Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

I REMEMBER ONLY SNATCHES OF the funeral.

Uncle Bernard was on his feet again, they had decided not to operate, and he and Carl were the only ones I saw crying. The church was full of people that – as far as I know – Mum and Dad had almost no connection with apart from what is absolutely unavoidable in a village like Os. Bernard said a few words and read out the condolences on the wreaths. The biggest was from Willumsen’s Used Cars and Breaker’s Yard, which probably meant he could charge it to customer services for tax purposes. Neither Carl nor I had expressed any wish to say anything, and the priest didn’t press us, I think he appreciated the elbow room when he had such a large audience. But I don’t remember what he said, don’t actually think I was listening. The condolences came afterwards, an endless row of pale, grief-stricken faces, like sitting in a car at a level crossing and watching the train pass by, faces staring out, seemingly at you, but actually on their way to quite other places.

Many people said they felt for me, but then of course I couldn’t tell them that in that case they weren’t feeling too bad.

I remember Carl and me standing in the dining room up at the farm the day before we were due to move down to Uncle Bernard’s. We didn’t know, of course, that it would only last a few days and that we would move back to Opgard. It was so bloody quiet in there.

‘This is all ours now,’ said Carl.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘But is there anything you want?’

‘That,’ said Carl, pointing to the cupboard where Dad kept his crates of Budweiser and bottles of bourbon. I took the carton of tins of Berry’s moist snuff, and that’s how I began using the stuff. Not too often, because you never know when you’re going to be able to get hold of Berry’s next time, and you don’t want to be using that Swedish shite, not once you’ve known the taste of properly fermented tobacco.

Even before the funeral we’d both been interrogated by the sheriff, though he referred to it as ‘just a chat’. Sigmund Olsen wondered why there were no braking marks on Geitesvingen and asked if my father was depressed. But Carl and I stuck to our story that it had looked like an accident. Maybe driving a little too fast and a momentary lapse of attention as he glanced in the rear-view mirror to check that we were following. Something like that. And finally the sheriff appeared to be satisfied. But it struck me too that it was lucky for us these were the only two theories he had: accident or suicide. I knew that punching a couple of holes in the brake hoses and draining off enough brake fluid to significantly reduce the car’s braking power would not in itself be enough to arouse suspicion if it was discovered. Air in the braking system is something you get all the time in old cars. It would be worse if they found out that the set screw holding the steering column had been loosened so the steering didn’t work. The car had landed on its roof and not been the total wreck I’d been expecting. If they went over the car they might have come to the conclusion that anything that’s fixed can also work loose, even set screws. But loose screws as well as holes in the brake hoses? And why no traces of leaking brake fluid on the ground beneath the car? As I say, we had been lucky. Or more accurately, I had been lucky. Of course I knew that Carl knew that somehow or other I had been behind the accident. He had instinctively realised that at any cost he and I must not ride in the Cadillac that evening. And then there was the promise I had given him, that I would fix things. But he never asked exactly how I’d done it. He probably realised it was the brakes, because he’d seen the brake lights go on without the Cadillac slowing down. And when he never asked, why would I tell him? You can’t be punished for something you don’t know about, and if I did get done for the murder of our parents I could take the fall alone, I didn’t need to have Carl beside me, not the way Dad had had Mum. Because unlike them, Carl could easily live without me. Or so I thought.

CARL WAS BORN EARLY IN the autumn, I was born during the summer holidays. It meant that on his birthday he got presents from his classmates and even had a birthday party, whereas mine passed by without celebrations. Not that I ever really complained. That’s why it took a couple of seconds before I realised that the words being sung were actually being sung for me.

‘Happy eighteenth birthday!’

I was on a break and sitting out in the sun on a couple of pallets, my eyes closed and listening to Cream on my headphones. I looked up and pulled out the earbuds. Had to shade my eyes. Not that I didn’t remember that voice. It was Rita Willumsen.

‘Thanks,’ I said, feeling my face and ears start to glow as though I’d been caught doing something I shouldn’t be doing. ‘Who told you that?’

‘Coming of age,’ was all she said. ‘The right to vote. Driving licence. And they can put you in jail.’

The Saab Sonett was parked behind her, just the way it had been all those months ago. But at the same time something felt different, as though she’d given me a promise back then and had come now to keep it. I felt my hand shaking slightly as I pushed the headphones into the back pocket. I was no longer completely unkissed and I’d fumbled a bit under a bra behind the village hall at Årtun, but I was very definitely still a virgin.

‘There’s funny sounds coming from the Sonett,’ she said.

‘What kind of sounds?’ I asked.

‘Maybe we should take a drive and you can hear them for yourself.’

‘Sure thing. Just a moment.’ I went into the office.

‘I’ll be away for a while,’ I said.

‘OK,’ said Uncle Bernard without looking up from ‘that damned paperwork’, as he used to call it, and which now surrounded him in enormous piles after his stay in hospital. ‘When are you back?’

‘I don’t know.’

He took off his reading glasses and looked at me. ‘OK.’ He said it like a question, like, was there something else I wanted to tell him? And if I didn’t want to, fine by him, he trusted me.

I nodded and went back out into the sunlight.

‘On a day like this we ought really to have had the roof back,’ said Rita Willumsen as she drove the Sonett out onto the main highway.

I didn’t ask why we didn’t.

‘What kind of sounds are you hearing?’ I asked.

‘People round here ask if I bought this car because the roof goes back. Here where the summer only lasts a month and a half, they’re probably thinking. But do you know what the reason is, Roy?’

‘The colour?’

‘Quite the male chauvinist.’ She laughed. ‘It was the name. Sonett. Know what that is?’

‘It’s a Saab.’

‘It’s a verse form. A type of love poem with two quartets and two trios, fourteen lines in all. The master sonneteer was an Italian named Francesco Petrarch who was madly in love with a woman named Laura who was married to a count. Altogether he wrote 317 sonnets to her. Quite a lot, don’t you think?’

‘Pity she was married then.’

‘Not at all. The key to passion is that you never wholly and completely get the one you love. We human beings are made rather impractically when it comes to things like that.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘You’ve a lot to learn, I can hear that.’

‘Maybe so. But I don’t hear any strange noises from the car.’

She glanced in the mirror. ‘It’s there when I start it in the morning. It goes once the engine heats up. We’ll park for a while, give the engine a chance to cool down properly.’

She indicated and turned down a wooded track. She’d obviously driven here before, and after a while she turned down an even narrower track and stopped the car under some low-hanging pine-tree branches.