standing on the gravel side road and what might have been fragments of broken glass crunching under the car tyres. He would not have seen a trace of a police car lying on its roof down under the trees by the river.
I know all of this because I was in a position that enabled me to state that we were lying on the car roof, hidden from the road by the trees alongside the river. The times given depend on the accuracy of Sunded’s watch, which was ticking away right in front of me. At least I think it was his; it hung from the wrist of a severed arm protruding from a piece of grey raincoat.
A puff of wind wafted over carrying with it the resin smell of brake linings and the sound of a diesel engine idling.
The sunshine flickered down through the trees from a cloudless sky, but around me it was raining. Petrol, oil and blood. Dripping and draining away. Everyone was dead. Pimples no longer had any Pimples. Or any face for that matter. What was left of Sunded was squashed flat like a cardboard figure; I could see him peering out from between his own legs. The twins seemed more or less whole but had stopped breathing. That I was alive myself was solely down to the Monsen family’s aptitude for amassing body weight and forming it into perfect airbags. But those same bodies which had saved my life were now wresting it from me. The whole of the car body was crushed and I was hanging upside down from my seat. One arm was free, but I was squeezed in between the two policemen so tightly that I could neither move nor breathe. For the time being, however, my senses were functioning perfectly. Such that I could see petrol trickling out, feel it running down my trouser legs, along my body and out of my tracksuit neck. And hear the lorry up on the road, hear it snorting and clearing its throat and jerking. I knew he was sitting there, Greve, thinking, appraising. He could see on the GPS tracker that I wasn’t moving. He was thinking that he still ought to go down and make sure everyone was dead. On the other hand, it would be tricky getting down the slope and even trickier getting back up. And surely no one could have survived that crash? But you slept so much better knowing you had seen it with your own eyes…
Drive, I begged. Drive.
The worst thing about being fully conscious was that I could imagine what would happen if he found me soaked in petrol.
Drive. Drive!
The lorry’s diesel engine was chuntering away as though carrying on a conversation with itself.
Everything that had happened was clear to me now. Greve had not gone up to Sindre Aa on the steps to ask where I was, he could see that on the display of his GPS tracker. Aa had to be got rid of simply because he had seen Greve and his car. But while Greve had been walking up the path to the cabin, I had moved to the outside toilet, and as he hadn’t found me in the cabin, he had checked the tracker again. And discovered to his amazement that the signal had gone. Because the transmitters in my hair at that point were submerged under crap, which HOTE’s transmitters, as has been mentioned before, do not have signals powerful enough to penetrate. Idiot that I am, I had had more luck than I deserved.
Greve had then sent out the dog to find me while he waited. Still without a signal. Because the crap that dried round the transmitters was still blocking the signals while I was checking Aa’s body and then fleeing on the tractor. It was not until the middle of the night that Greve’s GPS tracker would have begun to receive signals again. Which was when I was lying on a stretcher in the hospital shower and the crap was being washed out of my hair. Greve had jumped into his car and was at the hospital by dawn. God knows how he had stolen the lorry, but anyway he had no problem finding me again, me, Brown, the babbling nutter who was veritably imploring to be caught.
The fingers on Sunded’s severed arm were still curled around the handle of his overnight case. His wristwatch was ticking. Ten sixteen. In a minute I would lose consciousness. In two I would be suffocated. Make up your mind, Greve.
And then he did.
I heard the lorry belch. The rpm sank. He had switched off the ignition; he was on his way here!
Or… had he put it into gear?
A low rumble. The crunch of gravel under the tyres bearing twenty-five tonnes. The rumble increased in volume. And increased. And became quieter. Disappeared into the countryside. Died away.
I closed my eyes and offered up my thanks. For not being burned, but only dying from a lack of oxygen. Because that is by no means the worst way to die. The brain closes down chambers one by one, you become dopey, you are numbed, stop thinking, and with that your problems cease to exist. In a way it is like taking a few stiff drinks. Yep, I thought, I can live with dying like that.
The idea of it almost made me laugh.
Me, who had spent my whole life trying to be my father’s opposite, would end my life as he had, in a wrecked car. And how different to him had I actually been? When I was too old for the bloody drunkard to hit me, I had begun to hit him. In the same way that he had hit Mum, without leaving any visible marks. As another example, when he had offered to teach me to drive, I had politely refused and informed him that I was not interested in having a driver’s licence. And I had got together with the ugly, pampered ambassador’s daughter Dad had driven to school every day, just so I could take her home for dinner and humiliate him. When I saw my mother in the kitchen crying between the main course and dessert, I had regretted that. I had applied to a college in London I had heard Dad say was a posh place for social parasites. But he hadn’t taken it as badly as I had hoped. He had even managed to put on a smile, seemed proud when I told him about it, the crafty bastard. So when later that autumn he had asked if he and my mother could travel from Norway to visit me on campus, I had said no, on the basis that I didn’t want my fellow students to discover that my father was not someone high up in the diplomatic corps but a plain chauffeur. That seemed to hit a tender spot. Not tender as in tenderness, of course, but sore.
I had rung my mother two weeks before the wedding to say that I was getting married to a girl I had met, explained that it would be a simple affair, just us and two witnesses. But my mother was welcome to come so long as she came without Dad. Mum had lost her temper and said that of course she wouldn’t come without him. Noble, loyal souls are often handicapped by loyalty to even the basest of individuals. Well, especially the base individuals.
Diana was going to meet my parents after the end of the semester that summer, but three weeks before we left London I had received news of the car accident. On the way home from their cabin, the policeman had said on the crackly telephone line. Evening, rain, the car had been going too fast. The old road had been temporarily re- routed, motorway extension. A new, perhaps somewhat illogical bend, but marked with danger signs. The newly laid tarmac absorbed light, naturally enough. A parked road-laying machine. I had interrupted the policeman and said they should breath-test my father. Just so that they could confirm what I already knew: that he had killed my mother.
That evening, alone in a pub in Barons Court, had been the first time I had tasted alcohol. And cried in public. The evening when I washed away my tears in the stinking urinals I saw my father’s limp, drunken face in the cracked mirror. And remembered that calm, attentive glow in his eyes when he had hit out at the chess pieces, hitting the queen which had whirled through the air – two and a half somersaults – before landing on the floor. Then he had hit me. Just the once, but he had raised his hand. Slapped me below the ear. And I had seen it then, in his eyes; what Mum called the Sickness. And it was a hideous, graceful and bloodthirsty monster that resided behind his eyes. But it was also him, my father, my own flesh and blood.
Blood.
Something which lay deep, that had lain under all the layers of denial for a long time, rose to the surface. A hazy memory of a thought that had gone through my head which would not let itself be held down any longer. It took a more concrete form. Became articulated through pain. Became the truth. The truth that hitherto I had managed to hold at arm’s length by lying to myself. For it wasn’t the fear of being supplanted by a child that made me not want to have children. It was the fear of the Sickness. The fear that I, the son, also had it. That it was there, behind my eyes. I had lied to everyone. I had told Lotte I didn’t want the child because it had a flaw, a syndrome, a chromosome irregularity. While the truth was that the irregularity was in me.
Everything was flowing now. My life had been a property left by the deceased, and now my brain had draped the furniture with dust sheets, closed the doors, prepared itself to switch off the current. My eyes dripped, ran and flooded, over my forehead, into my scalp. I was being suffocated by two human balloons. I thought about Lotte. And there, on the threshold, it dawned on me. I saw the light. I saw… Diana? What was the traitor doing here now? Balloons…
My free, dangling hand moved towards the overnight bag. My numb fingers loosened Sunded’s from the handle and opened it. Petrol was dripping off me into the bag as I rummaged around, pulled out a shirt, a pair of socks,
