The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  ‘Well?’ said Carl brightly. ‘What do people do for kicks around here?’ He put one arm across my shoulder, laid the other round Grete’s. Breathed champagne breath on me.

  ‘Hm,’ I said. ‘What do you say, Grete?’

  ‘Trotting,’ said Grete.

  ‘Trotting?’ Carl laughed loudly and took a glass of champagne from the tray on the counter. He was getting very drunk, no question about that. ‘I didn’t know Roy followed the gee-gees.’

  ‘I’m trying to get him interested,’ said Grete.

  ‘And what’s your pitch?’

  ‘My pitch?’

  ‘Your sales pitch.’

  ‘If you don’t play, you can’t win. And I think Roy knows that.’

  Carl turned to me. ‘Do you?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Roy’s more the type that thinks if you don’t play, you can’t lose,’ said Carl.

  ‘It’s just a question of finding a game where everyone’s a winner,’ said Grete. ‘Just like with your hotel, Carl. No losers, only winners and a happy ending.’

  ‘Let’s drink to that!’ said Carl. He and Grete clinked their glasses together and then Carl turned to me, his glass still raised.

  I realised I was still wearing that idiotic smile.

  ‘Left my glass over there,’ I said, nodding towards the Bowie colloquy, and then walked away, with no plans to return.

  As I walked back towards them my heart was singing. Paradoxical, carefree, and almost mockingly, like the wheatear that sat on a gravestone and sang his zip-tuk song as the priest tossed the earth down onto my parents’ coffins. There are no happy endings, but there are moments of meaningless happiness, and each one of those moments might be the last, so why not sing at the top of your voice? Tell the world. And then let life – or death – knock you down another day.

  As I approached Stanley turned his head towards me as though he had known I was coming. He didn’t smile, just sought out my eyes. A warmth flowed through my body. I didn’t know why, all I knew was that the time had come. The time when I would drive into Geitesvingen and not come out of the turn. I would drive off the road and out in free fall, secure in the knowledge that the only prize awaiting me was those few seconds of freedom, understanding, truth and all of that stuff. And then I would come to the end, crushed against the ground in a place where the wreck could never be recovered, where I could rot in a blessed loneliness, peace and quiet.

  I don’t know why I chose that particular moment. Maybe because that one glass of champagne had given me just enough courage. Maybe because I knew I had straight away to crush the little hope Grete had given me before I could pursue it and let it grow. Because I did not want the prize she was offering, it would be worse than all the loneliness a life could offer.

  I passed Stanley, picked up the champagne glass beside the trotting coupons and stood behind Shannon, who was listening to the new chairman as he spoke enthusiastically about what the hotel would mean for the village, although what he probably meant was for the coming council election. I touched Shannon’s shoulder lightly, leaned towards her ear, so close I could pick up the smell of her, so unlike the smell of any woman I had known or made love to, and yet so familiar, as though it could have been my own.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I whispered. ‘But there’s nothing I can do about it. I love you.’

  She didn’t turn to me. Didn’t ask me to repeat what I had just said. She just carried on looking at Gilbert with the same unchanged expression on her face, as though I had whispered a translation of something he was saying. But for an instant I could feel the smell of her grow stronger, the same warmth that flowed through me flowing through her too, lifting the scent molecules from her skin as it rose up towards me.

  I carried on towards the door, stopped by the old payazzo machine, downed the rest of the champagne and placed the glass up on the wooden frame. Noticed that Giovanni was standing there looking at me with his sharp and censorious rooster look before he – almost in contempt – turned away with a cock-a-doodle-doo that made his little red Hitler-quiff jump.

  I went out. Closed my eyes and inhaled the air, washed clean by the rain, as sharp as the blade of an open razor against the cheek. Oh yes, winter would be coming early this year.

  When I reached the station I called head office and asked to be put through to the personnel manager.

  ‘This is Roy Opgard. I was wondering if that position as manager of the station in Sørlandet is still open?’

  PART FOUR

  27

  THEY SAY I’M THE ONE who’s most like Dad.

  Silent and steady. Kind and practical. An average, hard-working type with no obvious talent for anything in particular but will always get by, perhaps mostly because he never asks too much of life. Bit of a loner but sociable when necessary, with enough empathy to know when someone’s in trouble, but enough sense of shame not to interfere in other people’s lives. The way Dad didn’t let others interfere in his. They said he was proud without being arrogant, and the respect he showed others was reciprocated, though he was never the village bellwether. He left that to the more literary, the more eloquent, the more pushy, the more charismatic and visionary, the Aases and the Carls. Those with less shame.

  Because he did feel shame. And that quality is something I very definitely inherited from him.

  He felt ashamed of what he was and what he did. I felt ashamed of what I was and what I didn’t do.

  Dad liked me. I loved him. And he loved Carl.

  As the older son I was given a thorough grounding in how to run a mountain farm with thirty goats. The goat population of Norway had been five times greater in my grandfather’s day, and the number of goat farmers had fallen by half just over the last ten years, and my father probably realised that in the future it wouldn’t be possible to make a living from goat farming on such a small scale at Opgard. But as he said: there’s always the chance that one day the power would go, the world be hurled into a chaos in which it was every man for himself. And people like me will still get by.

  And people like Carl will go under.

  And maybe that’s why he loved Carl more.

  Or maybe it was because Carl didn’t worship him the way I did.

  I don’t know if that’s what it was, a mixture of Dad’s protective instincts and a need to be loved by his son. Or that Carl was so like my mother when she and my dad first met. Alike in the way they talked, laughed, thought and moved, and even in the photos of Mum from back then. Carl was as good-looking as Elvis, Dad used to say. Maybe that’s what he fell for in Mum. Her Elvis looks. A blonde Elvis, but with the same Latino or Indian features: almond-shaped eyes, smooth, glowing skin, prominent eyebrows. The smile and the laughter that seemed always to be just below the surface. Maybe my father fell in love all over again with Mum. And then with Carl.

  I don’t know.

  All I know is that Dad took over the bedtime reading in the boys’ room and that he spent longer and longer doing it. That he carried on long after I had fallen asleep in the upper bunk, and that I knew nothing about it until one night I was woken by Carl’s crying and Dad trying to hush him up. I peered over the edge of the bunk and saw that Dad’s chair was empty, that he must have sneaked into bed beside Carl.

  ‘What’s the matter?’ I asked.

  There was no answer from down below, so I repeated the question.

  ‘Carl was just having a bad dream,’ said my father. ‘Go back to sleep, Roy.’

  And I went back to sleep. I slept the guilty sleep of the innocent. And I went on doing so until one night Carl was crying again, and this time Dad had left, so my little brother was alone with no one to comfort him. So I climbed down to his bunk, wrapped my arms around him and told him to tell me what he had dreamed, because then the monsters would all disappear.

  And Carl sniffed and said the
monsters had said he wasn’t to tell anybody, because then they would come and take me and Mum too, take us down into Huken and eat us.

  ‘But not Dad?’ I asked.

  Carl didn’t reply, and I don’t know if I understood and repressed it right there, or if I only understood later, wanted to understand it: that the monster was our father. Dad. And I don’t know either if Mum wanted to understand it but that in her case the will was lacking, because it was happening right in front of our eyes and ears. And that made her as guilty as me in looking the other way and not trying to stop it.

  * * *

  —

  When I finally did it I was seventeen years old and Dad and I were alone in the barn. I was footing the ladder as he shifted light bulbs up under the ridge. Barns on mountain farms aren’t all that high, but still I felt I was a risk for him, standing there a few metres below him.

  ‘You’re not to do what you do to Carl.’

  ‘All right then,’ said Dad quietly, and finished changing the light bulbs.

  Then he climbed down the ladder, with me holding it as steady as I could. He put the used bulbs down before attacking me. He didn’t hit me in the face, only on the body, in all the soft places where it hurt the most. As I lay in the hay, unable to breathe, he leaned over me and whispered in a thick, hoarse voice: ‘Don’t you accuse your father of something like that or I’ll kill you, Roy. There’s only one way to stop a father and that’s by keeping your mouth shut, wait for your chance and then kill him. You understand?’

  Of course I understood. That was what Little Red Riding Hood should have done. But I couldn’t speak, couldn’t even nod, just raised my head very slightly and saw that he had tears in his eyes.

  Dad helped me to my feet, we ate supper, and that night he was with Carl in the lower bunk again.

  Next day he took me into the barn where he’d suspended the big punchbag that came over with him from Minnesota to Norway. For a time he’d wanted Carl and me to box, but we hadn’t been interested, not even when he told us about the famous boxing brothers Mike and Tommy Gibbons from Minnesota. Tommy Gibbons was Dad’s favourite – he’d shown us pictures of him, said how Carl looked like the tall, blond heavyweight Tommy. I was more like Mike, the big brother who was nevertheless smaller, and whose career wasn’t so successful. Anyway, neither of them had been champions, Tommy came closest in 1923, when he went fifteen rounds and lost on points to the great Jack Dempsey. It was in the little town of Shelby, a crossing on the Great Northern Railway which the railway director Peter Shelby – the place was named after him – called ‘a godforsaken mudhole’. The town had been promised that the fight would put them on the map in the USA and they invested all they had and more in it. A big stadium was built, but only seven thousand turned up to watch, plus a handful that sneaked in without paying, and the whole town – including four banks – went bankrupt. Tommy Gibbons left a town in ruins, without a title, without a cent in his pocket, with nothing but the knowledge that he had at least tried.

  ‘How’s your body feeling?’ asked Dad.

  ‘Fine,’ I said, though I still ached all over.

  Dad showed me how to stand and the basic punches, then he tied his worn-out old boxing gloves on me.

  ‘What about the guard?’ I asked, recalling a newsreel I had seen from the Dempsey–Gibbons fight.

  ‘You hit hard and you hit first, so you don’t need that,’ he said, and positioned himself behind the bag. ‘This is the enemy. Tell yourself you’ve got to kill him before he kills you.’

  And I killed. He kept a firm hold on the bag to stop it swinging too much, but now and then he peered out from behind it, as though to show me who it was I was training to kill.

  ‘Not bad,’ he said as I stood there bent double, dripping sweat, my hands on my knees. ‘Now we’ll tape your wrists and do it again without gloves.’

  Within three weeks I had punched holes in the bag and the cloth had to be sewn up with thick twine. I bloodied my knuckles hitting those stitches, let them heal for two days and then bloodied them again. It felt better that way, the pain deadened the pain, deadened the shame I felt just standing there and punching, unable to do anything else.

  Because it went on.

  Not as often as before, maybe, I don’t remember.

  Remember only that he no longer cared if I was asleep or not, didn’t care if Mum was asleep, cared only to show that he was master in his own house, and that a master does as he pleases. And that he had turned me into his physically equal opponent, as though to show us that he controlled us spiritually, not physically. Because what is physical is evanescent and fades, while spirit is eternal.

  And I felt shame. Shame as my thoughts tried to flee from the sounds down below, from the swaying and creaking frame of the bunk beds, from that house. And after he’d gone I climbed down to Carl, held him until his crying stopped, whispered in his ear that one day, one day we’d go somewhere far away. I’d stop him. Stop that fucking mirror image of me. Empty words that only made my shame the greater.

  * * *

  —

  We grew old enough to go to parties. Carl drank more than he should. And wound up in trouble more often than he should. And I was glad of it, because it opened up a place where I could do what I could never do at home: protect my little brother. It was simple, I just did what Dad had taught me: hit first and hit hard. Hit faces as though they were punchbags with Dad’s face on them.

  But the day had to come.

  * * *

  —

  And the day did come.

  Carl came and told me he’d been to the doctor’s. That they’d examined him and asked him a lot of questions. That they had their suspicions. I asked what was wrong with him and he pulled down his trousers and showed me. I felt so angry I began to cry.

  Before going to bed that night I went to the porch and took down the hunting knife. I put it under my pillow and waited.

  On the fourth night he came in. As usual I was woken by the little creak from the door. He’d turned off the light in the corridor so all I saw was the outline in the doorway. I put my hand under the pillow and gripped round the handle of the knife. I had asked Uncle Bernard, who had read all about the saboteurs in Os during the war, and he said that silent killing was something you did by sticking your knife into the enemy’s back at the level of the kidneys. That cutting someone’s throat was much more difficult than it looks in films, that a lot of them ended up cutting their own thumb that was holding the enemy. I didn’t know exactly how high up the kidneys were, but my plan anyway was to stab lots of times, so one of them would probably hit. If not, then I’d have to go for his throat and my thumb, I didn’t give a fuck.

  The figure in the doorway swayed slightly, maybe he’d drunk a few more beers than usual. He just stood there, as though wondering if he’d taken the wrong turning. As indeed he had. For years. But this would be the last time.

  I heard a sound, as though he was drawing breath. Or sniffing the air.

  The door closed, pitch darkness descended and I got ready. My heart was pounding so hard I could feel it literally pressing against my ribs. Then I heard his footsteps on the stairs and realised he had changed his mind.

  I heard the front door open.

  Had he sensed something? I had read somewhere that adrenaline has a distinctive smell that our brain – consciously or unconsciously – registers, and puts us on the alert automatically. Or had he come to a decision there in the doorway? Not just to walk away from it tonight, but that it was over. That it would never happen again.

  As I lay there I could feel my body start to shake. And when a rasping sound came from my throat as I drew breath I realised I had been holding it from the moment I heard the door creak.

  After a while I heard the sound of someone crying quietly. I held my breath again, but it wasn’t coming from Carl, he was breathing regu
larly again. It was coming through the stovepipe.

  I crept out of bed, pulled on some clothes and went downstairs.

  Mum was sitting in the half-dark in the kitchen by the worktop. She was wearing her red dressing gown that looked like a quilted coat, and staring out the window towards the barn, where the lights were on. She was holding a glass, and on the table stood the bottle of bourbon that for years had remained unopened in the cupboard in the dining room.

  I sat down.

  Looked in the same direction as her, towards the barn.

  She emptied her glass and filled it up again. It was the first time since that evening at the Grand Hotel that I had seen her drinking when it wasn’t Christmas Eve.

  When at last she spoke her voice was hoarse and trembling.

  ‘You know, Roy, that I love your father so much I can’t live without him.’

  It sounded like the conclusion of a long, silent discussion she’d been having with herself.

  I said nothing, just stared across at the barn. Waiting to hear something from over there.

  ‘But he can live without me,’ she said. ‘You know, there were complications when Carl was born. I had lost a lot of blood and was unconscious, and the doctor had to let your father take the decision. There were two ways of doing it, one that was a risk for the foetus, and one that was a risk for the mother. Your father chose the one that was dangerous for me, Roy. Afterwards he said that of course I would have made the same choice, and he was right about that. But I wasn’t the one that chose, Roy. It was him.’