The Kingdom Read online

  ‘It means a pig.’ I said. ‘A male pig. Hot and dangerous.’

  ‘Does it have to be dangerous?’

  ‘Well, you can castrate it. Then it becomes a galte.’

  ‘Galte,’ she echoed.

  ‘So strictly speaking, what we had up here tonight wasn’t actually a rånegjeng but a galtegjeng.’ Carl chuckled. ‘Married, settled, castrated, but obviously still capable of reproducing.’

  ‘Galtegjeng. And some of them drive American cars, which you call Amcars.’ I could see how every Norwegian word we said went straight into that linguist’s brain of hers.

  ‘Shannon loves American cars,’ Carl went on. ‘She was driving her own Buick from the age of eleven. Ouch!’

  I heard Shannon’s whispered protest from below.

  ‘Buick,’ I said. ‘Not bad.’

  ‘He’s lying, I didn’t drive,’ said Shannon. ‘My grandma let me hold the steering wheel of this rusty old car she inherited from my great-uncle Leo. He was killed in Cuba, fighting with Castro against Batista. The car and Leo both came back from Havana in pieces, and Grandma put the car back together by herself.’

  Carl laughed. ‘But Leo she couldn’t put back together?’

  ‘What type of Buick was it?’ I asked.

  ‘A Roadmaster ’54,’ said Shannon. ‘When I was at university in Bridgetown, Grandma drove me there in that car every single day.’

  I must have been tired, or else still groggy from the punch and the beer, because I almost said that those vintage Buick Roadmasters were the most beautiful cars ever in my view.

  ‘Shame you slept through the whole party, Roy,’ said Shannon.

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t mind,’ said Carl. ‘See, Roy doesn’t really like people. Apart from me, that is.’

  ‘Is it true you saved his life, Roy?’ asked Shannon.

  ‘No,’ I said.

  ‘Oh yes!’ said Carl. ‘That time we bought the second-hand diving gear from Willumsen and didn’t have enough money to pay for the course, so we tested it out without knowing a fucking thing about it.’

  ‘It was my fault,’ I said. ‘I was the one who said it was just simple, practical logic.’

  ‘Says he. Of course, he managed it all right,’ said Carl. ‘And when it was my turn I got water inside the mask, I panicked and spat out the mouthpiece. If it hadn’t been for Roy...’

  ‘No, no, I just leaned over the side of the boat and pulled you to the surface,’ I said.

  ‘That same evening I sold my share in the diving equipment. Never wanted to set eyes on it again. How much did you give for it? Hundred, was it?’

  I could feel the corners of my lips widening. ‘All I remember is that for once I thought I got a good price from you.’

  ‘It was a hundred too much!’ cried Shannon. ‘Did you ever do anything in return for your big brother?’

  ‘No,’ said Carl. ‘Roy’s a far better brother than I am.’

  Shannon gave a sudden laugh and the bunk beds swayed; I think he must have been tickling her.

  ‘Is that true?’ Shannon hiccupped.

  There was no answer, and I realised it was me she was asking.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘He’s lying.’

  ‘Is he? How did he help you then?’

  ‘He corrected my homework for me.’

  ‘No I did not!’ protested Carl.

  ‘The nights before I had to hand in my essays he used to get up from where you are now, sneak over to my satchel, take my exercise book out to the toilet and correct all the misspellings. Then put the book back and crept back into his bed again. Never said a word about it.’

  ‘That happened maybe once!’ said Carl.

  ‘Every time,’ I said. ‘And I never said anything about it either.’

  ‘Why not?’ Shannon’s whisper had the same dark quality as the darkness in the room.

  ‘I couldn’t have people knowing that I quite happily let my kid brother sort things out for me,’ I said. ‘But on the other hand I needed a pass mark in Norwegian.’

  ‘Twice,’ said Carl. ‘Maybe three times.’

  We lay in silence. Shared the silence. I heard the sound of Carl’s breathing, so familiar it was like hearing my own. Now there was a third person breathing in the room, and I felt a stab of jealousy. That it wasn’t me lying down there with my arms around him. There was a chill cry; it sounded like it came from the outfields. Or from Huken.

  I heard muttering from the bunk below.

  ‘She’s asking what kind of animal that was,’ said Carl. ‘A raven, wasn’t it?’

  ‘That’s right,’ I said and waited. The raven – at least the one that lived up here – usually called twice, but this time not.

  ‘Does it mean danger?’ asked Shannon.

  ‘Could be,’ I said. ‘Or it’s answering another raven, one we can’t hear, that’s half a dozen kilometres away.’

  ‘Do they have different calls?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘There’s a different call if you get too close to the nest. The females call most. Sometimes a whole choir at it for no reason you can figure out.’

  Carl chuckled. I love that sound. It spread warmth, goodness. ‘Roy knows more about birds than anything else. Apart from cars maybe. And service stations.’

  ‘But not about people,’ said Shannon. From the way she said it you couldn’t tell if it was a question or a statement.

  ‘Precisely,’ said Carl. ‘So instead he gives people bird names. Dad was the mountain lark, Mum the wheatear. Uncle Bernard was the bunting because he was training to be a priest before he became a car mechanic, and the reed bunting has a white collar.’

  Shannon laughed. ‘And what were you, darling?’

  ‘I was...what was I again?’

  ‘The meadow pipit,’ I said quietly.

  ‘I presume the meadow pipit is handsome, strong and intelligent then,’ chuckled Shannon.

  ‘Maybe,’ I said.

  ‘It was because it flies higher than all the others,’ said Carl. ‘And on top of that it’s a big-mouthed big head that practises...what d’you call it again?’

  ‘Fluktspill,’ I said.

  ‘Fluktspill,’ Shannon said. ‘That’s a nice word. What does it mean?’

  I sighed as though it was a lot of bother for me to explain everything. ‘It’s a sort of winnowing display. Once it’s flown as high as it can it starts to sing, so that everyone can see how high up it is. Then it floats down with wings outstretched, showing off all the tricks and acrobatics it can do.’

  ‘Carl to a P!’ cried Shannon.

  ‘To a T,’ said Carl.

  ‘To a T,’ she repeated.

  ‘But even though the meadow pipit likes to show off, it’s not an unprincipled con man,’ I said. ‘In fact, it’s pretty easy to trick. That’s what makes it a favourite when the cuckoo’s looking for someone else’s nest to lay eggs in.’

  ‘Poor Carl!’ said Shannon, and I heard a big wet kiss. ‘Roy, what kind of bird would you say I was?’

  I thought about it. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Come on,’ said Carl.

  ‘I don’t know. Hummingbird? I only really know mountain birds.’

  ‘I don’t want to be a hummingbird!’ Shannon protested. ‘They’re too small and they like sweet stuff. Can’t I be like the one I found. The dotterel?’

  I thought of the dotterel’s white face. Dark eyes. The cap that almost looks like a crew cut.

  ‘OK,’ I said. ‘You’re the dotterel.’

  ‘And you, Roy, what are you?’

  ‘Me? I’m not anything.’

  ‘Everybody’s something. Come on.’

  I didn’t respond.

  ‘Roy’s the storyteller who tells us who we are,’ said Carl. ‘So that makes him everyone and no
one. He’s the mountain bird that has no name.’

  ‘The solitary mountain bird with no name,’ she said. ‘What kind of song does a nameless male like you sing to attract a mate?’

  Carl laughed. ‘Sorry, Roy, but this one here won’t stop until you’ve revealed your entire life to her.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘A characteristic of the male mountain bird is that he doesn’t sing for the female. He thinks it’s a load of flash nonsense and anyway up here in the mountains there are no trees for him to sit in and sing. So what he does instead is build a nest to impress her.’

  ‘Hotels?’ she asked. ‘Or service stations?’

  ‘Looks like hotels work best,’ I said.

  They both laughed.

  ‘Now let’s give the mountain thrush up there a bit of rest,’ said Carl.

  They climbed out of the bunk.

  ‘Goodnight,’ said Carl and stroked my head.

  The door closed behind them and I lay there listening.

  He remembered. That once, a long time ago, I’d told him I was the mountain thrush, the ring ouzel. A shy and cautious bird that hides away among the rocks. He’d said there was no need for me to do that, there was nothing out there to be afraid of. And I had answered that I knew that, but that I was still afraid anyway.

  I slept. Dreamed the same dream, as though it had just been paused and was waiting for me. When I woke to the scream of the climber getting hit by the rock I realised it was Shannon screaming. She screamed again. And again. Carl was fucking her well. Good for them. But of course, hard to sleep through a racket like that. I listened for a bit, thought she’d reached her climax, but it didn’t stop, so I put a pillow over my head. After a while I took it away again. It was quiet in there now. They were probably sleeping, but I couldn’t get back to sleep. Tossed and turned and the bed creaked as I thought about what Erik Nerell had said about the sheriff wanting to send climbers down into Huken to check the Cadillac.

  And finally it came.

  The raven’s second call.

  And I knew that this time it warned of danger. Not some immediate danger, but a fate that was out there, waiting somewhere. That had been waiting a long time now. Patient. Never forgetting. Trouble.

  PART TWO

  5

  CARL. HE’S THERE IN ALMOST all my childhood memories. Carl in the lower bunk. Carl whom I crept in beside in January, when the thermometer dropped to minus fifteen, or when the other situation demanded it in some way. Carl, my kid brother, with whom I quarrelled until he sobbed with anger and lashed out at me, and with the same result every time: I got him down easily, sat astride him so his arms were pinioned, pinched his nose. When he stopped struggling and just sobbed I could feel how his weakness and his giving up irritated me. Until at last he gave me that helpless kid brother look, and I got a lump in my throat, let him up and put an arm around him and promised him something or other. But the lump in the throat and the guilty conscience were still there long after Carl had dried his tears. Once Dad had seen us fighting. He hadn’t said a word, just let us get on with it, the way those of us who live up on the mountain let nature take its brutal course without interfering, unless our own goats were involved. It ended with me and Carl sitting on the sofa, me with my arm round him, both of us tearful. He just shook his head in exasperation and left the room.

  And I remember when I was twelve years old and Carl eleven, when my uncle Bernard turned fifty. He did something that, from Mum and Dad’s reaction, we realised was something really big time; he invited everyone to the city – the big city – to celebrate at the Grand Hotel. Mum said it had a swimming pool, and Carl and I were just crazy with excitement. And when we got there, it turned out there was no swimming pool, never had been, and I was pretty pissed off. But it didn’t seem to bother Carl that much, and when one of the people working there offered to show the eleven-year-old around the hotel I saw the bulge in Carl’s jacket pocket where he’d stuffed his swimming trunks. When he got back he went on about all the incredible things he’d seen, said the hotel was a bloody palace, and that one day he was going to build himself a fucking palace just like it. He said. Minus the swearing. And in the years that followed he always swore he’d had a swim in the pool at the Grand Hotel that evening.

  I think that was something Carl and Mum had in common, that the dream could top the reality, the packaging beat the contents. If things weren’t exactly like you wanted them to be, then you just reimagined them until they were, and remained more or less blind to things that shouldn’t have been there. For example, Mum always used the English word ‘hall’ to refer to the passageway in our house that stank of dung and stables. The haaall – that was how she said it. She’d worked as a maid and housekeeper for a shipping family from when she was a teenager and liked things to sound English and upper class.

  Dad was the opposite. He called a stable shovel a shite shovel, and he wanted everything around him to be, sound and feel American. And not big-city American but Midwest American, like Minnesota, where he had lived from the age of four until he was twelve, with the father whom we had never met. America was and remained the promised land for Dad, along with Cadillacs, the Methodist Church and the pursuit of happiness, always expressed in English. Originally he had wanted to name me Calvin, after the American president Calvin Coolidge. A Republican, naturally. Unlike his more charismatic predecessor Warren Harding – who had left in his wake a trail of scandals that all began with a c: chicks, cards, corruption and cocaine – Calvin was a hard-working man, serious, slow, taciturn and gruff, a man who, according to my father, hadn’t rushed things but climbed the career ladder one rung at a time. But Mum had protested, so they compromised on Roy, with Calvin as a middle name.

  Carl had been given the middle name Abel, after Secretary of State Abel Parker Upshur, an intelligent and charming man, according to Dad, as well as a man who dreamed big. So big that he arranged the annexation of Texas to the USA in 1845 and in so doing made it in one night a much bigger country. As part of the deal Abel accepted that Texas could continue with slavery. But under the circumstances that was, according to Dad, a mere detail.

  It could be that Carl and I matched pretty well the two we were named for. No one in the village – apart from maybe the old chairman Aas – knew anything about the original Calvin and Abel. They just said that I was most like Dad, and Carl most like Mum. But people down in Os don’t know what they’re talking about, they just talk.

  * * *

  —

  I was ten years old the time Dad came driving home in a Cadillac DeVille. Willum Willumsen at Willumsen’s Used Car and Breaker’s Yard had boasted about this beautiful specimen the owner had imported from the USA but found he couldn’t afford the import duty and had had to sell. In other words the car, a 1979 model, had done nothing but drive along dead straight highways through bone-dry Nevada deserts, so no rust to worry about there. Dad probably nodded his head slowly. He hadn’t a clue about cars, and my own interest still lay in the future. He made the deal without even haggling over the price, and after it had to be taken back to the repair shop less than two weeks later it was obvious it had as many pirated parts and faults as any of those wrecks you see balanced on breeze blocks on the streets of Havana. In the end the repairs set him back more than the car had. The locals laughed themselves silly about it and said that was what you get for not knowing the first thing about cars, one up for Willumsen, that wily old horse-trader. But I got a new toy. No, it was more than that, it was an education. A gadget in a thousand mechanical pieces, from which I learned that if you just took the time to understand the construction, and used your brain and your fingers then it was actually possible to mend things.

  I started spending more time at Uncle Bernard’s car repair shop. He allowed me to ‘help him out’, as he put it, though to begin with I was more of a hindrance than a help. And Dad taught me to box. Around that time Carl is a
little hazy for me. This was before he shot up. At first it looked as though I was going to be the taller of us, and for a while back then he had some terrible pimples. He did well at school, but he was quiet, had few friends, and kept himself to himself most of the time. And once he started at secondary school and I was spending more and more time at the repair shop it was often bedtime before we saw each other.

  I remember one evening talking about how much I was looking forward to turning eighteen, coming of age, getting a driving licence, and Ma shed a little tear and asked if the only thing I thought about was jumping into the car and getting away from Opgard.

  And of course, looking back, it’s easy to say that would have been best. But things had already started falling apart, and I couldn’t just run off. I had to fix them. Repair them. Anyway: where would I go?

  * * *

  —

  Then came the day Mum and Dad died, and Carl is back in all of those memory-pictures. I was almost eighteen, him not yet seventeen. Him and me sit watching as the Cadillac heads away from the yard and down in the direction of Geitesvingen. Even now it’s still like a film I can watch and discover new details in every time.

  Two tons of machinery from the General Motors factory, rolling along and gradually gathering speed. Now it’s so far away from me I can no longer hear the gravel crunch beneath the tyres. Silence, silence and the red rear lights. I can feel my heart beating, the speed increasing there too. Another twenty metres to Geitesvingen. The Highways Maintenance Department had been on the point of erecting a crash barrier when the council discovered that the last hundred metres up to the farm were private road and Opgard’s responsibility. Ten metres to go. The brake lights – like two bars, two hyphens running between the lid of the boot and the shiny bumper bar – lit up for a moment. Then they were gone. Everything was gone.

  6

  ‘NOW LET’S SEE, ROY. YOU were standing outside the house on the evening of the accident at half past...’ Sheriff Sigmund Olsen sat with his head bent as he looked through the documents. His thick mane of blond hair made me think of the mop in the gym at school. The hair hanging down was the same length at the front, the sides and the back. He had one of those thick walrus moustaches too, probably had the mop and the moustache ever since the seventies. Because he could. There wasn’t a trace of baldness on his bent head. ‘...seven. And you saw your parents go over the edge?’