I pull my clothes out of the wardrobe in the tiny room, fold what’s on the chair, gather up the books and magazines and put everything inside my bag. It’s getting dark outside. The garden is so nice at night, the bushes look like dark animals or shadowy figures, a few of Olea’s toys lie abandoned on the grass. The hammock sways in the wind, as if someone had just been lying inside and hopped out. Out on the fjord, lanterns pass each other by, green, red. I watch the lights as I rest a hand on my lower abdomen, try to get a sense of whether anything is still working in there, whether anything there might be able to support life, or if it’s simply silent and flat and dead. All I feel is skin, warm beneath my hand. I’ll ask one of the others to drive me to the bus stop tomorrow, it’ll have to be Mum or perhaps even Stein, I’ll go back to my flat and be alone, feel that lonesomeness enfold me, I can watch TV and sleep in every day, right up until I’m due back at work, I don’t need to speak to any of them, all will be silent.

Mum sticks her head in the door and asks what I’m doing. She doesn’t knock, either. 136

‘Packing,’ I tell her. ‘I’m going tomorrow.’

‘You’re going?’ she says. ‘Why?’

‘We’re heading back soon anyway,’ I say. ‘I just fancy a bit of time to myself in the city.’

She stands there with her arms crossed, peering at me over her reading glasses, she looks just like Marthe standing there like that, and I feel my temper flaring up at the fact that she has to stand there like that, to look the way she does, lingering there and shifting her weight from her left foot to her right, all when she doesn’t need to be here, it’s enough to tip a person over the edge.

‘Did you want something?’ I ask.

‘Is something wrong?’ she asks, that fumbling she does, why does she have to do everything so slowly, I feel breathless with impatience.

‘I’m fine,’ I reply, turning a jumper inside out before folding it.

‘You’re acting so strangely,’ Mum says.