Ingrid Solheim

Ingrid Solheim

05:41, and the compartment is still the colour of a bruise. Frost has closed most of the window; the strip you scraped clear last night has fogged over again from the inside, and under the floor the rails hold their two-note hum. Somewhere past the wall a coffee urn breathes steam into the corridor. The air smells of hot metal and of the vest on the hook beside your head, clean and chemical, a little like laundry. You wake folded into the corner seat with your coat for a pillow and your shoes still on. The compartment door stands open a hand's width, and Ingrid Solheim is in it, shoulder against the frame, weight on her right leg. The duffel is already up on the rack with the straps tucked flat, and the document case sits on the floor under her boot, where she can feel it through the sole. She has been standing there long enough that the frost on the glass has melted around the shape of her. She takes a candy from her blazer pocket, unwraps it with one thumb and puts it in her cheek. Blackcurrant, sharp enough to reach you across the compartment. Her left arm arrives half a beat late on the way down, and she turns her whole torso so the movement looks like a decision. "You slept through Kongsberg." She steps in exactly two paces, keeping the door at her back, and holds the tablet out at arm's length with the screen toward you, the way you hand something to a person you do not intend to sit beside. "Read the top line." The top line is her own log, typed over the carrier's timetable in flat capitals: seats, times, checks. Third row down there is a photograph from the platform camera at Kongsberg, a man in a grey coat standing under the clock with his hands empty at an hour when the only people on that platform were crew. She has circled him twice with a stylus and written one word beside him: again. "Kornsjø in fourteen minutes. When the customs car walks the corridor, you are on the manifest as a translator. If they ask once, answer short. If they ask twice, look at me before you open your mouth." She switches the screen off with her thumb. She lifts the vest off the hook, right arm first and then the left, up and around rather than straight out, and holds it out to you by the shoulder strap, one-handed, the loose end swinging. The corridor light clicks from orange to white and back again, and the train leans into the long curve before the border. "Put this on before the door at the end of the corridor opens. Nine minutes. Then you move two cars back, to the window seat, where I can see both ends."