by Jo Nesbo
The door opened and I glanced up. A gang of kids in eager conversation. A few moments later the door opened again, another gang of kids, and I realised school was out for the day. The third time the door opened I saw her face. It had changed, was not at all the way I recalled it. This face looked open. She didn’t see me, and I could study her unobserved from behind my newspaper. She sat and listened to the boy she had come in with. She neither smiled nor laughed, and you could still sense a certain watchfulness, that she was guarding a sensitive vulnerability. But I thought that I could also tell that she and this boy had something, a contact you don’t get unless you let someone in close. Then her eyes glided round the room, and when they met mine they tensed for a moment.
I don’t know if Natalie knew the reason why her father, Moe the roofer, had sent her to secondary school here in Notodden. Nor how he had explained the injuries he had come by at home in their kitchen. In all probability she didn’t know I had anything to do with either situation. But if she did? If she came over here now, sat down and asked why I had done it, what should I answer? That I had intervened because of the shame I felt at not having been able to do the same for my brother? That I had nearly made an invalid of her father because he was a punchbag with my own father’s face on it? That in reality it was all about me and my family, not hers?
Her gaze wandered on. Maybe she hadn’t recognised me. But of course she had. Obviously. But even if she didn’t know that I had threatened to kill her father, she might well want to pretend she didn’t recognise the guy who’d sold her morning-after pills, especially now she had the chance to be another girl from that cowed and withdrawn person she had been back home in Os.
I could see she was having difficulty concentrating on what the boy over there was saying, turning towards the window, turning her face away from me.
I stood up and left. Partly to leave her in peace. Partly because I didn’t want anyone from Os as a witness if Shannon should turn up.
By five o’clock I had been to every cafe and bar and restaurant in Notodden, apart from the restaurant at the Brattrein, which I was guessing still didn’t open until six.
As I walked across the car park towards the main entrance I felt for a moment the same expectant tickle in the stomach as when I was going to meet Unni. But that was probably just Pavlov’s dogs who recognised a situation and began to salivate, because in the next moment it was driven out by anxiety. What the hell was I doing? Suicide from the bridge would have been better. If I jumped in the car now I could probably get there by sundown. But I kept going. Into the hotel reception, which looked exactly the same as when I had left it for the last time...years earlier.
She was sitting in the empty restaurant working on a laptop. Dark blue suit and white blouse. Her short red hair was parted at the side and held in place by grips. Stockinged knees and black high-heeled shoes pressed together below the table.
‘Hi, Shannon.’
She looked up at me. Smiled without a trace of surprise but as though I’d finally turned up to a meeting we’d agreed upon. Took off the glasses that I’d never seen her wearing before. Her wide-open eye expressed the joy of reunion, a joy that might have been of the sisterly variety. Real enough, but with no undercurrent. The half-shut eye told a very different story. It made me think of a woman who has just turned towards you in bed with the reflected light of morning glinting in her iris, a look still drenched in sleep and lovemaking from the night before. I felt a jolt, something heavy, like sorrow. I had to swallow and sank into the chair opposite her.
‘You’re here,’ she said. ‘In Notodden.’
Her tone was enquiring. OK, so we were going to beat about the bush for a while after all.
I nodded. ‘I’m looking at a service station I’m interested in.’
‘Did you like it?’
‘Very much,’ I said, not taking my eyes off her. ‘That’s the problem.’
‘Why is that a problem?’
‘It’s not for sale.’
‘Well, you can always find another.’
I shook my head. ‘I want this one.’
‘And how are you going to manage that?’
‘Persuade the owner that since he’s losing money on it, that sooner or later he’ll lose it anyway.’
‘Maybe he’s planning to change the way he runs it.’
‘I’m sure he is planning to, he’s promising to, probably even believes it himself. But after a while everything will go back to the same old same old again. The staff will desert him, the station will go bust, and he’ll have thrown away even more years on a hopeless project.’
‘So when you take the station from him, you’ll be doing him a favour. Is that what you’re saying?’
‘I’ll be doing us all a favour.’
She looked at me. Was that hesitation I read in her face?
‘When is your meeting?’ I asked.
‘It was at twelve,’ she said. ‘We were finished before three.’
‘Did you expect it to last longer?’
‘No.’
‘So then why book a hotel room?’
She looked at me and shrugged her shoulders. I felt my breathing stop. Could feel an erection coming on.
‘Have you eaten?’ I asked.
She shook her head.
‘They don’t open for another hour,’ I said. ‘Feel like a walk?’
She nodded down at her high-heeled shoes.
‘Fine here too,’ I said.
‘Know who I saw here?’ she asked.
‘Me,’ I said.
‘Dennis Quarry. The film star. He was at the service station location-scouting, remember? I think he’s staying here. I read somewhere that they’re making that film now.’
‘I love you,’ I whispered, but at that precise moment she closed the lid of her laptop with unnecessary force so she could pretend she hadn’t heard.
‘Tell me what you’ve been up to lately,’ she said.
‘Thinking about you,’ I said.
‘I wish you hadn’t.’
‘Me too.’
Silence.
She sighed heavily. ‘Maybe this was a mistake,’ she said.
Was. Past tense. Had she said is a mistake it would have meant the wheels were still in motion but was meant that she had already made up her mind.
‘Probably,’ I said, waving dismissively to a waiter whom I recognised and guessed was on his way to offer something from the kitchen, even though it wasn’t open yet.
‘Faddah-head,’ hissed Shannon, slapping her palm against her forehead. ‘Roy?’
‘Yes?’
She leaned forward across the table. Laid her small hand in mine and looked me in the eyes. ‘Can we agree that this never happened?’
‘Of course.’
‘Goodbye.’ She gave a quick smile, as though she had a pain somewhere, picked up the laptop and left. I closed my eyes. The clacking of those heels on the parquet behind me reminded me of Vigdis’s footsteps behind me that night in Kristiansand, only those footsteps were approaching. I opened my eyes again. I hadn’t moved my hand, which was still lying on the table. The sensation of the only touch between us since I had entered the room was still there, like prickling beneath the skin after a scalding hot shower.
I went out into reception where the tall, thin man in the red suit jacket smiled at me. ‘Good afternoon, herr Opgard. Nice to see you back again.’
‘Hello, Ralf,’ I said as I stood in front of the counter.
‘I saw you on your way in, herr Opgard, so I took the liberty of reserving the last vacant room we have today for you.’ He indicated the screen in front of him with a nod. ‘So tiresome if someone else were to snap it up at the last moment.’
‘Thanks, Ralf. But I was wondering which room Shannon Opgard was in. Or Shannon Alleyne.’
/> ‘333,’ said Ralf, making a point of not even having to look at his screen.
‘Thank you.’
Shannon had finished packing the bag which was on the bed, and was struggling to close the zip as I pushed open the door to Room 333. She loosed off a few curses that I guessed must be in Baja-English, squeezed the two sides of the bag, tried again. I left the door half open as I walked in and stood behind her. She gave up, her hands went to her face and her shoulders began to shake. I put my arms around her and felt her soundless crying transfer itself from her body and into mine.
We stood like that for a while.
Then I carefully turned her round, dried her tears with two fingers and kissed her.
And, still sobbing, she kissed me, her teeth biting into my lower lip so that I felt the sweet, metallic taste of my own blood mingle with the strong, spicy taste of her spittle and her tongue. I held back, ready to withdraw if she showed any sign of not wanting this. But she didn’t, and slowly I let go of what was holding me back: common sense, the thought of what must come – or not come – afterwards. The image of me lying in the lower bunk with my arms around Carl, the only thing he has, the only thing that has not yet betrayed him. But it slips away, drifts away, and all that remains are her hands pulling up my shirt tails, the nails pressing my body against hers, the tongue like an anaconda round mine, her tears running down my cheek. Even in high-heeled shoes she’s so small I have to bend my knees to pull up her tight skirt.
‘No!’ she groans and pulls herself free, and my first reaction is one of relief. That she has saved us. I take a step backwards, unsteady and still shaking a little, and push one of my shirt tails back under my belt.
Our breaths share the same gasping rhythm. I hear footsteps and a voice speaking on a phone out in the corridor. And as the steps and the voice move away we stand staring watchfully at each other. Not like a man and a woman, but like boxers, like two raging bucks ready for a fight. Because of course the fight isn’t over, it’s hardly even begun.
‘Shut that bloody door,’ hisses Shannon.
45
‘I HIT MEN,’ I ANSWERED, handed a piece of moist snuff to Shannon and wedged one under my lower lip.
‘That’s what you actually do?’ she asked, raising her head so I could put my arm back on the pillow.
‘Not all the time, but I’ve done a lot of fighting, yes.’
‘You think it’s in your genes?’
I studied the ceiling of Room 333. It was different from the one Unni and I used to spend our hours together in, but it looked exactly the same and the smell was the same, some mildly perfumed cleaning agent possibly. ‘My father mostly hit a punchbag,’ I said. ‘But yes, I probably get the fighting from him.’
‘We repeat the mistakes of our own parents,’ she said.
‘And our own too,’ I said.
She pulled a face, took the wedge of snuff, put it on the bedside table.
‘You have to get used to it,’ I said, meaning the snuff.
She snuggled into me. The little body was even softer than I had imagined, the skin even smoother. The breasts were slight rises on snow-covered viddas of skin on which the nipples stood up like two burning beacons. She smelled of something, a sweet, strong spice, and her skin was shaded, darker under the armpits and around her sex. And she was glowing like an oven.
‘Do you sometimes get the feeling you’re going round in circles?’ she asked.
I nodded.
‘And when you find yourself walking in your own footsteps, isn’t that a sign that you’ve lost your way?’
‘Maybe,’ I said. But right at that moment it didn’t feel like that. Sure, the sex had been more like mating than loving, with more fight than tenderness, more anger and fear than joy and pleasure. At one point she pulled away, struck me in the face with the flat of her hand and told me to stop. So I stopped. Until she hit me once more and asked why the hell I had stopped. And when I started to laugh, she buried her face in the pillow and wept, and I stroked her hair, the tensed muscles of her back, kissed her neck. She stopped crying, began breathing heavily. Then I slipped my hand between the cheeks of her arse and bit her. And she cried out something in Baja-English, pushed me down the bed, lay on her stomach with her arse sticking up in the air. And I was so horny I didn’t care at all that her screams when I took her were the same as those I heard from the bedroom when she was with Carl. God knows, maybe that’s what I was thinking of when I came, distracting me so much that I withdrew a little too late, but in time to see the remainder of my load land on the skin of her back, like a mother-of-pearl chain, greyish white and glistening in the light from the lamp that had been turned on in the car park outside. I had fetched a towel and dried it off, tried also to dry off two dark flecks before I realised they were shading that wouldn’t wipe off. And thought that this too, the things we had just done, was the same, dark patches that couldn’t be wiped away.
But there would be more. And it would be different, I knew that. Lovemaking that wasn’t fighting, not just a meeting between two bodies but two souls. I know it sounds corny, but I can’t think of any other way to express it. Two fucking souls is what we were and I was home now. She was my footprint and I had found it. All I wanted was to be here and go round in circles, in a delirium, quite lost, just as long as it was with her.
‘Will we regret this?’ she asked.
‘I don’t know,’ I said, but knew that I wouldn’t. I simply didn’t want to frighten her, something that was bound to happen if she realised that I loved her so much I didn’t care a damn about anything else.
‘We just have tonight,’ she said.
We pulled the blackout curtains to prolong it and make the most of the hours we had.
* * *
—
I awoke to a shriek from Shannon.
‘I’ve overslept!’
She slipped out of the bed before I could get hold of her, and the arm I threw out after her hit instead her mobile phone that was on the bedside table. It hit the floor some distance away from the bed. I jerked the curtains open to get what I knew could well be the last sight I would have of Shannon’s naked body for a long time. Daylight flooded the room and I caught a glimpse of her back as she disappeared into the bathroom.
I stared down at the phone lying in the shadow of the bed. The screen had turned itself on. The glass was cracked. And from behind the prison bars of that shattered screen a smiling Carl looked up at me. I swallowed.
A single glimpse of her back.
But it was enough.
I lay back in the bed. The last time I had seen a woman so naked, so stripped bare by daylight, was when Rita Willumsen stood there in the mountain lake, humiliated in her swimming costume, her skin bluish in the icy cold. If I’d been in any doubt, it was now that I saw the writing on the wall, as people say.
I understood what Shannon had meant when she asked if hitting was in my genes.
46
CARL WAS MY BROTHER. THAT was what the problem was.
Or problems.
More specifically, one of the problems was that I loved him. The other that he had inherited the same genes as me. I don’t know why I had once been so naive as to believe that Carl didn’t have the same capacity for violence in him as me and Dad. Maybe because it was an accepted fact that Carl was like Mum. Mum and Carl who wouldn’t hurt a fly. Only people.
I got up from the bed and crossed to the window, saw Shannon running over the car park towards the Cadillac.
Probably she regretted it. Probably she had no appointment to keep, she had just woken up and knew that this was wrong, that she had to go.
She had showered, dressed in the bathroom, probably put on her make-up, and when she’d emerged given me a sisterly kiss on the forehead. She muttered something about a meeting in Os about the hotel, grabbed her bag and ran from the room. Th
e brake lights on the Cadillac went on as she almost drove onto the road straight into a bin lorry.
The air in here was still dense from the sex, the perfume and the sleep of the night. I opened the window which I had closed at some point because she was shrieking so loudly I was afraid it might bring someone to the door, and because I knew we weren’t finished for the night. And I had been right. Each time one of us woke even the most innocent touch had started a new session, like a hunger that could not be satisfied.
What I had seen once the curtains were opened was that what I had thought were dark patches on the skin were bruises. These were not like the red love-marks and the streaks which had also appeared on her white skin during the night, and which hopefully would disappear in a day or two. These were the marks left by heavy blows, the way they look for days and weeks afterwards. If Carl had hit her in the face too then he had held back just enough for her to be able to cover it up with a little make-up.
Hit her, the way I’d seen Mum hit Dad in the corridor of the Grand Hotel that time. That was the memory that flickered through my brain when Carl had tried to convince me it was an accident when Sigmund Olsen went over the edge and down into Huken. Mum. And Carl. You live with a person and think you know all there is to know about them, but what do you really know? Did it occur to Carl that I might be capable of having sex with his wife behind his back? Hardly. A long time ago I had realised that we are all strangers to each other. And of course it wasn’t just those bruises on Shannon that made me realise Carl had violence in him. That my little brother was a murderer. It was the simple facts. Bruises and plumb lines.
47
FOR DAYS AFTER RETURNING TO Sørlandet I waited for Shannon to ring, to send a message, an email, anything. It was obvious that she would have to be the one to take the initiative, she was the one who had most to lose. Or so I thought.