by Jo Nesbo
‘Julie,’ I groaned, my jaws clenched.
‘Roy,’ she groaned back, clearly misunderstanding.
‘We can’t,’ I said.
‘It’s a New Year’s kiss,’ she said. ‘Everybody—’
‘What’s going on here?’
The voice came from behind Julie. She turned, and there was Alex. Julie’s boyfriend was in line to take over the farm at Ribu, and lads in line to take over the farm tend to be – with certain exceptions, such as me – big. He had the kind of thick, cropped hair that looks as though it’s been painted on the head, with a parting, gel and stripes in it, like an Italian footballer. I weighed up the situation. Alex looked a bit unsteady on his feet too, and he still had his hands in his coat pockets. He’d have more to say before he hit out. He had an agenda. I pushed Julie away from me.
She turned and saw clearly what was brewing.
‘No,’ she shouted. ‘No, Alex!’
‘No, what?’ asked Alex, pretending to be astounded. ‘I just want to thank Opgard and his brother for what they’ve done for the village.’ He held out his right hand.
OK, so no agenda. But the way he was standing – one foot in front of the other – showed plainly what he had in mind. The old handshake-to-nut-in-the-face trick. He was probably too young to know how many people I had beaten up. Or maybe he knew, but realised also that he had no choice, that he was a man and had to defend his territory. All I had to do was stand to one side of his line of sight, give him my hand, and jerk him off balance as he adjusted his footing. I took his hand. And at the same moment I saw the fear in his eyes. Was he afraid of me after all? Or was he afraid because he thought he was about to lose the one he loved, the one he had been hoping until now would be his. Well, soon he’d be flat on his back feeling the pain of yet another defeat, yet another humiliation, yet another reminder that he didn’t count for much, and Julie’s comfort would be like salt in his wounds. In short, a repeat of that night at Lund in Kristiansand. A repeat of that morning in the kitchen at the roofer’s house. A repeat of every fucking Saturday night at Årtun when I was eighteen years old. I’d be leaving the spot with yet another scalp in my belt, and I’d still be the loser. I didn’t want that any more. I had to get away, break out of the circle, disappear. So I let it happen.
He jerked me forward, butting me at the same time. I heard the crunch as his forehead met my nose. I took a backward step, and saw his right shoulder pulled back ready to swing. I could have easily sidestepped, instead I moved forward and walked straight into his punch. He yelled as his hand caught me directly below the eye. I steadied myself, ready for the next punch. His right wrist was hurting him, but after all, the lad had two hands. Instead he kicked out. Good choice. Caught me in the stomach and I doubled over. Then he elbowed me, catching me in the temple.
‘Alex, stop!’
But Alex didn’t stop. I felt the juddering in the cerebral cortex, the pain flashing like lightning in the dark before everything turned black.
* * *
—
Was there ever a moment when I would have welcomed the end? The net, the seine net that trapped me and drew me down under the water, the certainty that at last I would receive my punishment, for what I had done as well as for what I had not done? The sins of omission, as they call it. My father should be burning in hell because he didn’t stop doing what he was doing to Carl. Because he could have done. And I could have. So I should burn too. I was dragged down to the bottom, where they waited for me.
‘Roy?’
Life is, in essence, a simple matter. Its only goal is the maximising of pleasure. Even our much-lauded curiosity, our inclination to explore the universe and human nature, is a mere manifestation of the desire to accentuate and protract this pleasure. So when our sums end up on the minus side, when life offers us more pain than pleasure, and there’s no longer any hope of things changing, we end it. We eat or drink ourselves to death, swim out to where the current is strong, smoke in bed, drive when drunk, put off seeing the doctor even though the lump on the throat is growing. Or quite simply hang ourselves in the barn. It’s banal when you realise for the first time that this is actually a completely practical alternative; indeed, it doesn’t even feel like the most important decision of your life. To build that house or get that education – these are bigger decisions than choosing to end your life sooner than it otherwise would have ended.
And this time I decided I wouldn’t struggle. I would freeze to death.
‘Roy.’
Freeze to death, I said.
‘Roy.’
The voice calling to me was as deep as a man’s but soft as a woman’s, with no trace of an accent, and I loved to hear her say my name, the rolling, caressing way she pronounced the ‘r’.
‘Roy.’
The only problem was that the lad, Alex, risked a fine and possibly even a prison sentence that took no account of the situation that led up to the fight. In fact, it wasn’t even a ‘situation’ but a quite reasonable response, given how he’d misunderstood things.
‘You can’t lie here, Roy.’
A hand shaking me. A small hand. I opened my eyes. And looked straight into Shannon’s, brown and worried. I wasn’t sure whether she was real, or I was dreaming, but that didn’t matter.
‘You can’t lie here,’ she repeated.
‘No?’ I said, raising my head slightly. We were alone in the alleyway, but from the square I could hear people chanting in unison. ‘Have I taken someone’s place?’
Shannon looked at me for a long time. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘You know that.’
‘Shannon,’ I said, my voice thick, ‘I lo...’
The remainder was drowned in the noise as the heavens above her exploded in sizzling light and colour.
She took hold of my lapels and helped me to my feet, the landscape around me swimming, nausea blocking my throat. Shannon helped me out of the alleyway at the back of the sports shop. She led me along the highway, probably unseen, since everyone was gathered in the square and looking up as the fireworks blew this way and that in the gusting wind. A rocket whizzed low above the rooftops, as another – must have been one of Willumsen’s powerful emergency flares – climbed into the sky where it described a white parabola as it headed towards the mountains at two hundred kilometres an hour.
‘What are you doing here?’ she asked, as we concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other.
‘Julie kissed me and—’
‘Yes, she told me, before her boyfriend dragged her away. I mean, what are you doing here, in Os?’
‘Celebrating New Year’s Eve,’ I said. ‘At Stanley’s.’
‘Carl told me that. But you’re not answering my question.’
‘Are you asking me if I came because of you?’
She didn’t reply. So I answered myself.
‘Yes. I came here to be with you.’
‘You’re crazy.’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I am crazy for believing you wanted me. I should have understood. You were with me as revenge on Carl.’
There was a jerk in my arm, and I realised she had slipped and lost her balance for a moment.
‘How do you know that?’ she asked.
‘Grete. She told me that she’d told you about Carl and Mari last spring.’
Shannon nodded slowly.
‘So it’s true?’ I said. ‘You and me, for you it was just revenge?’
‘It’s half true,’ she said.
‘Half?’
‘Mari isn’t the first woman Carl’s been unfaithful with. But she’s the first one I know he cared about. That’s why it had to be you, Roy.’
‘Oh?’
‘For my revenge to be equal it had to be with someone I had feelings for.’
I had to laugh. It was brief, hard laughter. ‘Bullshit.’
/> She sighed. ‘Yes, it is bullshit.’
‘There, you see.’
Suddenly Shannon let go my arm and stood in front of me. Behind the small figure the highway stretched like a white umbilical cord into the night.
‘It is bullshit,’ she said. ‘Bullshit to fall in love with the brother of your husband because of the way he strokes the breast of a bird you’re holding while he tells you about the bird. It’s bullshit to fall in love with him because of the stories his brother has told about him.’
‘Shannon, don’t—’
‘It’s bullshit!’ she shouted. ‘Bullshit for you to fall in love with a heart that you know doesn’t know the meaning of the word betrayal.’
She put her hands against my chest as I tried to walk by her.
‘And it is bullshit,’ she said quietly. ‘Bullshit that you can’t think of anything but this man because of a few hours in a hotel room in Notodden.’
I stood there, swaying.
‘Shall we go?’ I whispered.
* * *
—
The moment the workshop door closed behind us she pulled me in to her. I breathed in the smell of her. Dizzy and intoxicated I kissed those sweet lips, felt her bite my own until they bled, and we tasted once more the sweet, metallic taste of my blood as she unbuttoned my trousers and whispered a few angry words I seemed to recognise. Held me at the same time as she kicked and swept my legs from under me, so that I fell onto the stone floor. I lay there looking up at her as she danced round on one foot, pulling off her shoe and one of her stockings. Then she pulled up her dress and sat on me. She wasn’t wet but grabbed my stiff cock and forced it into her, and it felt as though the skin of my prick was being ripped off. But fortunately she didn’t move, she just sat there looking down at me like a queen.
‘Is it good?’ she asked.
‘No,’ I said.
We both began laughing at the same time.
The laughter made her sex contract around mine, and she must have felt it too, because she laughed even more.
‘There’s engine oil on the shelf up there,’ I said, pointing.
She put her head on one side and gave me a loving look, as though I were a child who should be going to sleep. Then she closed her eyes, still not moving, but I could feel her sex growing warm and wet.
‘Wait,’ she whispered. ‘Wait.’
I thought of the midnight countdown in the square. That the circle had finally been broken. That we had come out the other side and I was free.
She began to move.
And when she came it was with an angry, triumphal cry, as though she too had just managed to kick open the door that had been keeping her imprisoned.
* * *
—
We lay entwined in the bed and listened. The wind had dropped, and now and then we heard the burst of a late rocket. And then I asked the question I had been asking myself ever since that day Carl and Shannon had swung into the yard at Opgard.
‘Why did the two of you come to Os?’
‘Did Carl never say?’
‘Only that business about putting the village on the map. Is he on the run from something?’
‘He didn’t tell you?’
‘Just something about a legal wrangle concerning some property project in Canada.’
Shannon sighed. ‘It was a project in Canmore that had to be scrapped because of soaring costs and the finances running out. And there’s no wrangling. Not any more.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The case is closed. Carl was ordered to pay restitution to his partners.’
‘And?’
‘And he couldn’t. So he ran off. Came here.’
I raised myself up on one elbow. ‘You mean Carl is...on the run?’
‘In principle, yes.’
‘Is that what the spa hotel is about? A way for him to pay off this debt in Toronto?’
She smiled vaguely. ‘He’s not planning on going back to Canada.’
I tried to take all this in. So Carl’s homecoming was nothing more than the flight of a common-or-garden swindler?
‘And you? Why did you come here with him?’
‘Because I did the drawings for the Canmore project.’
‘And?’
‘It was my magnum opus. My IBM building. I didn’t get it built in Canmore, but Carl promised me another chance.’
It became clear to me. ‘The spa hotel. You’ve designed it before.’
‘With a few modifications, yes. The landscapes round Canmore in the Rocky Mountains and round here aren’t very different. We had no money left and no one who was willing to invest in our project. So Carl suggested Os. He said it was a place where people trusted him, where they regarded him as a local wonder-boy made good.’
‘So you came here. Without a krone in your pockets. But in a Cadillac.’
‘Carl said appearances are everything when you’re trying to sell a project like this.’
I thought of Armand, the travelling preacher. When it emerged one day that he’d been lining his pockets with money taken from gullible people who were hoping for a cure, at the same time as he stopped them getting the medical help they needed, he’d had to flee north. But when they caught up with him there it turned out he’d started a sect, built himself a church of miracle healing, and had three ‘wives’. He was arrested for non-payment of income taxes and fraud, and when he was asked in court why he had carried on swindling after he’d got away he had replied:
‘Because that’s what I do.’
‘Why didn’t the two of you tell me all this?’ I asked.
Shannon smiled to herself.
‘Eh?’ I said.
‘He said it wouldn’t be good for you. I’m just trying to remember exactly how he put it. That’s right: he said that even though you aren’t sensitive and you don’t know much about empathy, you’re a moralist. Unlike himself, who is a sensitive and sympathetic cynic.’
I felt like cursing out loud, but instead I had to laugh. Damn him, he had a knack for describing things. He didn’t just correct the orthography in my school essays, sometimes he tacked on a sentence or two. Sort of lifted it a bit, gave wings to the crap. Giving wings to crap. Yeah, that was what his talent was.
‘But you’re wrong if you don’t think Carl’s intentions are good,’ said Shannon. ‘He wishes everybody well. But of course, he wishes himself a bit more well. And look, he actually manages it.’
‘There are probably a few submerged rocks to look out for. Dan Krane, for example, is planning an article.’
Shannon shook her head. ‘Carl says that problem has been solved. And things are going much better now. The project is back on schedule. In two weeks he’s signing a contract with a Swedish hotelier who’s going to run the place.’
‘So Carl Opgard saves the village. Gets to erect a permanent monument to himself. And gets rich. Which of those do you think matters most to him?’
‘I think our motives are so complex that we don’t even understand them completely ourselves.’
I stroked the bruise beneath her cheekbone.
‘And his motives for beating you, are they complex too?’
She shrugged. ‘Before I left him and went to Toronto last summer he’d never laid so much as a finger on me. But when I came back something had changed. He had changed. He drank all the time. And he started to hit me. He was so distraught after the first time that I convinced myself it was a one-off. But then it turned into a pattern, like a form of compulsive behaviour, something he had to do. Sometimes he would be crying even before he began.’
I thought of the crying down below in the bunk bed, that time I realised it wasn’t Carl but Dad.
‘Why didn’t you leave then?’ I asked. ‘Why come back from Toronto at all? Did you love him so much?’<
br />
She shook her head. ‘I’d stopped loving him.’
‘Did you come because of me?’
‘No,’ she said, and stroked my cheek.
‘You came because of the hotel,’ I said.
She nodded.
‘You love that hotel.’
‘No,’ she said. ‘I hate the hotel. But it’s my prison, it won’t let me go.’
‘And yet still you love it,’ I said.
‘The way a mother loves the child that holds her hostage,’ she said, and I thought of what Grete had said.
Shannon turned.
‘When you’ve created something that has cost you so much time, pain and love, as I’ve put into the creation of that building, it becomes a part of you. No, not a part, it’s bigger than you, more important. The child, the building, the work of art, it’s your only shot at immortality, right? More important than anything else you might love. Do you understand?’
‘So then, it’s also your own personal monument?’
‘No! I don’t design monuments. I’ve designed a simple and useful and beautiful building. Because we, the people, need beauty. And the beauty of my designs for the hotel lies in their simplicity, their self-evident logic. There’s nothing monumental about my drawings.’
‘Why do you say the drawings and not the hotel? I mean, it’s almost finished.’
‘Because they’re destroying it. These compromises with the council regarding the facade. The cheap materials Carl has agreed to use to stay within the budget. The entire lobby and the restaurant that were altered while I was in Toronto.’
‘So you came back to save your child.’
‘But I came too late,’ she said. ‘And the man I thought I loved tried to beat me into submission.’
‘Then if you’ve already lost the battle, why are you still here?’
She smiled bitterly. ‘You tell me. I guess maybe a mother feels compelled to be present at the funeral of her own child.’