The Kingdom Page 5

‘You never mentioned that.’

  Carl shrugged. ‘I was embarrassed. I’d been unfaithful to his daughter and now I was letting him help me in all good faith. But I think he had his reasons, he probably hoped I’d return with a university degree and win back the princess and half the kingdom, like the boy in the fairy story.’

  ‘So now you want him to help you again?’

  ‘Not me,’ said Carl. ‘The village.’

  ‘Naturally. The village. And exactly when was it you started having these heart-warming thoughts about the village?’

  ‘And just exactly when did you become so cold-hearted and cynical?’

  I smiled. I could have told him the date and the hour.

  Carl took a deep breath. ‘Something happens to you when you’re sitting on the other side of the world and wondering who you really are. Where you come from. What context you belong to. Who your people are.’

  ‘So you’ve discovered that these are your people?’ I nodded in the direction of the village a thousand metres beneath us.

  ‘For good and ill, yes. It’s like an inheritance you can’t give away. It comes back to you, whether you want it to or not.’

  ‘Is that why you’ve dropped your accent? You turning against your own culture?’

  ‘No way. This is Mum’s culture.’

  ‘She talked city talk because she spent so long working as a housekeeper, not because it was her own dialect.’

  ‘Then put it this way: our heritage is her adaptability. There are a lot of Norwegians in Minnesota, and I was taken more seriously, especially by potential investors, when I spoke naicely.’ He said it through his nose, the way Mum spoke, and with an exaggeratedly posh accent. We laughed.

  ‘I’ll be back talking in the old way soon enough,’ said Carl. ‘I’m from Os. But even more from Opgard. My real people, Roy – above all, that’s you. If the national highway is routed round the village and nothing else comes along that turns the village into a place to come to then your service station—’

  ‘It isn’t my station, Carl, I just work there. I can run a service station anywhere, the company has five hundred of them, so you’ve no need to be rescuing me.’

  ‘I owe you.’

  ‘I said, I don’t need anything—’

  ‘Oh yes, you need something. What you really fucking need is to own your own service station.’

  I shut my mouth. OK, so he’d hit the nail on the head there. He was my brother, after all. No one knew me better.

  ‘And with this project you’ll raise the capital you need, Roy. To buy a station here, or wherever.’

  I’d been saving up. Saving every damn krone I didn’t need for food and electricity to warm up the king-size pizzas when I didn’t eat my dinner at the station, for petrol for the old Volvo, and to keep the house in a reasonable state of repair. I’d talked to head office about possibly taking over the station, signing a franchise contract. And they weren’t completely negative about it when they realised the main road and all the traffic with it would soon be gone. But the price hadn’t fallen as much as I had hoped it would, which was, paradoxically enough, my own fault, since we were quite simply doing too well.

  ‘Supposing I did go along with this SL thing...’

  ‘Yes!’ he yelled. Typical Carl, celebrating as though I was already in.

  I shook my head irritably. ‘It’ll still be two years before your hotel is up and running. Plus another two years minimum before it starts earning money. If it doesn’t all go to shit, that is. Whatever, if in the course of the next decade I can buy the service station and need a quick loan, the bank will say “no, you’re in debt up to your chimney pot with this here SL project”.’

  Carl couldn’t even be bothered to pick me up on my embarrassingly obvious bullshit. SL or no SL, no bank would give a loan for the purchase of a service station that would be slap bang in the middle of nowhere the way things were shaping up.

  ‘You’re going to be part of this hotel project, Roy. And what’s more, you’ll have the money for your station even before we start building the hotel.’

  I looked at him. ‘What d’you mean?’

  ‘The SL has to buy the land the hotel is going to be built on. And who owns that?’

  ‘You and me,’ I said. ‘So what? You don’t get rich selling a few acres of bare mountainside.’

  ‘That depends who sets the price,’ said Carl.

  I’m not usually reckoned to be slow when it comes to logic and practical thinking, but even so it took a few seconds before it dawned on me.

  ‘You mean...’

  ‘I mean that I’m responsible for the description of the project, yes. And that means that it’s me who defines the items in the budget that I’m going to present at the investors’ meeting. Of course I won’t lie about the value of the land, but let’s say we set it at twenty million—’

  ‘Twenty million!’ I slapped the heather with my hand in exasperation. ‘For this?’

  ‘—then that is relatively speaking such a small sum in comparison with the four hundred million total that it’ll be a small matter to split the price of the property and spread it out over the other items. Item 1, the road and surrounding area; item 2, the parking space; item 3, the actual building site...’

  ‘And what if someone asks the price per acre?’

  ‘Then of course we tell them. We’re not thieves.’

  ‘If we’re not thieves then what...?’ We? How had he suddenly managed to get me into this? Well, OK, this was no time to be splitting hairs. ‘What are we then?’

  ‘We’re business people who are playing the game.’

  ‘Playing? These are villagers, people without a clue, Carl.’

  ‘Country bumpkins you mean? Yes, well, we should know, we’re from round here.’ He spat. ‘Like when Dad bought the Cadillac. That sure bothered people, you bet it did.’

  He gave a crooked smile.

  ‘This project is going to push up land prices here for everybody, Roy. Once the hotel is financed we roll out stage two. The ski lifts, cabins and lodges. That’s where the real money is. So why should we sell at a giveaway price now, when we know prices are guaranteed to go through the ceiling? Especially when we are the ones who made it happen. We’re not tricking anyone, Roy, there’s just no need for us to shout it from the rooftops that the Opgard brothers are scooping in the first millions. So...’ He looked at me. ‘You want the money for the station, or don’t you?’

  I chewed it over.

  ‘Think about it while I take a leak,’ said Carl.

  He turned and walked up to the top of the knoll, probably thinking he’d be sheltered on the other side.

  So Carl had given me the time it takes to empty a bladder to decide whether I wanted to sell the property that had been in our family’s possession for four generations. For a price that under other circumstances would be considered highway robbery. I didn’t need to think. I don’t give a fuck about generations, at least not as far as this family is concerned, and we’re talking about a wilderness that has no sentimental value whatever nor any other type of value either, unless someone suddenly discovers a rare metal. And if Carl was right and the millions we were about to scoop up were just the icing on a cake that every participant in the village would have a share in in due course, that was fine by me. Twenty million. Ten for me. You could get a bloody nice service station for ten million. Top class, good location, not an øre in debt. Fully automated car wash. Separate restaurant.

  ‘Roy?’

  I turned. Hadn’t heard Shannon approaching because of the wind. She looked up at me.

  ‘I think it’s sick,’ she said.

  For a moment I thought she was referring to herself, she looked so windblown and cold standing there, her big brown eyes looking up from under the old knitted hat I used to wear as a kid. Then I r
ealised she was cupping her hands round something. She opened them.

  It was a little bird. Black hood on a white head, light brown throat. Colours so pale it had to be a male. It looked lifeless.

  ‘A dotterel,’ I said.

  ‘It was just lying there,’ she said, and pointed to a hollow in the heather where I saw an egg. ‘I nearly stepped on it.’

  I squatted down and felt the egg.

  ‘Yes, the dotterel will stay sitting on the eggs and let itself be trodden on rather than sacrifice the eggs.’

  ‘I thought birds here hatched in the spring – they do in Canada.’

  ‘Yes, but this egg never hatched because it’s dead. He obviously didn’t realise, poor thing.’

  ‘He?’

  ‘The male dotterel does the brooding and looks after the chicks.’ I stood up and stroked the bird in Shannon’s hands on the breast. Felt its quick pulse beneath my fingertip. ‘He’s playing dead. To distract us from the egg.’

  Shannon looked round. ‘Where are they? And where is the female?’

  ‘The female is probably somewhere having it off with another male.’

  ‘Having it away?’

  ‘You know, mating. Having sex.’

  She gave me a sceptical look. ‘Do birds have sex outside the mating season?’

  ‘I’m kidding, but we can always hope so,’ I said. ‘Anyway, it’s called polyandry.’

  She stroked the bird’s back. ‘A male that sacrifices everything for the children, who keeps the family together even when the mother’s unfaithful. That really is something rare.’

  ‘That’s not actually what polyandry means,’ I said. ‘It’s—’

  ‘—a form of a marriage in which the woman takes several husbands,’ she said.

  ‘Oh?’ I said.

  ‘Yes. You get it in a number of places in the world. Especially in India and Tibet.’

  ‘Jesus. Why...’ I was about to ask do you know that?, but then changed it to ‘do they do that?’

  ‘Usually it’s brothers who marry the woman, and the reason is so as not to break up the family home.’

  ‘I didn’t know that.’

  She put her head on one side. ‘Maybe you know more about birds than people?’

  I didn’t answer. Then she laughed and threw the bird up high into the air. It spread its wings and flew straight ahead, away from us. I followed its flight until suddenly I detected a movement at the edge of my vision. My first thought was that it was a snake. I turned and saw the dark form winding its way towards us down the rocky slope. Lifted my gaze and saw Carl was standing there up at the top, looking out like some statue of Christ over Rio and still pissing. I stepped aside, coughed, and Shannon saw the stream of urine and did the same. It continued to wind its way on downwards towards the village.

  ‘What do you think of us selling the land up here for twenty million kroner?’ I asked.

  ‘Sounds like a lot. Where do you think the nest might be?’

  ‘That’s two and a half million American dollars. We’re going to build a house with two hundred beds in it.’

  She smiled, turned and began walking back the way we had come. ‘That’s a lot. But the dotterel was here first.’

  * * *

  —

  The power went just before bedtime.

  I was sitting in the kitchen looking over printouts of the most recent accounts. Working out how head office would discount future profits and price the station in the event of a sale. I had worked out that with ten million I would not only manage to buy a ten-year franchise but the whole shooting match, buildings and land included. Then I would really own my own station.

  I stood up and looked down over the village. No light down there either. Good, so that meant the problem wasn’t up here. I took a couple of paces in the direction of the living-room door, opened it and peered out into the pitch darkness.

  ‘Hello,’ I called out experimentally.

  ‘Hi,’ came the response in unison from Carl and Shannon.

  I fumbled my way to Mum’s rocking chair. Sat down. The rockers creaked against the floor planking. Shannon giggled. They’d had a drink.

  ‘Sorry about this,’ I said. ‘It isn’t us, it’s...them.’

  ‘Doesn’t bother me,’ said Shannon. ‘When I was a kid there were power cuts all the time.’

  I said into the darkness: ‘Is it poor, Barbados?’

  ‘No,’ said Shannon. ‘It’s one of the richest Caribbean islands. But where I grew up there were so many people cable hooking...what do you call that in Norwegian?’

  ‘Actually I don’t think we have a word for it,’ said Carl.

  ‘They stole electricity by connecting up to the mains. And that made the whole net unstable. I got used to the idea. You know, that everything can disappear, at any time.’

  Something told me she wasn’t just talking about electricity. About home and family, maybe? She hadn’t given up until she’d found the dotterel’s nest, and then she’d stuck a twig in the ground so we wouldn’t tread on it the next time.

  ‘Tell us about it,’ I said.

  For a few moments the silence in the darkness was complete.

  Then she gave a low laugh, as though excusing herself. ‘Why don’t you tell us instead, Roy?’

  What surprised me was that even though she never got the wrong Norwegian word or made a mistake in the syntax, her accent still made you think of her as a foreigner. Or maybe it was that meal she’d made. That mofongo, some Caribbean dish.

  ‘Yeah, let Roy tell us, he’s good at telling stories in the dark. He used to do it for me when I couldn’t get to sleep.’

  When you couldn’t get to sleep because you were crying, I thought. When I climbed down into your bed, after it was over, and put my arms around you, felt your skin so warm against mine, and told you not to think about it, just think about the story I’m telling you and let sleep come. And at the same moment as I was thinking that I realised that it wasn’t the accent or the mofongo, it was the fact that she was here, in the dark, with me and Carl. In the dark in our house, the dark that belonged to him and me and no one else.

  4

  CARL WAS ALREADY AT THE door, waiting to greet the guests. We heard the first cars struggling up the track towards Geitesvingen, change down, then down again. Shannon gave me a quizzical look when I poured more of the strong stuff into her punchbowl.

  ‘They like it to taste more moonshine than fruit,’ I said and peered out of the kitchen window.

  A Passat stopped in front of the house and six people tumbled out of the five-seater. It was always the same thing; they travelled up in a gang and the women drove. I don’t know why guys think they have priority when it comes to drinking parties like this, or why the girls volunteer to drive even before they’re asked, but that’s the way it is. The lads who came along because they were single or because someone had to stay home and look after the kids did a round of rock paper scissors to decide who drove. When Carl and I were growing up, people drove when they were drunk. Take Dad. But people don’t drink and drive any more. They still beat their wives, but no way would they drink and drive.

  There was a banner in the living room with HOMECOMING on it. I thought it was a bit strange because I thought the point of that American custom was that it was family and friends and not the homecoming person himself who was supposed to arrange the party. But Shannon just laughed and said if no one else was going to do it then you had to do it yourself.

  ‘Let me do the punch,’ said Shannon, who had come up to me as I stood and ladled the mixture of home brew and fruit cocktail into the glasses I’d put out. She was wearing the same outfit as when she arrived, black polo-neck sweater and black trousers. I mean, probably another set of clothes but that looked exactly the same. I don’t know much about clothes, but something told m
e that hers were of the discreet and exclusive type.

  ‘Thanks, but I’m quite capable,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ said the little lady and shoved me aside. ‘Off you go and talk to old friends, while I’ll go round with the glasses and get to know everyone a bit better.’

  ‘OK,’ I said. I didn’t bother to explain to her that they were Carl’s friends, that I didn’t have friends. But anyway, it was nice to see them all give Carl a hug in the doorway, slap him on the back as though he’d got something stuck in his throat, grin and say some laddish thing they’d worked out on the drive up, a little bit high, a bit shy and ready for a drink.

  Me they shook hands with.

  Of all things, this was perhaps the biggest difference between my brother and me. These were people whom Carl hadn’t seen for fifteen years, but they’d seen me every other day at the service station, year in and year out. And yet still they felt as though he was the one they knew, not me. Standing there and watching him now, how he relished the warmth and nearness of our friends, things which I had never enjoyed – did I envy him? Well, I guess we all want to be loved. But would I change places? Would I be willing to let people get as close as Carl did? It didn’t seem to cost him anything. But for me the price would have been too high.

  ‘Hi, Roy. Not often we see you with a beer.’ It was Mari Aas. She was looking good. Mari always looked good, even when she was wheeling her twins around when they had gripe. And I know how much that annoyed the women in town who had been hoping they might finally get to see little Miss Perfect having a hard time of it like the rest of us mere mortals. The girl who had everything. Because as well as the silver spoon in her mouth she was born with, and a brain that got her top marks at school, and the respect that came with her surname Aas, she had the looks to match it all. From her mother Mari Aas inherited the dark glow in her skin and feminine curves, and from her father the blonde hair and the cold, blue, vulpine eyes. And maybe it was those eyes, her sharp tongue and air of superiority and coolness that had kept the boys at an oddly respectful distance.

  ‘Funny we don’t run into each other more often,’ said Mari. ‘So how are you, really?’