When Dad died, I hadn’t seen him for two years. He would call me on occasion when he was in town, suggest that he and I and Marthe meet at a café, but I always came up with some excuse or other. Dad moved to Tromsø when I was thirteen, and before that we’d spent every other weekend and every Wednesday at his house for the few years after their divorce. That was how things were back then, you never saw children splitting their time fifty-fifty between parents like you do these days. Whenever Mum was angry or upset after speaking to Dad on the phone, I felt a chill within, a thick column of cold that ran from my stomach and up through my chest, I’d run to her and hug her as tightly as I could and tell her that I loved her much, much more than Dad, we don’t need Dad, I told her. Or I’d tell her that I wished he were dead, and Marthe would scream that I shouldn’t say things like that, and Mum said the same thing, but I knew that she wasn’t as angry, she 107responded with a kind of distressed amusement, as if I’d said something she’d been thinking. That woman, I heard Mum say over the telephone, and I started saying it too, that woman, whenever I was telling others that Dad had a new girlfriend. His new partner had two kids of her own, he’s chosen a new family, Mum would say, she was always saying that he’d ruined her life, crying as she made breakfast, telling me that it was just us now, we have to look after Marthe together, she’d say. When things ended between Dad and that woman, when he eventually found yet another partner and moved to Tromsø, I refused to visit him, I was old enough to refuse. Marthe flew there with a tag around her neck, ‘I’m flying solo’, she hadn’t wanted to refuse. Mum and I waved her off at Fornebu airport one weekend a month, Mum always felt compelled to weep as she bid her farewell, she was afraid that Marthe would be taken ill when she was up there and that the doctors in Tromsø wouldn’t be as good as the doctors at home. But Marthe would always swagger back, brimming with tales of new friends and the midnight sun, they’d eaten lasagne made by Dad’s new girlfriend, and I almost couldn’t breathe as she regaled us with it all, because she had experienced all of that, because she travelled unburdened by any anxieties, bright and breezy, and that could have been me. But I couldn’t do it to Mum, I had to stay close. Marthe, on the other hand, she didn’t understand that her enthusiasm had the potential to upset Mum, from time to time she was unstoppable all the way home from the airport in the car, chattering on and on about how much fun she’d had, and 108I was scathing with her, mimicked her cruelly and sniggered at the clumsy northern expressions she’d picked up, and Mum told me not to be mean, but I could tell that it cheered her up a bit, we were a team, her and me.