Jo Nesbo - Midnight Sun

She nodded in the direction of the chopping. ‘He says we need to look after you. The book has something to say about that as well.’

We sat in silence for a while. Me with my hands on the table, she with hers in her lap.

‘Thanks for taking care of Knut after the funeral.’

‘Don’t mention it. How is he taking it?’

‘Well, really.’

‘And you?’

She shrugged her shoulders. ‘Women always find a way of coping.’

The chopping had stopped. He’d soon be back. She looked at me again. Her eyes had taken on a colour I’d never seen before, and the look in them had a corrosive intensity. ‘I’ve changed my mind. I want to know what you’re running from.’

‘Your original decision was probably more sensible.’

‘Tell me.’

‘What for?’

‘Because I believe you’re a good person. And good people’s sins can always be forgiven.’

‘What if you’re wrong, what if I’m not a good person? Does that mean I’d end up burning in that hell of yours?’ It came out more bitterly than I intended.

‘I’m not wrong, Ulf, because I can see you. I can see you.’

I took a deep breath. I still didn’t know if the words were going to come out of my mouth. I was inside her eyes, blue, blue as the sea below you when you’re ten years old and standing on a rock and your whole being wants to jump, apart from your legs, which won’t move.

‘I had a job that involved chasing drug-related debts and killing people,’ I heard myself say. ‘I stole money from my employer, and now he’s hunting me. And I’ve managed to get Knut, your ten-year-old son, involved in this as well. I’m paying him to spy for me. Well, not even that — he gets paid if he can report anything suspicious. For instance, if he sees the sort of people who wouldn’t hesitate to kill a young boy if it was necessary.’ I shook a cigarette out of the packet. ‘How am I doing on forgiveness now?’

She opened her mouth just as Knut opened the door.

‘There,’ he said, dropping the wood on the floor in front of the stove. ‘I’m starving now.’

Lea looked at me.

‘I’ve got tinned fish balls,’ I said.

‘Yuck,’ Knut said. ‘Can’t we have fresh cod instead?’

‘I’m afraid I haven’t got any.’

‘Not here. In the sea. We can go fishing. Can we, Mum?’

‘It’s the middle of the night,’ she said quietly. She was still staring at me.

‘That’s the best time to go fishing,’ Knut said, jumping up and down. ‘Please, Mum!’

‘We haven’t got a boat, Knut.’

It took a moment for him to realise what she meant. I looked at Knut. His face darkened. Then he brightened up again. ‘We can take Grandpa’s boat. It’s in the boathouse, he said I could.’

‘Did he?’

‘Yes! Cod! Cod! You like cod, don’t you, Ulf?’

‘I love cod,’ I said, meeting her gaze. ‘But I don’t know if your mother wants any right now.’

‘Yes, she does, don’t you, Mum?’

She didn’t answer.

‘Mum?’

‘We’ll let Ulf decide,’ she said.

The boy squeezed between the table and my chair, forcing me to look at him.

‘Ulf?’

‘Yes, Knut?’

‘You can have the tongue.’

The boathouse lay some hundred metres from the jetty. The smell of rotten seaweed and salt water stirred some vague summer memories into life. Something about having my head poked through a life jacket that was too small, a cousin showing off because they were rich enough to have a boat and a cabin, and a red-faced uncle swearing because he couldn’t get the outboard motor started.

It was dark inside the boathouse, and there was a pleasant smell of tar. Everything we needed for fishing was already in the boat, its keel held in a wooden cradle.

‘Isn’t that a bit big for a rowing boat?’ I estimated that it was five or six metres long.

‘Oh, it’s no more than medium-sized,’ Lea said. ‘Come on, we’ve all got to push.’

‘Dad’s was much bigger,’ Knut said. ‘A ten-oared boat, with a mast.’

We launched the boat, and I managed to clamber in without getting my legs too wet.

I fitted the oars in place on one of the two pairs of rowlocks, and began to row out away from shore with calm, strong strokes. I recalled putting a lot of effort into being better at rowing than my cousin during the one summer that I, poor, fatherless relation, was allowed to be a guest there. Even so, I thought I could see that Lea and Knut weren’t impressed.

Some way out I pulled the oars in.

Knut crept towards the back of the boat, leaned over the gunwale, threw the line out and stared after it. I could see the distant look in his eyes as his imagination roamed free.

‘Good lad,’ I said, taking off the jacket that had been hanging on a hook in the boathouse.

She nodded.

There was no wind, and the sea — or ocean, as Lea and Knut called it — was shiny as a mirror. It looked solid enough for us to walk towards the red cauldron of the sun sticking above the horizon off to the north.

‘Knut said you haven’t got anyone waiting for you back home,’ she said.

I shook my head. ‘Fortunately not.’

‘That must be strange.’

‘What?’

‘Not having anyone. No one thinking of you. No one looking after you. Or no one to look after.’

‘I’ve tried,’ I said, loosening the hook from one of the lines. ‘And I couldn’t handle it.’

‘You couldn’t handle having a family?’

‘I couldn’t handle looking after them,’ I said. ‘I’m — as you must have realised by now — not the sort of man you can rely on.’

‘I hear you say that, Ulf, but I don’t know if it’s true. What happened?’

I pulled the spoon bait free from the line. ‘Why are you still calling me Ulf?’

‘That’s what you told me your name was, so that’s the name I use. Until you want to be called something different. Everyone should be allowed to change their name every so often.’

‘And how long have you been called Lea?’

She screwed one eye up. ‘Are you asking a woman how old she is?’

‘I didn’t mean...’

‘Twenty-nine years.’

‘Hmm. Lea’s a nice name, no reason to change—’

‘It means “cow”,’ she interrupted. ‘I’d like to be called Sara. That means “princess”. But my father said I couldn’t be called Sara Sara. So instead I’ve been called cow for twenty-nine years. What do you have to say about that?’

‘Well.’ I thought for a moment. ‘Moo?’

At first she looked at me in disbelief. Then she started to laugh. That deep laugh. Slow guffaws. Knut turned round in the stern. ‘What is it? Did he tell a joke?’

‘Yes,’ she said, without taking her eyes off me. ‘I think he did.’

‘Tell me!’

‘Later.’ She leaned towards me. ‘So, what happened?’

‘I don’t know that anything happened.’ I cast the line out. ‘I was just too late.’

She frowned. ‘Too late for what?’

‘To save my daughter.’ The water was so clear that I could see the shimmering spoon lure sink deeper and deeper. Until it vanished out of sight in the greenish black darkness. ‘When I finally had the money she was already in a coma. She died three weeks after I had scraped together the cost of the treatment in Germany. Not that it would have made any difference, it was already too late. At least that’s what the doctors said. But the point is that I couldn’t do what I was supposed to. I let her down. That’s been the constant refrain to my life. But the fact that I couldn’t handle... that I couldn’t even manage when...’

I sniffed. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken the jacket off; after all, we were close to the North Pole. I felt something on my lower arm. My hair stood on end. A touch. I couldn’t remember the last time a woman had touched me. Until I remembered that it was less than twenty-four hours ago. To hell with this place, these people, all this.