The Island

At four the sun came up. At six someone brought us waffles and hot chocolate. At eight we agreed with the police that we would go home. All the while that other girl lay there on her steel gurney in her plain white tent, still and alone, waiting for parents who did not come.

After the last ambulance left we stood on the shoreline, eyes fixed on the fjord, as if something might change, as if some new and better reality might dislodge this one. And as the lights in the tents were extinguished one by one I felt a guilty, vertiginous hope take hold of me.

What if our daughter were not amongst the dead?

PART TWO

6

We thanked the policeman who had driven us home, walked the last fifty metres up the tarmacked path, turned left at the barrier.

Another police car was parked on the path outside the apartment. Its doors were thrown open, blocking the way. Next to it was a grey van.

At the front of the van Elsa’s father stood talking to a detective in a dirty suit.

‘Henrik,’ I said.

Henrik turned, began to walk towards us. ‘Oh, Cal,’ he said. ‘Elsa.’

The detective moved with him, tracking him. He was fifty, I guessed, face ugly with lack of sleep, his cuffs stained with late-night food.

Henrik and Elsa held each other, all sinews and silent suffering. I knew Elsa. She and her father would not cry, either of them. Not here in front of strangers.

Henrik embraced me. I heard him whisper, ‘Courage, Cal.’

I stepped away. We looked at each other, nodded. After all, we still didn’t know.

The door of the apartment building swung open. Two ponytailed female officers. The first carried Licia’s iMac in a large plastic crate, along with Vee’s gaming laptop. The other woman carried a smaller crate that contained two iPads, two old mobile phones, and my own laptop. She smiled at me as if we were friends. I saw the green drinking glass from the bathroom, spattered with toothpaste, and in the glass our toothbrushes. I did not return her smile.

Some tiny movement at the edge of my vision.

Vee was standing in her sister’s window. She looked bleached out, drained of blood.

‘You OK?’ I mouthed. Vee blinked hard and looked away. When she lifted her head to face me again, she nodded.

‘Mr Curtis?’

I turned. The detective in the dirty suit. His smile was friendly, though there was something behind the eyes that was not. He held out his hand. ‘May I have your cellphone?’

Licia’s bed was made. The blind was closed, the air stale and lifeless.

I walked to the window and wound the handle. Outside, metal slats jerked open. Light flooded in. Everything was neat, with none of the easy disorder of Vee’s bedroom. The plain blue carpet and the clean white walls and the cheap IKEA bedframe, none of which we owned. Licia had never made the room her own.

I sat down on her bed. My little girl, I would say, and she would sigh, and roll her eyes, and make her voice deep. ‘Don’t tell me I’m little. Who wants to be little?’ Still she would lean in to me briefly, before thinking better of it, pushing me laughingly away. The closest she ever got to rebellion.

I lay my head on the pillow, smelled the washing powder and the soap and the patchouli scent that make up Licia’s smell.

My little girl, I thought. Fifteen and gone. But my other daughter’s voice pulled me back.

‘Dad!’

‘Coming, Vee!’

There was Vee in the living room, balled into the rented blue sofa, a bag of cheap yellow sweets on the table in front of her, flicking through the channels on the rented TV. On every channel a new opinion over the same images, over and over and over. The bomb, the obliterated town hall, the ash raining down through the burnt air. Hard to know what you were looking at; everything grey and indistinct.

Above the sofa a two-metre square of deep red-brown. Another of Elsa’s photographs, Carmine 34. The only object in the room that we actually owned.

From the kitchen I could hear Elsa’s bare feet scuffing about.

‘Vee,’ I said. ‘Let’s eat.’

‘Not hungry. Thanks though.’ Looking at me all the while.

‘What you got in that bag?’

‘Scum bananas. They’re actually pretty good.’ Still staring at me. ‘Are you really not going to get that?’

‘Get what?’

The doorbell chimed.

Vee turned towards the hall. ‘You didn’t hear it the first time?’

‘Did it ring before?’

Vee nodded.

I walked through the dark interior of the apartment to the hall, looked at the screen on the entryphone. Edvard, staring awkwardly down at the camera.

I pressed the button, heard the door to the building swing open. I opened the front door, watched as he appeared around the corner. He was carrying a scuffed plastic bag, wearing yesterday’s shirt. He looked flat and ragged, as if he had been up all night. He reached out, hugged me awkwardly, patted my back as he stepped away.

‘Jo sends his love.’

‘Thanks, Edvard,’ I said. ‘Appreciate it.’

He gave a little half-smile. ‘I did think you might need these.’ He looked down at the plastic bag in his hand. ‘Normally they’d just download your phone and hand it back, but they’re up to their eyes right now.’

He opened the bag, handed me three simple grey mobile phones.

From his shirt pocket he took three folded envelopes. ‘Sim cards.’

‘They didn’t take mine.’ Vee was beside me, blinking up at Edvard.

Edvard smiled. ‘They will. Once they realize they haven’t.’

‘OK.’ She reached into her jeans pocket, held out her phone.

Edvard shook his head. ‘I’m not on the clock.’ He stood there for a moment, staring at Vee. ‘I can’t imagine what this is like for you, Viktoria.’ He smiled awkwardly, turned and walked briskly along the passage.

Vee watched him go, listened as his footsteps faded down the passageway. The main door swung open; it swung shut. She turned to me. ‘Jo’s so great, and Edvard’s so weird.’

She headed into the living room. I heard her sit heavily down on the sofa, followed her in.

The images had switched to aerial shots from the news helicopters. Clothing lay scattered. Bodies lined the water’s edge, some in bags.

‘Love,’ I said, ‘I don’t think watching this is a such a great idea.’

‘But yesterday, that clip they showed. Same dress. Same hair. So we know she was alive. And they never showed that bit again. Which is weird, right? We agree on that? And we agree that the bomb was a diversion? And the children on the island were the real target?’

‘We don’t know that for certain.’

‘Actually yes, we do.’ She picked up her phone, unlocked it, handed it to me.

PRESS RELEASE

All media

From the desk of Commander John Andersen

12 p.m., 23 June

‘What is this, Vee?’

‘Read it.’

At first you will call us child-murderers.

The actions we will take today are horrible, unthinkable to any civilized person. Yet the ‘children’ we eliminate on this peaceful island would soon enough have on their hands the blood of our white brothers and sisters. And so we are compelled to act.

We must learn the lesson our enemies learned long ago: that the child is never simply the child. Children are soldiers. They are transmitters of ideology. We underestimate them at our peril.

Their parents and their parents’ parents have opened our borders and left us at the mercy of an ideology that would enslave our women and emasculate our men. And thus we target this new generation of traitors. Thus shall we dismantle tomorrow’s treacherous elite, for they are lost to the ways of God and of our people.

I felt bile rising in my throat.

Our civilization must survive. The unthinkable must be thought. Children are both our greatest threat, and our most underused resource. Great men must step forward to prevent indoctrination, and when it is too late, when the child is too far gone, great men must eliminate that child as we crush the tiny flies that infest the fruit in our kitchens.

My brother and I face a stark choice – Killer or victim: which is it to be? The question is horrific to us in its cruelty, yet we ask it with love in our hearts and an easy spirit, for the answer is clear. And so it is that today we fire the first shots in a war for the emancipation of our people.

This is our gift to the nation, and to the entire European race.

Commanders John and Paul Andersen

Tactical Brigades of the Knights Templar

I looked up. Vee was watching me intently.

‘Brilliant, right?’ she said.

‘Brilliant?’

‘Everybody here trusts the police. These guys are first on the scene. I mean, you see the cleverness, don’t you, Dad? It’s using people’s naivety against them. And literally no one is discussing that.’

‘How did you find this?’

‘Not BBC or CNN or NRK, that’s for sure.’

‘Cal. A word?’ Elsa’s voice from the doorway, flat and affectless. How long had she been standing, arms around Franklin, watching us?

‘Sure.’ I got up. Vee looked at me. ‘Dad, they killed ninety people. And not one of the mainstream channels is telling us why. It’s like someone deleted Licia.’

I stood, staring at my daughter. Did she really believe there was some sort of cover-up?

‘Now would be good, Cal.’ Elsa’s voice again.

‘Coming,’ I said.

I turned towards Vee.

The intensity of her stare. ‘So go,’ she said.

Elsa waited in the middle of the kitchen floor, arms still folded around our son, who began kicking excitedly as I approached.

‘The police window for finding Licia alive is closing,’ she said, ‘and you’re trading conspiracy theories with Vee?’

‘That’s not—’

‘They should be camped out here, asking us everything we know. And you should be as worried as I am.’ Every line in Elsa’s face was etched a little deeper today.

‘I want to be sure Vee’s OK,’ I said.

‘All right, then, sorry.’ She stepped forwards and we embraced. Franklin kicked enthusiastically in Elsa’s arms. ‘I keep calling the police,’ she said quietly. ‘Because the first twenty-four hours are meant to be … I mean, they say that if you don’t … Fuck, Cal, it’s been what? Sixteen hours? How exact is the twenty-four-hour thing?’

I really had no idea.

Franklin was lying on his cushion in front of the TV, staring up at his fingers, entranced. Vee was on the sofa.

Ninety-one were now confirmed dead, the majority of them children.

‘A tragedy.’ A man’s voice, warm and deep, yet full of melody. ‘And an outrage that they should attach our name to their racialist agenda.’

Vee put down the remote.

The man wore a grey shirt with a neat grey collar. He was forty, I guessed. His hair was wild and black and had not been combed. The gold bands on the shoulder of his shirt looked almost military; the vertical creases were ironed straight.

A voice from off-screen. ‘Do you distance yourself from the actions of these men?’

‘We try to further God’s work. What these men have done is very far from that, no?’

I heard Elsa swear under her breath.

A caption on screen:

Father Bror

Patriotic Order of the Temple Knight

A concerned smile was playing at the corners of Father Bror’s mouth. There was something familiar about the kindness that radiated from him. I remembered the coffee he had passed into my hands as we waited for news of Licia.

‘That man,’ I said. ‘He was on the shore by the slipway …’

‘No, Cal,’ said Elsa. ‘No, that isn’t possible.’

‘Elsa, I swear. He handed me a coffee. Told me all would be well.’

‘Father Bror …’

‘It’s Bror,’ he was saying. ‘No need for the Father.’

‘Mr Bror, your organization describes itself as “furthering the chivalric aims of the crusader knight”. As do the Andersen brothers.’

The man Bror smiled a patient smile. ‘The Patriotic Order of the Temple Knight practises the chivalric virtues,’ he said. ‘The so-called Tactical Brigades of the Knights Templar copy and paste our texts. We farm vegetables. They murder children. We seek enlightenment. They spread dark lies. You see the difference, perhaps?’

‘But, Mr Bror—’

‘Bror means brother,’ he said. ‘So it really is just Bror.’

‘In their press release the Andersen brothers link prominently to this film.’

A blocky internet video filled the screen. Bror as a younger man, in jeans and a fisherman’s jumper. ‘These little flies,’ he was saying. ‘On our fruit. Began to enter Norway in the 1970s. And at first the cold winters killed them. Now though they have learned to adapt and they are everywhere.’

In the studio Bror gathered himself. ‘As I have explained on countless occasions, I am talking, in that clip, purely about fruit flies. This is not a veiled reference to something else, no matter how others may wish to exploit it.’

‘Yet you have described yourself as sceptical towards immigration …’

‘And I think perhaps you are confusing scepticism, which is part of our religious praxis, with acts of violence, which do not form any part of our praxis. The peaceful Muslim is our brother, our sister, our friend. No? And this video is not a racist dog whistle, no matter what you in the media might wish.’

Elsa’s fingers played across her lower lip. Her wolf eyes glowed.

‘So you are not,’ the presenter was saying, ‘an anti-Islamic organization? And you condemn the actions of the Andersens?’

‘Would you hold me responsible for the misuse others make of our good name?’

The interviewer was not letting go. ‘But you, like they, are immigration sceptics.’

‘And now you too are twisting our words. We teach scepticism in all things; it is the bedrock of our praxis. We insist that our recruits question every orthodoxy. Especially political orthodoxies. We demand that they speak with radical honesty about their innermost feelings. We are no more against immigration than we are against life itself. About which our recruits also have many sceptical questions.’

Elsa was staring at the screen, as if entranced. Vee was watching her mother intently.

‘Mum,’ said Vee. ‘Mum, how do you know that guy?’

Elsa’s hand curled around Vee’s. ‘Wow, Vee. You are good.’

‘You got this secretive smile.’

They looked at each other, Elsa’s eyes shining. ‘He was a friend once.’

No, I thought. No, he’s more to you than that. Because the way my wife was looking at the man on screen, you would swear she knew him well.

‘He seems OK,’ said Vee.

‘Yes,’ Elsa said. ‘He is OK.’

Vee made to say something more. Elsa’s phone rang. She got up off the sofa.

‘But Mum,’ said Vee.

Elsa picked up her phone. ‘Just a minute.’ She answered the call, listened, nodded. ‘Finally.’ She turned to me. ‘Police. Can we meet them in an hour?’

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