You stand in the middle of the corridor, while your girls go on running. They don’t notice, they look into the rooms and leave you behind. It’s the end of the sweet bitches. Your biggest fear has come true. You’re no longer part of them. You’re no longer part of anything. Even if you’ve been pretending over the past few days that everything would be as it always was, you were living only on the memory of a Taja who was once part of it.

Once upon a time there were five girls and I was one of them.

Shame floods over you, and you’d probably cry again if it wasn’t for this pain. The bullet hit you a couple of inches above the left of your pelvis. It got you just as you were running through the front door. At first there was just a dull stitch, you staggered and bumped your shoulder against one of the pillars, but then came the pain. You clutched your hip and blood stuck to your fingers. Your girls mustn’t find out anything about this, you don’t want their sympathy and concern. It’s just a scratch, you lie to yourself while the wound pulses like a strobe light, frantic and nervous.

And sometimes you’re there and sometimes you’re gone.

Your girls haven’t noticed anything, not even Nessi, who’s normally alert to everything. It must be the fear, the fear is too deep in their bones, Darian and your uncle could come charging in at any moment, and it doesn’t help that Stink has shut the double doors, because if your uncle comes, nothing in the world is going to help. So you went running through the hotel looking for a hiding place and you followed your girls for a while, as if a hiding place could save you. When they ended up in a blind alley, they turned around and you followed them to the entrance hall and that’s where you put on the brakes. You didn’t want to do this anymore, you let your girls go on.

Since you stepped inside the hotel you’ve only had one single destination.

The stairs groan under every step. You avoid the holes in the floor and hold on to the wall with your right hand, you don’t dare take your other hand away from your injury. Your lips move, you’re murmuring your very own mantra.

A house among rocks. Water below me, sky above me.

On the second floor you choose the first room you come to that looks out over the fjord. Here too the glass in the door onto the terrace has disappeared, only a single shard hangs in the frame like a comma. Your father told you the glass in the windows and the glass doors are from the days of art nouveau. You break the shard out of the frame and hold it against the light. It has a soft orange glow.

I was born here, you think and step outside.

The terrace is six feet wide and leads all the way around the building. You’d like to walk its full length, but in one direction the floor has broken away, in the other the wall has fallen outward, dragging the terrace and its railing away with it. When you were teething, your mother always pushed you around the house because you would only calm down in the moving stroller. Night after night. Her record is supposed to have been sixteen circuits of the terrace. You won’t be doing a single circuit, you’re trapped.

A house among rocks.

You shiver, even though there’s sweat on your forehead and the air is warm. The sunlight lies like a halo on the fjord. The mist has vanished, on the opposite shore you see the mountains and a road with two cars advancing slowly along it. You lean forward, the railing creaks and bends slightly outward. There’s the pebble beach with the boathouse. It’s all as your father described it to you. You look straight down. It’s high, really high. A drop of sweat falls from the tip of your nose. At this point Stink would say: This is definitely high enough. You wonder what it would be like to land down there. The glass slips from your hand and vanishes. No. You’re not planning on dying, but you’re not planning on living either. You want to stay in this intermediate stage. With pain, guilt, and suffering. You deserve to feel as miserable as this.

If your mother were here, she would understand you and your loneliness. You believe in that, you cling to it. Your mother would have understood you wanting to bring her back to life for a few days. For a few days you were really on the way to her.

Behind you, leaning against the wall of the house, are six deck chairs which are as weathered as the façade and have assumed the same gray color. When you were in your delirious state and traveled here in your mind, the deck chairs were green and yielded slightly under your weight. You unfold one of them, it comes to pieces in your hands. You pick up the chair behind it. It creaks and trembles when you sit down and stretch your legs out. The linen fabric holds, you lean all the way back, it’s the most relaxing feeling you’ve had for ages. Better than any drug, better than any hand touching you. You look down at the fjord. It’s like coming home.

Water below me, sky above me.