Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘I’ve overslept!’

She slipped out of the bed before I could get hold of her, and the arm I threw out after her hit instead her mobile phone that was on the bedside table. It hit the floor some distance away from the bed. I jerked the curtains open to get what I knew could well be the last sight I would have of Shannon’s naked body for a long time. Daylight flooded the room and I caught a glimpse of her back as she disappeared into the bathroom.

I stared down at the phone lying in the shadow of the bed. The screen had turned itself on. The glass was cracked. And from behind the prison bars of that shattered screen a smiling Carl looked up at me. I swallowed.

A single glimpse of her back.

But it was enough.

I lay back in the bed. The last time I had seen a woman so naked, so stripped bare by daylight, was when Rita Willumsen stood there in the mountain lake, humiliated in her swimming costume, her skin bluish in the icy cold. If I’d been in any doubt, it was now that I saw the writing on the wall, as people say.

I understood what Shannon had meant when she asked if hitting was in my genes.

CARL WAS MY BROTHER. THAT was what the problem was.

Or problems.

More specifically, one of the problems was that I loved him. The other that he had inherited the same genes as me. I don’t know why I had once been so naive as to believe that Carl didn’t have the same capacity for violence in him as me and Dad. Maybe because it was an accepted fact that Carl was like Mum. Mum and Carl who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Only people.

I got up from the bed and crossed to the window, saw Shannon running over the car park towards the Cadillac.

Probably she regretted it. Probably she had no appointment to keep, she had just woken up and knew that this was wrong, that she had to go.

She had showered, dressed in the bathroom, probably put on her make-up, and when she’d emerged given me a sisterly kiss on the forehead. She muttered something about a meeting in Os about the hotel, grabbed her bag and ran from the room. The brake lights on the Cadillac went on as she almost drove onto the road straight into a bin lorry.

The air in here was still dense from the sex, the perfume and the sleep of the night. I opened the window which I had closed at some point because she was shrieking so loudly I was afraid it might bring someone to the door, and because I knew we weren’t finished for the night. And I had been right. Each time one of us woke even the most innocent touch had started a new session, like a hunger that could not be satisfied.

What I had seen once the curtains were opened was that what I had thought were dark patches on the skin were bruises. These were not like the red love-marks and the streaks which had also appeared on her white skin during the night, and which hopefully would disappear in a day or two. These were the marks left by heavy blows, the way they look for days and weeks afterwards. If Carl had hit her in the face too then he had held back just enough for her to be able to cover it up with a little make-up.

Hit her, the way I’d seen Mum hit Dad in the corridor of the Grand Hotel that time. That was the memory that flickered through my brain when Carl had tried to convince me it was an accident when Sigmund Olsen went over the edge and down into Huken. Mum. And Carl. You live with a person and think you know all there is to know about them, but what do you really know? Did it occur to Carl that I might be capable of having sex with his wife behind his back? Hardly. A long time ago I had realised that we are all strangers to each other. And of course it wasn’t just those bruises on Shannon that made me realise Carl had violence in him. That my little brother was a murderer. It was the simple facts. Bruises and plumb lines.

FOR DAYS AFTER RETURNING TO Sørlandet I waited for Shannon to ring, to send a message, an email, anything. It was obvious that she would have to be the one to take the initiative, she was the one who had most to lose. Or so I thought.

But I heard nothing.

And there was no longer any room for doubt. She regretted it, of course. It had been a fairy tale, a fantasy I had planted in her when I told her I loved her and then went away, a fantasy that she, in peace and quiet, and in the absence of any other stimulation, had turned into something fantastic while she went about her daily round in the village and bored herself. So fantastic that the real me had been unable to live up to it. But now she’d got it out of her system and could return to her normal life.

The question now was when would I be able to get it out of my system? I told myself that our night together had been the aim, something to cross off on my to-do list, and that now I had to move on. But all the same, the first thing I did every morning was to check the phone for a message from Shannon.

Nothing.

So I started sleeping with other women.

I don’t know why it was, but it was as though they had suddenly discovered me, as though there was a secret society of women in which the news that I’d bedded my wife’s brother began to circulate, and that had to mean I was hot stuff. A bad reputation is a good reputation, as people say. Or else it was just writ large on my forehead that I didn’t care a damn. Maybe that was it. Maybe I had become the silent, sad-eyed man in the bar whom they’d heard could get anyone except the one he wanted, and for that reason didn’t give a fuck. The man they all wanted to prove wrong, that there is hope, there is salvation, there is another, and it’s them.

And yes, I played up to it. I played the part I had been allotted, told them the story, just left out the names and that it involved my brother, went home with them if they lived alone or to Søm if not. Woke up beside a stranger and turned to check my phone for messages.

But things improved, they did. On some days, hours would go by without my thinking of her. I knew that malaria is a parasitic illness that never completely leaves your blood, but it can be neutralised. If I stayed away and didn’t see her then I reckoned that the really hard part should be over within two years, three at the outside.

In December Pia Syse phoned and informed me that the station was now ranked sixth best in all Sørlandet. Naturally, I knew that it was the sales manager Gus Myre’s job to make calls with that type of news, not the personnel manager’s. That she probably had something else on her mind.

‘We want you to continue to run the station after the contract runs out next year,’ she said. ‘The conditions will of course reflect the fact that we are very pleased. And that we believe you can move the station even further up the list.’

It suited my plans well. I looked out the window of my office. Flat landscape, big industrial buildings, motorway with circular entrance and exit roads that made me think of the racing-car track on the floor of the back room at Willumsen’s Used Car and Breaker’s Yard, where kids could play if their father was out front buying a car. I’m guessing quite a few used-car sales came about because of kids kicking up about wanting to go down there.

‘Let me think about it,’ I said and hung up.

I sat there looking at the mist over the woods by the zoo. Jesus, the leaves on the trees were still green. I hadn’t seen a snowflake since coming here fourteen months earlier. They say you never really get a winter down here in the south, just more of that pissrain that isn’t really rain but just something wet in the air that can’t decide whether to go up or down or just stay where it is. Same as the mercury in the thermometer that reads six degrees for day after day. I stared into that bank of fog that lay like a thick duvet across the landscape and rendered it even flatter and more shapeless. A winter in Sørlandet was a shower of rain frozen in time. It just was there . So when the phone rang again and I heard Carl’s voice, for about two seconds I longed – yes, I longed! – for those ice-cold, freezing blasts, and that driving snow that whips against your face like grains of sand.