But she couldn’t bring herself to tell Nonni all this. She couldn’t tell him that she didn’t feel she was really here at all, that part of her had been lost, dripping into the bloodstained earth in Liberia or blown up in Syria, and that she was no longer sure what feelings she still bore for him. She couldn’t tell him, so she just shook her head.

‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she said, unable to contemplate hurting him.

12

Daylight made its way in through the window, so it had to be around the middle of the day. Stella sat up on the sofa and was frozen with fright as fragments of the weekend appeared in her thoughts. She had the strange feeling that she hadn’t been awake since Friday, but in fact, she had probably been awake more or less the whole weekend. It hadn’t been a normal wakefulness though, more a semi-dreamworld that had taken command of her senses, while her mind took a holiday. Now she’d need to piece those thoughts back together.

‘This is a fucking fantastic flat,’ she said as Gréta the newsreader appeared in the living room, fully dressed, make-up on and smiling, as if she had been awake for hours. 32

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘I inherited fishing quotas. It takes more than a journalist’s salary to pay for this.’

Stella admired the view from the floor-to-ceiling windows that overlooked the city in two directions. The old town looked grey with its covering of dirty snow, but the steep corrugated-iron roofs had thrown off their coverings and the bright colours stood out in the gloom. Gréta went to the kitchen and could be heard pottering about.

‘I’ll make some coffee,’ she called out.

Stella tried to recall what had happened since she had come back here with the newsreader. She remembered bacon and eggs, a couple of cans of beer and some gales of laughter over something that in hindsight wasn’t so funny. She went to the bathroom, peed, washed her face and gulped cold water from the tap until her belly was bursting, but somehow her thirst remained unslaked. When she went into the kitchen, Gréta was placing pastries on an oven tray to heat up.

‘Hey, last night’s not all that clear … So I have to ask—’ Stella began, before Gréta cut her off.

‘I may be desperate, but I’m not a perv,’ she said sharply. ‘I’ve no interest in unconscious women.’

‘Sorry,’ Stella muttered, taking a seat on a barstool and wondering how the hell Gréta managed to look so immaculate – in her own, weird, old-lady kind of way.

‘Did you take an upper to wake you up this morning?’ she asked.

Gréta smiled. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t always take the Es they offer. Somehow I don’t trust myself to let go completely, so I just let the champagne do for the last part of the party yesterday.’

That explained how she could be on her feet as fresh as a daisy while Stella’s mind was still a mess.