by Anne Holt
Joachim’s smile vanished when he switched off the ignition, pulling on the handbrake, and the reason he was in Glads vei struck him.
On Wednesday morning, as soon as he registered that Jon was in the office, Joachim had called Ellen and asked if he could pay her a visit. She seemed diffident, almost surly. Perhaps that was not so strange. When he thought about how badly he himself had taken Sander’s death, it was not difficult to imagine how she was feeling. He would have preferred to go there at once, but Ellen had said that it would not be convenient before Friday. He had no idea why, and did not think it a particularly good idea to enquire. In fact he had never been able to understand how she spent her time. Sander was at school all day long. Besides, his grandmother often took charge of him and, in any case, there were never more than eight to ten days between the times when he himself picked up the boy, usually from after-school activities, and kept him until bedtime. Sander always made a fuss about staying overnight, something he was allowed to do occasionally. At those times he stretched out, happy and content, beside Joachim in his massive double bed, in his Batman pyjamas and with a green pig made of soft plush in the crook of his arm. The pig, called Klonken, lived at Joachim’s apartment and was their secret. At home Sander was only allowed games, and his parents thought he was too old for cuddly toys. Sometimes, when Jon complained that it was impossible to get Sander to sleep, Joachim had been tempted to mention Klonken. At Joachim’s apartment, Sander was always happy to go to bed.
Nevertheless, he said nothing.
In any case, what Ellen spent all her time on was a mystery. Maybe she exercised. She looked as if she did.
Lingering for a moment at the top of the flight of wide slate steps, Joachim looked out across the city. The light hurt his eyes, even with sunglasses on. The sky was almost white, with even whiter specks of cloud, harbingers of good weather, in the south. It was already eleven o’clock. If only he had not made such a bloody mess of things, he could have been on the beach just now. Worked on his tan, swum for an hour, watched the girls go by. Phoned a pal, gone for a walk in the city centre when the sun began to set. Met some more girls.
He took a deep breath and then released it again with a faint whistling sound.
Everything felt so chaotic.
Anja used to say that he couldn’t handle emotions. To some extent, she was right about that. He could get to grips with that sort of thing, if forced to, but he had never quite seen the point of wasting time brooding. Life was simpler if you took it as it comes. If anything was enjoyable, he went on with it. If things became boring, he gave them up. When Anja, for instance, had used his relationship with Sander to drop a hint about it perhaps being time for them to move in together and think about having children, he only had to reflect briefly to know what was the right thing to do. He had fun with Sander. Sander was a plus point in his life, not only because the boy idolized him, but also because, deep down, Joachim was still a young boy who liked to play. He liked to teach, to communicate, to pass things on. Sander was no substitute for a son; he was the little brother that Joachim had never known he had wanted until they met.
He had no desire to have children of his own.
Not yet at least, and definitely not with Anja. Joachim Boyer was twenty-eight years old, and when Anja became boring and too much hassle, he cut her out of his life. That’s the way he had led his life for as long as he could remember. As a boy, he had been a talented football player and had trained fourteen hours a week as a fifteen-year-old. He had loved it, and dreamed of a professional career. The first time he had failed to be selected for the district team at the age of sixteen, he had suddenly stopped. Without once looking back. Never regretted it. If he could not be one of the best, there was no point. Between second and third years at high school he had a summer job as a sports reporter on the Dagsavisen newspaper. He handed in so much material that he was offered an extended temporary post. To his parents’ loud protests, he had accepted and packed in school. Three years later he had waltzed through Dagbladet and Se og Hør publications, where he earned more than both his parents put together, before ending up as a crime reporter on Verdens Gang. He fast-tracked to specialize in finance. After only eight months he had single-handedly toppled three business leaders, two for tax avoidance and one for sexual harassment of a whole crowd of weeping employees, who had finally found someone in whom they could confide in the good-looking, caring journalist who did not even take notes, but instead offered a comforting arm around their shoulders.
Joachim Boyer was not afraid of working long and hard, but above all felt that life should be fun. When Jon Mohr phoned one day to offer him a job at double his current salary and with fringe benefits that a journalist could only dream of, it was impossible to refuse. And he got on well. He knew how journalists thought, could anticipate their moves with pinpoint accuracy, and after a short time in Mohr & Westberg AS he had made himself virtually indispensable. Well liked by the younger ones in the firm, though a touch too self-important for the older ones, who on a couple of occasions had wanted to get shot of him. Something they never managed to do. Perhaps because it would be no catastrophe for him to have to leave: there would always be other opportunities for a man such as Joachim Boyer. He never clung like a limpet anywhere, preferring instead to rely on his own talents. Until now it had always paid off.
Anja often accused him of being simple, and she was correct on that point, too. He had experienced the best childhood in the world, in an area where one-third of his childhood friends had ended up on the scrapheap. All thanks to his ability not to take life too seriously. Follow his instinct. Think of things as black-white, right-wrong, yes-no. Joachim wanted to be simple. Life was not especially complicated if you refused to let anything really weigh on your mind.
Not until now.
He had got himself mixed up in a chaotic situation from which he could see no escape route.
He stood there, at the top of the steps down to Ellen and Jon’s villa, with Oslo lying at his feet under a hazy cloak of sunshine, with the fjord out there crowded with sailing boats and day-cruisers, and felt a surprising glimmer of longing to return to the carefree summers of his childhood.
Now he wanted so many things undone.
Maybe he could still rectify some of his stupid actions.
He descended the stairs in two leaps and strode quickly to the front door. Since the doorbell was out of commission, he opened the door and put his head inside, still with his hand on the doorknob.
‘Hello? Ellen? Are you here?’
‘Come in,’ he heard her shout from the kitchen.
He stepped inside, pushing his sunglasses up over his fringe, and crouched down. The laces on one of his training shoes had loosened.
‘Here,’ she called out again. ‘I’m in here!’
Joachim tried not to look in the direction of Sander’s room. He gave up on his laces, slipping the shoe off as he crossed the hall towards Ellen’s voice.
The kitchen was bathed in sunshine. After becoming accustomed to the semi-darkness in the hallway, he blinked and was tempted to put his sunglasses back on. Ellen was seated at the table with a newspaper spread out before her and a coffee cup in her hand. Joachim sniffed at the air and pulled a chair out from the table.
‘Have you started smoking?’ he asked as he sat down with his back to the window.
‘No,’ she replied. ‘It’s just that someone was here. No point insisting on a smoking ban, now that Sander’s gone.’
‘Whoever it was must have left their cigarettes behind,’ he said, nodding at the worktop, where four foul-smelling cigarette ends in an ashtray sat beside a pack of Marlboro and a disposable lighter.
‘Coffee?’ she asked casually. ‘You’re quick off the mark. We had an appointment at twelve o’clock, didn’t we?’
‘No. Eleven. And no thanks, to coffee. Have you got anything cold? Mineral water? Or just tap water.’
Standing up, Ellen carried her cup over to the fridge
. Steam was rising from it, but she nevertheless opened the door and placed it inside, before fetching a glass from a tall cupboard and filling it with ice from the dispenser on the freezer.
‘You shouldn’t really put hot things into a fridge,’ Joachim said, still taking shallow breaths of air through his nose; there was some other smell masked by the faint odour of burnt tobacco.
‘Of course not,’ she murmured. ‘What an idiot I am.’
Instead of taking the cup out again, she filled the tumbler with water from the tap.
‘Here. I’m afraid I don’t have very much else to offer.’
Joachim was taken aback. They had agreed on lunch.
‘That’s OK,’ he said, all at once recognizing the smell that was puzzling him. ‘Are you sitting here drinking, Ellen? It smells of...booze!’
‘Only a little...for medicinal purposes. Isn’t that what you say? Just something to settle my nerves.’
‘At eleven o’clock in the morning?’
He was more surprised than annoyed. In the first place, it was nothing to do with him what Ellen did to assuage her sorrow. And secondly, he could see from her demeanour that the cup in the fridge was hardly her first of the day. Her eyes were moist, and her hands were trembling as she sat there fiddling with the newspaper. It might possibly make it easier for him to broach the subject he had come to raise.
‘How are you doing?’ he asked softly.
‘Not so good.’
‘I understand.’
It was true. He did understand.
Sorrow was something Joachim Boyer had never particularly experienced or reflected upon, and so it had taken him a few days to put a name to what he was feeling. The shock on Friday afternoon, the discomfort at seeing Sander so badly injured, was one thing. The gnawing ache in his abdomen that occasionally pressed its way up and out and blurred his vision was something else entirely. Last night he had taken Klonken out. The smell of the green pig and the velvety softness of the fabric on his fingers had made him cry – cry in earnest, for the first time since his childhood. It disconcerted him, and made it difficult for him to think clearly.
‘When’s the funeral?’ he asked.
‘That’s one of many things I don’t know. The police won’t release him until...’
She stared out of the windows and laid her hands, palms down, on the table top.
‘I don’t know when they’ll let us have Sander back,’ she whispered. ‘I wish we could get it all over and done with. Now I’m just sitting here, in a kind of limbo, with nothing to do and nobody to talk to.’
‘Well, I’m here for now. And you’ve had another visitor earlier today, of course.’
Finally she made eye-contact with him. Her eyes were red-rimmed and shrunken. This must be the first time he had ever seen her without any make-up, and she seemed bewildered.
‘The cigarettes,’ he reminded her, nodding at the kitchen worktop.
‘Oh yes. It was...’
She began to mangle the newspaper again.
‘Have you had any thoughts about...about how you want to organize things?’
Leaning forward, Joachim rested his elbows on the table.
‘A gravestone, and that sort of thing? Notice in the newspaper? It’ll be Grefsen Chapel, I expect, since you...’
‘Gravestone,’ she repeated impassively.
‘Yes. That kind of thing takes some time, so you could start looking at them. Think about both what kind of stone and what sort of inscription you’d like. Both of you, I mean. You and Jon.’
‘Jon’s never at home.’
‘I know. Lots to do at work.’
‘It’s the middle of summer.’
‘Yes. But you know... The firm is expanding greatly, with new clients, new premises, soon a new name and profile and... Since Jon’s the manager, there’s a huge amount for him to see to, especially at the moment, when so many of the others are on holiday.’
Joachim was convinced that Jon had not mentioned to Ellen that he might be under investigation for insider trading. She never knew much about what was going on at work, something that had often surprised him. Joachim had grown up with parents who had seemed to talk to each other about everything. In Glads vei, life was characterized by restrained politeness, a fake sort of idyll in which voices were only raised in response to some crazy idea or other of Sander’s. Deep down, Joachim had never quite understood what the two of them saw in each other. Jon was both successful and well off, of course, but Ellen had reportedly practised as a dentist at one time and would have been well able to take care of herself. Besides, she must once have been pretty, he thought, scrutinizing her pinched, tear-stained face. Until now, he had simply taken their marriage for granted, in the way he seldom bothered about things that had nothing to do with him. Now, when he saw her folding up the newspaper and start plucking at her wedding ring instead, it struck him that this was a relationship he could make neither head nor tail of. They were rarely affectionate towards each other. In most contexts, it was mainly Jon who did the talking, and then almost never directed at Ellen. Ellen’s job seemed to be to look good. A trophy wife, it suddenly dawned on Joachim, even though the trophy did not look very attractive in the present circumstances.
At the same time Jon was incredibly preoccupied with looking after Ellen. Like the instance of having a beer after their Friday squash games – never in a pub, always at home. ‘So that Ellen avoids being on her own,’ Jon always said. When Jon and Joachim were working on major projects together, they usually left the office at about three o’clock and spent the rest of the afternoon and evening in Jon’s home office. ‘So that Ellen doesn’t have to be alone all the time,’ he said, although they sat behind a closed door that the family never even dared to knock on. Now, on the other hand, after Sander’s death, it was clear that Jon came home only to sleep. Maybe, for them, it was as it was for so many others: the children held them together. Without any youngsters, there was nothing left. Joachim did not know, and had never claimed to be an expert on serious relationships.
He used both hands to rotate the glass repeatedly.
‘Maybe the two of us could have a look at stones?’ he suggested. ‘If you get a laptop, we could—’
‘Mine’s ruined. Sander went swimming with it in Italy.’
Joachim gave a faint smile.
‘Why did he go swimming with your computer?’
‘He wanted to take pictures underneath the water, he said. I don’t know.’
‘Jon’s MacBook, then. Get that, then we can—’
‘That’s ruined as well.’
‘What? Did Sander—’
‘No. It was me.’
With a heavy sigh, Ellen ran both hands through her hair.
‘It was on the kitchen worktop when I was trying to open a bottle of ammonia. It had the kind of child-safety lid that made it a bit difficult to open, so I managed to spill the bottle all over the keyboard.’
‘Are you sure it’s ruined? Did you try it afterwards?’
‘First I rinsed it with water. Since ammonia is corrosive, you know, I...’
‘In water? You rinsed a computer with water? You’ve just had your own ruined by water, for heaven’s sake!’
‘But I thought ammonia was worse. So I rinsed it. And then I dried it. In the oven. It didn’t help.’
‘In the oven?’
Joachim could not restrain his laughter.
‘First the computer’s sprayed with ammonia, then it’s washed in water and, at the end of all that, it’s...baked?’
She nodded faintly, joining her hands and twisting her fingers from side to side.
‘Then I think it’s fairly certain to be absolutely ruined,’ Joachim said.
It went quiet between them. One window was open, and the noise of children playing in the neighbouring garden was mixed now and again with the distant roar from the ring road. A bee was buzzing on the window ledge. Laden and disorientated, it kept missing the tiny gap leading to freedom
.
‘Is there anything I can do for you, Ellen?’
He stretched across the table to put his hand on hers.
‘I don’t think so,’ she said, tugging her hand away.
Joachim sat up straight.
‘Shall we go out for a walk?’
‘A walk? Why on earth?’
‘It’s summer, Ellen. The weather’s beautiful. You can’t just sit here.’
‘Yes, I can.’
‘Just a short walk. In the neighbourhood here, or we can drive up to Solemskogen. Please.’
‘No, I don’t want to!’
Her voice was suddenly sharp.