Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘But after what you did to me today I’m thinking we can wait a while before we stop,’ she said. She put her cigarette out in the ashtray and turned to me.

‘Why is that?’ I asked.

‘Why?’ She gave me a long, thoughtful look, as though she didn’t have the answer. ‘Maybe it’s Sigmund Olsen’s drowning. The thought that you can wake up dead one day. Because we sure can’t postpone living, now can we?’

She caressed my chest and stomach.

‘Olsen took his own life,’ I said. ‘He wanted to die.’

‘Exactly.’ She looked at her own hand with the red-painted fingernails as it continued on its way downward. ‘And that can happen to any of us.’

‘Maybe,’ I said, picking up my watch from the bedside table. ‘But I have to go now. Hope you don’t mind me leaving first for once.’

At first she looked a bit surprised, but then she composed herself, gave a thin smile and asked teasingly if I had a date with another girl.

In reply I gave an equally teasing smile, got up and began to dress.

‘He’s away this weekend,’ she said, watching me from the bed with a slightly sulky expression on her face.

The name Willum Willumsen was never mentioned.

‘You can come and visit me.’

I stopped dressing. ‘Visit you at home ?’

She leaned out over the side of the bed, dipped her hand into her bag, fished out a bunch of keys and began to work one of them loose.

‘Come after dark, use the garden on the blind side of the house, where no neighbours can see you. This is to the basement door.’

She dangled the freed key in front of me. I was so surprised all I could do was stare at it.

‘Take it, you idiot!’ she hissed.

And I took it. Stuck it in my pocket and knew I wouldn’t be using it. I’d taken it because for the first time I’d seen what looked like vulnerability in Rita Willumsen’s expression. And with that anger in her voice she was trying to hide something I hadn’t even thought about; that she might be afraid of rejection.

And walking down the path away from the cabin, I knew the balance between Rita Willumsen and me had changed.

Carl had changed too.

In some way he held himself more erect. And no longer kept himself to himself but had started going out and seeing people. It had happened almost overnight. The Fritz night. Maybe he felt – like me – that the experience of the Fritz night was something that lifted us above the crowd. When Mum and Dad went over the edge into Huken, Carl had been a passive spectator, the victim who was being saved. But this time he’d been a participant, done what had to be done, things the people around us couldn’t have imagined. We had crossed a line and crossed back over again, and you can’t have been to the place we had been to without it changing you. Or to put it this way: maybe it was only now that Carl could be the person he had really been all along; maybe the Fritz night just tapped a hole in the cocoon that let this butterfly out. He had already grown taller than me, but in the course of the winter he had gone from being a fragile, shy young lad into a youth who understood he had nothing to be ashamed of. He’d always been well liked, now he became popular too. I began to notice that when he was hanging out with his friends it was him who was the leader, his comments people listened to, his jokes people laughed at, he was the one they looked at first when they were trying to impress or make the gang laugh. He was the one they imitated. And the girls noticed it too. It wasn’t just that Carl’s sweet, girlish prettiness had matured into strapping good looks, the way he acted had changed too. I noticed it when we were at the gatherings at Årtun, that he had acquired a natural self-assurance both in the way he spoke and the way he moved. He could be uninhibitedly playful, as though nothing was really serious, and then sit down with a mate who was having girl trouble, or a female friend with a broken heart, listen sympathetically to what they had to say and give them advice, as though he possessed experience and wisdom they hadn’t yet acquired.

As for me, I guess I just became more of what I always had been. More self-assured, of course. Because I knew now that, when it really mattered, I was capable of doing what had to be done.

‘Are you sitting here, reading?’ Carl said one Saturday evening. It was gone midnight, he’d just come home, obviously a bit tipsy, and I was sitting in the winter garden with An American Tragedy open on my lap.

And in a flash it was as though I saw the two of us from outside. That I had taken his place now. Alone in a room without company. Only it wasn’t his place. It was just him who had borrowed mine for a while.

‘Where have you been?’ I asked.

‘At a party,’ he said.

‘Didn’t you promise Uncle Bernard you would take it easy with the partying?

‘Sure,’ he said. There was laughter in his voice, but real regret too. ‘I broke my promise.’

We laughed.

It was good to laugh with Carl.

‘You have a good time?’ I asked, closing the book.

‘I danced with Mari Aas.’

‘Oh yeah?’

‘Yes. And I think I’m a little bit in love.’

I don’t know why, but the words cut me like a knife.

‘Mari Aas,’ I said. ‘The chairman’s daughter and an Opgard boy?’

‘Why not?’ he said.

‘Well, sure, there’s no law against dreaming,’ I said, and heard how ugly and mean my own laughter sounded.

‘Guess you’re right,’ he said with a smile. ‘I’ll head up and dream a bit.’

One day a few weeks later I saw Mari Aas at the coffee shop.

She was very pretty. And apparently ‘dangerously intelligent’, as someone put it. One thing was for certain, she sure knew how to speak. According to the local newspaper she’d seen off aspiring politicians much older than herself when she represented AUF in a debate in Notodden before the local election. Mari Aas stood there, leaning forward slightly, chubby, blonde pigtails, breasts pressing against the Che Guevara T-shirt, and the cold, blue eyes of a wolf, and a gaze that passed over me there in the coffee shop as though I wasn’t there, as though in search of something worth hunting for and I wasn’t it. A gaze without fear, that’s what I thought. The gaze of something at the very top of the food chain.

Summer returned and Rita Willumsen – who had been on a trip to America with him , her husband – sent a text message saying she wanted to meet at the cabin. She wrote that she’d been missing me. She, who always made the decisions, had started to write stuff like that in her messages, especially since I never turned up at her home through the basement door that weekend she was alone.

When I got to the cabin she seemed unusually excited. She had presents for me, and I unwrapped a pair of silk underpants and a little bottle of so-called perfume-for-men, both bought in New York City itself, she said. But best of all were the two cartons of Berry’s moist snuff, even though I wasn’t allowed to take any of it home, it belonged to our world at the cabin, she said. So the snuff was stored in the fridge there. And I realised she thought of it as an extra incentive for me once I ran out at home.

‘Take your clothes off,’ I said.

She looked at me in astonishment for a moment. Then she did as I had told her.

Afterwards we lay in the bed, sweating, and slippery with bodily fluids. The room felt like a baker’s oven, the summer sun roasting the roof, and I pulled myself free of Rita’s literally damp embrace.

I picked up the book of Petrarch’s sonnets from the bedside table, opened it at random and began reading aloud:

Clear, sweet fresh water where she, the only one who seemed woman to me .