He woke at seven, as planned, and before he looked at the news he looked at the sea.
The window was the reason he had taken the flat. Two rooms under a sloping roof, a radiator that knocked, a landlady who asked no questions so long as the rent arrived on the twentieth. And between the roofs below, a slot of grey water no wider than his hand held out at arm’s length. Enough. A man could live on that.
He put the kettle on and stood at the glass in the grey hoodie he had slept in. Rain on the panes, fine and steady. Down on the jetties the boats sat low and dark, all but one. On the old wooden one at the end the deck light was on again. It had been on when he went to bed, and it had been on at three when he woke for no reason and lay listening to the radiator. The man who never sleeps. He had watched him on other mornings, a shape on the deck with a blanket and a mug, sitting there for hours like someone waiting for a ferry that had been cancelled years ago.
This morning the deck was empty. A blanket lay on the boards in the rain. The light burned over nothing.
He noticed that, the way he noticed everything now. Then he let it go.
On the next jetty a cormorant stood with its wings held out to dry, black and patient, ugly as a burnt umbrella. It would stand like that for an hour if nobody bothered it.
The kettle clicked. He made the coffee too strong and drank half of it and let the rest go cold beside the keyboard, as he always did.
His phone lay face down on the pillow where he had left it at three. He did not turn it over. He did not open the laptop. On the radio in the kitchen downstairs, through the floor, the landlady’s morning news was mumbling something with the word Askøy in it, and something with the word nurses. He did not need to hear the rest. He had known for weeks what it would say.
He bit at the skin beside his thumbnail until it gave, and looked at the water between the roofs, and waited for the boat to come home.