He’s enjoyed being out of the city, too; it has felt like getting rid of an annoying bottleneck in his life – the constant driving between his home in the capital to the cabin in Valdres where he trained as a boy with his father almost every single weekend. As the flight settles into a smooth purr at cruising altitude and Norway’s jagged south coast disappears from view, Storm tries to imagine what the next few days might hold. He’s never been to London before; he has never really been anywhere that doesn’t have freshly prepped world-class powder.
*
His father parks almost self-consciously in front of a grand house with creeping ivy and merrily lit windows overlooking a charming garden. It occurs to Storm that this is the first time he’s seeing his father and stepmother’s home, and that they have a new life entirely removed from him now. As they approach the front door, it swings open inwards and there stands Bianka, wearing a strangely dressy light-blue outfit and high heels, beaming. Storm brings to mind the tired-looking Bianka who worked full time in an office in Oslo, rarely seen without jeans and sneakers.
‘Storm,’ she coos, and pulls him into a hug. ‘Welcome. Let me show you your room.’
He steps into the house and takes in the black-and-white tiled floor, the heavy chandelier spilling light into the furthest reaches of the room, the carved wood staircase disappearing into the gloom of the upper levels of the house.
‘Over here,’ she says, opening a door off the hallway. Storm steps into a small, unadorned room, the kind usually used for storing boxes or perhaps turned into a guest bathroom, though it has a lovely view of the garden, now shimmering softly in the late-afternoon light. He feels Bianka watching him as he takes in the room, scanning his face for a reaction, but he gives her none.
‘Uh, honey, I thought we’d put Storm in the big green room upstairs. Opposite us,’ says Emil.
‘No,’ says Bianka. ‘He’ll be much more comfortable down here. You know teenagers; they need their own space.’
‘B, I’m going to put him upstairs. I’ve already prepared it for him. He gets plenty of space to himself these days. Come on, Storm.’ Storm turns away from Bianka and follows his father up the stairs and feels his heart pick up its pace in anticipation of Bianka’s reaction, but she says nothing. The room upstairs is huge and airy, with unbroken views across the back garden which borders what looks like a huge park or a nature reserve. The bed has been made up with his familiar favourite childhood bedsheets and it’s this detail that gives Storm a lump in his throat.
‘Check it out,’ says his dad, pointing to two huge cardboard boxes standing next to a beautiful shiny wooden desk over by the windows. ‘A surprise for you.’ He catches sight of Bianka’s look of shock; she clearly had had no idea Emil had gotten him something. He walks over to the boxes and opens them. The first contains a gaming monitor, the one he’d wanted for Christmas but didn’t get, and the second contains the newest, just-released PlayStation console, almost impossible to get hold of in Norway.
‘Wow,’ says Storm.
‘Yeah. Wow,’ says Bianka and walks out of the room.
*
The sound of angry voices, or one angry voice, rather, travels through the big house all the way up to Storm’s bedroom. He listens to music while playing FIFA but every now and again he removes an AirPod to check whether they’re still at it. He feels a rush of anger at the sound of Bianka’s shrill voice, and another at the meek murmur of his father in the few gaps Bianka leaves him to speak. He knows that they’re fighting about this evening’s dinner party at the house of his father’s colleague. Storm has said he won’t go and Bianka is throwing shitfits about it. What he doesn’t understand is why she can’t just leave him be. He’s not some trophy Bianka gets to drag along and show off, and he’s most definitely not her trophy.
It goes quiet. Storm listens for a long while but the house is quiet and the only sound is the tinny voice of Vinni, still playing from his headphones. She’ll have gotten her way, she never stops until she does. He imagines her in this moment, in the bathroom, getting started on her meticulous grooming routine. She’ll stand in front of the mirror, a self-satisfied smile playing on her lips, before applying mascara with a trembling hand, anger still coursing through her. She’ll tease her unruly hair into a carefully arranged mess that apparently is supposed to look like she’s never brushed it. She’ll paint her lips with a slick of bright-red lipstick, a shade so far removed from the natural palette of human lip colours that it looks completely ridiculous, just another of Bianka’s many attention-grabbing tricks, thinks Storm. He shudders at the thought of his father pressing his lips to hers, which he seems to want to do all the time.
Just like Storm knew she would, when she is completely ready, she calls his name in her singsong voice, as though she isn’t quite aware that he’ll have heard the past hour’s tantrum. As though he still lives under her roof. Storm shudders at the thought and he feels a sharp yearning for his room at school, overlooking the slopes of Hafjell, shared with a nice golfer called Albert, from Bergen.
Her voice rises up the stairs to where he sits, first once, then twice more, a vein of irritation apparent in the third attempt. He has his headphones in but their volume is muted. He will make her come all the way up, her face reddening with the effort, haloed by her bouncy platinum curls. She’ll knock briefly once, then burst into the room as though hoping to catch him at something unsavoury, like rolling a joint or watching porn. He’ll be slumped over in his chair, pretending to be listening to music and that he hasn’t heard her repeat calls. He’ll smile blandly at her in the way he knows infuriates her, just the way he used to at home in Oslo, and rise slowly, following her down the hallway, shuffling his feet.
Instead, it’s his father that comes. His face bears an expression of exasperation.
‘Storm. Come on. Bianka has been calling you. We’re leaving.’ Storm removes his earphones and focuses on keeping his face open and amiable.
‘Hi, Dad. Oh, sorry. I didn’t hear her.’
‘Storm.’
‘What?’
‘Can you just try not to frustrate her? Please?’
His father glances at his outfit – slouchy sweatpants and a faded grey T-shirt with Pete Davidson’s face stretched across his chest – but says nothing. Storm follows behind Emil down the stairs, steeling himself for the moment he comes face to face with Bianka. She’s standing by the entrance door, looking at her own reflection in the mirror in the hallway. She’s wearing a green dress, the colour of poison, thinks Storm.
‘Nice dress,’ he says, unable to keep the sarcasm from his voice, and Emil shoots him a sharp glance.
‘You look beautiful, baby, as always,’ says Emil, and wraps his arms around Bianka from behind.
‘He’s not wearing that,’ Bianka says to Emil as though Storm isn’t standing right there.
‘Storm, I think your, uh, Bianka’s right. It’s probably a good idea to change.’
‘You said I could wear this.’
Bianka rolls her eyes at Storm, then sweetens her expression and looks up at Emil. ‘Honey, please. Surely we should all dress vaguely presentably.’
Storm slowly walks back up the stairs, taking care to hold his head high; he knows it infuriates Bianka that she never gets a real rise out of him. Showing his fury would imply he cares on some level, and Storm quite simply does not.
*
It’s not far, but they take a taxi as Bianka won’t walk. Storm stares out of the window at the unfamiliar streets, and the pubs with their outdoor terraces overflowing with people who seem to have stopped by on the way home from work. There’s a buzzy atmosphere, far removed from the quiet suburban streets of Slemdal where he grew up, or the mountains of Lillehammer where he now lives.
The people whose boring dinner he’s being forced to attend are clearly quite well-to-do; as the car turns down another residential road, Storm notices that there aren’t any smaller terraced houses or semi-detached ones like the ones he saw on the way here, only huge villas set back from the road in lush, vast gardens with pristine lawns and manicured hedges. Storm peers out the window as the taxi comes to a stop in front of a particularly impressive house, its blond stone facade beautifully lit by expensive-looking spotlights. They are buzzed through the gate and he waits for Emil and Bianka to start walking up the gravelled driveway before following them several steps behind. As they approach, the door swings open and two women beam at them. On closer inspection, Storm realizes they are mother and daughter, and the daughter is hot as all hell.
She smiles at him and he returns her smile, feeling a flush of heat creep up his neck, and is suddenly grateful to Bianka for basically forcing him to change clothes. He can’t even bear to think how awkward he would have felt turning up at this girl’s house in sweatpants and a stained T-shirt with Pete Davidson’s goofy grin printed on it.
‘Hey, I’m Madeleine,’ she says.
Storm shakes Madeleine’s mother’s hand, then greets Madeleine with a little wave.
‘Storm,’ he says.
‘I know,’ she says, giggling nervously, and he realizes that most Norwegian kids his age probably have heard of him at this point. She leans in and gives him a quick hug, leaving a fresh floral scent in the air. Storm’s heart lurches in his chest. He feels hugely more positive about the prospect of dining at his father’s business associate’s house.
‘I’m so glad you came,’ says Madeleine, out of earshot of the adults, who have continued down the hallway into a reception room where Madeleine’s father is wrenching the cork off a bottle of champagne. ‘My family is, like, insanely dull. And the other kids here are equally dull.’
