Janne Drangsholt - The Marvelous Misadventures of Ingrid Winter

He started knocking vigorously on the wall.

“Paneling,” he said. “We’ll move it. Plus the kitchen would have to be expanded. I think maybe an island in there. And new countertops. Silestone.”

She nodded contemplatively, and I threw up into my mouth. Oil money. Most likely an engineer and a graphic designer. They would remove the door hiding the attic stairs. And the portal to the other world would close and the magic shield would vanish. Possibly forever.

In a panic, I turned to Bjørnar, but instead crashed into a young pregnant couple.

“Sorry,” I said and laughed slightly, but they didn’t seem to have noticed me.

“How practical to have a separate ‘children’s wing,’” the pregnant lady exclaimed with air quotes.

“Yes, and the kids can use the basement entrance when their friends come to visit,” he chimed in.

I snorted. Children’s wing. This couple would fill the house with ten million books on how to parent. Besides, they were far too young to own a house like this. This wasn’t where you moved when you were expecting your first child. You bought a condo or maybe a modernist town house with a cute little yard. Not an enormous, stately old home! And the same goes for the shabby-chic family. What would they use all the space for? Walk-in closets? A wine cellar?

I was seething. Didn’t any of these morons get that this was my house? Mine and Bjørnar’s and Ebba’s and Jenny’s and Alva’s? Ours!

Suddenly going back home to our actual house felt unbearable, and all the warm fuzzy feelings from a leisurely morning with the newspaper and the croissants were gone.

I was repeating to myself the importance of breathing from the belly when Bjørnar came and took me by the arm.

“Did you get to see everything?”

“Yeah, I think so.”

“Then I guess we can go? But put your name on the list.”

“Really? You mean it?”

“Yeah, let’s put ourselves on the list.”

Joy darted through my chest, and I pulled him close and kissed him before we went back to the dining room, where the agent was now talking to Shabby Chic.

Neither the agent nor the woman paid any attention to me, but that didn’t matter. We were meant to get this house. We, the Ragamuffin Family, were going to move into this house with its portal to another world. It was meant to be. So all these other people could just go take a hike!

“How high can we go?” I asked Bjørnar as we biked home.

“Not much over the list price. I’ll have to crunch a few numbers. But I’m in court all day Monday, so in case it comes to a bidding war, we’ll have to agree on a maximum offer in advance. Then you can handle the back-and-forth.”

“Marvelous,” I rejoiced. “I’ll take care of it!”

Monday morning I hung up my “Testing in Progress” sign again before I sat down at my desk and pretended to work. When the real estate agent finally called, it was clear that he’d already begun to grow weary of the whole “interested” list.

“Are you considering making an offer?” he asked in a monotone.

“We’re thinking about it,” I said. “Have you had any other offers, by chance?”

“One. For six point eighty-five million kroner.”

“How long do we have to put in an offer?”

“Until noon.”

I asked him to contact me if any more offers came in before then, and he called back after just five minutes.

“We received an offer for seven point one million.”

“What? So much? Are there any others?”

“Yes,” the agent responded. “The people who made the first offer are planning to increase their bid. How about you?”

“I’ll add fifty thousand,” I said.

Then I sent Bjørnar a message: I offered 7,150,000. We’ll see how it goes.

Our deal was that we would give up and walk away at the list price, which was 7.25 million.

“If we go over that, we’ll be struggling,” he had concluded after plugging through our budget three times. “Because I haven’t set aside all that much for unforeseen expenses. True, it did look like it had been nicely maintained, but at the same time it’s almost a hundred years old, so we have to assume that things will pop up.”

To my despair, I had scarcely sent the text before someone else added another hundred thousand and then someone put in fifty thousand on top of that. It was a bidding war. I went to the bank’s mortgage calculator to find out if maybe we could swing a little more, but it only showed astronomical sums that seemed abstract and unreal and I couldn’t really see how these numbers had anything to do with me.

So when the agent called me back, I added another hundred thousand, even though it was over the limit we had agreed on. After all, we wouldn’t necessarily need any money for repairs right in the beginning. And Bjørnar was always so cautious. It was up to me to secure our future now.

It kept going like this for a little while longer.

I did some calculations and estimates of my own.

Until everything started to melt together and I could no longer distinguish plus from minus or things that had been said from things that had only been thought.

When the agent called to congratulate me, I wasn’t sure what he meant.

“The other bidders hated to withdraw, but they had already offered more than their limits,” he said. “So the house is yours now.”

I looked down at the piece of paper where I had tried to jot down how much the offers were as we went along. But after 7.5 million, my handwriting became illegible and I appeared to have started drawing hobbits instead.

I wondered if it would be socially acceptable to ask him how much we had ended up agreeing to pay.

Probably not.

“Do you want to discuss the move-in date now, or should we do that at the contract meeting?”

“Could I maybe call you later?”

“Sounds great.”

I put my head down on the desk and tried to think.

What was the last offer I remembered making?

Nothing. Apart from the offer that was supposed to have been the very last one, which was 7.25 million. But on my piece of paper it said 7.5 million. That was way too much. And that was also a lot of minutes ago. Many, many, many minutes.

I called the real estate office and gave the man who answered a fake name. I told him I was wondering if the house had been sold and, if so, what it went for.

“I’m not sure,” the man replied, “but I can transfer you to the listing agent if you’d like?”

“Oh, no. That won’t be necessary,” I hurried to say. “Couldn’t you just check for me?”

“Sure. Please hold for a moment.”

Pause.

“It went for eight point two million kroner.”

I concentrated on breathing.

Breathing was incredibly important. The brain needed oxygen to live.

So I breathed in.

And out.

And in.

And out.

I was still practicing breathing when Bjørnar called at noon.

“We’re taking a break here now,” he reported. “Has the bidding started?”

“Yes.”

“What’s the price at?”

“It’s over.”

“It’s over?”

“Yes.”

“Oh. Well, then, how much did it go for?”

“Eight million two.”

“Eight million two!”

He laughed and I could picture him shaking his head.

“Hope the buyers have a lot of money. How many people were bidding?”

“Only three.”

“ Three ? How long did you stay in?”

“A long time.”

“How long?”

“Until the end.”

“All the way until the end?”

“Yes.”

“Well, how high was your last offer then?”

I held my breath.

“Are you still there?”