Henning drives past the rubbish bins and continues until the road stops at the end of Donavall Camping with rows of trailers with picket fences, decking and locked plastic crates containing garden furniture. Everything is exactly as he remembers it.
The parking space allocated to their cabin appears a short distance ahead of him. But there is no car in sight. Trine isn’t there. No one is.
So he was wrong after all.
A little further along the gravel track he spots tyre tracks. Fresh. As if a car, or two, drove halfway into the space before turning around again.
Whenever Henning’s family went to the cabin, they would park as near the footpath as they could to unload the car. Then there would be the strenuous hike through the forest laden down with rucksacks, bags and food shopping. Trine and Henning were always made to carry something, even when they were little, and they would walk through the trees whose viper-like roots snaked down towards the footpath where they were. And every time there was a noise in the thicket, they would jump a mile, spooked as only children can be.
But it was also an incredibly beautiful landscape where the trees grew close, vines wound their way around them and white anemones, almost luminous in the spring, covered the forest floor like a duvet. And the view when they reached the top of the hill, when the sea opened out before them, and they could see ships draw white trails in their wake on the mirrored, blue surface of the Skagerrak.
He remembers everything now.
And seeing that he has driven all this way, he decides he might as well go down to the shore. Henning loves the sea. He has always loved throwing stones at the rocks to see if he could hit them. He loved snorkelling, looking for flounders on the seabed, the way the seaweed and bull rushes wafted around him in slow motion when he went swimming.
Henning parks the car and walks down the footpath where everything has changed, while at the same time nothing has. He still looks out for vipers, just in case. And the feeling when he reaches the top of the hill and the sea spreads out in front of him hasn’t changed, either. It’s as if something in him lets go. He stops and looks across the water; the distant sky has acquired a pink evening glow, which in a few places is reflected in the almost motionless surface of the sea.
He remembers how they used to play on the pebble beach, him and Trine, how they would pick bog whortleberries and crowberries that looked like blueberries and which Trine insisted on calling blueberries for years. Trine would always boss him around, like the know-it-all she was. This is how he remembers her, even though she is eighteen months younger than him, her constantly wagging finger and a tone of voice that would frighten most people into doing what she told them. This extended to when the family played cards. She learned new games and strategies very quickly. Their mother, however, never played to win; she always let her children beat her. And Trine hated that.
Henning inhales the sea air deep into his lungs before he starts walking down towards the row of blue cabins. He remembers the mound where he used to go to pee because the cabin only had an outside toilet and no power on earth could make him step inside the tiny cubicle that was riddled with flies, spiders and cobwebs. And he remembers the seagulls they fed with prawn shells and fish waste. Cormorants, oystercatchers and swans that always caused a stir whenever they flapped past. The eider ducks.
Tvistein Lighthouse stands just as staunchly on the horizon as it always did. On clear summer evenings they could see all the way out to the island of Jomfruland. If he tries really hard, he is sure that he can conjure up the smell of his father’s cigar smoke, the smell of holiday. And nowhere in the world do the stars twinkle more brightly.
Henning comes to a standstill when he sees that the door to the cabin is open. At first he thinks there must have been a break-in; he has read countless newspaper articles over the years about cabins closed down for the winter that have had uninvited, light-fingered guests, but his initial concern soon gives way to profound relief when he notices a plate and a glass in the sink outside.
So he was right after all.
Trine hasn’t scattered breadcrumbs for the wagtails with which they always used to share their breakfast, but the washing-up bowl is still there. Square and made from faded red plastic. And he sees the old gulley in the hillside that their father dug to divert rainwater away from their cabin. Their mother always took great care to weed around it. He can’t imagine that anyone has done any weeding here for years.
Their plot is relatively inaccessible from the surrounding footpaths so people rarely walked straight past their front door – even in the summer. It meant that they hardly ever had to lock the cabin, a tradition Henning notes to his satisfaction that Trine has upheld.
He enters the cabin tentatively.
‘Trine?’
It feels strange to say her name out loud and there is no response. The cabin is silent. But he sees a laptop on the table. Clothing thrown over the dark blue sofa. The curtains are still the same blue and white ones, in case anyone should forget that they are by the seaside. He looks across the juniper bushes that cover the hillside in front of the cabin; the thicket below. The irregularities in the terrain. And he remembers the cream buns they used to eat, radio plays on Saturdays, the television that never worked.
He remembers everything.
He leaves the cabin and walks up to the small mound and it feels as if the whole world is spread out in front of him. All he has to do is reach out his hand to touch it. And the wind, he hadn’t noticed it until now. Or the smell from Firsbukta, either – a smell he hated when he was little – of seaweed and rubbish that the sea has washed up and which has been rotting in the sun.
He wonders if that’s what makes him take a step back to stop himself from falling over. How can all this have been buried inside him, all these lovely memories that are now coming back to him? He closes his eyes and lets them in. He stands like this for a long time.
Then he walks back inside the cabin and sits down at the table where Trine’s laptop is open. He bumps into a table leg, and as he does so he causes the screen to wake up. A detailed city map appears. Blue, yellow, white and beige colours dotted across the page. A slightly thicker line runs through the streets along some water. He is about to read the street names when a shadow flits across the window. His gaze darts to the door frame where his sister is staring at him with frightened eyes.
‘Henning? What the hell are you doing here?’
Chapter 50
Trine is wearing muddy walking boots and a green, white and red anorak. A baseball cap covers her hair.
All he can do is stare at her. She has their mother’s features around her mouth and her eyes; nothing about her has changed except that she has aged a little. She is Trine, his sister. To whom he hasn’t spoken for God knows how many years.
‘Hi,’ he says at last.
Two men, whom Henning presumes to be Trine’s bodyguards, appear either side of her. He can see that they are about to rush inside, but Trine stops them with a gesture and mutters – with her face turned away from him – that it’s only her brother.
Then she turns to him again. And he doesn’t know how to interpret the look in her eyes. Whether it’s anger, fear or something else. But there is definitely something. Hostility, possibly.
‘Have you come here to gloat?’ she asks.
‘Gloat? No. I’m here to—’