The Kingdom Page 2

‘Excuse me, my good man, but does this farm belong to the famous Opgard brothers?’

  And then he grinned. Gave me that warm, wide irresistible smile, and it was as though time was wiped from his face, as well as the calendar which told me it had been fifteen years since last time. But there was also something quizzical about his face, as though he were testing the waters. I didn’t want to laugh. Not yet. But I couldn’t help it.

  The car door opened. He spread his arms wide and I leaned into his embrace. Something tells me it should have been the other way round. That it was me – the big brother – who should have been inviting the embrace. But somewhere along the line the division of roles between me and Carl had become unclear. He had grown bigger than me, both physically and as a person, and – at least when we were in the company of others – now he was the one conducting the orchestra. I closed my eyes, trembling, took a quavering breath, breathed in the smell of autumn, of Cadillac and kid brother. He was wearing some kind of ‘male fragrance’, as they call it.

  The passenger door had opened.

  Carl let go of me and walked me round the enormous front end of the car to where she stood, facing the valley.

  ‘It’s really lovely here,’ she said. She was thin and slightly built, but her voice was deep. Her accent was obvious, and although she got the intonation wrong, at least the sentence was Norwegian. I wondered if it was something she had been rehearsing on the drive up, something she had made up her mind to say whether she meant it or not. Something that would make me like her, whether I wanted to or not. Then she turned towards me and smiled. The first thing I noticed was that her face was white. Not pale, but white like snow that reflects light in such a way as to make it difficult to see the contours in it. The second was the eyelid of one of her eyes. It drooped, like a half-drawn blind. As though half of her was very sleepy. But the other half looked wide awake. A lively brown eye peering out at me from beneath a short crop of flaming red hair. She was wearing a simple black coat with no sidecut and there was no indication of shape beneath it either, just a black, high-necked sweater sticking up above the collar. The general first impression was of a scrawny little kid photographed in black and white and the hair coloured in afterwards.

  Carl always had a way with girls, so in all honesty I was a bit surprised. It wasn’t that she wasn’t sweet, because she actually was, but she wasn’t a smasher, as people round here say. She carried on smiling, and since the teeth could hardly be distinguished from the skin it meant they were white too. Carl had white teeth too, always did have, unlike me. He used to joke and say it was because his were bleached by daylight because he smiled so much more. Maybe that was what they had fallen for in each other, the white teeth. Mirror images. Because even though Carl was tall and broad, fair and blue-eyed, I could see the likeness at once. Something life-enhancing, as people call it. Something optimistic that is prepared to see the best in people. Themselves as well as others. Well, maybe; of course, I didn’t know the girl yet.

  ‘This is—’ Carl began.

  ‘Shannon Alleyne,’ she interrupted, reaching out a hand so small that it felt like taking hold of a chicken’s foot.

  ‘Opgard,’ Carl added proudly.

  Shannon Alleyne Opgard wanted to hold hands longer than me. I saw Carl in that too. Some are in more of a hurry to be liked than others.

  ‘Jet-lagged?’ I asked, and regretted it, feeling like an idiot for asking. Not because I didn’t know what jet lag was, but because Carl knew that I had never crossed even a single time zone and that whatever the answer was it wouldn’t mean a lot to me.

  Carl shook his head. ‘We landed two days ago. Had to wait for the car – it came by boat.’

  I nodded, glanced at the registration plates. MC. Monaco. Exotic, but not exotic enough for me to ask for it if the car was to be re-registered. On the walls of the office at the service station I had obsolete plates from French Equatorial Africa, Burma, Basutoland, British Honduras and Johor. The standard was high.

  Shannon looked from Carl to me and then back again. Smiled. I don’t know why, maybe she was happy to see Carl and his big brother – his only close relative – laughing together. That the slight tension was gone now. That he – that they were welcome home.

  ‘Why don’t you show Shannon round the house while I get the suitcases?’ said Carl, and opened the trunk, as Dad used to call it.

  ‘Probably take us about the same time,’ I murmured to Shannon as she followed me.

  * * *

  —

  We walked round to the north side of the house, where the main entrance was. Why Dad hadn’t had the door open straight onto the yard and the road I really don’t know. Maybe because he liked to see all his land each day when he stepped outside. Or because it mattered more to have the sun warm the kitchen than the corridor. We crossed the threshold and I opened one of the three doors in the corridor.

  ‘The kitchen,’ I said, noticing the smell of rancid fat. Had it been there the whole time?

  ‘How lovely,’ she lied. OK, so I’d tidied up and even washed it, but you couldn’t exactly say it was lovely. Wide-eyed – and maybe slightly anxious – her gaze followed the pipe that led from the wood stove through a hole sawn in the ceiling to the upper floor. Precision carpentry, that’s what Dad had called it, the way the circular pipe had safety clearance through the timbers on its way up. If that was true then it was – along with the two equally circular holes in the outside toilet – the only example of it on the farm. I turned the light switch on and off to show her that at least we had our own electricity.

  ‘Coffee?’ I asked and turned on the tap.

  ‘Thanks, but maybe later.’

  At least she’d mastered her Norwegian courtesies.

  ‘Carl will,’ I said and opened the kitchen cupboard. Fished and fumbled about until I found the coffee pot. I’d actually even bought some old-fashioned coarse ground coffee for the first time in...well, ages. I managed just fine myself with freeze-dried and noticed as I held the pot under the tap that from sheer habit I’d turned on the hot tap. Felt myself getting a little hot around the ears myself. But anyway, who says there’s something sad about making powdered coffee with water from the hot tap? Coffee’s coffee. Water’s water.

  I put the pot on the hot plate, turned on the oven and took the two paces over to the door to one of the two rooms that sandwiched the kitchen. The one facing west was the dining room, which was closed in winter since it acted as a buffer against the wind from the west, and we ate all our meals in the kitchen. Facing east was the living room with its bookcases, TV and its own wood stove. On the south side Dad had allowed the house’s only extravagance, a covered glass terrace, which he called the porch and Mum ‘the winter garden’, even though it was of course closed off in the winter and solidly barricaded behind wooden shutters. In summer Dad would sit there and suck on his Berry’s tobacco and drink a Budweiser or two – another couple of extravagances. He had to travel to town to buy his pale American beer, and the silvery-green boxes of Berry’s moist snuff were sent over the pond from a relative in America. Dad explained to me early on that unlike the Swedish crap American moist snuff goes through a fermentation process that you can taste. ‘Like bourbon,’ said Dad, who claimed that Norwegians only used that Swedish crap because they didn’t know any better. Well, at least I knew better, and when I began using it was Berry’s I used. Carl and I used to count up the empty bottles Dad lined up along the windowsill. We knew that if he drank more than four he could get tearful, and no one wants to see his dad tearful. Thinking back now, that might be why I seldom if ever drank more than one or two beers. I didn’t want to get tearful. Carl was a happy drunk, so he had less need to set these kinds of limits.

  All this was going through my mind while we traipsed around and I showed Shannon the biggest bedroom, the one Dad referred to, in English, as the master bedroom.

  �
��Fantastic,’ she said.

  I showed her the new bathroom, which wasn’t new any more, but at least it was the newest thing in the house. She probably wouldn’t have believed me if I’d told her we grew up without one. That we washed downstairs in the kitchen, with water heated up on the stove. That the bathroom came after the car accident. If what Carl had written was true, that she was from Barbados, from a family that could afford to send her to college in Canada, then it would naturally be difficult for her to imagine sharing the grey water with your brother while the two of you stood there shivering over the bowl in the middle of winter. While Dad, paradoxically enough, had had a Cadillac DeVille parked out there in the yard, because a proper car, that was definitely something we should have.

  The door to the boys’ room had obviously swollen and I had to wiggle the latch a bit to get it open. A breath of stale air and memories wafted over us, like the smell of old clothes you’d forgotten you owned from a wardrobe. Along one of the walls stood a desk with two chairs next to each other; along the opposite wall a bunk bed. The stovepipe from the hole in the floor down to the kitchen was at one end of it.

  ‘This was Carl’s and my room,’ I said.

  Shannon nodded at the bunk bed ‘Who was on top?’

  ‘Me,’ I said. ‘The oldest.’ I drew my finger through a layer of dust on the back of one of the chairs. ‘I’ll move in here today. So you two can have the big bedroom.’

  She looked at me in alarm. ‘But, Roy, of course we don’t want to...’

  I focused my gaze on her one open eye. Isn’t that a little strange, to have brown eyes when you have red hair and skin as white as snow? ‘There are two of you and only one of me so it’s no problem, OK?’

  She gazed round the room again. ‘Thanks,’ she said.

  I led her into Mum and Dad’s room. I’d aired it thoroughly. Regardless of what people smell like, I don’t like to breathe in their smells. Excepting Carl’s. Carl smelled – if not exactly good – at least right. He smelled of me. Of us. When Carl was ill in the winter – like he always was – I snuggled up to him. His smell was always right, even though his skin was covered with the dried sweat of fever, or his breath smelled of sick. I inhaled Carl and shivered in close to his glowing body, used the heat he was losing to warm my own carcass. One man’s fever is another man’s hotplate. Living up here makes you practical.

  Shannon crossed to the window and looked out. She’d kept her coat tightly buttoned up. She probably thought the house was cold. In September. It didn’t bode well for the winter. I heard Carl come thudding up the narrow staircase with the cases.

  ‘Carl says you aren’t rich,’ she said. ‘But you and him own everything you can see from here.’

  ‘That’s right. But it’s just outfield, all of it.’

  ‘Outfield?’

  ‘Wilderness,’ said Carl, who stood in the doorway panting and smiling. ‘Grazing for sheep and goats. There’s not a lot you can cultivate up on a mountain farm. You can see for yourself, there aren’t even many trees. But we’ll get something done about the skyline here. Ain’t that right, Roy?’

  I nodded slowly. Slowly, the way I had seen the old farmers nodding slowly when I was just a lad and believed so many complex thoughts went on behind those wrinkled brows that it would just take too long and maybe be impossible to express them all using our simple village dialect. And they seemed to have a telepathic understanding of each other, those grown-up, nodding men, the way the slow nodding of one would be answered by the slow nodding of the other. Now I gave that same slow nod, though I hardly understood any more now than I did then.

  Of course, I could have asked Carl about all this, but I probably wouldn’t have got the answer. Answers yes, plenty of them, not the answer. Maybe I didn’t need one either. I was just glad to have Carl back and had no intention of bothering him with the question right now: why the hell had he come back?

  ‘Roy is so kind,’ said Shannon. ‘He’s giving us this room.’

  ‘Figured you didn’t come back just so you could sleep in the boys’ room,’ I said.

  Carl nodded. Slowly. ‘Then this won’t seem like much in return,’ he said, holding up a large carton. I recognised it at once and took it from him. Berry’s. American moist snuff.

  ‘Dammit, it’s good to see you again, brother,’ said Carl, his voice choked. He came over to me and put his arms round me again. Gave me a real hug this time. I hugged him back. Could feel his body was softer. A little more padding there. The skin of his chin against mine a bit looser, I could feel the rasp of his beard even though he was clean-shaven. The woollen suit jacket felt like good quality, tightly knitted, and the shirt – he never wore a shirt before. Even the way he spoke was different, he talked the city talk him and me used sometimes when we were imitating Mum. But that was fine. He still smelled the same. He smelled of Carl. He stepped back and looked at me. Eyes that were as beautiful as a girl’s glowing. What the hell, mine were glowing too.

  ‘Coffee’s boiling,’ I said, my voice not too choked up, and headed for the stairs.

  * * *

  —

  In bed that evening I lay listening to the sounds. Did the house maybe sound different now people were living here again? It didn’t. It creaked, coughed and whistled same as always. I listened out too for sounds from the master bedroom. The walls are thin, so even with the bathroom between the two bedrooms I could still hear voices. Were they talking about me? Was Shannon asking Carl if his big brother was always this quiet? If Carl thought Roy had enjoyed the chilli con carne she had made? If his silent brother really had liked the gift she had brought with her, which she’d had so much trouble getting hold of through relatives, a used licence plate from Barbados? Didn’t his big brother like her? And Carl answering that Roy was like that with everybody, she should just give him time. And she said that maybe she thought Roy was jealous of her, that Roy was bound to feel she’d taken his brother from him, the brother that was all he had. And Carl laughing, stroking her cheek and telling her not to worry about things like that after just one day, that everything would work out. And she buried her head in his shoulder and said she was sure he was right, but anyway she was glad Carl wasn’t like his brother. That it was strange how, in a land almost without crime, people go around scowling as though in constant fear of being robbed.

  Or maybe they were getting it on.

  In Mum and Dad’s bed.

  ‘Who was on top?’ I should ask at breakfast in the morning. ‘The oldest?’ And see those gaping faces. Head out into the clear morning air, get into the car, release the handbrake, feel the steering wheel lock, see Geitesvingen coming up.

  A long, lovely sad note coming from outside. The plover. The mountain’s lonesome bird, skinny and serious. A bird that accompanies you when you’re out walking, looking out for you, but always at a safe distance. As though too afraid to make a friend, and yet still needing someone to listen when it sings of its loneliness.

  2

  I GOT TO THE SERVICE station at five thirty, half an hour earlier than usual on a Monday. Egil was behind the counter. He looked tired.

  ‘Morning, chief,’ he said in a flat monotone. Egil was like a plover, he only had the one note.

  ‘Good morning. Busy night?’

  ‘No,’ he said, without seeming to realise it was, as people say, a rhetorical question. That I knew it was never busy once the flow of cabin visitors heading back to the city had eased off on Sunday night. That I was asking because the area out round the pumps hadn’t been tidied and cleaned. The rule at other all-night stations is that night-duty attendants working alone don’t leave the building, but I hate mess and with the boy racer gang in their custom cars using the place as a combination fast-food shop, hangout for smokers and a lovers’ lane there’s always a lot of paper, butt ends and, yeah, even the odd used condom. Since the frankfurters, the cigarettes and the b
lobs all come from the station I don’t want to be driving my boy racer customers away, they’re welcome to sit in their cars and watch the world drive by. Instead I get my night guys to clean up when they get the chance. I’d pinned a notice up in the staff toilet that stares you straight in the face every time you sit on the throne: ‘DO WHAT HAS TO BE DONE. EVERYTHING DEPENDS ON YOU. DO IT NOW.’ Egil probably thought it was something to do with having a shit. I’d also mentioned this about cleaning up and taking responsibility so many times you would think Egil would get the little joke about a busy night. But then again, Egil wasn’t just tired, he was a simple lad of twenty who’d been the butt of jokes so many times in his life that it didn’t bother him any more. If you want to get by with the minimum of effort then pretending to understand less than you do is not the stupidest tactic to employ. So maybe Egil wasn’t so dumb after all.

  ‘You’re early, chief.’

  A bit too early for you to have cleaned up around the pumps so I would think the place had been shipshape the whole night, I thought.

  ‘Couldn’t sleep,’ I said. Crossed to the till and punched in the till-shift command. That ended the night and I heard the printer in the office start grinding away. ‘Go home and get some sleep.’

  ‘Thanks.’

  I went into the office and began looking through the takings while the paper was still being spewed out. It looked good. Another busy Sunday. Maybe our main road isn’t the busiest in the country, but with thirty-five kilometres to the next service station in both directions we’d become a bit of an oasis for motorists, especially those with young families, on their way home from the cabin. I’d installed a couple of tables and benches by the birch grove with a view across Lake Budal where they could sit with their burgers and buns and Cokes. Sold almost three hundred buns yesterday. I had less of a guilty conscience about the CO2 emissions than all the gluten intolerance I was causing the world. I let my eye run down the page and noted the number of frankfurters Egil had thrown away. Fair enough, but there were – as usual – a few too many compared to the sales figures. He’d changed now and was on his way out the door.