Arve Støp was last on the programme – he always stipulated that as a prerequisite for his appearance. So that he could start by slating the other lecturers as greedy narcissists, divide them into the three above-mentioned categories and place himself in the first – success with a not very original business idea. The money that was spent on this motivation day was wasted; most people in the room would never advance that far because they were lucky enough not to have the abnormal drive for recognition that tormented those standing on the platform. Including himself. A condition which he said was caused by his father’s lack of affection. So he had been obliged to seek love and admiration from others and he should therefore have become an actor or a musician, only he had no talent in those directions.
At this point in the lecture the audience’s amazement had turned into laughter. And sympathy. And Støp knew this would culminate in admiration. For he stood there and shone. Shone because he and everyone else knew that whatever he said he was a success and you can’t argue with success, not even your own. He stressed that luck was the most important factor in success, he played down his own talent and emphasised that general incompetence and idleness in the Norwegian business sector ensured that even mediocrity can succeed.
At the end they gave him a standing ovation.
And he smiled as he eyed the dark-haired beauty in the first row who would prove to be Birte. He had noticed her the minute he had entered. He was aware that the combination of slim legs and large breasts was often synonymous with silicone implants, but Støp was no opponent of cosmetic surgery for women. Nail varnish, silicone: in principle, what was the difference? With the applause pounding in his ears he simply stepped down from the stage, walked along the first row and began to shake hands with the audience. It was a fatuous gesture, something an American president could permit himself to do, but he didn’t give a toss, not a flying toss; if he could annoy someone he was happy. He stopped in front of the dark-haired woman who glowed back at him with elated red cheeks. As he passed her his hand she curtsied as if for a royal, and he felt the sharp corners of his business card stick in his palm as he pressed it against hers. She looked for a wedding ring.
The ring was lustreless. And her right hand narrow and pale, but it held his in an astonishingly firm grip.
‘Sylvia Ottersen,’ she said with a foolish smile. ‘I’m a great admirer so I just had to shake hands.’
That was how he had met Sylvia Ottersen for the first time, in her shop Taste of Africa one hot summer’s day in Oslo. Her looks were run-of-the-mill. Married, though.
Arve Støp looked up at the African masks and asked about something so as not to make the situation any more awkward than it already was. Not that it was awkward for him, but he noticed that the woman at his side had stiffened when Sylvia Ottersen had shaken his hand. Her name was Marita. No, it was Marite. She had insisted on bringing him here to show him some zebra-skin cushions that Marite – or was it Marita? – thought he just
had
to have for the bed they had left not long before and which now sported strands of long blonde hair, which, he made a mental note, would have to be removed.
‘We don’t have any left in zebra,’ Sylvia Ottersen said. ‘But what about these?’
She walked over to a shelf by the window; the daylight fell on her curves, which, he reflected, were not bad at all. Her commonplace brown hair, however, was straggly and dead.
‘What is it?’ asked the woman whose name began with M.
‘Imitation gnu skin.’
‘Imitation?’ M snorted, tossing her blonde hair over her shoulder. ‘We’ll wait until you get in more zebra.’
‘The zebra skin’s imitation too,’ Sylvia said, smiling the way you smile at children when you have to explain that the moon isn’t made of cheese after all.
‘I see,’ M said, breaking her red lips into a sour smile and hooking her arm under Arve’s. ‘Thank you for letting us browse.’
He hadn’t liked M’s idea of going out and parading around in public, and even less the grip she now had on his arm. She may have noticed his distaste when they were outside. At any rate, she let go. He glanced at his watch.
‘Ooh,’ he said. ‘I’ve got a meeting.’
‘No lunch?’ She regarded him with a surprised expression, quite able to hide how hurt she was.
‘I’ll ring you, maybe,’ he said.
She rang him. Only thirty minutes had passed since he had been standing on the Sentrum stage, and now he was sitting in a taxi behind a snowplough churning filthy snow onto the roadside.
‘I was sitting right in front of you,’ she said. ‘I’d like to thank you for the lecture.’
‘Hope my staring wasn’t too obvious,’ he shouted exultantly over the scraping of iron on tarmac.
She chuckled.
‘Any plans for the evening?’ he asked.
‘Well,’ she said, ‘none that can’t be changed . . .’ Beautiful voice. Beautiful words.
The rest of the afternoon he went round thinking about her, fantasising about screwing her on the chest of drawers in the hallway, her head banging against the Gerhard Richter painting he had bought in Berlin. And thinking this was always the best bit: the wait.
At eight she rang the bell downstairs. He was in the hall. Heard the echo of the lift’s mechanical clicking, like a weapon being loaded. A humming tone that rose. The blood was throbbing in his dick.
And then there she stood. He felt as if he had been slapped.
‘Who are you?’ he said.
‘Stine,’ she said and a mild expression of surprise spread across the smiling fleshy face. ‘I phoned . . .’
He weighed her up from top to toe and for a moment considered the possibility regardless; every so often he was turned on by the ordinary and fairly unattractive type. However, he could feel his erection dwindling and rejected the idea.
‘I’m sorry, but I was unable to get hold of you,’ he said. ‘I’ve just been summoned to a meeting.’
‘A meeting?’ she said, quite unable to hide how hurt she was.
‘An emergency meeting. I’ll ring you, perhaps.’
He stood in the hallway and heard the lift doors outside opening and closing. Then he began to laugh. He laughed until he realised he might never see the dark-haired beauty in the first row again.
He saw her again an hour later. After he had eaten lunch alone in the aptly named Bar&Restaurant, bought a suit at Kamikaze that he put on straight away and twice walked past Taste of Africa, which was in the shade out of the boiling hot sun. The third time he went in.
‘Back already?’ smiled Sylvia Ottersen.
Just as an hour before she was alone in the cool dark shop.
‘I liked the cushions,’ he said.
‘Yes, they’re elegant,’ she said, stroking the imitation gnu skin.
‘Have you anything else you could show me?’ he asked.
She put a hand on her hip. Tilted her head. She knows, he thought. She can smell.
‘Depends what you want to see,’ she said.
He heard the quaver in his voice as he answered. ‘I’d like to see your pussy.’
She let him fuck her in the back room and didn’t even bother to lock the shop door.
Arve Støp came almost at once. Now and then the ordinary, fairly unattractive type made him so damned horny.
‘My husband’s in the shop on Tuesdays and Wednesdays,’ she said as he was leaving. ‘Thursday?’
‘Maybe,’ he said and saw that his suit from Kamikaze was already stained.
The snow was swirling in flurries between the office buildings in Aker Brygge when Birte rang.
She said she assumed he had given her his business card for her to contact him.
Sometimes Arve Støp asked himself why he had to have these women, these kicks, these sexual relations that were actually no more than ceremonial rituals of surrender. Hadn’t he had enough conquests in his life? Was it the fear of getting old? Did he believe that by penetrating these women he could steal some of their youth? And why the hurry, the frenetic tempo? Perhaps it came from the certainty of the disease he was carrying; that before long he would not be the man he still was. He didn’t have the answers, and what would he do with them anyway? That same night he listened to Birte’s groans, as deep as a man’s, her head banging against the Gerhard Richter painting he had bought in Berlin.
Arve Støp ejaculated his infected seed as the bell over the front door angrily warned them that someone was on their way into Taste of Africa. He tried to free himself, but Sylvia Ottersen grinned and tightened her grip around his buttocks. He tore himself free and pulled up his trousers. Sylvia slid down off the counter, adjusted her summer skirt and went round the corner to serve the customer. Arve Støp hurried over to the shelves of ornaments with his back to the room and buttoned up his flies. Behind him he heard a man’s voice apologising for being late; it had been difficult to find somewhere to park. And Sylvia had said in a sharp voice that he should have known, after all the summer holidays were over now. She was meeting her sister and she was already late and he would have to take over with the customer.
Arve Støp heard the man’s voice at his back. ‘May I help you?’
He turned and saw a skeleton of a man with unnaturally large eyes behind round glasses, a flannel shirt and a neck that reminded him of a stork.
He looked over his shoulder at the man, caught Sylvia going out of the door, the hem of her skirt ridden up, a wet line running down the back of her bare knee. And it struck him that she had known this scarecrow, presumably her husband, would be coming now. She had
wanted
him to catch them at it.
‘I’m fine, thank you. I got what I came for,’ he said, heading for the door.
Every once in a while Arve Støp imagined how he would react if he were told he had made someone pregnant. Whether he would insist on an abortion or that the child should be born. The only thing he was absolutely sure of was that he would insist on one or the other; leaving decisions to others was not in his nature.
Birte Becker had told him they didn’t need to use contraception as she couldn’t have children. When, three months and six acts of sexual intercourse later, she informed him with a rapturous beam that she could after all, he knew at once that she would have the baby. He reacted by panicking and insisting on the alternative option.
‘I have the best contacts,’ he said. ‘In Switzerland. No one will ever know.’
‘This is my opportunity to become a mother, Arve. The doctor says it’s a miracle that may never be repeated.’
‘Then I want to see neither you nor any children you may have again. Do you hear me?’
‘The child needs a father, Arve. And a secure home.’
‘And you won’t find either here. I’m the carrier of an awful inherited disease. Do you understand?’
Birte Becker understood. And since she was a simple but quick- witted girl with a drunkard of a father and a nervous wreck of a mother, accustomed from early years to coping on her own, she did what she had to do. She found her child a father and a secure home.
Filip Becker could not believe it when this beautiful woman he had wooed with such determination, yet to no avail, suddenly surrendered and set her heart on becoming his. And since he could not believe it, the seeds of suspicion were already sown. At the moment she announced that he had made her pregnant – only a week after she had given herself to him – the seeds were still well entrenched.
When Birte rang Arve to say that Jonas had been born and was the spitting image of him, Arve stood with his ear against the receiver staring into the air. Then he asked her for a photograph. It arrived in the post and two weeks later she was sitting, as arranged, in a coffee bar with Jonas on her lap and a wedding ring on her finger while Arve sat at another table pretending to read a paper.
That night he tossed and turned between the sheets, restlessly brooding over the disease.
It had to be handled with discretion, a doctor he could trust to keep his mouth shut. In short, it would have to be the feeble, obsequious prat of a surgeon at the curling club: Idar Vetlesen.
He contacted Vetlesen who was working at Marienlyst Clinic. The prat said yes to the job, yes to the money and at Støp’s expense travelled to Geneva where the foremost Fahr’s syndrome experts in Europe gathered every year to hold a course and present the latest discouraging findings from their research.
The first tests Jonas underwent revealed nothing wrong, but even though Vetlesen repeated that the symptoms usually came to light in adulthood – Arve Støp had himself been symptom-free until he was forty – Støp insisted that the boy should be examined once a year.
Two years had passed since he had seen his seed running down Sylvia Ottersen’s leg as she walked out of the shop and out of Arve Støp’s life. He had quite simply never contacted her again, nor she him. Until now. When she rang he said immediately that he was on his way to an emergency meeting, but she kept the message brief. In four sentences she told him that obviously not all his seed had dribbled out, she now had twins, her husband thought they were his and they needed a kindly disposed investor to keep Taste of Africa afloat.
‘I think I’ve injected enough into that shop,’ said Arve Støp, who often reacted to bad news with witticisms.
‘I could, on the other hand, raise the money by going to
Se og Hør.
They love these the-father-of-my-child’s-a-celeb etc., etc. stories, don’t they.’
‘Poor bluff,’ he said. ‘You’ve got too much to lose by doing that.’
‘Things have changed,’ she said. ‘I’m going to leave Rolf if I can scrape together enough cash to buy him out of the shop. The problem with the shop is its location, so I will make it a condition that
Se og Hør
publishes pictures of the place to get it some decent publicity. Do you know how many people read the rag?’
Arve Støp knew. Every sixth Norwegian adult. He had never objected to a nice glitzy scandal every once in a while, but to be made to look like a slippery Lothario exploiting his celebrity status with an innocent married woman in such a craven way? The public image of Arve Støp as upright and fearless would be smashed, and
Liberal
’s morally indignant outbursts would be cast in a hypocritical light. And she wasn’t even attractive. This was not good. Not good at all.