Marthe sticks her head round the door and asks if I fancy a swim, she doesn’t bother knocking, and I jump, cover myself even though I’m fully clothed, as if she’d caught me in the act of doing something I shouldn’t be doing. She doesn’t apologise, she’s used to it, thinks of it as her cabin. The idea is that we both have equal rights in terms of the time we spend here, but she and Kristoffer are here most often. They’re the ones who do the painting and cut the grass and drive to the nearest town along the coast to buy fresh prawns that they eat in the garden in the evenings, and they pull up the weeds along the path down to the jetty, or rather, Kristoffer does, I’m sure it’s him, Marthe might do half an hour’s work before getting too tired and saying she needs a lie-down on the sofa. But even then, she’s a grown-up here, she washes up the crockery with the naturalness of someone who owns the place, buys cushions she thinks would look nice here, while I never quite get around to doing the same myself. I’ve thought about spending some time here by myself once or twice, just me, I’ll clean and treat the timber decking and weed the garden just as they do, take ownership; I resolve to spend a few days here when neither Marthe nor Kristoffer nor Mum nor Stein are around. But it’s so much trouble, hiring a car when I can barely remember how to drive, and then there’s the thought of not seeing anyone all day every day, plus, I take the boat out so rarely that I’ve almost forgotten how to remove the hood and fill the tank with petrol, I always moor it with a strange take on a double knot because I can’t remember how to do any others and end up getting told 26off by Mum afterwards. I’d find myself reading old comic books, Donald Duck and Asterix, and drinking beer in the late afternoon instead of painting walls, alone and restless and in need of a few Imovane when night fell because I’d be terrified, and by the morning I’d just want to go back to the city, with the feeling that I’d been trying to achieve something that was beyond me.