‘It obviously pays to drop to your knees for the prime minister,’ he said and took a seat in the front row, directly in front of her.

Had he really said that? She could have misheard him over the loud mutter of voices in the hall, but that was wishful thinking. She understood perfectly that his ego had been bruised, as Edvard and many others had been certain that he would be the one who would get the call when Rúnar stepped down. Was that what people thought – that she had fucked the PM to get a ministerial appointment? Did they imagine that her experience of social affairs and with UNHCR weren’t the reason for her appointment, and a sordid transaction was? It wasn’t as if she had any political ambitions. She had taken the job because of the opportunity it would give her to push immigration as an issue, and because taking on something new was the kind of challenge she enjoyed. It was true that having a spell as a government minister would do her CV good, for the future, when she’d go back to working for international organisations.

She looked out over the hall and hoped that people would take their time sitting down so she could get her heartbeat under control before the meeting began. The same regrets seemed to come at her from every direction. Everything, even her own memories, appeared to be telling her that she was in fact no use at all, that anything she could do would have no value – at least, no more value than a bottle of booze.

The next time she had met her father after bringing him the sweater, in the week between Christmas and New Year, she had found him shivering with cold, wearing the padded boiler suit and a cotton singlet under it.

‘I’m no good,’ he said, shedding tears of remorse for having swapped the sweater for a bottle. 151

62

Stella sat on a barstool in Gréta’s kitchen and watched absently as she dipped slices of bread in whipped-egg and fried them in a pan. Her head was still filled with the hot light, and she was grateful to her grandmother for her gift. Each birthday brought her a greater understanding of her mysterious inheritance and her growing power to use it.

‘I had the weirdest dream last night,’ Gréta said. ‘I dreamed there was an old woman in the bedroom with us and you were speaking to her in some other language. It was an unbelievably clear dream and spookily strange.’

‘Yes,’ Stella said, and smiled. ‘Strange dream.’

It was the first time she had seen Gréta looking the worse for wear, standing in the kitchen in a dressing gown and fussing over the stove. Partying had finally caught up with her, which was no surprise considering how high she had been flying the night before.

‘French toast,’ Gréta said, as she placed the stack of fried bread on the table in front of her, took a seat by the corner and slopped coffee into cups. She poured a generous helping of syrup over the bread on her plate and added cream to her coffee. There was no way that Gréta was going to get any slimmer if she was going to carry on like this, Stella thought as she watched. All the same, she knew well the insatiable hunger that was the legacy of popping pills.