Fuck. She couldn’t use that as an excuse. She hadn’t gone to the hotel bar to look for prey. It was just that the wretched daylight was keeping her awake. There were blackout curtains in the room, but beams of sunlight still squeezed through the cracks, and after tossing and turning for a while, she had decided that a glass of wine or three might help her cope with this infuriating endless brightness.

18

7

Different physiques mean different diets and exercise regimes. So elf girls and troll girls don’t get the same treatment.

He puts two slices of toast on Ísafold’s plate for breakfast and piles mine high with bacon. After breakfast Ísafold goes for a run, and I go with Dad to the gym to lift weights.

Mum has nothing to do with exercise, says she doesn’t get involved in that kind of rubbish.

One day Ísafold demands to do weights with us, and I laugh at her and tell her that she won’t even manage the beginners’ weights. But Dad scowls and takes the weights off her bar, fibbing to her that when I started, it was with a bar with no weights. I start to say something to put the record straight, but he says ‘shhh’, and takes me to one side.

‘Ísafold is your older sister, but you’re stronger so you’ll have to look after her, so don’t put her down,’ he says. ‘Physical strength is an indicator of inner strength, and you have much more of that than she does.’

Looking in the gym’s mirror, I compare the two of us, standing side by side. There are thirty kilos at each end of my bar and nothing on hers, and it’s as if I can see myself growing. All of a sudden I’m a head taller than Ísafold, my legs are solid and my arms muscular. At the same time, she seems to shrink, withering away, as if she might shrivel up, as if there’s nothing under her pale skin but bone and sinew that she hardly has the energy to keep together.

That evening Ísafold is in tears because she’s put on a kilo, while I’m delighted at the extra weight. Muscles are heavy. More muscle means greater strength.

19

FRIDAY

8

Grímur was startled by the chime of the doorbell of the flat upstairs. Their flat. He got out of bed and tiptoed cautiously to the window, as if he was concerned that whoever was at the door with their finger on the bell might hear him. Not that there was any chance of that. His window, which overlooked the entrance to the block, was high enough up that there was little likelihood his footsteps on the carpeted floor would carry through the insulated walls and double-glazed windows; unlike the noise from the flat upstairs, the noise that came from them.