Free Death By Water by Torkil Damhaug

remember everything.
    Liss felt nauseous. Had to go out and vomit again.
    – Call you later, she managed to say before ending the call.

2
     
Saturday 6 December
     
    L ISS PADDED NAKED around the flat. Checked to see if the ivy on the windowsill needed water. Brewed herself another cup of espresso. Sat by the kitchen window and looked out. The Christmas decorations in Haarlemmerdijk were pine-bedecked bows with lights hanging beneath them. Like suckling nipples on a bitch’s belly, it struck her. A large six-pointed star hung across the middle of the street. Inside it was a heart with red light bulbs glowing.
    She had the flat to herself. A girl in her class, someone she hardly knew, had said without a moment’s hesitation that she could stay with her till she found somewhere permanent. Now the girl had gone to Venlo to spend the weekend with her family. They had to be pretty well off if they could afford to pay for their daughter’s three-bedroomed flat in trendy Jordaan, a part of the old town where Huguenot refugees had once lived. Here the facades had been tastefully refurbished and there were no trams or heavy lorries thundering through at all hours of the day and night.
    Liss took her coffee into the bathroom. Stood in front of the mirror. She didn’t need make-up. Her skin was soft and smooth, without blemishes. But it felt good to smear a mask on. If the whole of her naked body could be coated in thin film, something she could wrap around herself when she went out, pull off when she returned home, that would leave her skin untouched … If she could do the same thing with her eyes. Put something not just on the brows and the lashes but on the pupils themselves. Cover everything that could betray her. Buy contact lenses, though there was nothing wrong with her sight. In another colour, black or brown.
    Two thin flutings from her mobile. Message from Mailin: Didn’t hear back from you. Something’s just happened that has to do with what you asked me about that morning.
    Her sister had called the previous evening. Liss was in the middle of a photo shoot and said she would call back but didn’t. Regretted revealing to her sister that this memory had surfaced. Actually there was nothing wrong with her memory; on a daily and weekly basis she could remember things perfectly well. It was what lay far back that was gone. Other people, like Rikke, seemed to have a detailed overview of their entire lives, starting with the day they got their very first pair of shoes ever. Rikke could rewind; her memory was obviously a film that could be viewed over and over again. Liss’s didn’t work like that. She could remember a few things from the holiday cabin, but not from before she was ten or twelve. Every summer and winter they had lived in the forest cabin just outside Oslo for several weeks. Weekends and holidays. They drove to Bysetermosan and then hauled a fully loaded sledge along the path to Vangen and then on to Morr Water. Or went on skis from Losby. When they got to be old enough, she and Mailin used to go there on their own, without the grown-ups. Sometimes in the evenings. By the light of the moon over Geitsjø and Røiri Waters. Up through the dark forest with their rucksacks, laughing and reverent in the great silence.
    She didn’t need to remember more than she did. Mailin perhaps thought that she mentioned that vague memory from the bedroom in Lørenskog because it bothered her. If so, she was wrong, and Liss decided to tell her next time she rang.
    It was six months since she had last seen her sister. Mailin had visited her in Amsterdam in the early summer. She’d been attending a conference. Something about child abuse. Something she was researching and she delivered a paper on. She stayed on for a few days afterwards. Liss had shown her the town. Taken her along to the school and to one of the photographic studios where she’d done a few jobs. But most things she kept from her big sister. Nothing about