While he was talking on the telephone, I picked up a magazine and leafed through. It was one of those literary journals where you need to be relentlessly academic in order to work out the layout and require a degree in semiotics to understand a word. I studied the pictures.

Jakob reappeared in the doorway, carrying a plastic bag in one hand. ‘That was fine. Shall we go?’ He shouted down the corridor: ‘Bye, Maria.’ But the only response came from a-ha. He shrugged and guided me back out through the door. ‘Kids,’ he muttered.

We picked up his youngest child from the crèche by St John’s church. She was wearing a dark-red raincoat, with long yellow cuffs to protect her hands from the rain, and blue-and-white rubber boots. Her cheeks were flushed and gooseberry jelly ran from both nostrils. She smiled as she met us, revealing two missing front teeth.

Her shyness was different from her sister’s. She didn’t blush, she 14watched me from the corner of her eye all the way from the gate to the car. In one hand she was holding a blue plastic bucket with a handle that had come away on one side. In the other, she was holding the wettest teddy bear I had ever seen. ‘She won’t let it go for an instant,’ Jakob mumbled. ‘I have to wash it when she’s asleep, otherwise she’d insist she went into the washing machine with it.’

Jakob’s sister lived in a street off Nye Sandviksvei with a man who worked on oil rigs and a Saint Bernard that had to be at least a hundred years old. It barely batted an eyelid as we passed it on the stairs. ‘Åse hasn’t got any children,’ Jakob said, as if that explained everything.

Åse opened the door and I still didn’t remember her. She was ten years younger than us and as such belonged to a different generation. Now she was a new experience: tall, wearing a colourful plaid smock, light-brown elephant cord trousers and grey felt slippers. She was the archetypal mamma and I had an inkling why her beaming smile never seemed to reach her eyes.

We shook hands and of course she didn’t remember me. Neither of us gave the impression we had missed anything.

She and Jakob agreed that Grete might as well stay the night.

Then we drove up to Stølen and parked the car. That was the last thing we did while still in full control of ourselves. The next few days passed on autopilot, as they often do when you have lost all ability to make decisions.

15

3

We started gently, each with a beer, in a bar reminiscent of a folk-craft gift shop, from the hard, wooden benches to the buxom waitresses. The faces around us were plump and bland, either because they were young or because their owners had drunk too much beer. There was a buzz of conversation around us.

‘How long’s it been, Varg? Since we last saw each other properly? I mean, talked?’