THE CAR

Standing in Ormsundveien, Selma Falck stared up at a house that was no longer hers. It was close to eleven o’clock at night.

As usual it had grown colder again in the afternoon and at eight p.m. it had started to snow once more. Wet, massive blobs of snow that eventually lay everywhere as slush before finally freezing to ice. She had run from Grünerløkka and was drenched. She quickly tore off her orange reflective waistcoat, rolled it up to next to nothing and stuffed it into her Camelbak rucksack after rummaging to find her car keys.

The house, which in Selma’s opinion was the most hideous in all of Norway, was shrouded in darkness. Only the lamps around the swimming pool, covered over for winter, were lit; the bulbs in the wrought-iron lamps flanking the steep driveway up to the main garage had not been replaced when they had all gone at the one time due to a short circuit earlier that autumn.

Selma stood gazing at the house.

She wished him all the best in owning it. He loved every bay window and pillar of it. He was the one who had insisted on glazed roof tiles when they had to renew them in 2010, at least twenty years after the shiny roofs had gone out of fashion. Jesso had laid out most of the garden. He had taken a stand about the swimming pool as well, even though environmental concerns meant it was unheated and so served the same purpose as the fjord directly across the road.

And which was free of charge into the bargain.

Selma had put her foot down when it came to the interior, but the house in Ormsundveien had always been mostly his, in actual fact.

And now his mother was living there too.

As an MP, Jesso earned around a million kroner a year. He had not been able to buy out Selma’s half-share in the house. The valuation was set at 26 million, the mortgage had been paid off two years ago, and Selma had asked for her rightful 13 million virtually overnight.

But he was the only son of a mother aged eighty-four, a widow living in a huge villa in Nordberg. Her house had barely seen a tradesman’s work since the sixties, and some of the land had been parcelled out and sold by Jesso’s father after a bankruptcy. Nordberg was still Nordberg, however, and on a promise of being allowed to live in a basement apartment in Ormundsundveien for the rest of her natural life, his mother had allowed Jesso to sell his childhood home and use the money to become sole owner of what had once also been Selma’s residence.

Her mother-in-law was allergic to cats, so Darius had been included in the arrangement. Selma had to take the cat with her and renounce all claim on the house and its contents, in exchange for 10 million kroner and a mortgage credit bond on Ormsundveien as security for the remainder of the sum owing.