Killing Moon полностью

‘Did he ever give you any presents, for instance?’

‘Yes,’ Prim said. ‘One Christmas when I was ten, he gave me a book about the torture methods of the Comanches. They were the most proficient. For example, they would hang their victims upside down from trees and light fires beneath them, so eventually their brains boiled.’

His uncle laughed. ‘Not bad. Anyway, my moral indignation has limits, both when it comes to Comanches and your stepfather. Your mother should have treated him better, he was her patron, after all. Just like the parasite that is humanity should treat this planet better. Well, no reason to be sorry about that either. People think we biologists wish to preserve nature unchanged, like an organic museum. But we seem to be the only ones who understand and accept that nature is in flux, that everything dies and disappears, that is what’s natural. Not the continued existence of the species, but its destruction.’

‘Shall we turn and go back?’

‘Go back? Back where?’

Prim sighed. His uncle’s mind was obviously clouding over again. ‘To the nursing home.’

‘I’m just messing with you.’ His uncle grinned. ‘That nurse who showed you up to my room. Bet you a thousand-krone note I fuck her by Monday. What do you say?’

‘Every time we make a bet and you lose, you claim not to remember we made a bet. When you win, however...’

‘Now don’t be unreasonable, Prim. Suffering from dementia must have its advantages.’

After they had rounded off their short walk and Prim had delivered his uncle back into the care of the nurse in question, he walked back the same way. He crossed Slemdalsveien, continuing east, before coming to a residential area with villas on spacious plots. The houses were expensive in this area, but the ones located next to the Ring 3 motorway were more reasonably priced due to the noise. That was where the ruins lay.

He lifted the latch on the rusty iron gate and walked up the gravelly incline to the grove of birch trees. On the other side of the rise, obscured behind trees, stood a burnt-out villa. The fact the house lay so hidden from the neighbours had been a help to him over the years in his stalling tactics with the council, who wanted the ruins demolished. He unlocked the door and went inside. The staircase up to the first floor had collapsed. Mother’s bedroom had been up there. His had been on the ground floor. Perhaps that was what had made it possible. The distance. Not that she hadn’t known, but it had made it possible for her to pretend she didn’t know. All the non-load-bearing internal walls had also burnt down, the entire ground floor was one big room covered in a carpet of ash. Here and there vegetation sprouted and grew in the ash. A bush. A seedling that would perhaps grow into a tree. He walked over to the burnt-out iron bed in what had been his room. A homeless Bulgarian had broken in and lived here for a while. If it wasn’t for the fact his presence would have inevitably led to complaints from the neighbours and more hassle about demolition, Prim would have let the poor wretch stay. He had given the Bulgarian some cash, and the man had left peacefully with what few possessions he had, apart from a pair of damp woollen socks with holes in them and the mattress on the bed. Prim had changed the lock on the front door and nailed new boards over the windows.

The metal springs creaked as he sat his full weight down on the dirty mattress. He shuddered. It was the sound of a childhood, a sound that was stuck in his mind, as undeniable as the parasites he had bred.

Yet ironically, this bed had been his salvation when he crept under it during the fire.

Though there had been days he had cursed that salvation.

The loneliness at the institutions. The loneliness at the different homes of foster parents he had run away from. Not because they weren’t good, well-meaning people, but because in those years he was unable to sleep in a strange room, but always lay awake, listening. And waiting. For fire. For the father in the house. And eventually couldn’t stand it any longer and would run. Soon he would be placed in a new institution where Uncle Fredric would visit him now and again, pretty much how he now visited Uncle Fredric. His uncle, who had made it clear that he was just an uncle after all and, as he lived alone, was in no position to take the boy in. The liar. Yet he was in a position to look after the boy’s modest inheritance from his mother. So Prim had seen precious little of that. Apart from this, the property. It was just one of the reasons he had been opposed to selling it — he knew all the proceeds would disappear into his uncle’s pocket.