Her faces flickered past me. The little girl, a new arrival to the street, standing on the lowest step outside their house, a finger in her mouth and a doubtful gaze directed at the new life she had around her. The thirteen-year-old running at full speed down the street or arm in arm with girlfriends, giggling as they walked past us, while we played football pretending we hadn’t seen them … all of a sudden she was gone and lived in another part of town. The eighteen-year-old in the darkly lit room, with adult features now, an anxious sensuality, as though she was holding her breath on the threshold of life, I leaned forward slowly and met her in the middle of what was to become the first kiss of my life. Her 314face above the shelves when I happened to meet her in the foreign section of Beyer bookshop, in the basement. I had been to sea and we had written to each other. But the intervals between letters had become longer and when we met by chance one rainy September day her eyes wandered and we talked across the shelves about everything and nothing until she said: ‘Thank you for the letters, by the way. I suppose you must’ve heard I’m with Jakob now?’ And even later, a chance meeting, over a buzz of voices, in the Student Union one of the years I was pretending I would go on to take exams: her face, older and at once different, more serious; she had a new perspective on life, and all the things that had happened were a long, long way back in the past. And then … now.

She suddenly had a strange look in her eyes and she turned to me, no longer studying me in the window. ‘You … look at me in such a way, Varg. What do you see?’

I smiled wryly. ‘The girl you once were, Rebecca,’ I said in a reedy voice.

‘And who was that?’

I made a grab for her hand and missed. Hesitantly she passed me a hand and I squeezed it as though it were a magic lamp that could transport us back in time, to the moments we had once shared.

She watched me for a few seconds. Then she took a decision, gently disengaged her hand, stood up and said: ‘I think I’ll go and get a bottle of red wine. Is that OK?’

I nodded and she went to the kitchen. For a few instants I was alone. In the window I could see my own high forehead, my fair hair, which I brushed back and to the side and – through it – the windows facing the yard in the house across the way. Like an illuminated chessboard, they broke into the contours of my face, reality breaking through memories.315

She returned with two glasses and a bottle. Set them down on the desk, moved the books and poured the wine. The bright light made the liquid sparkle, like red glass: stained glass drenched with blood.