Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

A FEW MONTHS AFTER I’D left my father in the barn, fru Willumsen pulled up in front of the workshop and booked a service for her Saab Sonett ‘58 model, a roadster, and the only cabriolet in the village.

People in the village claimed that Willumsen’s wife was obsessed with a Norwegian pop diva from the seventies and tried to copy her in every way: the car, the clothes, the make-up and her way of walking. She even went so far as to try to copy the diva’s famous deep voice. I was too young to remember this pop star, but fru Willumsen was a diva all right, no question about it.

Uncle Bernard had a doctor’s appointment so I had to go over the machine myself to see if there were any obvious problems.

‘Nice lines,’ I said, stroking a hand over one of the front fins. Fibreglass reinforced plastic. According to Uncle Bernard, Saab had produced fewer than ten of them, and it must have set Willumsen back more than he liked.

‘Thanks,’ she said.

I opened the bonnet and looked over the engine. Checked the leads and that the caps were on properly, copying someone else again, in this case Uncle Bernard.

‘You look like you know how to handle the insides too,’ she said. ‘Even though you look so young.’

It was my turn to say thanks.

It was a hot day; I’d been working on a lorry and pulled down the top half of the overalls so my chest was bare when she arrived. I was boxing a lot up in the barn now, I had muscles where before there was just skin and bone, and her eyes glided over me as she told me what she wanted. And when I pulled on a T-shirt before checking over her car she had almost looked disappointed.

I closed the bonnet and turned to her. The high heels she was wearing meant she wasn’t just taller than me, she towered over me.

‘Well?’ she said, and then continued after a pause that was much too long. ‘Do you like what you see?’

‘It seems fine but I ought to take a closer look,’ I said with a fake self-assurance, as though it would be me and not Uncle Bernard who would be taking that look.

It occurred to me that she was older than she looked. The eyebrows looked as though they’d been shaved off and then drawn on again. There were small wrinkles in the skin above her upper lip. But all the same, fru Willumsen was what Uncle Bernard called a full rigger .

‘And after that…’ She put her head on one side and appraised me, as though she was in a butcher’s shop and I was a piece of meat laid out on the slab. ‘…look?’

‘Then we’ll go over the engine and change anything that needs changing,’ I said, ‘within the limits of what’s reasonable and acceptable, naturally.’ Another line I’d nicked from Uncle Bernard. Apart from when I had to swallow in the middle of the sentence.

‘Reasonable and acceptable.’ She smiled, as though I’d just served up a witticism in the Oscar Wilde class. Apart from the fact that I’d never heard of Oscar Wilde at that time. But right about then it dawned on me that I wasn’t the only one standing there and reading all sorts of hidden sex fantasies into the conversation. There could no longer be any doubt about it, fru Willumsen was flirting with me. Not that I kidded myself she wanted to take it any further, but she was definitely taking time for a little game with a seventeen-year-old, the way a grown cat will pat your dangling balls of wool before padding on its way. And just that was enough to make me feel proud and a little arrogant as I stood there.

‘But I can tell you already that there isn’t much here that needs to be fixed,’ I said, fishing up my silver box of snuff from the pocket of my overalls as I leaned against the bonnet. ‘The car looks to be in excellent condition. For its age.’

Fru Willumsen laughed.

‘Rita,’ she said, extending a dazzlingly white hand with blood-red nails.

If I’d been more on the case I would probably have kissed it, but instead I put down my snuffbox, wiped my hand on the rag that was dangling from my back pocket and gave her a firm handshake. ‘Roy.’

She gave me a thoughtful look. ‘OK, Roy. But there’s no need to squeeze so hard.’

‘Eh?’

‘Don’t say “eh”. Say “what”. Or “excuse me”. Try again.’ She offered me her hand once more.

I took it again. Carefully this time. She pulled it towards her.

‘I didn’t tell you to treat it as though it were stolen property, Roy. I’m giving you my hand, and for these few brief moments it’s yours. So use it, be good to it, treat it in such a way that you know you will be allowed to have it again.’

She offered me her hand for a third time.

And I put both of mine around it.

Stroked it. Pressed it against my cheek. No idea where I got the bottle from. Only knew that right now I had it, all that courage I had lacked as I stood outside the barn and saw the shotgun in the doorway.

Rita Willumsen laughed, looked around quickly as though to confirm that we were still unobserved, let me keep her hand a little longer before slowly withdrawing it.

‘You learn quickly,’ she said. ‘Quickly. And soon you’ll be a man. I think you’ll make someone very happy, Roy.’

A Mercedes pulled up in front of us. Willumsen jumped out and hardly had time to say hello to me he was so busy opening the car door for fru Willumsen. Who was now Rita Willumsen. He held her hand as she manoeuvred her way in, high heels, high hair, tight skirt. And when they drove off I felt a mixture of excitement and confusion at the thought of what now suddenly lay before me. The excitement came from having fru Willumsen’s hand in mine, those long nails scraping against my palm. And the fact that she was the clearly much-treasured wife of Willumsen, the man who had cheated Dad over the purchase of the Cadillac and boasted of it afterwards. The confusion was caused by the engine compartment, in which everything seemed to be back to front. I mean, the gearbox was in front of the engine. Later Uncle Bernard explained to me that it was because of the special dispersal of the weight in a Sonett, that they had even turned the crankshaft so the engine on this car went the opposite way to all other cars. Saab Sonett. What a car. What a gorgeous, useless piece of outdated beauty.

I worked on the Saab until late at night, checking, tightening, changing. I possessed a new, furious energy and I didn’t know quite where it came from. Or actually, yes, I did. It came from Rita Willumsen. She had touched me. I had touched her. She had seen me as a man. Or at least as the man I could become. And that had changed something. At some point, as I stood there in the grease pit and ran my hand over the chassis of the car, I felt myself growing hard. I closed my eyes and imagined it. Tried to imagine it. A semi-naked Rita Willumsen on the bonnet of the Saab, beckoning to me with her index finger. That red nail varnish. Jesus.

I listened out to make sure I was alone in the workshop before I pulled down the zip on my overalls.

‘Roy?’ whispered Carl in the dark as I was about to creep up to the top bunk.

I was on the point of saying something about doing overtime at the workshop, that we should sleep now. But something in his voice stopped me. I turned on the light above his bed. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying and one of his cheeks was swollen. I felt my stomach tighten. After that time in the barn with the shotgun, Dad had kept away.

‘Has he been here again?’ I whispered.

Carl just nodded.

‘Did he… did he hit you as well?’

‘Yes. And I thought he was going to strangle me. He was furious. Asked where you were.’

‘Shit,’ I said.

‘You’ve got to be here,’ said Carl. ‘He doesn’t come if you’re here.’