Page 159 of The Sleepwalker

‘Kasper, come over here,’ Svanhildur shouts over.

The thin young man ignores her, sitting with a straight back as he slices his potatoes and meatballs into four even pieces.

Svanhildur gets up and goes over to his table.

‘Don’t you want to sit with us?’ she asks.

‘Whore,’ he replies without looking up at her.

‘Don’t say that.’

‘You don’t know a thing about me. You’re just a fucking whore,’ he says, meeting her eye.

‘All I wanted to say is that you’re welcome to sit with us.’

Kasper mutters to himself as she turns around and returns to her seat. He starts eating again, and Hugo notices that he turns his plate exactly ninety degrees after every bite.

‘Little rat,’ Bo mumbles in Danish.

‘He’s just scared of—’

‘A frightened little rat.’

The young man eats the last piece of potato, turns his empty plate ninety degrees, finishes the water in his glass, turns the plate another two full rotations and gets up and leaves the room.

‘What’s he scared of?’ Hugo asks quietly.

‘Ending up like his mum,’ Svanhildur replies, keeping her voice low. ‘She was here, at the sleepwalking clinic, when he was little, but she didn’t get any better .?.?. She refused to sleep, and in the end she was so tired that she fell off a ladder and died while she was picking apples.’

‘How do you know that?’ Hugo asks, biting his nails.

‘I met Kasper right after he arrived. He was totally out of it on benzos, and he said way too much .?.?. He told me his dad had forbidden him from coming to get help here, but he did it anyway the day he turned eighteen. For sleepwalking, too, just like his mum.’

Bo pushes back his chair and gets up.

‘I’ve gotta go talk to Grind. Seems like he wants to change my meds again,’ he says as he leaves the table.

Hugo lowers his cutlery and picks up his phone to check whether he has any messages, but there seems to be something wrong with the reception. He closes the app and reopens it, but nothing happens.

‘This fucking phone,’ he says with a sigh, restlessly bouncing one leg.

‘What’s the problem?’ Svanhildur asks as she spears a meatball on her fork.

‘I don’t actually know. I never get any messages while I’m in here,’ he replies, scratching the back of his hand.

‘Want me to fix it?’

She drags the meatball through the sauce on her plate and lifts it to her mouth.

‘Fix it?’ Hugo repeats with a note of scepticism. ‘How?’

Still chewing, she puts down her fork and holds out a hand. He passes her his phone and watches as she pushes a USB-C cable into the charging port and plugs the other end into a small plastic satellite phone.

‘Enter the code on the screen when you connect,’ she says, handing it back to him so that she can continue eating.

Hugo follows her instructions, and a moment later his phone pings with five new messages.

‘Thanks,’ he says, taken aback that it actually worked.