Kristoffer’s eyes are shining, as they often do when he’s been drinking, and his expression is kind when he glances over at me, serious in the same way it was when we were in the kitchen together earlier. I look back at him and can’t bring myself to smile, so I take a quick gulp of my wine, and he winks at me. I go to the loo and almost miss, I look at myself, my cheeks almost drooping, my face bloated. I straighten up, smile at myself, suck my cheeks in, there. When it’s Marthe’s turn to use the loo, Kristoffer tells me I needn’t look so down in the dumps.

‘Come here and have a hug,’ he says.

‘What?’ I reply, laughing, he wraps his arms around me and squeezes.

My cheek is against his, it’s unshaven; such sudden intimacy, my chest hurts, and when Marthe comes back to say she’s going to bed and Kristoffer tells me that tomorrow is another day, I feel so despondent and I don’t know why, there’s nothing worth staying up for. I sit alone and drink up as I scroll up and down my contact list, eventually sending a message to a guy I was involved with two years ago now, I can’t even remember how it ended, it just drifted into being something else, and then I send the same message to someone I had a thing with even longer ago than that, someone I really ought not to contact, he wasn’t particularly special. ‘Hi! How are things?’ I write to them both. ‘At the cabin. Thinking of you.’

No reply. I’m always doing things like that, I don’t know why, I’m not thinking about either of them, yet still I paw and claw at people in the hope that just one of them might 59think about me, respond to me. I lie in bed and stare at my phone. The smell of the bedsheets. My hand on my naked flesh. The knots in the ceiling planks. I’ve been thirteen in this bed, sixteen, twenty-five, thirty-five.

I drift off, the darkness begins to stir around me; I hear a gull in the distance, the sounds generate wider and wider circles, and the door opens slowly, and something is moving in the room, lifting my bedcovers, and I shuffle over to make room, then we’re lying on our sides, I’m naked and a hand slides up towards my breasts, I wake up and the bed is empty and I’m wet and it’s silent in the cabin, the light is grey, it’s early, I masturbate without thinking and lie there wide awake. I don’t know who I’m thinking about, there’s nobody to think about.