Ю Несбё - The Kingdom

‘You can’t lie here,’ she repeated.

‘No?’ I said, raising my head slightly. We were alone in the alleyway, but from the square I could hear people chanting in unison. ‘Have I taken someone’s place?’

Shannon looked at me for a long time. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You know that.’

‘Shannon,’ I said, my voice thick, ‘I lo…’

The remainder was drowned in the noise as the heavens above her exploded in sizzling light and colour.

She took hold of my lapels and helped me to my feet, the landscape around me swimming, nausea blocking my throat. Shannon helped me out of the alleyway at the back of the sports shop. She led me along the highway, probably unseen, since everyone was gathered in the square and looking up as the fireworks blew this way and that in the gusting wind. A rocket whizzed low above the rooftops, as another – must have been one of Willumsen’s powerful emergency flares – climbed into the sky where it described a white parabola as it headed towards the mountains at two hundred kilometres an hour.

‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, as we concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.

‘Julie kissed me and—’

‘Yes, she told me, before her boyfriend dragged her away. I mean, what are you doing here, in Os?’

‘Celebrating New Year’s Eve,’ I said. ‘At Stanley’s.’

‘Carl told me that. But you’re not answering my question.’

‘Are you asking me if I came because of you?’

She didn’t reply. So I answered myself.

‘Yes. I came here to be with you.’

‘You’re crazy.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am crazy for believing you wanted me. I should have understood. You were with me as revenge on Carl.’

There was a jerk in my arm, and I realised she had slipped and lost her balance for a moment.

‘How do you know that?’ she asked.

‘Grete. She told me that she’d told you about Carl and Mari last spring.’

Shannon nodded slowly.

‘So it’s true?’ I said. ‘You and me, for you it was just revenge?’

‘It’s half true,’ she said.

‘Half?’

‘Mari isn’t the first woman Carl’s been unfaithful with. But she’s the first one I know he cared about. That’s why it had to be you, Roy.’

‘Oh?’

‘For my revenge to be equal it had to be with someone I had feelings for.’

I had to laugh. It was brief, hard laughter. ‘Bullshit.’

She sighed. ‘Yes, it is bullshit.’

‘There, you see.’

Suddenly Shannon let go my arm and stood in front of me. Behind the small figure the highway stretched like a white umbilical cord into the night.

‘It is bullshit,’ she said. ‘Bullshit to fall in love with the brother of your husband because of the way he strokes the breast of a bird you’re holding while he tells you about the bird. It’s bullshit to fall in love with him because of the stories his brother has told about him.’

‘Shannon, don’t—’

‘It’s bullshit!’ she shouted. ‘Bullshit for you to fall in love with a heart that you know doesn’t know the meaning of the word betrayal.’

She put her hands against my chest as I tried to walk by her.

‘And it is bullshit,’ she said quietly. ‘Bullshit that you can’t think of anything but this man because of a few hours in a hotel room in Notodden.’

I stood there, swaying.

‘Shall we go?’ I whispered.

The moment the workshop door closed behind us she pulled me in to her. I breathed in the smell of her. Dizzy and intoxicated I kissed those sweet lips, felt her bite my own until they bled, and we tasted once more the sweet, metallic taste of my blood as she unbuttoned my trousers and whispered a few angry words I seemed to recognise. Held me at the same time as she kicked and swept my legs from under me, so that I fell onto the stone floor. I lay there looking up at her as she danced round on one foot, pulling off her shoe and one of her stockings. Then she pulled up her dress and sat on me. She wasn’t wet but grabbed my stiff cock and forced it into her, and it felt as though the skin of my prick was being ripped off. But fortunately she didn’t move, she just sat there looking down at me like a queen.

‘Is it good?’ she asked.

‘No,’ I said.

We both began laughing at the same time.

The laughter made her sex contract around mine, and she must have felt it too, because she laughed even more.

‘There’s engine oil on the shelf up there,’ I said, pointing.

She put her head on one side and gave me a loving look, as though I were a child who should be going to sleep. Then she closed her eyes, still not moving, but I could feel her sex growing warm and wet.

‘Wait,’ she whispered. ‘Wait.’

I thought of the midnight countdown in the square. That the circle had finally been broken. That we had come out the other side and I was free.

She began to move.

And when she came it was with an angry, triumphal cry, as though she too had just managed to kick open the door that had been keeping her imprisoned.

We lay entwined in the bed and listened. The wind had dropped, and now and then we heard the burst of a late rocket. And then I asked the question I had been asking myself ever since that day Carl and Shannon had swung into the yard at Opgard.

‘Why did the two of you come to Os?’

‘Did Carl never say?’

‘Only that business about putting the village on the map. Is he on the run from something?’

‘He didn’t tell you?’

‘Just something about a legal wrangle concerning some property project in Canada.’

Shannon sighed. ‘It was a project in Canmore that had to be scrapped because of soaring costs and the finances running out. And there’s no wrangling. Not any more.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The case is closed. Carl was ordered to pay restitution to his partners.’

‘And?’

‘And he couldn’t. So he ran off. Came here.’

I raised myself up on one elbow. ‘You mean Carl is… on the run?’

‘In principle, yes.’

‘Is that what the spa hotel is about? A way for him to pay off this debt in Toronto?’

She smiled vaguely. ‘He’s not planning on going back to Canada.’

I tried to take all this in. So Carl’s homecoming was nothing more than the flight of a common-or-garden swindler?

‘And you? Why did you come here with him?’

‘Because I did the drawings for the Canmore project.’

‘And?’

‘It was my magnum opus. My IBM building. I didn’t get it built in Canmore, but Carl promised me another chance.’

It became clear to me. ‘The spa hotel. You’ve designed it before.’

‘With a few modifications, yes. The landscapes round Canmore in the Rocky Mountains and round here aren’t very different. We had no money left and no one who was willing to invest in our project. So Carl suggested Os. He said it was a place where people trusted him, where they regarded him as a local wonder-boy made good.’

‘So you came here. Without a krone in your pockets. But in a Cadillac.’

‘Carl said appearances are everything when you’re trying to sell a project like this.’

I thought of Armand, the travelling preacher. When it emerged one day that he’d been lining his pockets with money taken from gullible people who were hoping for a cure, at the same time as he stopped them getting the medical help they needed, he’d had to flee north. But when they caught up with him there it turned out he’d started a sect, built himself a church of miracle healing, and had three ‘wives’. He was arrested for non-payment of income taxes and fraud, and when he was asked in court why he had carried on swindling after he’d got away he had replied: