The Cold Song (2 page)

JENNY BRODAL HAD
not had a drink in nearly twenty years. She opened a bottle of Cabernet and poured herself a large glass. She had imagined the warmth filtering down into her stomach, the tingling in her fingertips, but there was none of that, no warmth, no tingling, nothing, so she drained the glass and waited. Surely there would be something. Jenny looked at the open bottle on her bedside table. She had never said never! She had taken one day at a time,
one day at a time
, and never,
never
, said never.

She was in her bedroom, sitting on the edge of her large four-poster bed, almost done now. She’d put on her makeup, she’d put on a dress. She still had on thick, gray woolly socks, the ones that Irma had knitted. She looked at her feet. They looked twice as big in those socks and they were still cold, despite the socks. There was also the lump on the side of her right big toe, she could feel it, sometimes red, sometimes purple, sometimes blue, and she dreaded taking off the socks and thrusting her feet into her slender, high-heeled sandals.

She looked at the shoes, paired up like well-behaved children on the floor by her bed. Such pretty shoes, the color of nectarines, from the sixties, she remembered the store where she had bought them. Jenny poured herself another glass. The trick was to get the wine right down to her feet. She had never said never. She had said one day at a time.

For one, she would have to give a speech. There were other things too. Jenny recalled a list of very good reasons she had given for not wanting to go through with this celebration, which was the word everyone kept insisting on using, and then she tried to remember why nobody had listened to her.

Jenny stood up; twirled in front of the mirror on the wall. The black dress fit beautifully over her breasts. Yes. And her cheeks flushed rather nicely. And everything was ready. Soon, after one more glass, she would take off her socks and put on the sandals.

It was the fifteenth of July 2008 and Jenny’s seventy-fifth birthday. Mailund, the big white mansion-like house where she had grown up after the war, was filled with flowers. She had lived in this house almost all her life, in good times and bad, and now forty-seven guests dressed in their summer finery were on their way here to salute her.

MILLA, OR WHAT
was left of her, was found by Simen and two of his friends when they were digging for buried treasure in the woods. They didn’t know what it was they had found. But they knew it wasn’t the treasure. It was the opposite of treasure. Later, when asked to explain to the police and their parents why they had been in the woods, Simen found this hard to do. Why had they started digging in that
particular
clearing? Under that
particular
tree? And what exactly had they been looking for?

Two years earlier, in July 2008, everyone had been out searching for Milla. Far and wide, over land and sea, in ditches and trenches, in the sand hills out on the point and all around the forbidding cliffs, in the pile of rubble behind the old school and in the empty, tumbledown houses at the end of Brage Road where grass grew out of the windows and no child was allowed to go. Simen remembered scouring every inch of town, thinking she might just be hiding somewhere waiting to be found, and that maybe if he looked really hard, he’d be the one to find her.

Everyone had searched for Milla, even the boy known as K.B., the one who was later arrested and charged with her murder, searched for her, and for two years she had lain buried under that tree in the woods, unfound, covered by dirt
and grass and moss and twigs and stones until she had almost turned to dirt herself, all except for her skull and bits of bones and her teeth and the long dark hair, which was no longer long and dark, but wispy and withered, as if it had been yanked up out of the ditch, roots and all.

That summer when she went missing, Simen thought he saw her everywhere: She was the face in the shopwindow, the head bobbing in the waves, the long dark hair of some unknown woman fluttering in the breeze. Once Milla had looked at him and laughed, she had been real, like him, like his bike, but then she was a veil of night and frost that sometimes slipped through him and swept happiness away.

He never forgot her. In the two years she lay buried, he’d think about her when he couldn’t sleep or when autumn was coming and the air smelled of cordite, damp and withered leaves, but at some point he had stopped looking for her and no longer believed that he would be the one to find her.

Simen was the youngest of the three boys. The other two were Gunnar and Christian. It was a Saturday at the end of October 2010 and the three friends were spending one last weekend together. The time had come to close down the summer houses for the winter and for their little seaside town a couple of hours south of Oslo to curl in on its own darkness. It was afternoon, not quite five o’clock, the light was already beginning to fade, and the boys had decided to locate and dig up a treasure they had buried some months earlier.

Gunnar and Christian couldn’t see the point in leaving it in the ground forever. Simen didn’t agree. As far as he was
concerned that was
exactly
the point—that was what made it treasure. It was concealed from everyone except them and was a thousand times more valuable
in
the ground than
above
the ground. He couldn’t explain why, he just knew that’s how it was.

But neither Gunnar nor Christian even tried to understand what Simen was talking about. They just thought he was being a fool, they wanted their stuff back,
their
contributions,
their
part of the treasure, they really didn’t give a shit about the treasure as treasure, so eventually Simen said it was fine by him, why didn’t they just go out there in the forest right now and dig it up, he didn’t care.

The story of the treasure had begun some months earlier, in August 2010, when Gunnar, the eldest of the three friends, suggested that they become blood brothers. The light was warm and red, and everything in that small town was lusher than ever on this particular evening, as things tend to be when summer is almost over. Soon they would be going their separate ways, back to the city where they lived far apart and called other boys their friends.

Gunnar had taken a deep breath and said, “Mixing blood is a symbol of eternal friendship.”

The other two boys had balked at this, the thought of slashing the skin of your palm with a piece of glass from a broken Coca-Cola bottle was not something you would want to do, not even in the interest of eternal friendship; and even if you were mainly given to kicking a soccer ball about and using your legs, you did actually need your hands too—Simen tried
to say this, but couldn’t find the right words—needed them for all sorts of things, without bloody cuts and scratches, but how did you tell Gunnar without ruining everything, without being accused of being a coward?

They were sitting on the deck outside their secret cottage in the woods, the one they had built the previous summer. They had lit a fire and grilled hot dogs, eaten chips, and had some Coke; they were all Liverpool fans, so they had plenty to talk about; they sang songs too, because there was no one there to hear them,
Walk on, walk on, with hope in your heart
, and Simen had thought to himself that when you sang that song you felt like your life really was about to begin. But then Gunnar—and this was typical Gunnar—had started talking about how just because they spent their summers together that didn’t necessarily mean they were
true
friends. True friends who were there for each other through thick and thin. Gunnar knew a guy who had supported Liverpool for years, and then he had suddenly switched to Manchester United, just because his new neighbor was a fan of Manchester United.
And what the fuck do you do with a guy like that? Is that a true friend?
And Gunnar had launched into a long and complicated speech about blood and pain and true friendship and other things he had obviously been thinking a lot about over the summer, concluding with this very dramatic idea that they become blood brothers. He had come prepared, had it all planned out—that too was just like Gunnar. The bits of broken glass were neatly wrapped in tinfoil—he had broken the bottle in the back garden at home and then washed the shards with dishwashing liquid because, said Gunnar, if you cut your hand with a dirty bit of broken
glass you might die, you might get blood poisoning and die—and he had placed the lumpy little package between them in the sunlight and carefully folded back the foil, as if it were diamonds he had in there, or scorpions.

And that was the moment when Christian came up with the idea of burying treasure instead—as a symbol of true and everlasting friendship. It was simple: All three of them would have to offer up one thing, and that thing had to be precious, it had to be a sacrifice. No mingling of blood, no cuts or grazes, but stuff,
valuable
stuff, buried deep in the ground, as a symbol of their commitment to each other, to friendship, and to Liverpool F.C.