Chapters (56)
‘Certainly not as deep,’ Clive agrees. ‘We’ve made good progress, haven’t we, babe?’
‘We?’ Tom says, his smile not quite concealing the bitterness in his voice. All week he has toiled and slaved to get the build on track. At nights he feels steamrollered, but secretly he’s enjoying the physical exertion. Takes his mind off things. But Clive – where has he been? On the phone, sending emails. It can’t take a solid week to pay an invoice. Has he even visited Dag?
Clive ignores him. ‘You here to take measurements?’ he asks Derry.
‘I think I’ll need to rethink my palette,’ she laughs, glancing around, hand on her hip. ‘There’s much more light than I’d anticipated.’ She stands by the wooden frame that marks the window, looks up and down. ‘Is this where the windows are going?’
‘That whole wall,’ Tom says.
‘So it’ll let in a ton of light into the front of the room,’ Derry says, heading to the back. ‘But it’ll still be slightly darker here.’
Tom shakes his head, points up. ‘We’re putting in sun pipes. Count on it being every bit as light as the front of the space.’
Derry taps on her iPad. ‘I’m thinking the walls in here will be mostly timber-clad, but at the back I want a sastrugi effect in a milky plaster over the concrete. Kind of a nod to the polar landscape.’
‘Sounds good,’ Tom says. On the iPad she shows him the palette of colours, textures, and key pieces she’s put together – milky white, a biscuit-beige and Arctic meltwater-blue. Cottony textures, clean, unobtrusive furniture handmade by Oslo craftsmen, bespoke ceiling lights, and table lamps made of leftovers from the iron girders. He likes that idea. Anything that can be recycled is good.
After an hour Derry returns to Granhus to begin ordering her fabrics and wallpapers. She’s not gone ten minutes when a commotion breaks out on top. Voices shouting. What now? Tom thinks. Probably the bloody moose again.
‘I’ll go check it out,’ Clive says, stepping on to the hoist. Tom steps out on to the scaffold and cranes his head up, only to duck back under as a stream of something milky pours down. It lands – splat – on the wooden planks of the scaffolding. It’s vomit. One of the workers actually puked over the side of the cliff.
‘Clive, mate, send down the hoist!’ he screams up, but just then his phone buzzes in his pocket.
‘Yes?’
‘You might want to come and have a look at this,’ Clive says.
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