards me and waited for me to do the same. I was trying to work out some way of retreat from the situation when Julie tossed my phone to the end of the bed and wrapped her arms around me. Pressed her face into the hollow of my neck. ‘Can’t we lie down for a bit?’

‘You know very well we can’t, Julie.’ I neither moved nor responded to the embrace.

She lifted her face to mine. ‘You smell of booze, Roy. Have you been drinking?’

‘A bit. And so have you, I gather.’

‘Then in that case we’ve both got an excuse,’ she said and laughed.

I didn’t reply.

She pushed me back, sat on top of me and pressed her heels against my thighs as though spurring on a horse. I could easily have bounced her off, but I didn’t. She sat there and looked down at me. ‘I’ve got you now,’ she said in a low voice.

I still didn’t reply. But I could feel myself getting hard again. And I knew she could feel it too. She started moving, carefully. I didn’t stop her, just watched her as her gaze clouded over and her breathing grew heavier. Then I closed my eyes and imagined the other one. Felt Julie’s hands pressing my wrists against the mattress, her bubblegum breath in my face.

I rolled her off towards the wall and stood up.

‘What?’ Julie called after me as I walked over to the worktop. I filled a glass of water from the tap, drank it, filled it again.

‘You better go,’ I said.

‘But you want to!’ she protested.

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘And that’s why you should go.’

‘But no one need know. They think I’ve gone home, and at home they think I’m staying over at Alex’s.’

‘I can’t, Julie.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re seventeen years old…’

‘Eighteen. I’ll be eighteen in two days.’

‘…I’m your boss…’

‘I can finish tomorrow!’

‘…and…’ I stopped.

‘And?’ she yelled. ‘And?’

‘And I like someone else.’

‘Like?’

‘Love. I’m in love with someone else.’

In the silence that ensued I heard the dying echo of my own words. Because I had said them to myself. Said them aloud to hear if they sounded true. And they did. Of course they did.

‘Who then?’ she hiccupped. ‘The doctor?’

‘What?’

‘Dr Spind?’

I couldn’t answer, just stood there, glass in hand, as she climbed off the bed and pulled on her jacket.

‘I knew it!’ she hissed as she pushed past me on her way out.

I followed, stood in the doorway and watched as she stamped across the forecourt as though she was trying to crack the asphalt. Then I locked the door, went back and lay on my bed. Plugged the headphones into my phone and pressed play. J. J. Cale. ‘Crying Eyes’.

THE FOLLOWING MORNING A PORSCHE Cayenne turned into the station forecourt. Two men and a woman climbed out. One of the men filled up with petrol while the other two stretched their legs. The woman had blonde hair and was sensibly dressed in the Norwegian way, but still she didn’t strike me as one of the cabin people. The man was wearing an immaculate woollen overcoat and scarf and had on a pair of comically large sunglasses, the kind women wear when they want you to know that they might not be good-looking but they’ve still got something. Active body language with much waving of the arms. Pointed and explained things to the woman though I was prepared to bet he’d never been here before. I would also have bet he wasn’t Norwegian.

It was quiet, and I was bored, and travellers sometimes have interesting tales to tell. So I went out to them, gave the windscreen of the Porsche a wash and asked where they were headed.

‘West country,’ said the woman.

‘Well, you can’t miss that,’ I said.

The woman laughed and translated into English for the guy in the sunglasses, who laughed too.

‘We’re scouting locations for my new film,’ he said in English. ‘This place looks interesting too.’

‘Are you a director?’ I asked.

‘Director and actor,’ he said and removed his sunglasses. He had a pair of extremely blue eyes in his well-looked-after face. I could see he was waiting for a reaction.

‘This is Dennis Quarry,’ the woman discreetly prompted me.

‘Roy Calvin Opgard.’ I smiled, dried off the windscreen and left them to give the other pumps a clean while I was at it. Well, OK, but sometimes they really do have interesting stories.

The Cadillac glided into the forecourt and Carl jumped out, unhooked one of the pump nozzles, caught sight of me and raised his eyebrows quizzically. He’d asked me the same question ten times in the two days that had passed since the football match and the dive. Have they taken the bait? I shook my head, and at the same time my heart skipped a beat when I saw Shannon in the passenger seat. And maybe her heart skipped a beat when she saw the American with the blue eyes, because she put a hand in front of her mouth, fumbled for pen and paper in her bag, got out and went over to him and I saw him smiling as he signed his autograph. His assistant walked over and sat in the SUV while Dennis Quarry stood there talking to Shannon. She was about to leave when he stopped her, took the pen and paper back and scribbled something else down.

I went over to Carl. His face was grey.

‘Worried?’ I asked.

‘Some,’ he said.