Jo Nesbo - Midnight Sun

I looked over to where I knew the path ran. At the landscape that seemed to rise up and vanish into the clouds. Somewhere in there, the long night started.

Bobby was one of the girls in Slottsparken. She had very long brown hair and dark eyes, and she smoked hash. That’s obviously an extremely superficial description of anyone, but those are the first things I think of. She didn’t say much, but she smoked a lot, which made her eyes soft. We were fairly similar. Her real name was Borgny, and she was from a wealthy family in the western suburbs. Well, she wasn’t quite as wealthy as she liked to make out; she just liked the idea of the rebellious hippy chick breaking away from social conservatism, financial security and right-wing politics for... well, what? To test some naive ideas about how to live life, expand her consciousness and break from old-fashioned convention. Such as the convention that when a man and a woman have a child together, that brings with it a certain responsibility for both parties. Like I said, we were fairly similar.

We were sitting in Slottsparken, listening to a guy play a dodgy version of ‘The Times They Are A-Changin’’ on an untuned guitar when Bobby told me she was pregnant. And that she was pretty sure I was the father.

‘Cool, we’re going to be parents,’ I said, trying not to look as though someone had just tipped a bucket of ice-cold water over my head.

‘You just have to pay maintenance,’ she said.

‘Well, obviously I’ll be happy to do my bit. We’ll do this together.’

‘Together is right,’ she said. ‘But not together with you.’

‘Oh? So... together with who, then?’

‘Me and Ingvald,’ she said, nodding towards the guy with the guitar. ‘We’re together now, and he says he’d like to be a father. As long as you pay maintenance, of course.’

And that’s what happened. Okay, so Ingvald didn’t hang around for long. By the time Anna was born Bobby was with another bloke whose name started with ‘I’, I think it might have been Ivar. I was allowed to see Anna very occasionally, at irregular intervals, but there was never any discussion of me looking after her. Nor did I think that was what I wanted either, not then. Not because I didn’t care — I fell in love with her the moment I first set eyes on her. Her eyes radiated a sort of blue shimmer as she lay in her pram gurgling and looking up at me, and even if I didn’t really know her, she became the most valuable thing in my life overnight.

Maybe that was why. She was so small and fragile, but so precious that I didn’t want to look after her on my own. I couldn’t. I didn’t dare. Because I was bound to do something wrong, something irrevocable. I was sure I would do lasting damage to Anna one way or another. Not that I’m an irresponsible or careless person, I’ve just got really bad judgement. That’s why I was always prepared to follow the advice given by random strangers, and leave important decisions to other people. Even when I knew that they — in this case Bobby — were no better than me. Cowardly is probably the word I’m looking for. So I kept out of the way, sold hash, and gave Bobby half the money once a week, when I would look down into the magical blue shimmer of Anna’s smiling eyes, and maybe even get to hold her when we were having coffee if Bobby was between men.

I told Bobby that if she could stay away from Slottsparken and dope, I’d keep away from the cops, from the Fisherman, from trouble. Because she and Anna wouldn’t be able to manage if I ended up behind bars. Like I said, Bobby’s parents weren’t actually that rich, but were so middle class and conservative that they’d made it very clear that they wanted nothing to do with their hash-smoking, promiscuous hippy daughter, and that she and the child’s father would have to fend for themselves, possibly with the help of the state.

Finally the day came when Bobby said she couldn’t handle looking after the bloody kid any more. Anna had been crying, her nose bleeding, and she had been running a fever for four days in a row. When I looked down at the bed, the blue light in her eyes had been replaced by blue circles beneath them; she was pale and had strange blue bruises on her knees and elbows. I took her to the doctor’s, and three days later came the diagnosis. Acute leukaemia. A one-way ticket to death. The doctors gave her four months. Everyone kept saying that things like that just happened, lightning striking at random, mercilessly, pointlessly.

I flew into a rage, asked questions, made phone calls, checked, went to see specialists, and eventually found out that there was a treatment for leukaemia in Germany. It didn’t save everyone, and it cost a fortune, but it gave one thing: hope. Sensibly, the Norwegian state had other things to spend its money on than fragile hope, and Bobby’s parents said it was fate, and a matter for the Norwegian health service, they weren’t paying for some fantasy cure from Naziland. I did the sums. If I sold five times as much hash, I still wouldn’t make enough in time. Even so, I tried, I worked eighteen-hour shifts and pushed like mad for sales, heading down towards the cathedral when the Slottsparken fell silent at night. When I next went to the hospital they asked why no one had been there for the past three days.

‘Hasn’t Bobby been here?’

The nurse and doctor shook their heads, said they’d tried calling her, but that her phone seemed to have been cut off.

When I got to Bobby’s she was lying in bed and said she was ill, and that it was my fault she couldn’t afford to pay the phone bill. I went to the toilet and was about to drop a cigarette butt in the bin when I saw the bloody cotton-wool ball. Further down in the bin I found a syringe. Maybe I’d been half-expecting it to happen; I’d seen more fragile souls than Bobby cross that line.

So what did I do?

I did nothing.

I left Bobby there, tried to convince myself that Anna was better off with the nurses than with either of her parents, and I sold hash and saved up for that bastard miracle cure I forced myself to believe in because the alternative was unbearable, because my fear that the little girl with the blue light in her eyes would die was even stronger than my own fear of death. Because we take comfort where we can find it: in a German medical journal, in a syringe full of heroin, in a shiny new book promising eternal life as long as you subordinate yourself to whatever new saviour they’ve just come up with. So I sold hash and counted the kroner, and counted the days.

That was the situation when the Fisherman offered me a job.

Two days. The clouds were hanging low, but weren’t letting go of any rain. The earth turned, but I didn’t see the sun. The hours were, if possible, even more monotonous. I tried to sleep through them, but that turned out to be impossible without Valium.

I was going mad. More mad. Knut had been right. There’s nothing worse than not knowing when the bullet’s coming .

Towards the evening of the second day I’d had enough.

Mattis had said the wedding would carry on for three days.

I washed in the stream. I no longer noticed the midges, they only annoyed me now when they landed on my eyes, in my mouth or on a piece of bread. And my shoulder no longer hurt. It was funny, but when I woke up the day after the funeral the pain was gone. I’d cast my mind back, tried to remember if I’d done anything in particular, but I couldn’t think of anything.

After washing I rinsed my shirt, wrung it out and put it on. I hoped it would be passably dry by the time I reached the village. I wondered whether or not I should take the pistol. In the end I decided to leave it, and hid it behind the moss alongside the money belt. I looked at the rifle and box of ammunition. I thought about what Mattis had said. That the only reason no one ever stole anything in Kåsund was that there was nothing worth stealing. There wasn’t room for the rifle behind the plank, so I wrapped it in some roofing felt I found under the bunk and hid it beneath four big stones over by the stream.