The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘I believe in chaos. And in our ability to see connections where none exist, because we find chaos intolerable.’

  ‘You don’t believe in fate?’

  ‘Should I?’

  ‘You predicted that you and I would lie in the same bed together.’

  ‘You heard the prediction, maybe subconsciously that was what made you invite me into your bed. Anyway, I said that we’d be clothed.’

  ‘We’re wearing towels. And we’re not kissing.’

  I was about to turn towards her, but then noticed the slight resistance in her body and desisted. Stared instead up at the ceiling.

  ‘Maybe we always do that,’ I said. ‘Try to make sure that some prediction or other we believe in will actually come true. Maybe that’s what our lives are about.’

  We fell silent and listened as the sound of the falling rain grew even lighter. Soon people would be back on the streets again. The taxis would be driving round. Miriam would go to her mother. I glanced at the clock. In a couple of hours’ time I would have to get up for my bus, but that was fine, I wouldn’t be getting any sleep tonight anyway.

  Now the rain had stopped completely. The Scot was no longer singing, but other voices were raised here and there across the square. Miriam changed position. I thought she was going to get up, but then she lay still. It was so quiet we could hear the drops of rain from the gutter as they hit the cobblestones beneath the open window with a sound like a deep, heavy sigh. I made up my mind.

  ‘What I’m going to tell you now isn’t to frighten you off Peter,’ I said. ‘It’s just something I think you ought to know.’

  ‘And what is that?’ she said, as though she’d been expecting this.

  ‘I think,’ I said, and swallowed, ‘that Peter has murdered someone.’

  ‘All right,’ she said. ‘But that doesn’t necessarily make him a bad person.’

  ‘It doesn’t?’ I said, astonished.

  ‘I hope not. I’ve murdered someone too.’

  * * *

  —

  The people had all gone home and the birds were not yet awake, so all was still outside by the time Miriam had finished her story. She told me she had been telling the truth when she said she didn’t lie to friends. ‘But you weren’t a friend then, Martin. You are now.’

  It wasn’t true that the man she had married hadn’t managed to consummate the marriage. Once he threatened to call for assistance she had allowed him to take her. Rape without violence, that was what she called it. She’d blocked the details from her memory and recalled only the vodka stink of his breath. And when they got into bed he had fallen asleep at once. What really happened next was that she had held a pillow over his face. And didn’t take it away again. She’d sat on top of the puny boy, trapped his arms beneath her knees and kept on pressing until she felt his resistance stop, and then carried on pressing.

  ‘Until all the tension was gone from his body and I was certain I was a widow,’ she said.

  The rest of her story was true enough.

  ‘I was convinced the police would stop us at the airport the following day. But I guess the Kolyev family never goes to the police. But if we’d taken a later plane, I’m certain they would have caught us.’

  Miriam and her mother had then lived with friends in Istanbul.

  ‘Until the day there was a knock on the door and someone was asking about us. Mamma’s friends knew it must Kolyev’s people and said they didn’t dare to hide us any longer. Since then we’ve travelled back and forth all across Europe. It’s expensive, but the advantage is that as long as we’re within Schengen we don’t have to show our passports. We never take planes or other forms of transport that keep passenger lists. But twice they’ve turned up at the hotels we were living at, and we’ve only just managed to get away. Now we stay in cheap hotels where they don’t keep a digital record of the guests. But it’s impossible not to leave any traces at all, so it’s just a matter of time before they catch up with us. The one thing that could stop them looking is if they realise there’s nothing to look for any more. That I’m dead. So that’s why…’ She swallowed. ‘That’s why I told Mamma we should go to the beach at Zurriola.’

  I swallowed hard. ‘You wanted to drown yourself.’

  She nodded slowly.

  ‘So that your mother would be free,’ I said. My voice was thick.

  Miriam looked at me, and from the expression on her face I realised that I had misunderstood.

  ‘It was supposed to look as though I’d drowned,’ she said. ‘I’m a good swimmer. I was on the university swimming team in Moscow. The plan was to make a lot of noise so that we had witnesses to the fact that I was in difficulties, and then disappear. I was going to swim for a long way underwater – I’m good at that – and then continue on out to the point on the eastern side, where there’s no road and it’s completely deserted. I had a bag with clothes and shoes hidden behind one of the rocks there, and then I was going to take a bus to Bilbao where I’d booked a room under a false name and stay there a week. Mamma was going to report me missing, so that it would be in the newspapers.’

  ‘And Kolyev would give up the chase.’

  She nodded. ‘But you came so quickly. I dived, and thought, well, now we have at least one witness to the drowning. But then you found me down there, in the darkness.’

  ‘It was your bathing cap.’

  ‘I wasn’t quite sure what to do. The plan was ruined. So I thought I should just let myself be rescued, and then try to disappear again some other day.’

  ‘But you’ve given up that idea now?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Because now that you’ve got Peter to help you, you don’t need it.’

  She nodded again.

  ‘And he knows nothing about the Kolyevs, is that correct?’

  ‘I told him about the abduction and the forced marriage.’

  ‘But he doesn’t know you killed your husband.’

  ‘Don’t call him my husband!’

  ‘OK. So this means that you knew all along it was me and not Peter who rescued you.’

  She gave a quick, bitter laugh. ‘You didn’t rescue me, Martin, you screwed things up for me.’

  ‘But you played the rescued maiden for Peter.’

  ‘He played the hero!’

  ‘Yeah, everyone’s lying. But…’ I felt a hand touching my face. Fingertips against my lips.

  ‘Shh,’ she whispered. ‘Can’t we just be quiet for a few moments?’

  I nodded and closed my eyes. She was right, we needed to take a break. Gather our thoughts. How could so much have happened in such a short space of time? Just two days ago Peter and I were pals on our way to the bull run in Pamplona, where his father and his uncle before him had been, so even though he would never admit it, it was understood to be a male rite of passage in the family. For me it was pure romance, living out Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, a book which, according to my father, has to be read and enjoyed when you’re young, because Hemingway is a young man’s writer, a writer who has less appeal the older you get. But instead of a short, three-minute sprint through the streets of Pamplona I had the feeling now of running all the time, with all the side streets barricaded, and the horns of the bulls getting closer and closer. It was like Peter said, everything that can happen happens all the time, all at the same time. Time both is and isn’t an illusion, because in an infinity of realities it is just as irrelevant as everything else. I was dizzy. I fell. I fell into a chasm and had never felt happier.

  I could hear how her breathing had fallen into rhythm with mine, how her body rose and fell with mine. It was as though, just for a moment, we had become one; it was no longer her body giving warmth to mine or the other way round, we had become one body. I don’t know how much time passed – five minutes, half an hour – before I spoke again:

 
‘Have you sometimes wished you could travel back in time and change something?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘But you can’t. We might feel as though we have free will, but if you’re the same person you were, carrying the same information in the same situation, you’ll just repeat yourself all over again. It’s obvious.’

  ‘But what if you can travel back as the person you are now?’

  ‘Aha. The idea that you can take revenge on your old psychopath of a schoolteacher in front of the whole class, or invest money where you know for certain what the outcome will be?’

  ‘Or score the penalty you missed in your earlier life,’ I added.

  ‘It’s fun to fantasise about,’ she said. ‘Until you come up against the paradox of time, that by changing the past you also change the future. And then it doesn’t work out.’

  ‘What if you travel back in time in the universe you inhabit now, but at a certain point which you’ve decided on yourself you slip into a parallel universe? One that up until that point is identical to the one you’ve been living in? A universe in which you already exist as another person.’

  ‘Meaning that there are two of you?’

  ‘Yes. In that case there is no paradox of time involved.’

  ‘But a completely crazy reality.’

  ‘Isn’t every reality crazy?’

  She laughed. ‘Oh, yes!’

  ‘The problem is that if you want to take that penalty kick again the earlier edition of yourself is already there, all geared up to miss. So you have to get that person out of the way first.’

  ‘How do you that?’

  ‘If you want to take that person’s place without anybody noticing, the best way is to do what you did. Get the main character to disappear for ever.’

  ‘Drown yourself?’

  ‘Put a pillow over his face while he’s sleeping.’

  ‘Er, right. Martin?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘What are we talking about now?’

  ‘We’re talking about Peter having travelled here from another reality which was identical with this one until two days ago. And in this reality, which is here and now, he killed himself while I was out at breakfast.’

  ‘Here? In this bed? With a pillow?’

  ‘I think it happened in the bathroom, perhaps while my Peter was showering or using the toilet. The Peter who has just arrived hit him with something heavy, and there was bleeding, because there’s blood beneath the toilet bowl. The new, but older, Peter cleaned up as far as he could, wrapped the body in the floor rug and dumped it in the wheelie bin behind the building, which he knew would be emptied later the same day.’

  ‘I love it,’ she laughed. ‘But why? Why has he come back?’

  ‘To change something that happened in the universe he’s arrived from.’

  ‘And that is?’

  ‘That he didn’t get you. I think you’re the penalty kick he missed.’

  ‘This is so good! You should make a film about it,’ she said, apparently not noticing that she’d lain a hand on my chest.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said, and closed my eyes again. It was OK. OK to leave it there. Outside, it had started raining again. Miriam sighed heavily. Without opening my eyes I noticed the light from her phone.

  ‘I need to tell Mamma I’m spending the night here,’ she said. ‘It’s OK, all she knows is that I’ve rented a room here. She doesn’t know you’re here.’

  I mumbled something in response. On the interior of my eyelids I saw once again that naked corpse. The mark on the temple. The white, unblemished skin. No tattoo. Peter. Who had just fallen in love for the first time in his life. Who had not yet had time to make his first mistake, the one that would ensure he never got her. He just looked like a happy boy sleeping.

  * * *

  —

  I was mistaken.

  I did manage to sleep.

  When the alarm on my phone woke me it was still dark outside.

  I looked at her, lying with her back turned to me in the bed. The black hair spread out across the pillow.

  ‘I’ve got to go,’ I said.

  She didn’t move. ‘Will you tell Peter that we met?’

  ‘No, I promised, remember.’

  ‘Sure you promised, but you’re best friends. I know how it is. Anyway, we’ve established now that all three of us are liars.’ She turned in the bed and smiled at me – at least I saw teeth in the darkness.

  ‘I don’t know if the guy in Pamplona is any friend of mine,’ I said. ‘But I do know that I love you.’

  ‘That’s what I call respecting the girl in the morning,’ she muttered, and turned her back on me again.

  * * *

  —

  Once outside I discovered I hadn’t enough cash for a taxi, but at least, as I ran to the bus station, my body built up enough warmth to dry off my clothes, which had been damp and ice-cold when I put them on in the dark.

  There was a strange atmosphere on the bus to Pamplona. The passengers fell into three categories. In the first were those who were gearing themselves and their pals up for the bull run, shouting to each other from their seats, laughing loudly to hide their nervousness, punching one another on the shoulder and already on the sangria and the brandy. Then there were those who slept or else tried to. The third group was me, the guy on his own who sat looking out across the landscape, thinking. Who tried to understand and make sense of it all, and each time had to give up and start again. Finally the thinking was interrupted by a phone call from Peter, which I couldn’t take, otherwise he would have known I was sitting on a bus. There was still over an hour until we arrived, and that wouldn’t fit in with the story about it being a local bus.

  I didn’t call back until we reached the outskirts of Pamplona.

  ‘And here was me thinking you’d overslept,’ he said.

  ‘No way. Meet at Jake’s in fifteen?’

  ‘I’m there already. See you.’

  I pushed the phone down into my pocket. Had there been something in his voice? Something not quite right, some sign that he knew? I had no idea. Had it been Peter I would have known. But the man I had just spoken to was a stranger. I felt as though my brain were about to explode.

  * * *

  —

  Jake’s was so crowded I literally had to force a way between all the men – and the few women – wearing red and white. Peter – or the man calling himself Peter – was seated at the bar. He must have started early. He was wearing a cap and a large pair of sunglasses I hadn’t seen before.

  ‘Enjoy,’ he said, pointing at a full glass of brandy.

  I hesitated. Then I picked up the glass and drank it in one.

  ‘Scared?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  He nodded at the newspaper on the counter. ‘The bulls today are from the Galavanez farm. People say the bulls from there are real killers.’

  ‘They do?’

  ‘What they probably don’t know is that they’re the ones who are going to get killed. This afternoon.’

  ‘I guess it’s better not to know,’ I said.

  ‘Yes.’ He looked at me. I looked at him. It was easy to see now. When he’d emerged from the bathroom in San Sebastián and said he’d thrown up, I’d thought the reason he’d lost his tan and looked older was that he was ill. Where had he come from? Which time? Which place?

  ‘The hour is late,’ he said without looking at his watch. ‘Let’s go.’

  * * *

  —

  We stood in the same place as we had done the day before. That was the plan, that as far as possible the second time should be a replica of the first. Sticking to as many of the variables as possible, as Peter had described it. So that we could focus on the experience itself, not just spend the time processing everything that was new and unknown. Experiencing the same t
hing, but in a different way. Was that what this Peter had done over the last two days? In the universe he came from, had he and I – or the self I was in that other universe – stood in this same place waiting for the bulls? Of course, things had started to change from the moment he entered this universe, the sequence of events had stopped running in parallel. But how much had he changed? And how much did he want to change? It was unbearable.

  Next to us a boy began sobbing convulsively. I recognised him as one of the noisy Americans from the bus. No, it was unbearable and I turned to Peter intending to tell him that I knew who he was – or more accurately, who he wasn’t – when a sound told us that the bulls had been released.

  My mouth went dry. I hunched over in a sort of starting position. I don’t know why the runners didn’t spread themselves out more evenly along the route, because actually one place seemed as good as any other. Instead we were gathered in groups. Maybe the idea is that there’s safety in numbers.

  ‘I’ll run directly behind you,’ said Peter. ‘Between you and the bulls.’

  The noise and the shouting got closer, and I seemed to smell panic and blood in the air, the same way the rain on the street the day before had pushed the air in front of it, causing the trees to sway and rustle out a forewarning. A couple of the tourists broke from our crowd and started to run, like those drips falling from the guttering outside the room during the night.

  And then there they were. Rounding the corner. One of the bulls slipped on the cobblestones, fell onto his side but rose to his feet again. A body lay in the road where the bull had landed. A shaven-headed man in white ran directly in front of the lead bull, seeming to be steering it with the rolled-up newspaper he held in his hand, using it now to strike the bull on the forehead and now to keep his balance. The swarm around us began to move and I wanted to run, but somebody held me back by my jacket.

  ‘Wait,’ said Peter calmly behind me.

  My mouth was so dry I couldn’t respond.

  ‘Now,’ he said.

  I ran. A little to the left of the middle of the street, as on the previous day. Concentrating on what was in front of me. Not falling. Everything else was beyond my control. Just feeling my way forward. But there was nothing there, white fear blanked out everything else. And then the legs went from under me. A clear and obvious trip. That was all I had time to think before I hit the cobblestones.