In the evening he refreshed the page until the page stopped meaning anything.
It was raining properly now, the heavy straight rain that comes after dark and drums on the skylight like fingers on a table. The coffee in the mug beside the keyboard had gone cold at four and grown a skin. He drank it anyway. He had bitten the cuticle on his left thumb down to the pink and it stung when he typed.
Five o’clock had come and gone. Nothing would call home for hours yet, even if the spare key had turned; he knew that. There was no way to see whether it had, not without opening the door, and he had promised himself on Monday night that he would not touch the door again until it was over. Doors remember who knocks. A cautious admin, a held job, nothing more. Nine was the real door. He told himself that twice.
He read the last exchange again.
Ka tid går den ut?
He had written that himself. He should not have. At twenty past six, with the machine taking its time over some careful sentence, his thumb had done it for him, in the voice he used on the landlady. The machine had smoothed it over a minute later in good correct Bokmål. He scrolled up through three months of its patience and found nothing else like it, and felt something he decided not to call unease.
Then her answer. I’m so tired.
He read that three times. It was her. It was a little too much her, if anything. The way a photograph of someone can be more like them than their face. He pushed the thought away and it came back, and he pushed it away again and held it under.
At half past eight he got up and went to the window with the binoculars. The harbour, black. The lights on the far side bleeding into the water. The old wooden houses below him stepping down the hill with their wet roofs shining.
The boat was dark.
He had lived at this window for a long time, and every night of it the deck light on that boat had been burning. The man who never slept. Some nights, at three in the morning, he had felt a kind of companionship with it.
Now the light was off and the boat was a shape against a shape.
He held the binoculars on it until his arms ached. Nothing moved. A man can go out for the evening. A man can sleep, once.
He didn’t like it.
At five to nine he took the bottle down from the shelf, the one he had been keeping for this, and poured a glass and set it beside the cold coffee, and sat, and pulled the sleeve of the grey hoodie down over the bleeding thumb.
At nine the doors would open. Two hundred of them.
He waited.