Mum and i walk to Heia. The forest is dry, dust rises from the path beneath our feet. I’ve taken two paracetamol and thrown up once more, retching as quietly as I was able to behind the bathroom door, I feel better now. I know this path well too, know the way it creeps up into the forest past the white house and meandering a little too close to the red one, know where you can catch a glimpse of the sea before the pathway curves back around into the woodland, know what the shadow cast by the towering, steep rock above feels like on my skin, it looks like a troll. It’s always cool there in the shade, I recall flat beetles creeping past my head as I stood against the rock face, busy playing hide-and-seek and kick the can, recall the moss and lichen that I picked and scraped off the rock as I listened for the others, waited for them to find me, earth accumulating beneath my nails, Mum scrubbing my hands with the nailbrush when I returned to the cabin in the evening. Now Mum is walking ahead of me on the same path, a little slower than me, but that’s nothing to do with her age, she’s always been that way, just slow enough to make 106me feel impatient. Anyone who walks too slowly makes me feel impatient, anyone who talks too slowly makes me feel impatient, Mum and Marthe both have a sluggishness to them. Mum is wearing a cap and knee-length shorts with a pair of relatively new trainers, her hair has started thinning but her waistline is wider than it used to be, and she has a prominent varicose vein on the back of one leg.

‘I sometimes think about your father when I’m here,’ she says, turning to look at me. ‘It’s a funny thing. I mean, it’s always been my cabin. Does that happen to you too?’

I say nothing. There’s a rustling in the undergrowth beside us, it must be a bird.