Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘You and Pia liked each other,’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘But I liked you better. And I knew you would like me better.’

‘Why is that?’

‘Because you and I are alike, and you and Pia aren’t. And because it isn’t as far to Notodden.’

I laughed. ‘You think I like you better because it isn’t as far to Notodden as to Oslo?’

‘As a rule our sympathies are practical.’

I laughed again and she smiled. Slightly.

Unni wasn’t actually unhappy in her marriage, she said.

‘He’s a fine man and a good father,’ she said. ‘But he never touches me.’ Her body was thin and hard, like a skinny young boy. She worked out a bit, jogging, pumping iron. ‘We all need to be touched,’ she said.

She wasn’t too worried about him finding out she was having an affair. She thought he would understand. It was the kids she was worried about.

‘They have a good, secure home. I can’t let anything destroy that for them. My children will always come first, ahead of that type of happiness. I really like these hours with you, but I’ll give it all up like a shot if it risks the slightest unhappiness or insecurity for my children. Do you understand?’

The question was delivered with a sudden intensity, like when you download a fun app and suddenly a very serious, almost threatening form appears that you have to complete, filled with conditions you have to accept before the fun can begin.

One day I asked her if she, faced with a hypothetical crisis, would be willing to shoot me and her husband if doing so increased the likelihood of her children surviving by forty per cent. That accountant’s brain of hers needed a few seconds before replying.

‘Yes.’

‘Thirty per cent?’

‘Yes.’

‘Twenty?’

‘No.’

What I liked about Unni was that I knew exactly what I was dealing with.

CARL SENT ME EMAILS AND pics from his university. It looked and sounded like he was doing fine. White smile and friends who looked as though they’d known Carl all his life. He always was adaptable. ‘Chuck that boy in the water and he’ll grow gills before he’s even wet,’ Mum used to say. I remember that towards the end of that summer when he hung out with that pretty cabin visitor I was jealous of, Carl had learned to speak with an Oslo accent. And now American expressions began to crop up more and more in his emails, more than Dad ever used. It was as though his Norwegian was slowly but surely withering away. And maybe that was what he wanted. Pack everything that had happened here in layers of forgetfulness and distance. When Stanley Spind, the new doctor, heard me refer to the boot of the car as the ‘trunk’, he told me something about forgetting.

‘In Vest-Agder where I grew up, whole villages emigrated to America. Some of them came back. And it turned out that the ones who had forgotten their Norwegian had forgotten almost everything about their old home country. It’s as though language preserves the memories.’

In the days that followed I toyed with the idea of learning a new language, of never speaking Norwegian again, to see if it helped. Because now it wasn’t just screams I heard from Huken. When the silence fell I could hear a low murmuring, as though the dead were talking to each other down there. Planning something. Fucking conspiring.

Carl was hard up, he wrote. He had failed a couple of exams and lost his stipend. I sent money. It was no problem, I had my wage, my outgoings were minimal, I’d even managed to put a little bit aside.

The year after that the college fees went up and he needed more. That winter I equipped a room down in the disused workshop that meant I saved on electricity and petrol. I tried to rent out the farm but there were no takers. When I suggested to Unni that we change our meeting place from the Brattrein to the Notodden Hotel, which was cheaper, she asked if I was short of money. And suggested we could share the cost of the room as she had insisted on doing for a while. I said no, and in the end we carried on meeting at the Brattrein, but the next time we met Unni told me she’d checked the accounts and seen that I was getting a lower wage than station managers with smaller stations than mine.

I rang head office and after a bit of toing and froing was put through to someone I was told could take decisions about pay rises.

The voice that took the call was bright: ‘Pia Syse.’

I hung up.

Before the final semester – at least, he claimed it was the final semester – Carl called in the middle of the night and told me he was short twenty-one thousand dollars, two hundred thousand Norwegian kroner. He’d been banking on the award of a stipend from the Norwegian Society in Minneapolis, but he’d just found out he hadn’t got it, and he needed the school fees before 0900 the next day, or he’d be excluded and not allowed to take his final exams. And without them his whole education was wasted, he said.

‘ Business administration is not about what you know but what people think you know, Roy. And what they believe in are exams and diplomas.’

‘Have the school fees really doubled since you started there?’ I asked.

‘It’s really… unfortunate ,’ said Carl, slipping into English. ‘I’m sorry to have to ask, but the chairman of the Norwegian Society told me two months ago that there shouldn’t be any problem.’

I was waiting outside the bank when it opened. The bank manager listened as I suggested a loan of two hundred thousand, with the farm as security.

‘You and Carl own the farm and land together, so for that we’ll need both your signature and your brother’s,’ said the bank manager, a man with a bow tie and eyes like a St Bernard. ‘And the processing and documentation take a couple of days. But of course I realise you need this today, and I’ve been authorised by head office to give you a hundred thousand on account of your honest face.’

‘Without security?’

‘We trust people here in the village, Roy.’

‘I need two hundred thousand.’

‘But not that much.’ He smiled, and his eyes grew even more mournful.

‘Carl’s going to be barred at nine o’clock. Four o’clock Norwegian time.’

‘I’ve never heard of universities operating with regimes as strict as that,’ said the bank manager, scratching the back of his hand. ‘But if you say so, then…’ He scratched and scratched away at the back of his hand.

‘Well…?’ I asked impatiently, glancing at my watch. Six and a half hours left.

‘Well, you didn’t hear this from me, but maybe you should have a word with Willumsen.’

I looked at the bank manager. So it really was true what people said, that Willumsen loaned money to people. With no security and at extortionate rates of interest. No security, that is, other than the certainty that Willumsen, somehow or other, sometime or other, would call in his debt. And if there was any trouble, rumour had it that he brought in that enforcer from Denmark to get the job done. I actually knew that Erik Nerell had borrowed from Willumsen when he bought the Fritt Fall bar, but there was no talk there of strong-arm stuff. On the contrary, Erik said that Willumsen had been patient and waited, and when he asked for an extension, Willumsen had answered: ‘As long as there’s interest coming in, I’ll do nothing, Nerell. Because compound interest, that’s heaven on earth.’

I drove down to Willumsen’s Used Cars and Breaker’s Yard. Knew Rita wouldn’t be there, she hated the place. Willumsen saw me in his office. Above his desk was a stag’s head that looked as if it had butted its way through the wall and was looking in astonishment at the sight that met its eyes. Willumsen sat beneath it and leaned back in his chair, his double chin flopping over his shirt collar, his small, pudgy fingers folded across his chest. Just raised the right hand now and then to flick off ash from his cigar. Put his head on one side and studied me thoughtfully. A process known as credit rating, I realised.