Medusa by Torkil Damhaug

nothing about her. He didn’t want to know. Had made a point of not asking anything that might have led to her talking about herself. Whom she was seeing. Where she was from. Family, friends, former lovers. He had everything to lose.
    The alarm from the oven told him that the pizza was ready. He had had fantasies about Miriam. Almost without realising it. Only now did he recognise that in his mind he had started to turn her into something she almost certainly wasn’t. Was that why he had been able to go up to the attic flat with her? Was that why it would be possible to see her again? He knew it would happen. Afterwards he would let her go.
     
    Axel had been responsible for most of his sons’ birthday parties over the years. Compared to them, girls’ birthdays were straightforward enough. Nobody threw slices of pizza around. No one squeezed tomato ketchup across the table. No one put a straw into the ear of the child sitting beside him and blew it full of fizzy lemonade. He could pad about filling glasses for a throng of pink rabbits. There were a few cats too, a couple of ponies, a ladybird and a lugubrious donkey. Natasha, Marlen’s best friend, was a lion, apparently, the crown of Afro hair pushed up into a mane and every question answered with an ominous growling. But she laughed until her eyes rolled back in her head when she saw how frightened Axel was, and reassured him that she was really very nice, as long as she got enough pizza.
    – My grandad was nearly killed by the Germans, Marlen boasted. – Isn’t that so, Daddy?
    – That’s true enough.
    Marlen picked up Cassiopeia and kissed it on the shell.
    – Tell about the time Grandad had to escape to Sweden, she said.
    Axel declined, didn’t want to invite Colonel Glenne to this particular party. He’d hidden bags of sweets in various places around the house and drawn pirate maps with hidden messages showing where they were. But Marlen wouldn’t give up.
    – Then tell us about Castor and Pollux, she insisted. – The one who had to go into the underworld to visit his dead brother.
    She got the support of the other animals for her demand, and Axel saw that there was nothing for it but to tell the story. Even as a child he had always liked to tell stories. If he managed to make them exciting enough, he would have his mother’s attention. Astrid Glenne would look at him with her big blue eyes wide open and sit down and listen until he had finished. He considered it particularly successful if he managed to frighten her. When his stories were about Frankenstein and vampires and werewolves, she would be genuinely afraid and hold her hands out in front of her as though she didn’t want to hear any more, though more was exactly what she did want. And when he conjured up a picture of Count Dracula sneaking into the bedroom of a half-naked woman, shadowless and driven on by his insatiable lust for blood, then Axel had his mother in the palm of his hand. The more afraid she was, the closer she was to him.
    He didn’t try to frighten the little girls in their animal costumes with the story of the twins, but wove in new, dramatic episodes that came to him as he was going along. They sat there spellbound. The little one in the donkey outfit, the only one of Marlen’s friends whose name he couldn’t recall, had black wrinkles painted on her forehead and cheeks and looked like an old lady. Something about her wide eyes made him think of the daughter of the patient he had visited earlier. That feeling of being a messenger of death invading their home in Vindern hit him again. And with it came the thought of Miriam: return her message. Call her. Go there. He had to talk to her.
    – You’ll find Castor and Pollux if you look up into the night sky, he concluded. – Not too far away from the Ethiopian queen, Cassiopeia.
    – Did everyone know Cassiopeia was a queen? shouted Marlen. – We’re going out to see if we can find her.
    She raced across the room and opened