Midnight Sun

Chapter 2

I carried on taking slow, even breaths, and felt my pulse calm down. My body had realised what my head still hadn’t worked out: that if it had been them, they wouldn’t have poked me, they’d just have pulled off the vestments, checked it was the right person, then peppered me worse than over-spiced mutton stew.

I carefully pulled the cassock away from my face.

The one looking down at me had freckles, a snub nose, a plaster on its forehead and pale eyelashes surrounding a pair of unusually blue eyes. Topping this was a thick fringe of red hair. How old could he be? Nine? Thirteen? I had no idea, I’m hopeless at anything to do with kids.

‘You can’t sleep here.’

I looked round. He seemed to be alone.

‘Why not?’ I said in a hoarse voice.

‘Because Mum’s got to clean there.’

I got to my feet, rolled up the cassock, took my jacket from the altar rail and checked that the pistol was still in the pocket. Pain stabbed through my left shoulder as I forced it into the jacket.

‘Are you from the south?’ the boy asked.

‘That depends what you mean by “south”.’

‘That you’re from south of here, of course.’

‘Everyone’s from south of here.’

The boy tilted his head. ‘My name’s Knut, I’m ten. What’s your name?’

I was on the verge of saying something else before I remembered what I’d said the day before. ‘Ulf.’

‘How old are you, Ulf?’

‘Old,’ I said, stretching my neck.

‘More than thirty?’

The sacristy door opened. I spun round. A woman emerged, then stopped and stared at me. The first thing that struck me was that she was very young to be a cleaner. And that she looked strong. You could see the veins in her lower arm, and on the hand holding the bucket, which was overflowing with water. She had broad shoulders but a narrow waist. Her legs were hidden under an old-fashioned, black pleated skirt. The other thing that struck me was her hair. It was long, and so dark that the light from the high windows made it glisten. It was held back by a simple hairclip.

She started moving again and came towards me, her shoes clattering on the floor. When she got close enough I could see that she had a fine mouth, but with a scar, perhaps from an operation to correct a harelip, on her top lip. It seemed almost unnatural, considering her dark complexion and hair, that she should have such blue eyes.

‘Good morning,’ she said.

‘Good morning. I arrived on the bus last night. And there was nowhere to...’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘The door here is high, and the gate is wide.’ She said this without warmth in her voice, put down the bucket and broom and held out her hand.

‘Ulf,’ I said, holding out my hand to shake hers.

‘The cassock,’ she said, waving my hand away. I looked down at the bundle in my other hand.

‘I couldn’t find a blanket,’ I said, handing her the vestments.

‘And nothing to eat apart from our communion wafers,’ she said, unrolling and inspecting the heavy white garment.

‘Sorry, of course I’ll pay for—’

‘You’re welcome to it, with or without a blessing. But please don’t spit on our council leader next time, if you don’t mind.’

I wasn’t sure if that was a smile I could see, but the scar on her top lip seemed to twitch. Without saying anything else she turned and disappeared back into the sacristy.

I picked up my case and stepped over the altar rail.

‘Where are you going?’ the boy asked.

‘Outside.’

‘What for?’

‘What for? Because I don’t live here.’

‘Mum’s not as cross as she seems.’

‘Say goodbye from me.’

‘From whom?’ her voice called. She was walking back towards the altar rail.

‘Ulf.’ I was starting to get used to the name.

‘And what are you doing here in Kåsund, Ulf?’ She wrung out a cloth above the bucket.

‘Hunting.’ I thought it was best to stick to one and the same story in such a small community.

She fixed the cloth to the end of the broom. ‘What for?’

‘Grouse,’ I chanced. Did they have grouse this far north? ‘Or anything with a pulse, really,’ I added.

‘It’s been a bad year for mice and lemmings this year,’ she said.

I hummed. ‘Well, I was thinking something a bit bigger than that.’

She raised an eyebrow. ‘I just meant that there aren’t many grouse.’

There was a pause.

In the end Knut broke it. ‘When predators can’t get enough mice and lemmings, they take grouse eggs.’

‘Of course,’ I said with a nod, and realised my back was sweating. I could do with a wash. My shirt and money belt could do with a wash. My suit jacket could do with a wash. ‘I daresay I’ll find something to shoot. It’s more of a problem that I’m a week early. After all, hunting season doesn’t start until next week. I’ll just have to practise until then.’ I hoped the Sámi had given me accurate information.

‘I don’t know about a season,’ the woman said, pushing the broom across the floor where I had slept so hard that the broom head squeaked. ‘You southerners are the ones who came up with that idea. Here we go hunting when we have to. And don’t bother when there’s no need.’

‘Speaking of needs,’ I said. ‘You don’t know of anywhere in the village where I could stay?’

She stopped cleaning and leaned on the broom. ‘You just have to knock on a door and they’ll give you a bed.’

‘Anywhere?’

‘Yes, I’d say so. But of course there aren’t that many people at home right now.’

‘Of course.’ I nodded towards Knut. ‘Summer holidays?’

She smiled and tilted her head. ‘Summer work. Anyone who’s got reindeer is sleeping in tents and caravans at the pastures down by the coast. A few have gone fishing for pollock. And a lot of people have gone off to the fair in Kautokeino.’

‘I see. Any chance I could rent a bed from you?’ When she hesitated I quickly added: ‘I’ll pay well. Very well.’

‘No one here would let you pay much. But my husband isn’t at home, so it’s really not befitting.’

Befitting? I looked at her skirt. Her long hair.

‘I see. Is there anywhere that isn’t so... er, central? Where you can get some peace and quiet. With a view.’ By which I meant, where you can see if anyone’s coming.

‘Well,’ she said. ‘Seeing as you’re going to be hunting, I suppose you could always stay in the hunting cabin. Everyone uses it. It’s fairly remote, and a bit cramped and ramshackle, but you’d certainly get your peace and quiet. And a fine view in all directions, that much is certain.’

‘Sounds perfect.’

‘Knut can show you the way.’

‘There’s no need for him to do that. I’m sure I can—’

‘No!’ Knut said. ‘Please!’

I looked down at him again. Summer holidays. Everyone away. Bored having to follow his mum to do her cleaning. Finally, something happening.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Shall we go, then?’

‘Yes!’

‘What’s bothering me,’ the dark-haired woman said, dipping the broom in the bucket, ‘is what you’re going to shoot with. You’ve hardly got a shotgun in that case.’

I stared down at my case. As if I were measuring it to see if I agreed with her.

‘I left it on the train,’ I said. ‘I called them, they’ve promised to send it on the bus in a couple of days.’

‘But you’ll be wanting something to practise with,’ she said, then smiled. ‘Before the season starts.’

‘I...’

‘You can borrow my husband’s shotgun. The two of you can wait outside until I’m done, this won’t take long.’

A shotgun? Hell, why not? And because none of her questions was phrased as a question, I simply nodded and walked towards the door. I heard quick breathing behind me and slowed down slightly. The young lad tripped over my heels.

‘Ulf?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you know any jokes?’

I sat on the south side of the church and smoked a cigarette. I don’t know why I smoke. Because I’m not addicted. I mean, my blood doesn’t thirst for nicotine. It’s not that. It’s something else. Something to do with the act itself. It calms me down. I might as well smoke bits of straw. Am I addicted to nicotine? No, I’m sure I’m not. I might possibly be an alcoholic, but I’m really not sure about that either. But I like being high, wired, drunk, that much is obvious. I liked Valium a lot. Or rather, I really didn’t like not taking Valium. That’s why it was the only drug I’ve ever felt I had to actively cut out.

When I started dealing hash it was mainly to finance my own use. It was simple and logical: you buy enough grammes so you can haggle about the price, sell two thirds of it in small quantities at a higher price, and hey presto, you get free dope. The path from there to turning it into a full-time occupation isn’t a long one. It was the path to my first sale that was long. Long, complicated, and with a couple of twists and turns I could have done without. But there I stood, in Slottsparken, muttering my concise sales pitch (‘Dope?’) to passers-by I thought had long enough hair or freaky enough clothes. And like most things in life, the first time is always the worst. So when a bloke with a crew cut and a blue shirt stopped and asked for two grammes, I freaked out and ran.

I knew he wasn’t an undercover cop — they were the ones with the longest hair and the freakiest clothes. I was scared he was one of the Fisherman’s men. But gradually I realised that the Fisherman didn’t care about small fry like me. You just had to make sure you didn’t get too big. And didn’t venture into his amphetamine and heroin market. Unlike Hoffmann. Things had ended badly for Hoffmann. There no longer was a Hoffmann.

I flicked the cigarette butt in amongst the gravestones in front of me.

You have an allotted time, you burn down to the filter, and then it’s over, for good. But the point is to burn down to the filter, and not go out before that. Well, maybe that isn’t the whole point, but just then it was my goal. I don’t really give a shit about the point of it. And there’d been plenty of days since the funeral when I hadn’t been very sure of the goal either.

I shut my eyes and concentrated on the sun, and on feeling it warm my skin. On pleasure. Hedon. The Greek god. Or idol, as he should probably be called seeing as I was on hallowed ground. It’s pretty arrogant, calling all other gods, apart from the one you’ve come up with, idols. Thou shalt have no other gods before me. Every dictator’s command to his subjects, of course. The funny thing was that Christians couldn’t see it themselves, they didn’t see the mechanism, the regenerative, self-fulfilling, self-aggrandising aspect which meant that a superstition like this could survive for two thousand years, and in which the key — salvation — was restricted to those who were fortunate enough to have been born in a space of time which was a merest blink of the eye in human history, and who also happened to live on the only little bit of the planet that ever got to hear the commandment and were able to formulate an opinion about the concise sales pitch (‘paradise?’).

The heat disappeared. A cloud was passing in front of the sun.

‘That’s Grandma.’

I opened my eyes. It wasn’t a cloud. The sun was forming a halo around the young boy’s red hair. Was the woman in there really his grandmother?

‘Sorry?’

He pointed. ‘The grave you just threw your cigarette at.’

I looked past him. I could see a plume of smoke rise from the flower bed in front of a black stone. ‘I’m sorry. I was aiming at the path.’

He folded his arms. ‘Really? So how are you going to hit grouse when you can’t even hit a path?’

‘Good question.’

‘Have you thought of any jokes, then?’

‘No, I said it was going to take me a while.’

‘It’s been—’ he looked at the watch he didn’t have — ‘twenty-five minutes.’

It hadn’t. It was beginning to dawn on me that the walk to the hunting cabin was going to be a long one.

‘Knut! Leave the man alone.’ It was his mother. She came out through the church door and walked towards the gate.

I stood up and followed her. She had a quick stride and a way of moving that reminded me of a swan. The gravel road that went past the church led down into the cluster of houses that made up Kåsund. The stillness was almost unsettling. As yet I hadn’t seen anyone else apart from these two and the Sámi last night.

‘Why don’t most of the houses have curtains?’ I asked.

‘Because Læstadius taught us to let the light of God in,’ she said.

‘Læstadius?’

‘Lars Levi Læstadius. You don’t know of his teachings?’

I shook my head. I guess I’d read about the Swedish priest from the last century, who’d had to clean up the licentious ways of the locals, but I couldn’t claim to know of his teachings, and I suppose I’d imagined that old-fashioned stuff like that had died out.

‘Aren’t you a Læstadian?’ the boy asked. ‘You’ll burn in hell, then.’

‘Knut!’

‘But that’s what Grandpa says! And he knows, because he’s a travelling preacher all over Finnmark and Nord-Troms, so there!’

‘Grandpa also says that you shouldn’t shout your faith from the street corner.’ She looked at me with a pained expression. ‘Knut sometimes gets a bit overzealous. Are you from Oslo?’

‘Born and raised.’

‘Family?’

I shook my head.

‘Sure?’

‘What?’

She smiled. ‘You hesitated. Divorced, perhaps?’

‘Then you’ll definitely burn!’ Knut cried, wiggling his fingers in a way I assumed was supposed to represent flames.

‘Not divorced,’ I said.

I noticed her giving me a sideways look. ‘A lonely hunter far from home, then. What do you do otherwise?’

‘Fixer,’ I said. A movement made me look up, and I caught a glimpse of a face behind a window before the curtain was closed again. ‘But I’ve just resigned. I’m going to try to find something new.’

‘Something new,’ she repeated. It sounded like a sigh.

‘And you’re a cleaner?’ I asked, mostly for the sake of saying something.

‘Mum’s the sexton too, and the verger,’ Knut said. ‘Grandpa says she could have taken over as vicar as well. If she was a man, I mean.’

‘I thought they’d passed legislation about female vicars?’

She laughed. ‘A female vicar in Kåsund?’

The boy waggled his fingers again.

‘Here we are.’ She turned off towards a small, curtainless house. In the drive, perched on breeze blocks, was a Volvo with no wheels, and next to it stood a wheelbarrow containing two rusty wheel rims.

‘That’s Dad’s car,’ Knut said. ‘That one’s Mum’s.’ He pointed to a Volkswagen Beetle parked in the shade inside the garage.

We went in the unlocked house, and she showed me into the living room and said she’d fetch the shotgun, leaving me standing there with Knut. The room was sparsely furnished, neat, clean and tidy. Sturdy furniture, but no television or stereo. No pot plants. And the only pictures on the wall were Jesus carrying a sheep, and a wedding photograph.

I went closer. It was her, no doubt about that. She looked sweet, almost beautiful in her bridal gown. The man next to her was tall and broad-shouldered. For some reason, his smiling yet impassive face made me think of the face I had just caught a glimpse of in the window.

‘Come here, Ulf!’

I followed the voice, through a passageway and in through the open door of what looked as like a workroom. His workroom. A carpenter’s bench with rusty car parts, broken children’s toys that looked as though they’d been there for a while, plus several other half-finished projects.

She had pulled out a box of cartridges and pointed at a shotgun that was hanging next to a rifle balanced on two nails on the wall, too high for her to reach. I suspected she had asked me to wait in the living room so she could clear some things away in there first. I looked round for bottles, and I couldn’t miss the smell of home brew, alcohol and cigarettes.

‘Have you got bullets for that rifle?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ she said. ‘But weren’t you going to be hunting grouse?’

‘It’s more of a challenge with a rifle,’ I said, as I reached up and took it down. I aimed it out of the window. The curtains in the next house twitched. ‘And then you don’t have the job of getting all the shot out. How do you load it?’

She looked at me intently, evidently not sure if I was joking, before she showed me. Given my job, you’d think I’d know a lot about guns, but all I know is a bit about pistols. She inserted a magazine, demonstrated the loading action, and explained that the rifle was semi-automatic, but that the hunting laws said it was illegal to have more than three bullets in the magazine and one in the chamber.

‘Of course,’ I said, practising the loading action. What I like about guns is the sound of greased metal, of precision engineering. But that’s all.

‘You’ll find these useful as well,’ she said.

I turned round. She was holding a pair of binoculars out to me. They were Soviet B8 military binoculars. My grandfather had managed to get hold of a pair somehow, which he used to study the details of church architecture. He had told me that before and during the war, all the good optical engineering came from Germany, and the first thing the Russians did when they occupied the east of the country was steal the Germans’ industrial secrets and make cheaper, but damn good copies. God knows how they’d got hold of a pair of B8 binoculars here. I put the rifle down and looked through them. At the house with the face. No one there now.

‘Obviously I’ll pay to hire them.’

‘Nonsense.’ She replaced the box of bullets in front of me with one of rifle cartridges. ‘But Hugo would probably like it if you could cover the cost of the ammunition you use.’

‘Where is he?’

It was clearly an inappropriate question, because I saw her face twitch.

‘Fishing for pollock. Have you got any food and drink?’ she asked.

I shook my head. I hadn’t really thought about that. How many meals had I actually eaten since Oslo?

‘I’ll put together some food for you, and you can get the rest from Pirjo’s shop. Knut will show you.’

We went back out onto the steps. She looked at the time. Presumably making sure I hadn’t been inside long enough to give the neighbours anything to talk about. Knut was racing about the garden, eager as a puppy to get going.

‘It’ll take between thirty minutes and an hour to get to the cabin,’ she said. ‘Depending on how quick you are on your feet.’

‘Hmm. I’m not sure when my own shotgun’s going to arrive.’

‘There’s no rush. Hugo doesn’t hunt much.’

I nodded, then adjusted the strap on the rifle and slung it over my shoulder. My good shoulder. Time to get going. I tried to think of something to say in farewell. She tilted her head slightly, just like her son, and brushed some strands of hair from her face.

‘You don’t think it’s that beautiful, do you?’

I must have looked a bit confused, because she let out a short laugh and her high cheekbones flushed. ‘Kåsund, I mean. Our houses. It used to be nice here. Before the war. But when the Russians came in 1945 and the Germans fled, they burned down everything that was left as they retreated. Everything except the church.’

‘The scorched-earth tactics.’

‘People needed houses. So they built quickly. With no thought to what they looked like.’

‘Oh, they’re not that bad,’ I lied.

‘Yes, they are,’ she laughed. ‘The houses are ugly. But not the people who live in them.’

I looked at her scar. ‘I believe you. Right, time to get going. Thank you.’ I held out my hand. This time she took it. Her hand was firm and warm, like a smooth, sun-warmed stone.

‘The peace of God.’

I stared at her. She looked as if she meant it.

Pirjo’s shop was in the basement of one of the houses. It was dark inside, and she only showed up after Knut had called her name three times. She was big and round, and was wearing a headscarf. She had a squeaky voice:

‘Jumalan terve.’

‘Sorry?’ I said.

She turned away from me and looked at Knut.

‘The peace of God,’ he said. ‘Pirjo only speaks Finnish, but she knows the Norwegian for the things in her shop.’

The goods were behind the counter, and she got them out as I listed them. Tinned reindeer meatballs. Tinned fish balls. Sausages. Cheese. Crispbread.

She evidently added them up in her head, because when I was finished she just wrote a number on a piece of paper and showed it to me. I realised that I should have taken some notes out of the money belt before I went in. Seeing as I didn’t want to advertise the fact that I was carrying a serious amount of money, around a hundred and thirteen thousand kroner, I turned my back on the other two and undid the bottom two buttons of my shirt.

‘You’re not allowed to pee in here, Ulf,’ Knut said.

I half-turned to look at him.

‘I was joking,’ he said with a laugh.

Pirjo gestured that she couldn’t change the hundred-kroner note I gave her.

‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Take it as a tip.’

She said something in her harsh, incomprehensible language.

‘She says you can have more supplies when you come back,’ Knut said.

‘Maybe she should write the outstanding amount down.’

‘She’ll remember,’ Knut said. ‘Come on.’

Knut danced ahead of me on the path. The heather brushed my trouser legs and the midges buzzed around our heads. The plateau.

‘Ulf?’

‘Yes?’

‘Why have you got such long hair?’

‘Because no one’s cut it.’

‘Oh.’

Twenty seconds later.

‘Ulf?’

‘Hmm?’

‘Do you know any Finnish?’

‘No.’

‘Sámi?’

‘Not a word.’

‘Just Norwegian?’

‘And English.’

‘Are there lots of English people down in Oslo?’

I squinted at the sun. If it was the middle of the day, that meant we were walking more or less directly west. ‘Not really,’ I said. ‘But it’s a global language.’

‘A global language, yes. That’s what Grandpa says too. He says Norwegian is the language of common sense. But Sámi is the language of the heart. And Finnish is the holy language.’

‘If he says so.’

‘Ulf?’

‘Yes?’

‘I know a joke.’

‘Okay.’

He stopped and waited for me to catch up, then set off beside me through the heather. ‘What keeps going but never reaches the door?’

‘That’s a riddle, isn’t it?’

‘Shall I tell you the answer?’

‘Yes, I think you’re going to have to.’

He shaded his eyes with his hand and grinned up at me. ‘You’re lying, Ulf.’

‘Sorry?’

‘You know the answer!’

‘Do I?’

‘Everyone knows the answer to that riddle. Why do you all keep lying? You’ll end up—’

‘Burning in hell?’

‘Yes!’

‘Who are “you all”?’

‘Dad. And Uncle Ove. And Mum.’

‘Really? What does your mum lie about?’

‘She says there’s no need for me to worry about Dad. Now it’s your turn to tell a joke.’

‘I’m not much good at telling jokes.’

He stopped and leaned forward, with his arms dangling towards the heather. ‘You can’t hit a target, you don’t know anything about grouse, and you can’t tell jokes. Is there anything you can do?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, as I watched a solitary bird drift on its wings high above us. Watching. Hunting. Something about its stiff, angled wings made me think of a war plane. ‘I can hide.’

‘Yes!’ His head shot up. ‘Let’s play hide-and-seek! Who’s going to start? Eeny, meeny, miny mo...’

‘You run ahead and hide.’

He ran three paces and then stopped abruptly.

‘What is it?’

‘You’re only saying that because you want to get rid of me.’

‘Get rid of you? Never!’

‘Now you’re lying again!’

I shrugged. ‘We can play the being-quiet game. Anyone who isn’t completely quiet gets shot in the head.’

He gave me a funny look.

‘Not for real,’ I said. ‘Okay?’

He nodded, his mouth tight shut.

‘From now,’ I said.

We walked and walked. The scenery which had looked so monotonous from a distance was constantly changing, from soft, earthy browns covered by green and reddish-brown heather, to stony, scarred lunar landscapes, and suddenly — in the light of the sun which had turned half a revolution since I arrived, like a golden red discus — it looked like it was glowing, as though lava were running down the gently sloping hillsides. Above it all was a vast, broad sky. I don’t know why it seemed so much bigger here, or why I imagined I could see the curvature of the earth. Maybe it was lack of sleep. I’ve read that people can become psychotic after just two days without sleep.

Knut marched on in silence, with a determined look on his freckled face. There were more clouds of midges now, until eventually they formed one great big swarm that we couldn’t escape. I’d stopped swatting them when they landed on me. They punctured my skin with their anaesthetised bites, and the whole business was so gentle that I left them to it. The important thing was that I was putting metre after metre — kilometres — between me and civilisation. Even so, I needed to come up with a plan soon.

The Fisherman always finds what he’s looking for.

The plan up to now had been not to have a plan, seeing as he would be able to predict every logical plan I could come up with. My only chance was unpredictability. Acting so erratically that even I didn’t know what my next move was going to be. But I’d have to think of something after that. If there was any ‘after that’.

‘A clock,’ Knut said. ‘The answer’s a clock.’

I nodded. It was only a matter of time.

‘And now you can shoot me in the head, Ulf.’

‘Okay.’

‘Go on, then!’

‘What for?’

‘To get it over with. There’s nothing worse than not knowing when the bullet’s coming.’

‘Bang.’

‘Did you get teased at school, Ulf?’

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You’ve got a weird way of talking.’

‘Everyone talks like this where I grew up.’

‘Wow. Did they all get teased, then?’

I couldn’t help laughing. ‘Okay, I got teased a bit. When I was ten years old my parents died, and I moved from the east side of Oslo to the west, to live with my grandfather, Basse. The other kids called me Oliver Twist and east-end trash.’

‘But you’re not.’

‘Thanks.’

‘You’re south-side trash.’ He laughed. ‘That was a joke! That’s three you owe me now.’

‘I wish I knew where you got them all from, Knut.’

He screwed one eye shut and squinted at me. ‘Can I carry the rifle?’

‘No.’

‘It’s my dad’s.’

‘I said no.’

He groaned, and drooped his head and arms for a few seconds, then straightened again. We sped up. He sang quietly to himself. I couldn’t swear to it, but it sounded like a hymn. I thought about asking him what his mother’s name was — it might be useful to know when I needed to go back to the village. If I couldn’t remember where the house was, for instance. But for some reason I couldn’t bring myself to ask.

‘There’s the cabin,’ Knut said, and pointed.

I got the binoculars out and adjusted the focus, which you have to do with both lenses on a B8. Behind the dancing midges lay something that looked more like a small woodshed than a cabin. No windows, from what I could see, just a collection of unpainted, grey, dried-out planks gathered around a thin, black chimney pipe.

We carried on walking, and my mind must have been on something else entirely when my eyes registered a movement, something much bigger than the midges, something a hundred metres ahead of us, something suddenly emerging from the monotonous landscape. My heart felt as though it stopped for a moment. There was an odd clicking sound as the heavy-antlered creature ran off through the heather.

‘A buck,’ Knut declared.

My pulse slowly calmed down. ‘How do you know it’s not a... er, one of the other sort?’

He gave me that funny look again.

‘We don’t get many reindeer in Oslo,’ I said.

‘A doe. Because bucks have bigger horns, don’t they? See, it’s rubbing them against that tree.’

The reindeer had stopped in a cluster of trees behind the cabin and was rubbing its antlers against a birch trunk.

‘Is it scraping off bark to eat?’

He laughed. ‘Reindeer eat lichen.’

Of course, reindeer eat lichen. We’d learned about the types of moss that grow up here close to the North Pole in school. That a joik was a sort of improvised shouting in Sámi, that a lavvo was a form of Indian teepee, and that Finnmark was further away from Oslo than London or Paris. We also learned a way of remembering the names of the fjords, although I doubt anyone could recall what it was now. Not me, anyway — I’d made it through fifteen years of education, two of them at university, even, by half-remembering things.

‘They rub their horns to clean them,’ Knut said. ‘They do that in August. When I was little, Grandpa said it was because their horns itched so badly.’

He smacked his lips like an old man, as if to lament how naive he had once been. I could have told him that some of us never stop being naive.

The cabin stood on four large rocks. It wasn’t locked, but I had to tug the door handle hard to loosen it from the frame. Inside were a pair of bunk beds with woollen blankets, and a wood-burning stove with a dented kettle and a casserole dish sitting on its two hotplates. There was an orange wall cupboard, a red plastic bucket, two chairs and a table that leaned towards the west, either because it was crooked or because the floor was uneven.

The cabin did have windows. The reason I hadn’t seen them was that they were just embrasures, narrow slits in all the walls except for the one with the door in it. But they let in enough light, and you could see anything approaching from every direction. Even when I walked the three steps from one end of the cabin to the other and felt the whole building wobble like a French coffee table, it didn’t change my initial conclusion: the cabin was perfect.

I looked round and thought of the first thing Grandfather said when he had carried my trunk up to his house and unlocked it: Mi casa es tu casa. And even though I didn’t understand a word, I still guessed what it meant.

‘Do you want coffee before you walk back?’ I asked nonchalantly as I opened the wood-burning stove. Fine grey ash blew out.

‘I’m ten years old,’ Knut said. ‘I don’t drink coffee. You need wood. And water.’

‘So I see. A slice of bread, then?’

‘Have you got an axe? Or a knife?’

I looked at him without replying. He looked up at the ceiling in response. A hunter with no knife.

‘You can borrow this for the time being,’ Knut said, reaching behind his back and pulling out an enormous knife with a broad blade and a yellow wooden handle.

I turned the knife in my hand. Heavy, but not too heavy, and nicely balanced. Pretty much the way a pistol should feel.

‘Did you get this from your dad?’

‘From Grandpa. It’s a Sámi knife.’

We agreed that he would gather wood while I fetched water. He evidently liked being given a grown-up task, and grabbed the knife back and ran out. I found a loose plank in the wall. Behind it, between the two walls, was a sort of insulation made of moss and turf, and I pushed the money belt into that. I could hear the sound of steel against wood from the clump of trees as I filled the plastic bucket in the stream that ran just a hundred metres from the cabin.

Knut put some kindling and bark in the stove while I cleared the mouse shit from the cupboard and put the food away. I lent him my matches and before long the stove was alight and the kettle was hissing. Some smoke leaked out, and I noticed that the midges were holding back. I took the opportunity to take my shirt off and splash some water from the bucket on my face and upper body.

‘What’s that?’ Knut asked, pointing.

‘This?’ I said, taking hold of the dog tag hanging round my neck. ‘Name and date of birth engraved on bombproof metal, so they know who they’ve killed.’

‘Why would they want to know that?’

‘So they know where to send the skeleton.’

‘Ha, ha,’ he said drily. ‘Doesn’t count as a joke.’

The hissing of the kettle was replaced by a warning rumble. As I filled one of the two chipped coffee cups, Knut was already halfway through his second thick slice of bread with liver pâté. I blew on the black, greasy surface of the coffee.

‘What does coffee taste like?’ Knut asked with his mouth full.

‘The first time’s always the worst,’ I said, and took a sip. ‘Eat up, then you’d better get going before your mum wonders where you are.’

‘She knows where I am.’ He put both elbows on the table and leaned his head on his hands, pushing his cheeks up over his eyes. ‘Joke.’

The coffee tasted perfect, and the cup warmed my hands. ‘Have you heard the one about the Norwegian, the Dane and the Swede, who had a bet to see who could lean furthest out of the window?’

He took his arms off the table and stared at me expectantly. ‘No.’

‘They were sitting on the windowsill. And suddenly the Norwegian won.’

In the silence that followed I took another sip. I assumed from Knut’s gawping expression that he hadn’t figured out that was the end of the joke.

‘How did he win?’ he asked.

‘How do you think? The Norwegian fell out of the window.’

‘So the Norwegian bet on himself?’

‘Obviously.’

‘Not obviously. You should have said that from the start.’

‘Okay, but you get the point,’ I sighed. ‘So what do you think?’

He put one finger under his freckled chin and stared thoughtfully into space. Then came two loud bursts of laughter. Then more thoughtful staring.

‘A bit short,’ he said. ‘But that’s probably what makes it funny. Bang — it’s all over. Well, it made me laugh.’ He laughed a bit more.

‘Speaking of things being over...’

‘Of course,’ he said, standing up. ‘I’ll come back tomorrow.’

‘Really? Why?’

‘Midge oil.’

‘Midge oil?’

He took my hand and put it to my forehead. It was like bubble wrap, bump upon bump.

‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Bring midge oil. And beer.’

‘Beer? Then you’ll—’

‘Burn in hell?’

‘Have to go to Alta.’

I thought about the smell in his father’s workroom. ‘Hooch.’

‘Huh?’

‘Home brew. Moonshine. Whatever your father drinks. Where does he get it from?’

Knut shifted his weight a couple of times. ‘Mattis.’

‘Hmm. Bow-legged little fellow in a torn anorak?’

‘Yes.’

I took a note out of my pocket. ‘See how much you can get with this, and get yourself an ice cream. Unless that’s a sin, of course.’

He shook his head and took the note. ‘Goodbye, Ulf. And keep the door closed.’

‘Oh, there probably isn’t room for any more midges in here.’

‘Not midges. Wolves.’

Was he kidding?

When he had gone I picked up the rifle and rested it on one of the sills. I looked through the sights as I swept the horizon. I found Knut as he skipped away down the path. I carried on towards the little patch of woodland. I found the buck. At that moment it raised its head, as if it could sense me. As far as I knew, reindeer were herd animals, so this one must have been expelled. Like me.

I went and sat down outside the cabin and drank the rest of the coffee. The heat and the smoke from the stove had given me a thumping headache.

I looked at the time. Almost one hundred hours had passed now. Since I should have died. One hundred bonus hours.

When I looked out again the buck had come closer.