by Anne Holt
Apparently she was safe. It looked as if Selma had enough on her own plate today.
More than enough, in fact.
THE MANUSCRIPT
201 OUTSIDE, STREET IN OSLO CITY CENTRE, DAYTIME
The MAN walks along the pavement. His thick, silver-grey hair flutters in the wind. Sunshine. The MAN opens a heavy gate, goes inside. The gate slides slowly to behind him.
202 INTERIOR, OFFICE IN OSLO CITY CENTRE, DAYTIME
The WOMAN sitting on an office chair. She is restless. Swings from side to side. A notepad and pen are on an adjacent sideboard. The MAN is seated on a settee. Leaning forward, eager.
WOMAN: I think we’ve reached the end of the road. You don’t have anything more to gain from this.
MAN: Could you stop swinging on your chair? Please.
The WOMAN sits completely still, with her face turned directly towards the MAN.
WOMAN: As I said, we’re at the end of the road.
MAN: The end of the road? No way! It’s now that it begins, you see. It’s to your credit that I’ve come this far at all.
WOMAN: Come where? Where do you actually think you’ve come to?
MAN: To my liberation! At last I can start to do something. Sort things out, as you well know. Put things right!
WOMAN: And how are you going to do that?
MAN: In lots of ways. I’m writing a script for a TV series, for one thing. That could be great. There’s a possibility for symmetry in all of it. Balance.
WOMAN (looks at the clock in a far from discreet manner): I think …
MAN: It’s twenty minutes since I arrived … Honestly.
WOMAN: You can manage on your own now.
MAN: No. Now is when this starts to become important.
(PAUSE)
WOMAN: I’m really finding it difficult to see where you want to go with this. Can you try to explain?
MAN (rather overwrought): YOU’RE the one who explained to me that Mum and Dad’s reaction was normal. Dad grew silent, and Mum blubbered. They separated a year later. Fairly commonplace, according to you. Normal. I stayed with my father, something that was NOT usual at that time, in fact. He pulled up all the roots I had and moved away. New place, new people. Mum re-married, I ended up with two half-siblings, and Dad grew increasingly silent. Mum’s new guy didn’t like me. At their place I was superfluous. At Dad’s I was alone. My brother was gone. Everything was off balance.
(LENGTHY PAUSE)
WOMAN: Yes, as I’ve told you many times before, your parents’ reactions are …
MAN (angry): Off balance. Do you hear?
WOMAN: Yes, I hear. Your parents’ reactions to the death were pretty normal. The subsequent developments too. Of course this would have felt chaotic to a small child. Chaotic and therefore threatening. That’s absolutely normal, it’s just …
MAN: … I’m the one who’s abnormal, then. Eh?
WOMAN: No. As we’ve discussed so many times before, there’s nothing normal or abnormal in a human reaction to …
MAN: You used exactly that word a minute ago. Normal. About my parents. But not about me.
WOMAN (with a loud sigh): You were seven years old.
MAN (quietly): Yes, I was seven. And the only one who paid a price for what happened. A fucking high price. An unfairly high price for a seven-year-old. It’s time to take something back.
WOMAN: By writing a manuscript?
MAN: That too. And other things. I’ve got a few plans.
The MAN stands up abruptly. Remains standing, scrutinizing the woman for several seconds. The WOMAN obviously feels ill at ease.
MAN (cont.): You’re right. Let’s draw a line under things here. For this time. See you next Thursday, same time.
WOMAN: As I said, I think we’ve reached the stage where we can say we’re …
MAN: I’m the one who’ll decide when you and I are finished. It’s important to maintain balance between us as well. You’re the therapist. I get to decide when we’re finished.
The door slams behind the MAN. The WOMAN remains seated, restless again, for a long time.
SUNDAY 10 DECEMBER 2017
A STROKE OF LUCK
The second Sunday in Advent was six and a half hours old when Selma Falck opened the door into the apartment in Toftes gate.
She was humming an ABBA song, and the first thing she did was to give Darius some food. Then she unpacked the cat litter tray she had bought on Thursday, and filled it with sand. In the course of the next hour she had sorted out clean and dirty clothes from the cardboard boxes. There was a relatively new washing machine in the bathroom; at least it worked. After using two bottles of bleach to scrub the walls and porcelain, she tore down the shower curtain and threw it out. She showered for a long time, washed her hair, noticed that Darius had devoured all the food and had crapped in the box. She vacuumed the whole apartment, connected the TV without switching it on and scoured the kitchen until it at least smelled acceptable.
To round it off she put on a machine load of underwear.
Last night, when it was no longer possible to resist, she had taken out 9,000 kroner from the ATM. That was almost half of all she owned.
When she was let out of the Poker Turk’s dive just after six that same morning, it had started to snow. Selma had 29,500 kroner in her handbag. Divided into three envelopes, with 1,000 kroner notes in one, 500 bills in another and small denomination notes in the third.
For more than six hours she had experienced peace. Not given a thought to the children. Not to her office, not to Haakon, Vanja or Kristina. And certainly not to Jan Morell or his daughter. Selma had won nearly all the time, been lucky and skilful and on top of everything.
She would buy a new bed with some of the cash.
Besides, there was another poker session on Monday.
The stakes were higher there, and if she shopped at IKEA, she wouldn’t need to touch what was left in her bank account. She put a clean sheet over the cheese puffs settee, placed a pillow at the head and let Darius curl up at the foot.
Selma had taken a night’s respite from herself, for the first time in almost four weeks. She was still humming an old hit song when she lay down. She had money. Far more money than yesterday. She was doing well. On the front foot. And best of all, she thought as she closed her eyes, was that she had woken from something that only yesterday had been heading for the skids.
That was good, because now she knew precisely how she was going to start searching for the explanation as to why Hege Chin Morell had submitted a positive drugs sample without having done anything wrong. It was a night like this she had needed, and as soon as first light, she would seriously begin on the assignment Jan Morell had given her.
With a smile, it crossed her mind that she was well into overtime.
Then she drifted off to sleep and did not wake until nine hours had elapsed.
THE DELUXE EDITION
The apartment was enormous, but that was really all it had going for it. At least if you discounted the address, which was also a plus factor.
Sølve Bang had inherited the place, all 200 square metres of it, from a great-aunt in 1997. Gudrun Bang had been a librarian all her life, and the literary halo on her nephew’s son shone even more brightly at that time, if that were possible. The inheritance was a welcome solution to the still relatively young man’s chronically catastrophic financial situation, but caused a rift between him and his siblings so wide that no one had attempted to patch things up ever since. As both his parents were dead and his brother had lived in the USA following a student exchange visit at senior high school, Sølve was as good as on his own. Partners had come and gone six times since the time when the apartment in Thomas Heftyes gate was furnished throughout in the Biedermeier style.
The women in Sølve’s life had not entirely appreciated the bourgeois late empire trappings. Each of them had brought something to the place and pushed out something else. A mahogany writing desk and a dining room set in stained beech with
chair covers of silk damask were first to go. Subsequently chaises longues and sofas, beds and paintings, as well as the heavy curtains below beautifully decorated pelmets had all disappeared, to be replaced by the occasional piece of furniture from Expo Nova and Møbelringen, from IKEA and Skeidar and a suite from the flea market at Ruseløkka school into the bargain. The problem was that these women eventually vanished from the scene. Along with their goods and chattels they took some of their items of furniture, and in the end increasingly obvious gaps leered at Sølve in every room. Of course he could have bought replacements – his finances weren’t in such a bad state – and there were ways of furnishing an apartment for less than 200,000 kroner. But that wasn’t how he wanted it. Sølve Bang liked expensive things. Biedermeier, for example. When he had gone along with the women’s demands for dilution of all the heavy brown furniture, it was primarily because the pieces had given him a necessary financial lift each time they found their way to the Blomqvist auction house and new owners.
His great-aunt had known a thing or two about Biedermeier.
The desk was among the few pieces he had kept.
It was actually a dining table, and it had pride of place in the centre of one of the three drawing rooms. Facing the windows, and with the door to the almost clinically bare kitchen behind it. The chair was new. Sølve Bang bought a new chair once a year, and then he normally did not stint. This one had arrived in early autumn when he was short of funds, a Kinnarps Capella upholstered in anthracite-grey wool. It was the first time in years he had not gone for leather.
He didn’t like the chair: to his mind, it looked cheap.
He didn’t care for the calculation that appeared on the computer when he asked for a fourth word count, either.
The contract from Statoil had been impossible to turn down. Almost five years ago, Sølve Bang had been offered the opportunity to write the history of Norwegian cross-country skiing. There was plenty of reading material about skiing in Norway, of course, but he was going to write The Book. The standard work. The saga, the highly literary, but nonetheless widely accessible description of the nation’s most important and popular sport.
No one had qualifications like he had. The skier who became a world famous author before he had reached the age of twenty, was to receive 5,000,000 kroner divided into five annual instalments for undertaking the task. He pretended to hesitate, but had made up his mind as soon as he realized what they meant by 5,000,000. The money was for him. As remuneration. A fee, no less, 1,000,000 per year and all expenses paid. The payments arrived on the twelfth of every month.
The original deadline had expired last summer.
The picture editor had completed his work. The dust cover was clinched: the skier from the rock carvings at Tro, evidence of the sport’s Norwegian origins from approximately 5,000 years ago. The motif had been used before, both as the starting point for the icons of the Lillehammer Winter Olympics and on a postage stamp issued during the Skiing World Championships in Oslo in 1966.
Embossing and foil. Clothbound spine and corners. Silver edges in the same tones as the spot gloss on the rock carvings. To top off the exclusivity, ribbon bookmarks in silver. With tassels.
No expense had been spared. Everything was ready.
Apart from the text.
When the manuscript should have been delivered, Sølve had simply extended the deadline by sending chapter headings and a table of contents, together with three disconnected extracts. The structure was plausible, the texts well written. As the new deadline approached in October, Sølve Bang was let in on a business decision so secret he could hardly sleep that night at the thought that he had been entrusted with such a secret. Statoil was to change its name. Neither the state nor oil was any longer considered particularly representative of the colossal company. A bit too 1970, it had been decided. Reactionary. On the other hand, Equinor pointed crystal-clear towards something greater and better, a name that, according to the firm’s senior management, both said something about where the oil giant came from and where it was headed.
OK, Sølve had thought, rather at a loss since the new name mainly aroused associations with horses, but the change of name involved a glorious postponement of his personal contribution. The book would now be launched two days before the Winter Olympic Games, on 7 February 2018. The same day as public disclosure of the company’s new name.
The absolutely final deadline for delivery of the manuscript was fixed for Christmas Eve. The unusually short time span between submission and publication, especially for a deluxe edition of this type, would make it a close call, but it would work.
If only he could meet the very last, and very final, deadline.
The book was estimated at around 600,000 characters. In an ordinary novel, without illustrations, this would be the equivalent of 400 pages. Since Cross-Country Skiing in Norway – Historic Tracks into the Future would be published in large format, but also be fully illustrated, it was reckoned that the final result would be around 500 pages in length.
He had to have 600,000 characters by Christmas Eve. There was exactly a fortnight left until then.
Sølve stared in dismay at the word counter.
69,562 characters. Including spaces. That was all he had.
The text didn’t even hang together.
In the next fortnight he would have to write more than 530,000 characters, that is, more than 37,000 characters per day. Which was quite simply not possible.
Not for anyone. At any rate not for anyone in his literary league. On a good day he could come up with 2,000 characters. His record was 2,492, and that had taken him eleven unusually inspired hours.
He rose from the Kinnarps office chair and moved into the kitchen. The floor tiles in there, from 1934 and therefore lacking underfloor heating cables, made his footsteps resound on the bare, ice-cold walls in the overly large room.
Sølve Bang never wore slippers. He used indoor shoes.
And now he was incredibly thirsty.
The pipes groaned when he turned on the old mixer taps. He let the water run for a long time. Grabbed a glass from an enormous overhead cupboard and filled it to the brim.
When Hege Chin Morell was caught taking drugs, Sølve had been furious. He felt his entire book project was in impending danger, and with that the next payment due as soon as the following Tuesday. Statoil had, like all other sponsors, a strict drugs clause in their contract with the Federation. No one could overlook the fact that Hege’s drugs allegation might poison the atmosphere between the two parties so emphatically that the whole project regarding the deluxe edition ran the risk of falling through. So incensed had Sølve Bang been, for three days in a row, that he had completely forgotten to give closer consideration to how the contract between Statoil and himself had actually been worded.
He drank. Filled the glass again and drank half of it as well.
During the contract negotiations, he had used a friend as his lawyer. Someone from BAHR, one of the best known and most international law firms in Norway, an old school friend from St. Sunniva’s, who at the outset had cost 6,000 kroner an hour. When the invoice had arrived, Sølve had put the paper at the bottom of the dirty laundry basket before sending a text message to his friend, partly offended, partly hurt.
No reminder ever appeared.
His friend was an excellent lawyer. Brilliant, in fact.
Sølve slammed down the glass and returned to the drawing room. For a moment he stood thinking, half squinting at the curtain-less windows where December scudded past with sleet and gusts of wind. Suddenly he turned on his heel and walked on towards the bedroom. One wall was covered in practical, out-of-place wardrobes by the name of Pax. They had been left behind by partner number four who had been unusually fond of clothes. Sølve’s wardrobe was far less comprehensive.
It took him a second or two to find the document. He kept his belongings in pedantic order, and all his contracts had been systematically filed in ring binders stored in the cupboar
d furthest off.
Three minutes later he sat behind the Biedermeier desk giving thanks to a God he had never believed in. With his eyes closed, his hands folded and his body tensed.
His friend from St Sunniva’s had safeguarded him.
If he withdrew from the project, or did not manage to complete it, then the majority of the advance payment would have to be paid back. The contract specified an exponential scale. The further into the project, the greater the percentage to be repaid. With a rapid mental calculation, Sølve discovered he would have to shell out almost 350,000 kroner if he himself decided to pack it in.
That was money he by no means possessed.
Not without selling the apartment, which was out of the question.
On the other hand, if Statoil were to withdraw, the situation would be completely different. In paragraph 11.2 of the agreement, it emerged that Sølve’s interest in Hege Chin Morell’s drugs case suddenly became of major import. A breach on the oil company’s part, regardless of reason, implied that Sølve Bang, named The Author in the contract, would be able to keep all monies paid plus a sum approximating to three months’ remuneration. Furthermore he would retain the rights to his own intellectual property.
It was too good to be true.
Sølve read the clause three more times.
The good news was actually true.
He placed his hands behind his neck. Fixed his eyes on the stucco between the wall and ceiling, which was dark with dust and yellowed with age. He released his hands and slammed a fist down on the table. It was painful.
Hege’s affair might not be sufficient. Statoil might possibly consider it all to be a one-off occurrence. An occupational accident. A side-track that could be bypassed. Hege had never really fitted in anyway: Sølve himself was struggling to insert the dark-haired foreigner into a beautiful book about Norway and cross-country skiing.
But then there was that little journalist. At the press conference, where he had more than hinted that Haakon Holm-Vegge might also have been involved in drug-taking.
