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 realised she was cupping her hands round something. She opened them.