Jo Nesbo - Midnight Sun

‘Hi,’ I said quietly.

She looked up. Her cheeks were red, her eyes shiny.

‘Sorry,’ she said with a sniff.

‘You could have got some help to make dinner today.’

‘Oh, they all offered. But it’s better to keep yourself busy, I think.’

‘Yes, maybe you’re right,’ I said, sitting down at the kitchen table. I noticed her stiffen slightly. ‘You don’t have to say anything,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to sit down for a while before I left, and in there... well, I haven’t got much to talk to anyone about.’

‘Apart from Knut.’

‘Oh, he does most of the talking. Clever boy. He’s done a lot of thinking for someone his age.’

‘He’s had plenty to think about.’ She wiped her nose with the back of her hand.

‘Yes.’

I felt I was about to say something, that the words were on their way, I just wasn’t quite sure which ones they were going to be. And when they arrived it was as if they had arranged themselves, that I wasn’t in charge of them, yet they were still born of the clearest logic.

‘If you’d like to be on your own with Knut,’ I said, ‘but aren’t sure if you could manage, I’d really like to help you.’

I looked down at my hands. Heard the peeling stop.

‘I don’t know how long I’ve got to live,’ I said. ‘And I haven’t got any family. No heirs.’

‘What are you saying, Ulf?’

Yes, what exactly was I saying? Had these thoughts appeared in the few minutes that had passed since I had been standing beneath the window?

‘Just that if I disappear, then you should look behind the loose plank to the left of the wall cupboard up there,’ I said. ‘Behind the moss.’

She let the potato peeler fall into the sink and was looking at me with a concerned expression on her face. ‘Are you ill, Ulf?’

I shook my head.

She stared at me with that distant, blue look in her eyes. The look Ove had seen, and had drowned in. He must have done.

‘Then I’m not sure you should think like that,’ she said. ‘And Knut and I will be fine, so don’t worry about that either. If you’re looking for something to spend your money on, there are plenty of people in the village who are worse off.’

I felt my cheeks flush. She turned her back on me and started peeling again. She stopped again when she heard my chair scrape.

‘But thanks for coming,’ she said. ‘Seeing you cheered Knut up.’

‘No, thank you,’ I said, and headed towards the door.

‘And...’

‘Yes?’

‘There’s a prayer meeting here in two days’ time. Six o’clock. Like I said, you’d be very welcome.’

I found Knut in what I assumed was his room. His thin legs stuck out from under his bed. He was wearing a pair of football boots that had to be at least two sizes too small. He giggled as I pulled him out and dropped him down on top of the bed.

‘I’m off now,’ I said.

‘Already? But...’

‘Have you got a football?’

He nodded, but his bottom lip was pouting.

‘Good, then you can practise your kicking against the garage wall. Draw a circle, aim as hard as you can, then stop the ball as it comes back. If you do that a thousand times, you’ll be much better than the others in the team when they come home after the summer.’

‘I’m not in the team.’

‘You will be, if you do that.’

‘I’m not in the team because I’m not allowed to be.’

‘Not allowed?’

‘Mum says I can, but Grandpa says sport takes your attention away from God, that the rest of the world can spend Sundays shouting and yelling and running after a ball, but for us Sunday belongs to the Word.’

‘I see,’ I lied. ‘And what did your father say about that?’

The lad shrugged. ‘Nothing.’

‘Nothing?’

‘He didn’t care. All he cared about...’ Knut stopped. He had tears in his eyes. I put my arm round his shoulders. I didn’t need to hear it. Because I already knew, I’d met plenty of Hugos, some of them had been my customers. And I myself was fond of that sort of escape, I needed that outlet. It was just that as I sat there feeling the boy lean against me, the mute sobbing that rocked his warm body, I couldn’t help thinking that that had to be something no father could run away from, would even want to escape. That it was a blessing and a curse that strapped you firmly to the tiller. But who was I to say anything about that, I who — whether or not of my own accord — had abandoned ship before she had even been born? I let go of Knut.

‘You’re coming to the prayer meeting?’ he said.

‘I don’t know. But I’ve got another job for you.’

‘Okay!’

‘It’s like secret hiding, it’s all about not saying anything, not to anyone.’

‘Great!’

‘How often does the bus come?’

‘Four times a day. Two from the south, two from the east. Two during the day, two at night.’

‘Okay. I want you to be there when the daytime bus from the south arrives. If anyone you don’t know gets off, you come straight to me. You don’t run, you don’t shout, you don’t say anything. Same thing if a car with Oslo plates arrives. Do you get it? I’ll give you five kroner each time.’

‘Like a... spy mission?’

‘Something like that, yes.’

‘Are they the people who are going to bring your shotgun?’

‘See you, Knut.’ I tousled his hair and stood up.

On the way out I met the tall, fair-haired man as he stumbled out of the toilet. I heard the water flush behind him as he was still fumbling with his belt. He raised his head and looked at me. Ove Eliassen.

‘The peace of God,’ I said.

I could feel his heavy, drink-soused gaze on my back.

I came to a stop a short way down the road. The sound of drums was carrying on the wind. But I had already sated my hunger, I’d fulfilled my need to see other people.

‘I think it’s time for me to go home and have a good cry,’ Toralf would sometimes say late in the evening. That always made the other drinkers chuckle. That it happened to be precisely what Toralf did was another matter.

‘Put on that angry bloke of yours,’ he would say when we got home. ‘Let’s take a trip into the depths.’ I don’t know if he actually liked Charles Mingus, or any of my other jazz records, for that matter, or if he just wanted the company of another miserable bastard. But occasionally Toralf and I would enter the black of night at the same time.

‘Now we’re properly miserable!’ he would laugh.

Toralf and I called it the black hole. I’d read about a guy called Finkelstein who had discovered that there were holes in space which would suck everything in if you got too close, even light, and that they were so black they were impossible to observe with the naked eye. And that was exactly what it was like. You couldn’t see anything, you were just getting on with your life, and then one day you could just physically feel that you’d got caught in the gravitational field, and then you were lost, you got sucked into a black hole of hopelessness and infinite despair. And in there everything was the mirror image of the way it was outside, you’d keep asking yourself if there was any reason to have any hope, if there was any good reason not to despair. It was a hole in which you just had to let time run its course, put on a record by another depressed soul, the angry man of jazz, Charles Mingus, and hope you emerged on the other side, like some fucking Alice popping out of her rabbit hole. But according to Finkelstein and the others, that might be exactly what it was like, that there was a sort of mirror-image wonderland on the other side of the black hole. I don’t know, but it strikes me that it’s as good and reliable a religion as any other.