Jo Nesbo - Midnight Sun

He counted it. Grinned and stuffed it in his own pocket. ‘Silence,’ he said. ‘And drink, nice and cold from the cellar. What sort do you want?’

‘Is there more than one?’

‘No.’ The same grin. ‘Does this mean you’re thinking of staying in Kåsund, Ulf?’

‘Maybe.’

‘You’re safe here now, so why go anywhere else? You’ll be staying up at the cabin?’

‘Where else?’

‘Well...’ His grin looked as though it had been painted onto his face. ‘You’ve got to know a couple of the women here in the village. You might perchance feel like warming up a bit now that autumn’s on its way.’

I toyed with the idea of landing a fist right on his brown teeth. Where the hell had he got that from? I forced a smile: ‘Has your cousin been telling you stories, now?’

‘Cousin?’

‘Konrad. Kåre. Kornelius.’

‘He’s not my cousin.’

‘He said he was.’ I tried to unfold my legs again.

‘Did he?’ Mattis raised an eyebrow and scratched his bushy hair. ‘Bloody hell, that would mean... Hey, where are you going?’

‘Away from here.’

‘But you haven’t got your drink yet.’

‘I’ll manage without.’

‘Will you?’ he called after me.

I walked between the gravestones up to the church.

The door was ajar, so I slipped in.

She was standing by the altar with her back to me, arranging some flowers in a vase. I inhaled, trying to keep my breathing calm, but my heart was already out of control. I walked up to her with heavy strides. Even so, she jumped when I cleared my throat.

She spun round. The two steps leading up to the altar meant she was looking down at me. Her eyes were red, narrow slits under the swollen lids. I thought my heart must be visible from the outside, that it was about to start hammering dents in my chest.

‘What do you want?’ Her whispered voice sounded husky from crying.

It was gone.

Everything I had planned to say was gone, forgotten.

All that was left was the last sentence.

So I said it.

‘Lea, I love you.’

I saw her blink, as if horrified.

Encouraged by the fact that she hadn’t immediately thrown me out, I went on: ‘I want you and Knut to come with me. To a place where no one can find us. A big city. One with an archipelago and mashed potato and medium-strength lager. We can fish and go to the theatre. And afterwards we can walk slowly home to our flat on Strandvägen. I can’t afford a big flat if it has to be there, because it’s an expensive street. But the flat would be ours.’

She whispered something as tears filled her already red eyes.

‘What?’ I took a step forward, but stopped when she raised her hands. She was holding a bouquet of withered flowers up protectively in front of her. She repeated herself, louder this time:

‘Is that what you said to Anita as well?’

It was as if someone had tipped a bucket of water from the Barents Sea over me.

Lea shook her head. ‘She came here. To give me her condolences about Hugo, she said. And she had seen you and me in my car, so she wondered if I knew where you were. Seeing as you’d promised to come back.’

‘Lea, I...’

‘No need, Ulf. Just get out of here.’

‘No! You know I needed somewhere to hide. Johnny was here looking for me. Anita offered to let me stay, and I had nowhere else to go.’

I thought I could detect a tiny hint of doubt in her voice. ‘So you didn’t touch her?’

I wanted to deny it, but it was as if my jaw muscles were paralysed, and my mouth just gaped open. Knut had been right: I’m no good at lying either.

‘I... I might have touched her, maybe. But it didn’t mean anything.’

‘No?’ Lea sniffed, and wiped away a tear with the back of her hand. ‘Maybe it’s for the best, Ulf. I couldn’t have gone anywhere with you anyway, but now at least I won’t have to wonder about what might have been.’

She lowered her head, turned and walked towards the sacristy. No long-winded farewell.

I wanted to run after her. Stop her. Explain. Plead. Force her. But it was as if all my energy, all my willpower had drained away.

And as the sound of the door slamming behind her echoed around the rafters, I knew that was the last time I would see Lea.

I tumbled out into the daylight. Stood there on the church steps, staring out with stinging eyes at the serried ranks of gravestones.

The darkness came. I fell. The hole sucked me in, down, and not even all the drink in the world would stop it.

But of course even if it doesn’t do anything to help, drink is still drink. And when I knocked on Mattis’s door and went in, he had already put two bottles on the kitchen worktop.

‘I thought you’d come back,’ he grinned.

I took the bottles and left without a word.

How does a story end?

My grandfather was an architect. He said that a line — and a story — ends where it began. And vice versa.

He designed churches. Because he was good at it, he said, not because he believed in the existence of any gods. It was a way of making a living. But he said he wished he believed in the God they paid him to build churches for. That might have made the job feel more meaningful.

‘I ought to design hospitals in Uganda,’ he said. ‘It could be planned in five days, and built in ten, and it would save lives. Instead I sit for months designing monuments for a superstition that doesn’t save anyone.’

Places of refuge , that’s what he called his churches. Places of refuge from anxiety about death. Places of refuge for people’s incurable hope of eternal life.

‘It would have been cheaper to give people a security blanket and a teddy bear to comfort them,’ he said. ‘But it’s probably better that I design churches that people can bear to look at, rather than let any of the other idiots get the job. They’re littering the country with those monstrosities they call churches these days.’

We were sitting in the stench of the old people’s home, my rich uncle, my cousin and me, but neither of the other two was listening. Basse was just repeating things he’d said a hundred times before. They nodded, murmured in agreement, and kept glancing at the time. Before we went in, my uncle had said that half an hour was enough. I wanted to stay longer, but my uncle was driving. Basse had started to get a bit confused, but I enjoyed listening to him repeat what he thought about life. Possibly because it gave me a sense that some things were fixed, in spite of everything. ‘ You’re going to die, take it like a man, lad! ’ The only thing I was worried about was that one of the senior nurses with a crucifix round their neck would persuade him to surrender his soul to their god when the end was near. I suppose I thought that would be traumatic for a boy who had grown up with his grandfather’s atheism. I didn’t believe in life after death, but I did believe in death after life.

At any rate, that was now my innermost hope and desire.

Two days had passed since the door had slammed behind Lea.

Two days in bed in the cabin, two days in free fall down the hole, while I emptied one of the bottles of drink.

So how do we finish this story?

Dehydrated, I tumbled out of bed and staggered to the stream. I knelt down in the water and drank. Afterwards I just sat looking at my own reflection in an eddy behind some rocks.

And then I knew.

You’re going to shoot the reflection.

Hell, why not? They weren’t going to get me. I was going to get me. The line stops here. And what the hell would be so awful about that? Son cuatro días , as Basse used to say. Life lasts four days.