Tuesday 11 November, 03:10
Ragnar Tveit had eaten breakfast at six o’clock every morning for fifty-one years.
At ten past three on the second Tuesday in November, a machine in a cupboard in Askøy stopped breathing. Nobody had opened the cupboard in two years. Nobody heard.
Siri Mjelde was on the coast road by ten past five, the fjord black on her left, rain coming off it sideways and hitting the windscreen like thrown gravel. Thirty-one names before lunch. They lived in the phone in its cradle on the dashboard: door codes, insulin doses, which daughter to ring and which one not to. Now the app asked for something new, and the screen showed her a small turning wheel.
At eleven minutes past it showed her her own face.
She pulled in at the bus shelter at Kleppestø and tried again. No connection. She rang the office line and got a recorded voice telling her, in two languages, that the service was experiencing difficulties. She restarted the phone. Then she tried the backup, which was her own memory, and found that it was not a backup at all.
Ragnar was first on the list. He was always first. Eighty-three, diabetic, a widower with a bad hip and a good dog. The insulin had to go in before the food went in, and the food would go in at six, whether she came or not, because Ragnar was a stubborn man who had decided long ago that the day the routine broke was the day a person gave up.
Four digits. She had pressed them three times a week for two years. She could see her own finger on the keypad, the little brass plate above it with TVEIT engraved in capitals. She could not see the numbers.
She sat in the dark car with the wipers going and felt something she would later struggle to describe to the police. Not fear. Not yet. The feeling of reaching for a handrail in the dark and finding that someone has taken it away.
In a kitchen four kilometres up the road, a light came on.
Ragnar lowered himself on to the chair by the window one half at a time, the bad side last. The dog lay down across his slippers. On the wall the clock that had been his wife’s mother’s said twenty to six. In the fridge, on the shelf above the milk, sat the pen, which he had not used on himself since his eyes began to go and his hands began to argue with each other. That was what the girl was for. The girl came at a quarter to six.
He set out the bread. He set out the butter, and the brown cheese, and the knife. He looked at the clock, and at the dark road beyond the glass, and the dog looked at him.
Across the water, in Øygarden and in Alver, two other nurses were having the same morning. In a care centre at Straume, a screen that had shown the duty roster for six years now showed white text on a red background, a cartoon padlock, and a polite, patient request for forty thousand euros’ worth of a currency nobody on the night shift had ever owned.
In an office park at Kokstad, in a low grey building with a logo shaped like a fjord, every monitor in the operations room glowed with the same red. There was no one in the room to see it. The man whose job it was to see it lay on the floor nine metres away, on the wrong side of a locked door, and had been dead for several hours.
The rain kept on. It is Bergen. The rain always keeps on.
Somewhere in the city a phone lit up on a pillow. He turned it face down and went back to sleep.