I nodded. ‘But not in the middle of the floor?’

‘No, here. Is that alright? You won’t go?’

I shook my head. I wouldn’t go even if doomsday arrived and they shouted that the last bus was going to the terminus. I wouldn’t go; I had gone too often. Once again she kissed me, more softly this time and for longer. Then she slipped away, disappeared in the billowing sea of faces, bobbed up and down like a bottle, before leaving through the exit, stopped, a hand on the doorless frame, blew me a kiss, waved and was gone.

I was left there, as disorientated as a spinning top, unsure where to go: back to Stig Madsen and Jakob, after her to the door or just to the side somewhere?

I chose a fourth option and went to the wall to the south-west of Jakob and Stig, but with an eye on the exit to the north where new faces were arriving all the time, surveying the crowd, then deciding to join them or try their luck on the floor above.

Jakob called me over: ‘Hey, Varg. Don’t you go too. Come here.’

I turned and stopped watching the exit as I made my way through. Jakob was staring at me with some kind of tense amusement. Stig scowled, flattened his thinning hair over his balding head, snorted into his Sergeant Pepper moustache and nervously shifted his feet as he watched the door.121

‘Hello,’ I said to him. ‘We meet in the strangest places, don’t we.’

He didn’t answer. ‘Where was she off to?’

I looked at him as though I didn’t understand what he meant. ‘Eh? Belinda, do you mean?’

‘Bella. Where did she go?’

‘She said she just had to … go out.’

‘To powder her poodle,’ Jakob said.

Stig snorted and grimaced.

Jakob said: ‘Isn’t Johnny coming?’

Stig looked past him. ‘Ye-es. He said he was. But he had to do something first. We should just go ahead.’

Revealingly, Jakob eyed the door. ‘Has he got someone at the moment? Our Johnny?’

Stig snapped: ‘Not as far as I know. Just the same old harem.’

‘He hasn’t changed then, in other words?’

Stig looked at me. ‘How long’s she been gone now?’

I hesitated. ‘Four minutes. Five? Six?’

‘You have to think there’ll be a queue,’ Jakob said. ‘And if so she may’ve tried upstairs. But I can understand why you’re nervous. You can’t reckon on a girl like Bella passing through these rooms untouched by human hand.’

Stig glowered at him. A muscle in his jaw was churning. ‘I’m not worried.’

But time passed. It was ten minutes now and while we were waiting it quickly became a quarter of an hour.

This situation was familiar. In multiple flashbacks I saw women I had asked to dance and who had said no, women I had asked to dance who had pretended not to see me but had stood up with a smile and said yes to the man who had emerged from behind me, women who looked through the bus window and 122said, when I told them I was in love with them, they didn’t believe me, and women who had left me on the dance floor, as Belinda Bruflåt had just done, and never returned. Unlike Stig, I was not worried. It was a waste of energy. Inside me there was only certainty. I had been here before.