Nora glanced at the wall that she and Jody had used to hold themselves up only hours before. Sometimes she couldn’t remember who she was or what she was supposed to be doing. Could have forgotten her own name.

10

Pieter

Stavanger, 1955

Little bear, my first swim the summer of your fourth birthday was on a Sunday in early June. I remember it well because even though the air temperature had been rising steadily over the previous weeks, the sea was burning cold. You were digging in the sand with your sister and your mother, and I could hear you laughing as I walked into the sea, the smooth stones sliding against each other under my feet. When water is that cold, I don’t hesitate. I have to keep moving forward until it’s deep enough that I can float, and then plunge in and go. It couldn’t have been more than fourteen or fifteen degrees that day, and the sea took my breath from me. But my thoughts were pure and indivisible – this is why I love swimming in cold water. I plunged in and there was the first gasp, involuntary but familiar; then the chill-ache came right away to my eyes and forehead. I circled one arm over my head and pulled a pulse of that beautiful water down the length of my body, then the other, moving further and further away from you and your mother and your sister. I kicked hard and my calves balled up, and a cool spray of bubbles plumed from my toes. My skin began to burn and tingle across my cheeks and collarbone, down my arms and the barrel of my chest. As the blood left my extremities to warm my organs, my fingers and toes went numb and curled into claws, while the hearth of me remained warm and pumping. Then, all through me, electricity like the rainbow pulsations of a jellyfish, and tranquillity as the gasping subsided and my body learned to breathe again.

My thoughts meandered and soon I was thinking about wooden spinning tops, the manufacture of. The smooth running of a lathe over hardwood – solid, Norwegian maple. We used the heartwood for the manufacture of spinning tops because its quality wasn’t as good as the sapwood used for furniture or musical instruments or what have you, so we got it cheap, and besides, it was richer in colour. It was prone to burn on the lathe but . . . none of this matters anyway. The point is, you were right there on the beach, your white-blond hair ignited by the sun, your soft, pink lips pursed in concentration as you dug your hole to who knows where, while I swam in the sea ruminating over spinning tops. I wasn’t thinking about your mother, or Tilda; I wasn’t thinking about you. I was thinking about red dust flying from a spindle, a floor covered in ragged wood chips, sawdust settling over everything.

The thing is, I was becoming restless. Our company had done well on spinning tops and building blocks and fighter planes, on small wooden copper-inlaid boxes for girls to keep their feathers or glass beads or bits of ribbon. I was getting bored of wood and my interest had turned to plastics, specifically soft plastics. I know you don’t care about any of this, my Bear, but this is part of the story. And it’s important. And I want you to know everything. I swam that cold day, saltwater pickling my tongue, causing it to swell, my arms passing by my vision like ghosts, I swam that day further and further from you and your sister and your mother, thinking about polymers. About ethylene and benzoyl peroxide. Chemistry, Bear. I had been reading about the development of a new kind of plastic that was soft and durable, and I thought about the toys I could design with this material: cars and trucks. Dolls with soft faces and pudgy, bendable knees.