by Karen Swan
She had been itching to tell him the truth about Sofie’s so-called injury; their father wasn’t here now, things were different, they could trust Nils to keep the secret – at least then he’d see the truth about her. Why did he always look at her like she’d said something really interesting, when all she ever did was whine? And her jokes weren’t funny at all, even though he laughed like they were. He should know what she was really like. But Kari, fully able to read her mutinous thoughts as Signy had watched him watching Sofie, had kicked her ankle hard under the table, warning her to keep quiet – and when she’d limped as Nils went to leave, he hadn’t even noticed.
It had been a surprise to her how much she’d missed him, being here; it was the one thing that hadn’t been as she’d expected. But then, she’d grown up seeing his face every single day. How could she have known how it felt to miss something she had never left? That hollow ache in the pit of her stomach wasn’t something that could have been predicted. And besides, it didn’t feel like she was missing him so much as losing him. He had always had time for her, growing up – happy to throw a ball over the hayricks with her, or to go on rambling walks together after church on Sundays, looking for vipers in the grass or beavers damming the river – but then he’d grown tall and his voice had deepened and everything had changed. She had been left behind, and when he did notice her, it wasn’t as an equal but as an adult to a child.
She was almost down by the stream now, the white tufts of the cottongrass nodding gently in the evening breeze; it was so tall, the heads brushed beneath her hands as she walked, tickling her palms. She stopped to check on the herd behind her again, Stormy continuing onwards as she picked up on the sound of grain being rattled nearby in a bucket for the horse.
‘That’s it, nearly there,’ Signy said, holding out her arm with her stick to contain them from spreading out too soon. ‘Follow Stormy, follow Stormy,’ she said as the animals passed by her quickly, a migration in miniature: bells jingling, heads nodding, hooves knocking on the stones in the stream. The kids bleated loudly as they were splashed by the others, running faster before doubling back to their mothers again.
Signy’s eyes narrowed as they passed. She didn’t need to count them – not that she could here anyway – but she had an innate sense of knowing when the herd was wrong, as though the very shape of it had been changed by the loss of one or two members. They were all with her now, she felt sure of it. But something . . . there was something. The hairs on the back of her neck rose and she looked back from where they had come. The sun – still above the mountains – threw dazzling, blinding white haloes like discuses straight at her; she shaded her eyes, scanning the grass-embedded rocks, the long shadows of the trees, the thick clumps of moss.
All was still, apart from a woodpecker bouncing in the sky towards the trees. She waited, feeling the sky become a thin membrane, taut and quivering above her. But then a goshawk cawed, piercing the tension, and she shrugged, turning back and splashing through the stream after her animals. Her mind was playing tricks on her. Of course they weren’t being watched.
* * *
Bo sat up in bed, her neck at a slightly awkward angle; there was no headboard to speak of and the pillows were flat. Zac was in the bath – it was his ‘turn’ for the hot water. In order to keep gas cylinder consumption to a reasonable level, they had agreed to divvy up the days so that each of them had the bath every other day – Bo and Zac had it one day, Lenny the next. On their ‘off’ days, they would have to make do with washing themselves at the kitchen sink, which was a deeply unappetizing prospect. Lenny had told them that when he’d booked, Signy had said there was a nearby stream which people used for bathing, but washing in a river was one thing in July, quite another two weeks before Christmas.
Zac had tipped his head back against the bath edge and was humming ‘Hotel California’. ‘You need to shave,’ Bo said, watching his Adam’s apple bob up and down in his throat. ‘You’re turning into a bear.’
‘Yeah?’ he asked, raising a hand from the water and stroking his neck lightly. ‘I’m quite liking it actually. It’s warm.’
‘It makes my skin itch,’ she said, wrinkling her nose.
‘But it’s very “rugged man of the woods”, don’t you think?’
‘Do you see Anders with one?’ she asked, arching an eyebrow.
Zac sat a little higher and straighter in the bath. ‘Oh – he’s who comes to mind when you think of a rugged man of the woods?’
Bo shrugged. ‘Well, isn’t he? This is his shtick. A shelf farm in a forest on the side of a fjord.’
‘Yeah, well – he’s not far off this himself anyway,’ Zac said, rubbing his hand over his chin as though it was a pelt and feeling the thick covering of bristles. ‘Or maybe he just can’t grow one as thickly as me.’
Bo opened her mouth in a silent ‘o’ before she chuckled. ‘Oh, I see, right,’ she nodded.
‘What?’
‘This is a competition. He flies helicopters but you can grow a beard? Is that it?’
Zac grinned, busted. ‘I’m just saying.’ He paused. ‘And besides, I could learn to fly one of those things if I wanted – and then I’d be bearded and a pilot. And he’d just be a pilot. With bum fluff.’
Bo looked over at him from under her lashes, a bemused smile playing on her lips. She knew he was still smarting from Anders’ outmanoeuvring of him this morning that was leaving him paying way over the odds for two weeks’ work – although it said something about their income levels now that they could absorb the sum reasonably comfortably. Their brand had never been more influential and they weren’t even yet at their peak. ‘Mmhmm. If you say so.’
‘Well, don’t you?’
‘I don’t get why you care so much.’
‘I don’t, I just . . .’ he trailed off, watching her as she continued to scroll through her feed.
She arched an eyebrow. ‘Like winning?’
He grinned again, wolfishly this time. ‘Can you blame a guy?’
She sighed. ‘No, baby,’ she said, knowing it was what he wanted to hear.
She came to a photo that Zac had posted an hour ago – he was sitting in the blue kayak, the shopping bags positioned precariously around him, with not an inch spare; it was a wonder they hadn’t capsized. His stubble looked particularly dark in the image, his teeth especially white as he laughed at something, looking not directly to camera, but just off to the side of it. It looked natural and breezy but she knew it had been carefully contrived to have the essence of an amateur pic. Lenny loved the energy of reportage shots, always creeping about for an unexpected angle.
She glanced through the most recent comments for the post – they were almost entirely left by women crushing on Zac, all of them posting hearts or the heart-eye emoji, some of them asking him to marry them, others asking for more than that. It didn’t upset or bother her; they were harmless fantasies, momentary knee-jerk impulses as these nameless women fancied a handsome stranger for all of a moment, before scrolling down to the next post.
Funnily enough, most of her fans were women too – it wasn’t the case that if he had an almost all-female following, hers was all-male – and she was glad that other women liked her and found her approachable; she didn’t want to have a legion of men fantasizing about her, even though she knew that, statistically speaking, a fair percentage of her almost nine million followers would be male.
But she also knew that the core of Zac’s fans were men who had adopted him in the early days when, long before he’d met and linked up with her, he’d been a rookie climber with an ambition – and mission – to take the ‘ultimate selfie’ in every country in the world before he was twenty-five. It was those fans, the silent majority, who didn’t comment on the pretty-boy pictures but immediately hit ‘buy now’ whenever he endorsed a new rope or climbing shoe or powder bag. They were the ones he was really communicating with; those women were just the cheerleaders making noise at the front.
Still . .
. She looked up at him. ‘Tell you what, let’s put it to the vote.’
‘What to the vote?’ he asked, his eyes meeting her phone camera lens just as she clicked.
She smiled as she looked back at it on the screen. It was a cute photo: ever so slightly fuzzy but his eyes were animated and there was something amusing about seeing a bearded, muscular tanned man soaking in a bubbly copper bath.
‘The beard,’ she replied, bringing up the poll template and tapping out quickly: Keep the beard? Yes/No.
‘There,’ she smiled, pressing send and watching it try to upload. She held her arm up higher and it went on the third attempt. ‘We can let the people decide.’
‘How democratic of you, babe,’ he murmured, dropping his head back again and watching her.
‘I thought so.’
Her feed was a curious mix of sarcastic memes, adorable pictures of puppies, interiors shots – which was ironic for someone of no fixed abode – some fashion accounts, and assorted people they had met and connected with on the road.
The responses were immediate and she saw the numbers of messages in the top right of her screen begin to rack up, faster than she could count. ‘Ooh, half and half so far,’ she teased.
‘Anna likes it,’ he said, rubbing his jaw and chin again.
Bo arched an eyebrow. ‘Does she?’
‘She said she thought it made me look like Ryan Reynolds.’
‘Then let’s hope she votes Yes – along with the seven million other people you need on your side,’ Bo said wryly.
‘Are you gonna make me shave it off even if they do?’
‘Of course.’ She heard his low chuckle from the bath as she went back to scrolling again. She had missed so much on her feed over the past few days. ‘– Hey!’ Her smile faded suddenly. ‘What the actual fuck?’ she frowned, clicking on an image that was familiar. ‘Did you approve this?’
‘What?’
Angrily, spine ramrod straight, she held her phone up for him to see the image of her relaxing in the bath. ‘I deleted this picture! Why the hell has it been used?’
Zac peered at it for ten seconds before sinking back into his bubbles. ‘Don’t blame me. Lenny must have posted it. Looks good though. I like it.’
‘That’s not the point! It’s too intimate, Zac! I didn’t want it to be used. I deleted it for that reason – how did he even get hold of it?’
‘I dunno, he must have had a copy in the cloud,’ he shrugged. ‘Listen, chill. It’s not showing any of your bits. It’s pretty. It’s artsy. It’s . . . what’s that word?’ he asked, looking up at the ceiling. ‘Ambient. Yeah, that’s what it is.’
‘But he shouldn’t be posting to the page without our permission. You know he has to run anything that goes up past one of us first.’
‘Oh, Bo – cut the guy some slack,’ Zac said wearily. ‘He’s doing his job. That picture correlates perfectly with the brand.’
The brand. The bloody brand. Since when had she stopped becoming a private individual who couldn’t even take a bath in private because the vibe worked for the brand? She glowered at him, remembering the hushed voices behind the closed door last night when she’d flown off the handle then too. Zac was getting as tired of this conversation as Lenny. But so was she. No one was listening to her or taking her seriously. There had to be a boundary, a cut-off point, didn’t there? She wasn’t public property.
She swung her legs off the bed and got up.
‘Hey, where’re you going?’
‘To give Lenny a piece of my mind,’ she muttered.
‘Oh, Bo, no, wait,’ he groaned. ‘It’s not worth it. It’ll just cause tensio—’
But too late, she was already out of the door. ‘Lenny!’ she snapped, standing at the bottom of the stairs and calling up into his loft. ‘I want a word with you.’
She waited but there was no sound. And the lights were off. He couldn’t be asleep already, surely? She climbed the first few rungs of the ladder and peered in. It smelled of his cologne, worn boxers and T-shirts strewn across the floor like he was still a fifteen-year-old living in suburban Boise, Idaho.
He wasn’t there. Where was he? Having a smoke?
Stuffing her feet into Zac’s boots – the nearest to hand – she went outside, shivering immediately in the evening darkness. She looked for the tell-tale glow of a cigarette tip but not even the grass swayed in the still night. In the stabbur though, further down the path, lights pooled on the ground from the windows, two silhouettes moving past drawn curtains.
Oh.
She should have known.
She felt even angrier now. She had always made a point of never commenting on Lenny’s love life; if sleeping around made him happy, she wasn’t going to stand in judgement of it, but she could already see how this was going to play out: he would seduce Anna tonight and dump her by breakfast. It wouldn’t be any different from the scores of other women he’d done this to except that he – and they – were going to have to continue to work with the poor woman for the next fortnight. He was a dog peeing in his own backyard.
Her hands balled into angry fists. She wanted to storm down there and give Anna the heads-up, but she knew she couldn’t. It was none of her business. Anna was responsible for her own love life and Lenny was their photographer, done for the day, and what he did in his down time was nothing to do with her.
She turned – and started. Signy was sitting in her rocking chair by the window, watching her. For a moment their eyes met, and Bo gave a feeble, embarrassed wave.
Hesitating for a moment, feeling somehow exposed that she had been seen seething on her own, she walked back up the path and knocked lightly at the old woman’s door.
‘Come in.’
The voice was faint but Bo, with her ear to the door, entered. ‘Hi,’ she smiled, feeling awkward. ‘I was just about to go to bed and thought I’d check on you,’ she fibbed. ‘Is there anything you need before I go?’
Signy looked at her for so long that for a moment Bo wasn’t sure she’d heard her. Or was she simply seeing straight through the lie? ‘You can heat some water and put it in the wash-bowl for me. I prefer to bathe at night. The mornings are too cold.’
‘Sure. Of course.’ Bo walked over to the sink and filled the kettle, setting it to boil.
‘The wash-bowl is beside my bed,’ Signy directed her, not turning round.
Bo stepped into the dark room; familiar silhouettes of a bedstead, chair and wardrobe looked back at her, a large apple-green jug, sitting in a deep bowl, on the top of a small dresser. She brought it back through, pouring some cold water into the jug. ‘It’s a beautiful night,’ she said, walking over and perching on a chair by the table. Outside, the fjord lay cloaked in black velvet, silent and still.
‘It will be the last time we see the stars for a while. Snow is coming.’
‘Yes, Anders said that too. Not yet though, surely? It’s crystal clear out there.’
Signy tipped her chin up fractionally, like a dog on the scent. ‘It’s not far away.’
‘Do you think there’s any chance of catching the Aurora tonight? We’re so desperate to see it. Lenny was awake till three last night looking out for it. No joy, sadly.’
‘Yes. It is quite the tourist attraction,’ Signy muttered, her eyes on the sky.
Bo glanced at her. Was she just being defensive or did Signy seem to know to use the T-word pejoratively? ‘Well, I really hope we get to see it while we’re here,’ she said benignly, hearing the kettle begin to boil. ‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to see, ever since I was little. Have you read the Philip Pullman book Northern Lights?’
‘Why would I need to read about it when I can watch the real thing from my window?’
‘Fair enough,’ Bo smiled. ‘I read it when I was little. Or rather – my brother read it to me. I’m afraid I got too scared reading on my own about children being killed.’
Signy scowled. ‘Then why should it have been better when he read it?’
&n
bsp; ‘Oh, everything was always better with him,’ Bo said simply, a sigh spooling from her, her eyes on the black beyond – before she suddenly caught herself. What was she saying? She drew up the ramparts but it was too late. Signy was watching her; she had seen her flinch.
Her inquisitive gaze crept over Bo’s features like fingers. ‘Tell me why you have been away from your home for so long?’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You said it was four years since you had been home. That is a long time, unless you are deliberately staying away.’
‘Not at all,’ Bo said quickly. ‘I just . . . lose track of time. One trip always seems to lead to another. But I’ll go back soon.’
‘Not for Christmas though?’
‘We’re booked now,’ Bo shrugged. ‘All paid up here for one thing, working until Christmas Eve for another. And I doubt we could get a flight back now even if we wanted to.’
‘There’s always a way back home,’ Signy said firmly, making no secret of the way she scrutinized Bo’s face, as though she were a palm to be read. ‘What about your parents? Are they dead?’
‘No.’ The blunt question made Bo shudder.
‘So then it must be hard on them, not having you home for Christmas for all this time.’