That was how Pym came into our lives, from the apartment next door. He was older than us, in his early thirties, and was the size of Carral and I combined: a tall, ruddy and broad-shouldered man with a whisky bottle in his hand. His hair was thick and red and flattened behind his ears with hair gel. His shirt was half open, thick sun-bleached hair on his chest. He said he was from a small town in the south with waves and farmers and whisky, and that he came to the town to work as a journalist. While in between temp jobs at the Aybourne Post he worked on an apple farm in Castlehill and wrote some of his ‘own stuff’.

‘What do you study?’ he asked.

‘Biology, but I’m not sure what I’m specializing in yet. I just started.’

‘Of course she knows,’ Carral said and put her hands at her side, still in a pirate mood. She laughed loudly and stuck up her nose, as if she was balancing something on it. Pym looked at her for a while before his eyes trailed back to me. I didn’t want to look at him, and looked down into a spoon. My eye stared back, upside down.

‘What are you most interested in then?’ Pym asked.

Carral was quiet, leaning further and further back in her chair, and I realised I had to join the conversation. I looked up from the spoon and directly at Pym, who scratched his chin.

‘I don’t know. I like mycology.’

‘Mycology?’ I heard him put the stress on myc.

‘Fungi,’ I said, running my fingers through my bangs, feeling a sudden urge to scratch my chin too.

‘And you? What are you writing?’

‘It’s a novel, but in verse.’

‘A novel, wow,’ I replied.

‘Roman, Johanna, roman.’ My head sang the Norwegian for novel when I looked at Pym again. He had lifted his whisky bottle and was pouring it into a small shot glass Carral had produced.

‘Do you want any?’

I shook my head. He poured some in my glass anyway. His huge freckled upper arm tensed a little while he poured. I wasn’t sure if I could stretch even both hands around his arm. He moved continuously, tensing his body and relaxing it again, and I realised that in spite of myself, I was following the muscles in his arms, his neck, his chest. The whisky was sloshing in my wine glass. It was a sticky reddish brown, and had a sharp scent, just like Pym. When I took a tiny sip, I imagined for a second that it came from his body, and it made me cough. When I got up to make some tea, I pictured him grinning behind me.

The sink was full of plates and glasses, dried-up leftovers, mugs and tins. I poked what was left of some baked beans while waiting for the kettle to boil.