‘Take care of the flag and the pole,’ I tell him. ‘And do it today. I’ll go to the customer-service desk.’
I have already turned and am about to take my first step towards the front doors when I hear Kristian behind me, cursing again.
‘Think they can come into my park for a fucking joyride. This is my park. Mine.’
I don’t stop, don’t look behind me as I stride off towards the entrance. My mind is ablaze with questions burning like an iron poker against the skin. My shoulder aches as though someone were pressing a hundred needles into it at once. It feels as though the whole confounded adventure park has collapsed on my back, as though its weight were driving me into the ground, winding me, zapping my energy. I can see people filing through the gates. Mostly mothers and small children, a few fathers among them too. I’ve never worked at the front desk before, but I know the park and how it works perfectly well.
Besides, how difficult can customer service possibly be?
It turns out customer service is very difficult. And it’s because of the customers.
It has never occurred to me that so many people might ask for things that clearly aren’t on offer or ask for changes to what they have already bought, or that they might want to ask endless questions about different options only to settle for the only option that was originally on offer or, with the queue growing behind them, to engage in lengthy negotiations with the three-foot person next to them who simply cannot have all the facts or critical faculties necessary for rational decision-making. I hear that apparently the weather outside is so beautiful that it would be a shame to spend time indoors. I reply that visiting our facility is by no means compulsory and that the weather is in fact set to cool as the wind from the north strengthens, that in an hour’s time the winds will be blowing at eight metres per second and that a cloudy area of low pressure is forecast to bring heavy local showers, so the idea of beauty is, at least to some extent, a matter of interpretation.
The father, who mentioned the weather in the first place, is silent.
I manage to clear the morning queues. For a moment the entrance hall is empty. I walk around the counter and look outside.
Kristian is pacing the length of the fallen flagpole, speaking on the phone. Hopefully he is either asking someone to take the old pole away or ordering a new one. I don’t understand what this obvious case of sabotage is supposed to tell me. I can’t think what impact it’s supposed to have; all I know is it’s yet another little inconvenience. As if there weren’t enough of the larger inconveniences.
There is no money. I have thought through several options, everything from increasing the entrance fee to cutting back the staffing budget, but we have already exhausted these options as far as possible. Crucially, our entrance fee is a full euro cheaper than our nearest competitor, the largest adventure-park franchise in the country. We already operate on the lowest staffing costs around. (We don’t go out of our way to publicise this fact. We don’t want the parents to think their little ones’ development will be adversely affected just because we don’t have an on-duty ballet dancer or puppet-therapy classes.)
And after their last visit, I’m not naïve enough to imagine I could intimidate Lizard Man and his finger-snapping friend with the headphones. They’ll soon be back. Their colleague is in my freezer.
My actions last night were optimal given the pervading circumstances. I know that. From what I’ve read, I know that in almost one hundred percent of suspicious deaths, the body itself does most of the detective work. In an intermediary sense, that is. Who has died? How, where and when did they die? The body tells us everything. But if there is no body, getting to the bottom of things is a bit harder. I’m not especially proud or happy about what I’ve done, but I did it to save my life and to defend my adventure park, my brother’s estate and my parents’ memory. I had no other options. I did what I had to do. But after all this, I must admit that, at most, all I have done is postpone the inevitable. When the men return, I will need to have some answers.
I need money.
YouMeFun needs money.
Lots, quickly, somewhere, somehow.
In the car park, Kristian kneels down next to the fallen flag. He begins folding it slowly, respectfully, with a sense of ceremony. The moment is clearly important to him. The wind, however, doesn’t agree. The corners of the flags are whipped into the air whenever his hands aren’t touching them. He tries in vain to hold down all the fluttering corners at once. But there are four corners, and he only has two hands. Before long he is flailing here and there. A moment later and it looks like he is engaged in a ferocious wrestling match with an invisible opponent, the adventure-park flag as his arena. I don’t know how to break it to him that he will never be the general manager.
An ancient, turquoise Opel Vectra parks near the door. The driver’s door opens, and a man in his thirties steps out of the car. Black hoodie, light jeans, white trainers with three stripes on the sides. He is walking around the car as the passenger door starts to open, little by little, with a shove, the way small children open car doors. Dad helps the child out of the car. The girl must be about six years old. She is wearing a bright-yellow T-shirt with a picture of a violet unicorn on the front. She is visibly excited when she realises where she is. I turn from the doors, return to the service desk and wait. Father and daughter step inside. The girl is nattering the way children natter, her words have nothing to do with what is going on around her. Wait a minute, darling, Dad says eventually.
Dad has short, light-brown hair without any form of parting or other discernible style. His slender face is serious, his eyes blue. He tells me he would like one adult ticket and one children’s ticket. I type the price into the cash register and hand him the card reader. The man keys in his PIN, the machine thinks about this for a moment before informing us the transaction is rejected. We try again, and again. The card doesn’t work. I apologise to the man and explain that we also take cash, and that if he doesn’t have any cash, the nearest ATM is in the business park on the other side of the narrow strip of spruce trees and that—
‘Daddy, can I go and play yet?’
The girl has already walked through the adventure-park barriers and hollers back towards us. Dad glances up at the girl, then looks at me.
‘How about she goes in and I wait in the car?’
I explain that children must be accompanied by an adult at all times, that this is a regulation we cannot circumvent. The girl shouts at Dad again, eager to run off and play. Dad stares outside, and my eyes follow his. Perhaps both of us can see his car, the old Opel riddled with rust, its hubcaps missing.
‘Do you want to buy a car?’
‘Owning a car doesn’t make financial sense for me at the moment,’ I reply. ‘I’ve calculated it many times.’
Again the girl shouts in our direction. From the hall comes the clamour of other children’s squeals of high-pitched excitement. The last glimmer of life seems to have drained from the man’s face. What was serious is now deathly serious. He looks so disappointed, he’ll soon be unfit to drive – another reason he won’t be needing his car.
Overall, the situation looks perfectly clear. He has promised his daughter a day at the adventure park, but he can’t afford it.
And here he is – faced with rolling back on that promise.
I don’t know where the idea comes from, but it appears in a flash, instantly causing a chain of further thoughts, all linked to one another, growing and … accruing interest. Quite literally. I have found a solution. It’s standing right in front of me, and last night it tried to kill me. A combination of the two. It sounds insane, but it isn’t. It is logical, rational, the straightest line from A to B.