Nemesis

'They're strict about handing out system keys,' Anna said hastily. 'It fits the whole block, the main entrance, the cellar, flat, everything.' She gave a nervous, perfunctory laugh. 'They have to have a written application from our housing co-op just to make this one spare key.'

'I understand,' Harry said, rocking on his heels. He drew breath to say goodnight.

She beat him to it. Her voice was almost imploring: 'Just a cup of coffee, Harry.'

***

There was the same chandelier hanging from the ceiling high above the same table and chairs in the large sitting room. Harry thought the walls had been light-white or maybe yellow-but he wasn't sure. Now they were blue and the room seemed smaller. Perhaps Anna had wanted to reduce the space. It is not easy for one person living alone to fill a flat with three reception rooms, two big bedrooms and a ceiling height of three and a half metres. Harry remembered that Anna had told him her grandmother had also lived in the flat on her own, but she hadn't spent so much time here, as she had been a famous soprano and had travelled the world for as long as she was able to sing.

Anna disappeared into the kitchen and Harry looked around the sitting room. It was bare, empty, apart from a vaulting horse the size of an Icelandic pony, which stood in the middle on four splayed wooden legs with two rings protruding from its back. Harry went over and stroked the smooth, brown leather.

'Have you taken up gymnastics?' Harry called out.

'You mean the horse?' Anna shouted back from the kitchen.

'It's for men, isn't it?'

'Yes. Sure you won't have a beer, Harry?'

'Quite sure,' he shouted. 'Seriously, though, why have you got it here?'

Harry jumped when he heard her voice behind his back: 'Because I like to do things that men do.'

Harry turned. She had taken off her sweater and was standing in the doorway. One hand resting on her hip, the other up against the door frame. At the very last minute Harry resisted the temptation to let his eyes wander from top to toe.

'I bought it from Oslo Gym Club. It's going to be a work of art. An installation. Much like "Contact", which I am sure you haven't forgotten.'

'You mean the box on the table with the curtain you could stick your hand in? And inside there were loads of false hands you could shake?'

'Or stroke. Or flirt with. Or reject. They had heating elements in so they could maintain body temperature and were such a great hit, weren't they. People thought there was someone hiding under the table. Come with me and I'll show you something else.'

He followed her to the furthest room, where she opened sliding doors. Then she took his hand and pulled him into the dark with her. When the light was switched on, at first Harry stood staring at the lamp. It was a gilt standard lamp formed into the shape of a woman holding scales in one hand and a sword in the other. Three bulbs were located on the outside edge of the sword, the scales and the woman's head, and when Harry turned, he could see each illuminated its own oil painting. Two of them were hanging on the wall while the third, which clearly wasn't finished yet, was on an easel with a yellow-and-brown-stained palette fastened to the left-hand corner.

'What sort of pictures are they?' Harry asked.

'They're portraits. Can't you see that?'

'Right. Those are eyes?' He pointed. 'And that's a mouth?'

Anna tilted her head. 'If you like. There are three men.'

'Anyone I know?'

Anna gazed at Harry pensively for a long time before answering. 'No. I don't think you know any of them, Harry, but you could get to know them if you really wanted.'

Harry studied the pictures more closely.

'Tell me what you can see.'

'I can see my neighbour with a kicksled. I can see a man coming out of the backroom at the locksmith's as I'm leaving. And I can see the waiter in M. And that TV celeb, Per Stеle Lшnning.'

She laughed. 'Did you know that the retina reverses everything so your brain receives a mirror image first? If you want to see things as they really are, you have to see them in a mirror. Then you would have seen some quite different people in the pictures.' Her eyes were radiant and Harry couldn't bring himself to object that the retina didn't reverse images, it turned them upside down. 'This will be my final masterpiece, Harry. This is what I will be remembered for.'

'These portraits?'

'No, they're merely a part of the whole work of art. It's not finished yet. Just wait.'

'Mm, has it got a name?'

' "Nemesis",' she said in a low voice.

He gazed enquiringly at her and their eyes locked.

'After the goddess, you know.'

The shadow fell over one side of her face. Harry looked away. He had seen enough. The curve of her back begging for a dancing partner, one foot in front of the other as if unsure whether to move forwards or backwards, her heaving bosom and the slim neck with the veins he imagined he could see throbbing. He felt hot and a tiny bit faint. What was it she said? 'You shouldn't have been so quick to let go.' Had he been?

'Harry…'

'I have to go,' he said.

***

He pulled her dress over her head, and she fell back laughing against the white sheet. She loosened his belt as the turquoise light, which shone through the swaying palm trees of the laptop's screensaver, flickered over the imps and open-mouthed demons snarling from the carvings on the bedhead. Anna had told him it was her grandmother's bed and it had been there for almost eighty years. She nibbled at his ear and whispered sweet nothings in an unfamiliar language. Then she stopped whispering and rode him as she yelled, laughed, entreated and invoked external forces and he just wished it would go on and on. He was about to come when she suddenly held back, took his face between her hands and whispered: 'Mine for ever?'

'Not bloody likely,' he laughed and turned her so that he was on top. The wooden demons grinned at him.

'Mine for ever?'

'Yes,' he groaned and came.

When the laughter had died down and they lay there sweating, but still tightly entwined on the bedcovers, Anna told him that the bed had been given to her grandmother by a Spanish nobleman.

'After a concert she gave in Seville in 1911,' she said, raising her head slightly so that Harry could place the lit cigarette between her lips.

The bed arrived in Oslo three months later on SS Elenora. Chance, among other things, would have it that the Danish captain, Jesper something-or-other, would be her grandmother's first lover-though not her first ever-in this bed. Jesper had obviously been a passionate man, and according to the grandmother, that was why the horse adorning the bed had lost its head. Captain Jesper, in his ecstasy, bit it off.

Anna laughed and Harry smiled. Then the cigarette was finished and they made love to the creaking and groaning of the Spanish Manila wood, which made Harry think he was in a boat with no one at the helm, but that it didn't matter.

That was a long time ago and it was the first and last night he had slept sober in Anna's grandmother's bed.

Harry twisted in the narrow iron bed. The display of the radio alarm clock on the bedside table glowed 3.21. He cursed. He closed his eyes and his thoughts slowly glided back to Anna and the summer on the white sheets of her grandmother's bed. More often than not he had been drunk, but he could recall the nights, pink and wonderful like erotic picture postcards. Even the final line he had delivered when the summer was over had been a hackneyed, but a passionately felt clichй: 'You deserve someone better than me.'

At this stage he was drinking so hard that everything pointed in only one direction. In one of his clearer moments he had made up his mind he would not drag her down with him. She had cursed him in her foreign tongue and sworn that one day she would do the same to him: take the thing he loved most from him.