In the car to Laksevåg I tried to create a mental picture of Anita Solheim, the way I remembered her when she had been a hazy silhouette behind a roller blind across the alleyway where I grew up.

I turned off Carl Konows gate and followed Fyllingsveien’s steep upward climb. The night frost had left a protective layer of frozen plastic over the tarmac, but fortunately the day’s first buses had driven over it and the remnants lay on the roadside like wrinkled animal skin. But for the buses, this could have been a difficult hill to climb, even with front-wheel drive and aggressive winter tyres.200

I reached the top, passed Damsgård school and pulled into a side street where the plastic hadn’t cracked and it was a lot more difficult to steer the car.

Anita Solheim lived in a somewhat newer build than her ex-husband had. This was from the early sixties with high, whitewashed basement walls, stained wooden cladding and black, glazed roof tiles.

I parked by the gate, surveyed the front of the house and then walked through the little front garden, where the autumn apples hung from the frail trees like forgotten trophies.

As I lifted my hand to press the bell, the door was torn open and a girl of about fifteen stormed out, her dark hair flying. She was wearing tight blue jeans and a big puffer jacket in light-green and pink, and was carrying a light-brown leather rucksack over one shoulder. She had strikingly delicate facial features, which had the strange effect of making her seem a lot further away than she was. Shooting me a bemused glance, she loped off, her knees turned inwards in a style that revealed a lack of acquaintance with sports centres.

I stood watching her until she had gone. Then I rang the doorbell.

It made a terrible noise inside. The door was torn open again and an angry voice hissed: ‘What have you forgotten now?’

We stared at each other, her defensively, me still with a sense that I had been hit by an express train.

‘I … kids nowadays,’ she said wearily. ‘She should’ve been at school an hour ago … But they know how to roam the streets till late at night, don’t they.’

I had been wrong. I did recognise her. It was Anita Solheim, but she hadn’t developed as I’d imagined. She was a fallen star.

The proportions between her upper arms were still considerable, 201but her figure had filled out now, right down to the hem of her dress and her chubby legs. Her hair was unkempt, and there were untreated streaks of grey; her face was pallid and ravaged, with heavy bags under her eyes and only a perfunctory layer of make-up. She looked older than she was, in her mid-forties.

With sardonic distance, a greyish-brown, muscular Siamese cat rubbed against her calves, demonstrating a disdainful composure Anita could never have dreamed of attaining. Its hostile green eyes squinted up at me.