She slowly folded up the magazine.
‘And now I want to watch a film,’ said Lina.
‘
‘Not me,’ Lina said breezily. ‘Shall we watch
‘I’m sure even you have a couple of rooms with secrets in them, Lina.’ Johanne took off her glasses and rubbed her eyes, then added: ‘It’s just that you’ve lost the keys.’
‘Could be,’ Lina said amiably. ‘But what you don’t know can’t hurt you, as they say.’
‘You’re completely wrong there,’ said Johanne, pointing half-heartedly at
Vanity Fair
The worst thing of all would have been not knowing, thought Niclas Winter. He had lived on the verge of financial collapse for so long that the certain knowledge his buyer was no longer interested had once again made him drink a little too much, a little too often. Not to mention all the other stuff he took to keep his nerves under control. In actual fact he had knocked all that crap on the head long ago. It dulled his senses and made him lazy. And listless. Unproductive.
Not the way he wanted to be.
When the financial crisis hit the whole world in the autumn of 2008, it didn’t have the same effect in Norway as in many other countries. With billions in the bank, the Red-Green coalition government introduced the sort of expensive counter-measures that few could have imagined a few months earlier. Norway had been pumping money out of the North Sea for so long that it seemed more or less fireproof after the financial collapse in the United States. The property market in Norway, which for some time had been over-inflated and overactive, did indeed hit rock bottom in the early autumn. But it had already recovered – or there were signs of life, at least. The number of bankruptcies had rocketed in recent months, but many people regarded this as a healthy cleansing process, stripping away the companies that were never really viable. Unemployment was growing in the building industry, which was naturally taken very seriously. However, it was an industry that relied largely on an imported workforce. Poles, Swedes and workers from the Baltic states had one especially attractive quality: they were happy to go back home when there wasn’t any work – at least, those who hadn’t actually realized that they could pick up plenty of money through the Norwegian social security system. There were also enough economists who, quietly and in private, regarded an unemployment rate of around 40 per cent as good for the flexibility of the total labour market.
On the whole, Norway plc was moving forward; things may have changed, but at least the global financial crisis had not been a major catastrophe for the country and its people. They were still buying food; they still needed clothes for themselves and their children; they treated themselves to a bottle of wine at the weekend as usual and they were still going to the cinema just as often as before.
It was the luxury goods that were no longer attracting a significant number of buyers.
And, for some reason, art was regarded as a luxury.
Niclas Winter tore the foil off the bottle of champagne he had bought the day his mother died. He tried to remember if he had ever purchased such a bottle before. As he fumbled with the wire around the cork, he decided this was the first time. He had certainly drunk his fair share of the noble French wine, particularly in recent years, but always at others’ expense.
The champagne foamed up and he laughed to himself as he poured the bubbling, gently fizzing drink into a plastic glass on the edge of his overfilled desk. He put the bottle down on the floor to be on the safe side and raised the glass to his lips.
The studio, which measured almost 300 square metres and had originally been a warehouse, was flooded with daylight. To an outsider the room would have given an impression of total chaos, with light coming in from above and from the huge bay windows in the wall facing south-east. Niclas Winter, however, was in complete control of everything. There were welding torches and soldering irons, computers and old toilets, cables from the North Sea and half a wrecked car; the studio would be a paradise for any eleven-year-old. Not that such a person would ever have been allowed through the door. Niclas Winter, installation artist, suffered from three phobias: large birds, earthworms and children. It had been difficult enough to get through his own childhood, and he couldn’t cope with being reminded of it by seeing children playing and shouting and having fun. The fact that the studio lay just 200 metres from a school was a tragedy that he had somehow learned to live with. In every other way the location was perfect; the rent was low, and most of the kids kept out of the way once he put a BEWARE OF THE DOG sign with a picture of a Dobermann on the door.
The room was a slight rectangle, sixteen by eighteen metres. Everything was gathered along the walls, a frame of scrap and other necessities surrounding a large space in the middle. This was always clean and empty, apart from the installation Niclas Winter was working on at the time. Along one of the shorter walls stood installations which were more or less finished, but which he had not yet shown to anyone.
He sipped the champagne, which was too sweet and not cold enough.
This was the best thing he had done.
The piece was entitled
A monolith of shop window dummies rose up in the centre of the art work. They were wound around each other as in the original in Vigeland Park, but because the dummies were so rigid apart from their knees, elbows, hips and shoulders, the six-metre-high installation was positively spiky. Heads on almost broken necks, stiff, dead fingers and feet with painted nails stuck out on all sides. A thin, shimmering length of silver barbed wire was wound around the whole thing. Real silver, of course; the barbed wire alone had cost a small fortune. On closer inspection you could see that the naked, lifeless dummies were wearing expensive watches on their wrists, and almost every one was adorned with a necklace. The dummies had been literally sexless when he bought them. Only the broad shoulders and lack of breasts distinguished the men from the women, as well as a small, undefined bulge at the crotch. Niclas Winter had come to their rescue. He had bought so many dildos in a porn shop that they had given him a considerable discount, and he had mounted them on the castrated dummies. The dildos were marketed as being ‘natural’, which Niclas Winter knew was nonsense. They were colossal. He sprayed them in fluorescent colours, making them even more striking.
‘Perfect,’ he murmured to himself, emptying his glass in one swig.
He took a few steps back and shook his head.
His last exhibition had been an enormous success. Three outdoor installations had stood on Radhuskaia for four weeks. People were enthusiastic. So were the critics. He sold the lot. For the first time in his life, he was almost debt-free. And best of all, StatoilHydro, who had already bought
Then the bastards changed their minds.
He hadn’t much of a clue about contracts, and when he went to see a solicitor with the letter which had arrived in October, beside himself with rage, he realized it was time to get himself an agent. StatoilHydro were, in fact, perfectly within their rights. The contract had a cancellation clause. Niclas Winter had hardly even glanced through the document before signing it, dizzy with joy.
Blah, blah, blah. Fuck.
The bloody letter arrived four days before his mother died.
