Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

I told myself all of this, but it didn’t help. It was like fucking malaria. And I thought that maybe it’s true what people say, that it’s the second time you catch jungle fever that it does you in. I tried to work it away, but it kept coming back. I tried to sleep and forget, but was woken by screams from the zoo, even though that was impossible, the place was almost ten kilometres away.

I tried going out, someone recommended a pub in Kristiansand, but I ended up sitting alone at the bar. Hadn’t a clue how to approach people, and no desire to either, it was more a case of thinking I ought to. Because I don’t get lonely. Or rather yes, I do, but it doesn’t bother me, at least not to mention. What I was thinking was that maybe women would help, that they might be a remedy for the fever. But none of them looked at me for more than a second. If it’d been the Fritt Fall at least after a couple of beers someone would have asked who you were. But they probably saw it in that single second, that I was a country bumpkin out for a night on the town and not worth the bother, as people say. Maybe noticed the way my middle finger stuck out when I picked up my glass. So I gulped down the rest of the beer – a pale lager , Miller’s, American dishwater – and took the bus home. Lay in bed and heard the apes and the giraffes screaming.

It was when Julie called with some technical questions about the stocktaking that I realised Grete had kept her mouth shut about Dad’s abuse. After I’d explained the technicalities to her I asked her for the latest gossip. Which she provided, although somewhat surprised, I noticed, since I’d never shown any interest in that kind of stuff before. When it turned out to be uninteresting stuff I asked her straight out if there were any rumours involving our family, anything concerning Carl and Dad.

‘No – why should there be?’ she asked, and I could hear that she really had no idea what I was talking about.

‘Just ring if there’s anything else you want to know about the stocktaking,’ I said.

We hung up.

I scratched my head.

Maybe it wasn’t so strange that Grete hadn’t been spreading the news about Carl and Dad. She’d kept her mouth shut for all these years. Because in all her craziness she was most of all crazy in love, just like me. She didn’t want to hurt Carl, and for that reason she would continue to keep her mouth shut. But then why had Grete told me what she knew? I remembered her question about how had I saved Carl. What did you do, Roy? Was it a threat? Was she trying to tell me she had worked out who was to blame for Mum and Dad going over the edge into Huken? That I mustn’t do anything that got in the way of her plans for Carl?

If so, then it was so crazy the mere thought of it made me shiver.

But what it did mean was that I had one reason less to stay away from Os.

I didn’t go home at Christmas.

Nor Easter either.

Carl called and kept me updated on the hotel.

Winter had arrived earlier than expected and the snow had lain for a long time, so they were behind schedule. They’d also had to make some adjustments to the drawings after the council had said they wanted to see more timber and less concrete.

‘Shannon’s pissed off, she doesn’t understand that if the council hadn’t got those fucking timber walls of theirs then we wouldn’t have got permission from the planning department. She tried arguing that timber isn’t solid enough, but of course that’s crap, all she cares about is the aesthetics of the place, that it’ll have like her signature on it. But you always have these kinds of discussions with the architect.’

Maybe so, but I could hear in his voice that the quarrel had probably been a bit more violent than those one usually had with architects.

‘Is she—’ I coughed to interrupt myself when I realised I couldn’t complete the question in a neutral tone of voice. Not neutral enough for Carl’s ears, at least. But at least I understood she hadn’t told him about that idiotic declaration of love I’d made during the launch party at Fritt Fall, or I would have heard it in his tone of voice, because that’s a door that swings both ways. I could, for example, hear that he’d downed a few Budweisers.

‘Is she settling down OK?’

‘Yeah yeah,’ he said. ‘It takes time to adapt to something that’s so different from what you know. For example, after you left she was very quiet and taciturn for a while. Of course, she wants kids, but it’s not that easy, she has some kind of something, so it looks like the test tube is the only way.’

I felt the muscles of my stomach tighten.

‘That’s OK too, but it’s a bit much right at the moment. Oh, and she’s going to Toronto in the summer, got a couple of projects there to finish off.’

Did I hear a false note there? Or was that just something I wanted to hear? I could no longer even trust my own bloody judgement.

‘Maybe you should take some holiday and come up here then?’ said Carl. ‘We’ll have the whole house to ourselves. What d’you think? Party time. Like in the old days! Yeah!’

That old enthusiasm in his voice was still infectious, and I very nearly just said yes.

‘I’ll have to see. Summer is like the peak season with all the holidaymakers here down south.’

‘Come on. You need a holiday too. Have you had even a single day off since you’ve been there?’

‘Oh yes,’ I said, counting them. ‘When is she leaving?’

‘Shannon? First week in June.’

I drove home the second week in June.

SOMETHING STRANGE HAPPENED AS I was driving over Banehaugen, passing the county sign for Os, Lake Budal calm as a millpond before me. I felt myself choking up, and the road began to float away, and I had to blink hard. It was like one of those times when from sheer boredom you’re slumped in front of the TV watching some third-rate tearjerker and – because you’re quite relaxed and unprepared – you suddenly find yourself having to swallow hard.

I’d taken four days off.

For four days Carl and I sat around on the farm and looked out at the summer. At a sun that seemed as though it would never set. Drinking beer after beer in the winter garden. Talking about the old days. About school, friends, parties, the dances at Årtun and the Aas cabin. He talked about the USA and Toronto. About the money pouring in through a red-hot property market. About the project where, finally, they had bitten off more than they could chew.

‘What’s hardest to take is that it could’ve worked out,’ said Carl, adding his empty beer bottle to the row along the windowsill. His was three times longer than mine. ‘It was just a question of timing. If we’d managed to keep the project afloat for another three months, we’d be filthy rich today.’

When it all went pear-shaped the other two partners had threatened to sue him, he said.

‘I was the only one who hadn’t lost absolutely everything, so they thought they could shake a bit of money out of me,’ he said with a laugh and opened another bottle.

‘Don’t you have a ton of work you should be doing?’ I asked.

We’d visited the building site and had a look around. Work had begun there, but it didn’t exactly look like things were in full swing. A lot of machinery but not many people. And if you were to ask me, I’d have to say it didn’t look as though all that much had happened in the nine months they’d been at it. Carl explained they were still working on below-ground stuff, and that it had taken time to organise the roads, the water supply and sewage disposal. But that once they started work on the actual hotel building things would really speed up.

‘Actually the hotel is being built somewhere else even as we stand here. Module building is what they call it. Or element building. Over half the hotel will arrive here ready-made as large boxes that we then put in place.’