The Kingdom

by Jo Nesbo

  What was I expecting to hear from the barn? I know what it was. A shot. The door to the porch had been open when I came down the stairs. And the shotgun that usually hung high up on the wall was gone.

  ‘But if I had had to choose between saving your life and Carl’s, then I would have chosen him, Roy. So now you know. That’s all the mother I’ve been to you.’ She raised the glass to her mouth.

  I had never heard her talk that way before, and yet I didn’t care. All I could think about was what was happening in the barn.

  I got up and walked out. It was late summer, and the night air was cool against my hot cheeks. I didn’t rush. Walked at a measured tread, almost like a grown man. In the light from the open barn door I saw the shotgun, leaning up against the door jamb. As I came closer I saw the ladder leaning against one of the roof beams, and a rope slung over it.

  I heard the dull thud of punches against the plastic covering of the punchbag.

  I stopped before I reached the door, but close enough to be able to see him. He was punching and jabbing the bag. Did he know the face I had drawn on it was his? Probably.

  Was that shotgun leaning there because he hadn’t managed to finish what he had started? Or was it an invitation to me?

  My cheeks were no longer hot. Abruptly, along with the rest of my body, they had turned ice cold, and the slight night breeze blew right through me as though I were a fucking ghost.

  I stood there and watched my father. Of course I knew that he wanted me to stop him, stop what he was doing, stop his heart. Everything was arranged. He’d organised things so that it would look as though he’d done it himself, even that rope gave its own clear message. So all I needed to do was shoot at close range and lay the shotgun beside the body. I shook. I could no longer control my body, nothing obeyed, my limbs quivered and shook. I didn’t feel anger or fear any longer, all I felt was impotence and shame. Because I couldn’t do it. He wanted to die, I wanted him to die, and yet I still could not fucking do it. Because he was me. And I hated him and I needed him, as I hated and needed myself. As I turned and walked away I heard him groan and punch, swear and punch, sob and punch.

  At breakfast next morning it was as though it hadn’t happened. As though it was all just something I had dreamed. Dad peered out the kitchen window and passed some remark about the weather, and Mum hurried Carl along so he wouldn’t be late for school.

  28

  A FEW MONTHS AFTER I’D left my father in the barn, fru Willumsen pulled up in front of the workshop and booked a service for her Saab Sonett ‘58 model, a roadster, and the only cabriolet in the village.

  People in the village claimed that Willumsen’s wife was obsessed with a Norwegian pop diva from the seventies and tried to copy her in every way: the car, the clothes, the make-up and her way of walking. She even went so far as to try to copy the diva’s famous deep voice. I was too young to remember this pop star, but fru Willumsen was a diva all right, no question about it.

  Uncle Bernard had a doctor’s appointment so I had to go over the machine myself to see if there were any obvious problems.

  ‘Nice lines,’ I said, stroking a hand over one of the front fins. Fibreglass reinforced plastic. According to Uncle Bernard, Saab had produced fewer than ten of them, and it must have set Willumsen back more than he liked.

  ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  I opened the bonnet and looked over the engine. Checked the leads and that the caps were on properly, copying someone else again, in this case Uncle Bernard.

  ‘You look like you know how to handle the insides too,’ she said. ‘Even though you look so young.’

  It was my turn to say thanks.

  It was a hot day; I’d been working on a lorry and pulled down the top half of the overalls so my chest was bare when she arrived. I was boxing a lot up in the barn now, I had muscles where before there was just skin and bone, and her eyes glided over me as she told me what she wanted. And when I pulled on a T-shirt before checking over her car she had almost looked disappointed.

  I closed the bonnet and turned to her. The high heels she was wearing meant she wasn’t just taller than me, she towered over me.

  ‘Well?’ she said, and then continued after a pause that was much too long. ‘Do you like what you see?’

  ‘It seems fine but I ought to take a closer look,’ I said with a fake self-assurance, as though it would be me and not Uncle Bernard who would be taking that look.

  It occurred to me that she was older than she looked. The eyebrows looked as though they’d been shaved off and then drawn on again. There were small wrinkles in the skin above her upper lip. But all the same, fru Willumsen was what Uncle Bernard called a full rigger.

  ‘And after that...’ She put her head on one side and appraised me, as though she was in a butcher’s shop and I was a piece of meat laid out on the slab. ‘...look?’

  ‘Then we’ll go over the engine and change anything that needs changing,’ I said, ‘within the limits of what’s reasonable and acceptable, naturally.’ Another line I’d nicked from Uncle Bernard. Apart from when I had to swallow in the middle of the sentence.

  ‘Reasonable and acceptable.’ She smiled, as though I’d just served up a witticism in the Oscar Wilde class. Apart from the fact that I’d never heard of Oscar Wilde at that time. But right about then it dawned on me that I wasn’t the only one standing there and reading all sorts of hidden sex fantasies into the conversation. There could no longer be any doubt about it, fru Willumsen was flirting with me. Not that I kidded myself she wanted to take it any further, but she was definitely taking time for a little game with a seventeen-year-old, the way a grown cat will pat your dangling balls of wool before padding on its way. And just that was enough to make me feel proud and a little arrogant as I stood there.

  ‘But I can tell you already that there isn’t much here that needs to be fixed,’ I said, fishing up my silver box of snuff from the pocket of my overalls as I leaned against the bonnet. ‘The car looks to be in excellent condition. For its age.’

  Fru Willumsen laughed.

  ‘Rita,’ she said, extending a dazzlingly white hand with blood-red nails.

  If I’d been more on the case I would probably have kissed it, but instead I put down my snuffbox, wiped my hand on the rag that was dangling from my back pocket and gave her a firm handshake. ‘Roy.’

  She gave me a thoughtful look. ‘OK, Roy. But there’s no need to squeeze so hard.’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Don’t say “eh”. Say “what”. Or “excuse me”. Try again.’ She offered me her hand once more.

  I took it again. Carefully this time. She pulled it towards her.

  ‘I didn’t tell you to treat it as though it were stolen property, Roy. I’m giving you my hand, and for these few brief moments it’s yours. So use it, be good to it, treat it in such a way that you know you will be allowed to have it again.’

  She offered me her hand for a third time.

  And I put both of mine around it.

  Stroked it. Pressed it against my cheek. No idea where I got the bottle from. Only knew that right now I had it, all that courage I had lacked as I stood outside the barn and saw the shotgun in the doorway.

  Rita Willumsen laughed, looked around quickly as though to confirm that we were still unobserved, let me keep her hand a little longer before slowly withdrawing it.

  ‘You learn quickly,’ she said. ‘Quickly. And soon you’ll be a man. I think you’ll make someone very happy, Roy.’

  A Mercedes pulled up in front of us. Willumsen jumped out and hardly had time to say hello to me he was so busy opening the car door for fru Willumsen. Who was now Rita Willumsen. He held her hand as she manoeuvred her way in, high heels, high hair, tight skirt. And when they drove off I felt a mixture of excitement and confusion at the thought of what now suddenly lay before me. The excitement ca
me from having fru Willumsen’s hand in mine, those long nails scraping against my palm. And the fact that she was the clearly much-treasured wife of Willumsen, the man who had cheated Dad over the purchase of the Cadillac and boasted of it afterwards. The confusion was caused by the engine compartment, in which everything seemed to be back to front. I mean, the gearbox was in front of the engine. Later Uncle Bernard explained to me that it was because of the special dispersal of the weight in a Sonett, that they had even turned the crankshaft so the engine on this car went the opposite way to all other cars. Saab Sonett. What a car. What a gorgeous, useless piece of outdated beauty.

  I worked on the Saab until late at night, checking, tightening, changing. I possessed a new, furious energy and I didn’t know quite where it came from. Or actually, yes, I did. It came from Rita Willumsen. She had touched me. I had touched her. She had seen me as a man. Or at least as the man I could become. And that had changed something. At some point, as I stood there in the grease pit and ran my hand over the chassis of the car, I felt myself growing hard. I closed my eyes and imagined it. Tried to imagine it. A semi-naked Rita Willumsen on the bonnet of the Saab, beckoning to me with her index finger. That red nail varnish. Jesus.

  I listened out to make sure I was alone in the workshop before I pulled down the zip on my overalls.

  * * *

  —

  ‘Roy?’ whispered Carl in the dark as I was about to creep up to the top bunk.

  I was on the point of saying something about doing overtime at the workshop, that we should sleep now. But something in his voice stopped me. I turned on the light above his bed. His eyes were red-rimmed from crying and one of his cheeks was swollen. I felt my stomach tighten. After that time in the barn with the shotgun, Dad had kept away.

  ‘Has he been here again?’ I whispered.

  Carl just nodded.

  ‘Did he...did he hit you as well?’

  ‘Yes. And I thought he was going to strangle me. He was furious. Asked where you were.’

  ‘Shit,’ I said.

  ‘You’ve got to be here,’ said Carl. ‘He doesn’t come if you’re here.’

  ‘I can’t always be here, Carl.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to go away. I can’t take it any more...I don’t want to live any more with someone who...’

  I put one arm around Carl, the other around the back of his head, pressed his head into my chest so that his sobbing wouldn’t wake Mum and Dad.

  ‘I’ll fix it, Carl,’ I whispered down into his fair hair. ‘I swear. You won’t have to run away from him. I’ll fix this, d’you hear me?’

  * * *

  —

  With the coming of the first pale light of morning my plan was complete.

  Just to be thinking about it didn’t put me under any obligation, but at the same time I knew I was ready now. I thought of what Rita Willumsen had said, that soon I would be a man. Well, this was soon. This time I wouldn’t back off. I wouldn’t walk away from that shotgun.

  29

  I HAD LEARNED A COUPLE of things during those hours I worked on the Saab Sonett. Not only was the engine mounted back to front, but the braking system was easier too. Modern cars have double braking systems so that if one of the brake hoses is cut, the brakes will still work, at least on two of the wheels. But on the Sonett all you have to do is cut one hose and hey presto, what you’ve got is a freewheeling wagon, a loose cannon on deck. And it struck me that this was generally true of most old cars – including Dad’s 1979 Cadillac DeVille, although that does actually have two brake hoses.

  When men in this part of the country don’t die of some routine sickness, they die on a country lane in a car, or in a barn at the end of a rope or a shotgun barrel. I had failed the time Dad gave me the chance to use the shotgun, and maybe I understood too that he wouldn’t be giving me a second chance. That now I had to do the thinking for myself. And once I’d thought it through, I knew I’d found the right solution. It wasn’t about the skipper having to go down with his own ship or anything like that, it was purely practical. A car accident wouldn’t be investigated in the same way as a man who’d been shot through the head, at least that’s what I persuaded myself. And I didn’t know how I was going to get Dad into the barn and shoot him without Mum at least knowing what had happened. And God knows whether she would lie to the police when the man she couldn’t live without had been killed. That’s all the mother I’ve been to you. But sabotaging the brakes on the Cadillac was a simple matter. And the consequences as easy to predict. Every morning Dad got up, saw to the goats, heated up his coffee and watched in silence as Carl and I ate breakfast. After me and Carl had cycled off – him to school, me to the workshop – Dad got in his Cadillac and drove down into the village to fetch the mail and buy a newspaper.

  The Cadillac stood under the barn roof and I’d seen him do it countless times. Start the car, drive off and – unless there was snow and ice on the road – not touch the brakes or turn until he was heading into Geitesvingen.

  We ate supper in the dining room and then I said I was going out to the barn for a workout on the punchbag.

  No one said anything. Mum and Carl scraped their plates, but Dad gave me a quizzical look. Maybe because he and I didn’t usually announce what we were going to do, we just went ahead and did it.

  I took my training bag containing the tool I’d brought home from the workshop. The job was a little more complicated than I had supposed, but after half an hour I’d got the set screw loose and the bolt holding the steering column to the rack, punched holes in both of the brake hoses and collected the brake fluid in a bucket. I changed into my workout gear and spent another thirty minutes on the punchbag, so when I entered the living room where Mum and Dad were sitting like some couple from a sixties advert, him with his newspaper, Mum with her knitting, I was dripping with sweat.

  ‘You were late home last night,’ said Dad without looking up from his paper.

  ‘Overtime,’ I said.

  ‘You’re allowed to tell us if you’ve met a girl,’ said Mum. Smiled. As if that’s exactly what we were, the average family in a fucking advert.

  ‘Just overtime,’ I said.

  ‘Well,’ said Dad, folding his newspaper, ‘there might be more overtime from now on. They just rang from the hospital in Notodden. Bernard’s been admitted. Apparently they saw something they didn’t like when he was at the doctor’s yesterday. He might have to have an operation.’

  ‘Oh?’ I said, and felt myself go cold.

  ‘Yes, and his daughter’s in Mallorca with her family and can’t interrupt their holiday. So the hospital wants us to go.’

  Carl came in. ‘What’s that?’ he asked. His voice still sounded as if he’d been anaesthetised, and there was a nasty bruise on his cheek, although it was less swollen.

  ‘We’re going to Notodden,’ said Dad, pushing himself up out of the chair. ‘Get dressed.’

  I felt panic, like the morning you open the front door and aren’t prepared for the fact that the temperature’s fallen to minus thirty, it’s blowing a gale and you don’t feel the cold, just a sudden and complete paralysis. I opened my mouth, closed it again. Because paralysis affects the brain too.

  ‘I’ve got an important exam tomorrow,’ said Carl, and I saw he was looking at me. ‘And Roy’s promised to test me.’

  I hadn’t heard anything about any exam. I don’t know exactly what Carl had or hadn’t understood, only that he realised I was desperately looking for a way out of going to Notodden.

  ‘Well,’ said Mum, with a look at Dad, ‘they can probably—’

  ‘Out of the question,’ said Dad curtly. ‘Family comes before everything.’

  ‘Carl and I’ll take the bus to Notodden after school tomorrow,’ I said.

  They all looked at me in surprise. Because I think we all heard it. That suddenly I sounded like him, like
Dad when his mind was made up and there was nothing else to discuss, because that was the way things were going to be.

  ‘Fine,’ said Mum, sounding relieved.

  Dad didn’t say anything but kept his gaze fixed on me.

  When Mum and Dad were ready to leave Carl and I followed them out into the yard.

  Stood there in front of the car in the dusk, a family of four parting company after supper. ‘Drive carefully,’ I said.

  Dad nodded. Slowly. Of course it’s possible that I, like other people, make much too much out of famous last words. Or in Dad’s case, the last silent nodding. But there was definitely something there that looked almost like a kind of recognition. Or was it acknowledgement? Acknowledgement that his son was turning into an adult.

  He and Mum sat in the Cadillac and it started with a snarl. The snarl turned into a soft purring. And then away they drove in the direction of Geitesvingen.

  We saw the brake lights on the Cadillac flare. They’re connected to the pedal, so even if the brakes don’t work the lights do. Their speed increased. Carl made a sound. I could see in my mind’s eye Dad turning the wheel, hear a scraping noise from the steering column, feel the steering wheel turning and meeting no resistance, having no effect on the wheels. And I feel pretty sure he understood it then. I hope so. That he understood and accepted it. That he accepted it included Mum, and that the sums added up. She could live with what he did, but not without him.

  It happened quietly and with a strange lack of drama. No desperate pounding on the horn, no scorching rubber, no screams. All I could hear was the crunching of the tyres, and then the car was just gone, and the golden plover sang of loneliness.

  The crash from Huken sounded like the far-off rumble of delayed thunder. I didn’t hear what Carl said or shouted, I just thought that from now on Carl and I were alone up here in the world. That the road ahead of us was empty, that all we could see right now in the dusk was the mountain in silhouette against a sky coloured orange in the west and pink in the north and south. And it seemed to me the loveliest thing I had ever seen, like a sunset and a sunrise both at the same time.