The Story of Siw: Give Me A Little Happiness Before I Die

Norway. One of the most prosperous countries in the world. And some of the happiest people, too. It is said to have the world's best welfare state. But among all the statistics, the oil-rich nation holds another record. For decades, it has topped the list of countries with the most deaths by overdose per inhabitant.

How could this be possible? This is a disturbing story from the Norwegian oil capital of Stavanger, about a woman who wanted her share of that happiness. And, in time, a woman everyone would try to forget.

Chapter 1:
The woman they couldn’t forget

This is the story you were not supposed to read. Memories were suppressed.
Case files had been closed. Her house was torn down. Yet someone
would stand under a bridge, singing about her. Others had dreams
about her, so disturbing that they were afraid to sleep. There were
murmurs about her in the canteen. And then, one day, her name was
mentioned in passing. That was how we first heard about Siw.

You know that gaze, when someone looks straight at you without seeing anything at all. You speak to them and they stare right through you, in a world all of their own.
She had blue eyes, a lean face, sharp cheekbones. Her skin would glisten with sweat. Her hair, shoulder length, was a russet blonde. She was a grown woman in a tiny, fragile frame, and all she was wearing was a short pink dress made of a sheer, shimmering fabric.
She likely had on the jewellery she was wearing around that time: earrings in a floral form, a ring with decorative stones in green, small wooden beads in her hair and around her neck.
– I’ve got a heart that can live forever, she had told a psychiatrist just a few months earlier.
But on that day, Thursday 26 March 2015, she wouldn’t say a single word.

The white sheet
Ten days later, a private ambulance turned into the driveway of the blue duplex where the woman lived, the one with the paint peeling off the walls.
Once inside the entrance, the undertakers pulled on white all-in-one protective suits and facemasks. When they entered the bathroom, the first thing that they did was lay a white sheet over her. It was something they did so as not to take the memories home with them.
From the red duplex just across the road, a neighbour watched this final act in the woman’s life. For several years he had been following the drama from his window. The screaming, the threats, the weapons incidents, the knives, the smashing of windows and the slamming of doors and all the other fixtures and fittings. The flickering of flames. The flashing of blue lights in the night.
He had a view out onto 28B Haugås Road.

If you had been driving up Haugås Road that afternoon, the first day back at work after Easter, you might have seen it yourself. Let’s imagine you had been shopping at the Kilden retail centre and had taken the busy artery between Hillevåg and the E39 highway just outside downtown Stavanger.
At the first set of traffic lights, you stopped on red.
You glanced to the left. You probably didn’t stop to think about the somewhat austere scene. The lack of shrubs, hedges or flowerbeds. The absence of nice curtains and pot plants in the windows. All those small details that might make you think: that’s someone’s home.
There was something else that made you look left.
The lights turned amber.
The police car and the gathering of police officers and others in front of the blue house probably caught your eye. Perhaps you saw two individuals pushing a gurney over towards a black Mercedes, lifting it in and driving out onto Haugås Road. Perhaps you had time to wonder what had happened before the hearse vanished into the traffic.
Before the lights turned green and you drove on.

ID 34218
A year later, the two municipal duplexes were demolished. People who stopped for a few moments on red and cast an eye across the road would now see nothing more than a grassy lot. Two mature birch trees, which had formed part of the woman’s view, still sprouted buds and dropped leaves just as though she had never existed.
The weeds were kept at bay by workers from the municipality, and the lot bore a resemblance to a small park. Every night, some distance out onto the grass, a lamppost would shine aimlessly. It lit up what had once been a driveway and a mounting for post boxes from which the woman, clothed or otherwise, had picked up her news, the good and the bad. Now there were no more reminders of her – but across the entire city, there were people who couldn’t forget.
Some of them would suddenly hear her voice.
«It’s your fault,» she would say, in the same dialect she had when she was alive, a blend of Stavanger and Eastern Norway.
«It’s your fucking fault.»
Some of them would stand under a bridge and sing about her. She came to others in dreams. Sometimes dreams so disturbing that they were afraid to fall asleep.
Yet others had put her behind them. She was one of many: a former patient, a user departed, a hopeless cause, a smile extinguished, a sublet terminated.
She was a three-year-old municipal decision, case number 65/15-4, reference «ID 34218.»
She was an unfortunate case spoken about in hushed tones in the canteen, but one not worth re-opening if you wanted to stay on friendly terms with the agencies that were tangled up in it.
She was a story you were not meant to read, if only it hadn’t been for a passing remark.
She was a number in a baffling statistic.
Although Norway's population is named one of the happiest in the world every year...
Although many believe Norway is one of the world's foremost welfare states...
And although the oil country Norway probably is one of the world's most prosperous countries, Norway also tops a completely different statistic every year.
Every year, Norway is among the countries with the highest number of overdose deaths in relation to the number of inhabitants.
And now, at Easter 2015, Siw, a resident of Norway's oil capital, a woman who just wanted to experience some happiness, was added to this grim statistic.

The woman in pink
The fire inspectors recalled that the woman in the pink dress was gaunt. High. In her own bubble. This was what made the strongest impression during the inspectors’ visit for a run-of-the-mill check-up of the municipal rehabilitation apartments at 28 Haugås Road.
Inside were two men. One snuck out as the fire inspectors came in. The other, who said he was her partner, attempted to explain to her that the inspectors were there to help. She paid him no mind, either.
Suddenly she scurried out of the living room. A few moments later she came back in, slumping down onto a chair with her legs crossed while holding a vanity mirror up to her face. She began applying lipstick, still refusing to acknowledge the unfamiliar men in uniform standing right in front of her.
They changed the batteries in her smoke alarm and asked her not to tear it off the ceiling again. And if the siren started howling, it was for the best to get out of there.
Her partner repeated what the fire inspectors had said, but spoke slowly and clearly to her, as though she were a child.
She was 45.
And nobody could get through to her.
– That was nuts, said the longest serving of the two inspectors when they got back into their car.
– Something needs to be done right now.
He called a colleague at the station.
– We’ve got a very serious case, he said, ten days before the undertakers walked into the same apartment and laid a white sheet over her.

The coincidence
There was one more reason why the fire inspectors wouldn’t forget the woman in Haugås Road so easily. They sent a concern report to Stavanger municipality as soon as the morning after the inspection. The inspectors had spoken to both the police and people in the municipal support services. The conclusion: The woman was wrongly housed. She constituted a major risk to herself and other residents. She was incapable of taking care of herself and required full-time supervision. She had to be moved to a safe place, thought the fire inspectors. It would only be a matter of time before something bad happened.
In a follow-up email that was sent to heads of the fire department, the police and the municipality, one inspector used even starker terms: He hoped, he wrote, that they could avoid a repeat of the Kampen case.
In 2010, Jonny André Risvik, 28 years old, was beaten to death by friends and acquaintances in a house in the neighbourhood of Kampen, Stavanger. The perpetrators were youths, most of them with special needs. «Everyone» knew, wrote the fire inspector, but «as the public agencies passed the buck between themselves, little was done before it was too late.»tt
The municipal leadership in Stavanger took exception to the mention of the Kampen case. The fire inspector was criticised for his choice of words.
Then they disappeared for Easter.
The first thing to happen after Easter was that the woman was found dead in her own apartment.
Beyond grumbling at those who had attempted to raise the alarm, what had the municipality actually done for her?
The fire inspectors never got an answer.
In autumn 2017 they had a meeting with us in Stavanger Aftenblad about some other stories from the city’s darker side. After the meeting was over, this slipped out of one of the fire inspectors’ mouths, as if by accident:
– There’s actually one more case...one I probably shouldn’t talk about...A case we’ve been burdened with...kind of a secret.
• You can read interviews with criticized parties under at the end of the story

The search
They couldn’t remember what she was called. Neither could her name be found in the concern report, nor in the emails to which we had access. Even if her name were to be found there, the duty of confidentiality dictated that they would not have been able to tell us what it was.
There were no death announcements in the period following Easter 2015 that might have been the deceased woman.
There were no friends or acquaintances at her last address – the duplexes had since been torn down.
The woman’s name had never been registered at the address.
And neighbours still living there didn’t know her name. Above all else, they were happy to have a little peace and quiet.
But after a couple of weeks we had a name down on paper:
Siw.
Why did Siw die?
How could it have happened when the alarm had been sounded so clearly?
Who was Siw?
Was she just a junkie who would have died no matter what?
Yes, people in the city’s drug scene remembered Siw – or Techno Siw, as they called her. But they had no clue who her parents were, or if she was with anyone. If we wanted answers to our questions, we would have to have the permission of her next of kin.
Who were they? Would they have answers to all of these questions? If not, did they even want to know?
But it seemed as though nobody knew who they were.
In the end, we wrote a letter.
We noted down the little we knew about the case and the questions we wanted answers to. And we wrote that there were people who believed there was much to learn from how the support services had conducted themselves in Siw’s case.
«This is the kind of lesson that may ultimately save the lives of others, so we hope we hear back from you.»
We gave the letter to the police and asked if they could track down her relatives.
Then all we had to was wait.

The Rottweiler barks when strangers come to the door, but obeys and goes back to its spot on the sofa when told to by its owner By: Anders Minge

The same white smile
On the gate of the small house, at the top of a steep driveway in one of the city’s better districts, there hangs a sign: «Beware! I’m on guard.»
The Rottweiler barks at us as we are let in. Siw’s father sends the dog back to its regular spot on the sofa, and it does as it’s told.
When Siw was over for a visit, it wouldn’t always do so. She was fierce in so many ways, but always anxious about her father’s Rottweiler. It would mostly lie on the sofa growling at her until she left.
Now it’s snoring.
– We’ve heard nothing about this before, says Kjell after we’ve told him the little we know about his daughter’s final days.
We tell him about the fire inspectors’ visit twelve days before she was found dead, and about the concern report, and the city director who took exception the report’s tone.
This is all news to Siw’s father.
He’s 73, with short, grey hair combed in a side parting, and has been using a wheelchair ever since a blood clot paralysed him from the waist down. He’s a slender man who has a tendency to slouch forward when, as now, during our first encounter in autumn 2017, he has spent a long time sitting and talking. He has a glimmer in his eye and a taut, boyish face that can suddenly bloom into a huge, white smile. His bed lies at the opposite end of the living room; several framed pictures hang above it.
At the top, next to a medicine cabinet, hangs a picture of him as a young private with ‘Royal Norwegian Navy Harald Haarfagre’ on the brim of his hat. It’s clear to see that he was once a strong, noble man.
Below this, a collection of family photographs, several of them cut out with scissors. Some of them show a young, suntanned girl with long blond hair.
She has her father’s same white smile.
– I fell apart in the shower this morning, says Tove, his partner.
She’s standing at a sliding door beside the bed so as not to bother the guests while she smokes.
She’s over twenty years younger than Kjell, and has been through drug abuse herself, she says, until he helped her find a way out of it. Now she is into her third year of opioid replacement therapy. Once employed in the public health service, she now receives disability allowance because of her back. And now it’s she who’s helping him.
They are dreading this.
As she was taking a shower this morning, it began to dawn on her what they had agreed to.
Should they really be opening up old wounds?

The rumours that refused to die
Siw had dropped by a week before Palm Sunday 2015. That was the last time she had come to visit.
Two weeks and two days later, the priest rang on the doorbell.
At 1.30pm the same day, Tuesday 7 April, the first day back at work after Easter, care workers from the municipality had found Siw dead.
The police had opened their investigation.
The rumours began to swirl the very next day.
– People have told me that Siw was murdered, her father says.
They were told that she had been found in the shower cabinet in the bathroom, but people on the drug scene said that she had actually been lying dead in the bushes outside her apartment throughout Easter 2015. She was then said to have been carried inside and laid in the shower cabinet.
One of her former boyfriends had said that he met her just before she had been found dead.
This is all they know.
They are left, almost three years after her death, with only fragments of a bigger picture.
They remember the call from the police investigator in the autumn of 2015, five months after she passed away. The post-mortem report was complete and the coroner had found narcotics in Siw’s blood. They believed it was most likely that she had died of an overdose.
– The police said she died of an overdose of GHB, says Tove.
That, at least, is what she recalls Kjell telling her after his conversation with the investigator. Kjell, for his part, doesn’t remember. He passed on the opportunity to see the post-mortem report; there and then it seemed to be a clear-cut case. But then the doubts began to creep in.
Because the rumours refused to die.
– I’ve heard people saying that they’re sure she was murdered, but they can’t tell us anything else, Tove says.

She sighs heavily and walks to the other end of the living room again to smoke.
On the wall between the hallway and kitchen hangs the Lord’s Prayer and a painting of an altar. For a long time the image hung in Siw’s home, but ended up here when she moved. There’s a Bible lying on a little table next to the sofa. They are people of faith, but don’t practise religion.
– There’s so much we don’t know. Maybe you’ll be able to help us get some answers,” she says. “And then we were wondering about one more thing, she adds, steering the conversation towards the real reason behind our visit.
– How could this have happened to Siw when the municipality had been sent a concern report just a few days before? Didn’t they do anything?
Kjell signs over full authority, lifting the duty of confidentiality on behalf of his deceased daughter so that we can now get a full look at everything the public authorities have on record about Siw throughout her life – everything from medical records and municipal case files to the police’s investigative documents.
Then the hunt for answers begins.
We meet again several times over the following months. As the conversations progress, Kjell grows quieter. He rests his elbows on the coffee table, clasping his face in his rough working-man’s hands.
His voice is frail and hoarse. There’s a gurgling from his chest when he breathes in. It seems to be a strain for him to speak, and he pauses a little between each sentence.
– I dream about her all the time. She talks to me...
Kjell sits and stares out into space.
– I’m almost too scared to sleep, he says.

 

 

Chapter 2:
The girl who never swore

1970s to 1990s: As a young girl, Siw takes long bus trips to the Salvation Army. She dances ballet. She’s told that she’s going to be a princess. Then her father winds up in jail. As a 16-year-old, Siw falls for a charmer and a small-time crook, ten years her senior. Madly in love, they travel around Europe – as Stavanger’s very own Bonnie & Clyde.

When did it all go wrong? In the photos of her childhood it was all so idyllic, wasn’t it?
August 1976. She’s looking into the camera shyly. A gangly, suntanned girl with freshly pressed bellbottoms and a purple wristwatch, squinting at the sun with wavy blonde hair.
Siw is about to start school at Varhaug.
Her friend is beaming. Siw looks a little anxious, rolling on the edges of her feet.
She was as thin as a rake, but former classmates still recall her strength of will. She was a girl who took nonsense from no one. A little Ronja Robbersdaughter. If she felt misunderstood or treated unfairly, she could fly into a rage.
She is said not to have had any best friends – but not because people didn’t want to spend time with her. But if she did develop strong friendships, sooner or later they would come to an end.
Was it because Siw was somewhat reserved? Was it because she felt a little different? Or was it other parents’ strained enthusiasm for letting their own kids play with her, this girl who seemed to do as she pleased, who had those hippie parents?

«The prettiest woman in all Norway»
Her father, Kjell, was a seafarer, setting out for the first time before he turned 15.
Two to three years later, he met the love of his life. The oil tanker he was working on was docked in London and he strolled over to the Seaman’s Church to read the newspapers. It was there that he first met a young woman from Tønsberg.
– She was the prettiest woman in all Norway, says Kjell.
– You know what seamen are like – they’re only after the finer things in life.
He convinced his boss to let her come aboard for a krone a day, then they headed out towards the Gulf.
Some years later they settled down in Varhaug, in Jæren. Kjell would build garages, barns and silos.
– I ’ve never earned as good money as when we were living in Varhaug in the seventies.
In Jæren, though, Siw’s mother wasn’t quite so happy. Perhaps it was something to do with her proper way of speaking. She was a city girl from the other side of the country. Maybe, thinks Kjell, people thought she was putting on airs and graces.
Perhaps it was his mistake that he built them such a big house. Siw and her siblings wanted big rooms, and that’s exactly what they got, even if he had to break the building code to do so.
– Siw’s room was 25 square metres, he says in delight.
– I got a few thousand in fines, but was happy to pay up.
But hippie family?
– Yes, he says,
– Maybe that’s what people thought.
And there was a lot of smoking that went on at sea in the sixties, but not in Varhaug.
He had a lot of free time, and was often out in the forests and mountains with the kids. They might camp for six weeks at a time at Brusand. The children got so tanned they were almost black during summertime. Kjell felt a kinship with the travellers.
So yes, they probably were a little different. Perhaps they shouldn’t have been.
Siw’s mother stayed at home. She could speak several languages, loved music and dance – interests she tried to foster in Siw. She was also the smartest of the pair, he adds with a smile.
– I was the stupid one.
She couldn’t adapt to the conservative atmosphere in Jæren. Life in the west wore her down. She longed for home in Tønsberg
Siw wanted to learn to play the guitar. The Salvation Army in Bryne offered free classes – the fact that it was almost twenty kilometres away was no obstacle. Sometimes her father drove her, but often, even on dark, rain-soaked winter evenings, the little girl would sit on the bus and travel there and back between Varhaug and Bryne on her own.
She took guitar classes in Bryne for six or seven years, several times a week.
She was so proud when she earned her first diploma, remembers Kjell. She had learned to play the guitar, but something else too:

«Siw is still doing well»
At school she was a bright pupil. At the end of her first year her teacher remarked:
Absence: 2 days, 0 hours.
Siw is still doing well at school. She is equally good in all subjects. She is diligent and eager to learn. But she is still rather talkative during classes.
After her third year of school:
Absence: 4 days, 4 classes.Siw is a pleasant and clever pupil who has no difficulties in any subject.
After her fifth year:
Orderliness: Very good.
Behaviour: Very good.
Absence: 14 days, 2 classes.
Clever and pleasant throughout the year.
The dope in the tyres
But then Siw’s parents split up, and Kjell wound up in jail.
Was that part of the reason things went so wrong?
One of Siw’s brothers recalls that they were a nuclear family when they lived in Varhaug, and says it was a happy time.
Then – at around the same time that Siw began high school – they moved to Stokke, outside Tønsberg, just as their mother had wanted.
Kjell built the family a house.
But when the house was finally finished, the couple went their separate ways and Kjell moved to Stavanger.
Suddenly their mother was left alone with Siw and her three brothers. Many years later, when Siw was in her twenties and thirties and was being committed to the psychiatric hospital time after time, she spoke a little about her youth.
– A harrowing time, noted the psychiatrists.
Siw mentioned that she took on the «roles of go-between and therapist for her parents.»
A while after the separation, Siw’s father suffered another setback.
Kjell: «Me, I was sitting in the car. This guy was trying to make a quick buck. And yeah, of course I knew what was in the car! But I thought to myself, that’s got nothing to do with me. I was just sitting around drinking and enjoying myself. I’d worn myself out working non-stop to build the new house for them all in Stokke. I was just sitting around drinking and having a terrible time. I nearly died. It was my job to test the dope. The others wouldn’t dare, but me...yeah, I tried it!»
Tove: «Drunks do so much stupid stuff, you know what I mean, right?»
Kjell: «Yeah, they took advantage because I was drunk and messed up. I didn’t give a shit about life at that point in time. They were going around the ferry with the dogs, and the dope was in the tyres. Five kilos. You got a year for each kilo.»
Five years in jail.
«Siw was daddy’s little girl,» says Kjell.
It must have hurt that he was suddenly gone for several years.
Later, when the psychiatrists asked about her father, she replied that he was a substance abuser who wound up in jail when she was at high school.
«Drug smuggling» she said.
Enough about that.
Kjell remembers that Siw and some of her brothers visited him at Ullersmo prison. They took the train from Tønsberg to Oslo, then a taxi from Oslo to Ullersmo. He was granted leave to visit the family in Stokke. And shovel snow off the roof.

«A good childhood»
Siw’s assessment of her mother and father seemed to depend somewhat on how she was feeling. Sometimes she simply said that she had had “a good childhood.”
– You’re going to be a princess, they told her. That’s the sort of things adults say.
But Siw wouldn’t let it go. She talked about it her whole life.
She described her mother as a «stylish woman, kind and proper.» But from the age of 15, strange things began happening, she said, such as her mother ringing the police and claiming that Siw had hit her.
– She would have preferred me to move out, Siw told the psychiatrists.
– She was jealous of me.
Siw seems to have walked the line between two worlds.
At school she was a bright student.
When she graduated from high school in 1985 she came out with Good in six subjects, among them English, biology and mathematics, and Above average in seven others, including Norwegian, social science, music and physical education.
Good orderliness. Good behaviour.
She travelled long distances by bus and train for dance and ballet.
It seems that she had friends, but no best friends.
And a home that was starting to stand out a little from all the others.
When the psychiatrists asked when she had started taking drugs, Siw usually said that she began smoking hash at the age of 14 or 15.
Kjell: «You know, her mother could have taught her everything. Dance. That was the big one. And music. And when Siw was 14, she started taking her out with her. They would go out together. I drove them to restaurants, and picked them up again, so they could go out together and have fun dancing. Yeah...»
«But then it turned out that...they started smoking a lot of hash. I’ve never been like that...I’ve smoked a lot, but...»
«Then I moved away from Tønsberg. So many people started coming to the house that I left them to it. I couldn’t handle it...Yeah, then I went a bit off the rails myself with the alcohol.»
While some think they remember Siw’s mother having a liberal attitude towards marijuana, other members of the family do not identify with such portrayals at all. Siw’s older brother went out to sea at a young age and says that he had a few parties at the house when he was home, and that the police took an interest in him and those he was hanging around with. From time to time, perhaps things got out of control.
But their mother as a party animal?
No.
Her older brother, and others in the family, believe Siw’s problems began with a young charmer who arrived from the west.

Helmer
The yuppies were on the up. It was probably 1983. Helmer climbed into his Mercedes and drove to Tønsberg. He was due to meet some acquaintances there in order to steal a boat, and he found himself at a house party in Stokke.
The living room was full of people, most of them men drinking, or smoking hash, while a very pretty woman danced on the coffee table.
He saw a girl with long blond hair secluded away in one corner of the room. Blue eyes. She was ten years younger than him.
Her eyes were gorgeous.
She looked like a smart, fastidious schoolgirl who had come to the wrong address.
However, this was her home.
Helmer would often visit the house in Stokke over the years that followed. At times he would even stay there.
In a photograph from that time, he is sun-kissed with curly, shoulder-length hair and a jacket over his shirt. He had a glimmer in his eyes and was well spoken.
– You look like my father, Siw apparently told him.
He remembers one time she got into his Mercedes when he was about to head back to Stavanger. He asked her to get out again. It’s likely that she was only 14 at the time.
A new chapter in Siw’s life had begun.
She was probably only 16 when she had had enough of Stokke and moved in with Helmer in Stavanger. He was living on the ninth floor of a high-rise in the city.
To begin with they each had their own bed, he says.
– I’ve never met a kinder girl. She never even swore. She’d been in the Salvation Army!
Helmer’s own version of Siw’s story is that she wanted to get away from a family that was about to go off the rails. A family on the verge of falling apart. He gave in and took her along with him to Stavanger.
So he says.
With Siw’s family, the story is different. According to them, Helmer did as he pleased in a household led by a mother who was doing all she could to take care of her four children.
Helmer turned up, they say, and stole Siw from them.
It was Helmer who led her down the wrong path.
So they say.
He remembers her elegant hands, which would dance in the air as she spoke. Her watchful eyes studied his face’s every feature. She preferred to stay in the background, observing – but could suddenly jump in with a swift comment, and Helmer would break out into fits of laughter.
He was working in the North Sea and would come home to freshly pressed towels and work wear, fragrant with washing powder. In his mind’s eye he can still see her at the ironing board in her pink dressing gown.
A photograph of their apartment shows a clean, tidy home. Pine furniture, CD rack, potted plants with ferns and wooden masks from Africa on the walls. When she moved away from Tønsberg she left commercial school, beginning instead at a ‘sewing school’ in the industrial district of Forus, she later explained to a psychiatrist. She then gained a place on an administration course at Sola Upper High School – but after a few weeks, just before Christmas 1986, she quit. She never earned a diploma in Sola – the diplomas from Tønsberg are the last ones she ever received.
Her average grade was 3.6 out of 6.
In the records from Sola there is no reason given for her dropping out.
Many years later she offered a reason to the psychiatrists: The teachers at Sola had been rude.
– They would rock back and forth like crazy on their chairs when we had tests and such.
Helmer says that he wondered:
– What can I do for this girl?
Siw gave him his answer:
– Ballet.
The grand opening at the Victoria Hotel
The story of how the dance school came about – who paid, who guaranteed the loan, who ordered materials when they had no money, and who stole – varied depending on who we spoke to.
Siw’s father says that he contributed almost half a million kroner.
Helmer says that he stood as guarantor for a loan from the bank; in cash terms all he had amounted to mere pennies, so he had to steal almost everything: curtains, paint, flooring.
– I paid the junkies in the city a hundred kroner an hour for carpentry and painting, he says.
– We couldn’t afford doors so I just sawed holes in the walls. Bzzzzz. Made huge archways, plastered and painted them. I remember that there was a roll of curtains outside a shop in the city centre. I carried it away under my arm. «See this, Siw! Seamstress, do your best!»
The only thing that they agree on to any extent is that the Dance Loft turned out to be a fine dance studio, with its own changing rooms and an office for Siw. It was in Upper Holme Street, down the street from the Valberg fire tower. Helmer speaks of pink ceilings and billowing silk drapes.
In 1990, the year she turned 21, she had 250 pupils – children, teenagers and adults, she told the psychiatrists with pride. The only picture that Helmer has managed to dig out from those times was taken at the Victoria Hotel, which they had to rent for the grand opening because the Dance Loft wasn’t ready in time. Beneath chandeliers, the photograph shows a function room overflowing with children and teenagers in leotards, surrounded by their parents.
There is no trace of the Dance Loft in Aftenblad’s archives, but in one advertisement from January 1990 it is announced that Siw is holding a course at the SOL centre in Sandnes:
JAZZ BALLET/CLASSICAL BALLET
Instructor: Siw from the Dance Loft
Groups for 8–12 years, 12–16 years, 16 years and above
Information and registration with Siw, tel. 62 37 27 (10am – 7.30pm)

Bonnie and Clyde
– I did everything for her, says Helmer, reeling off a list:
He arranged her driving licence in two weeks by bribing a driving instructor with stolen goods.
He built «the city’s finest VW Beetle» for her: cream-coloured with a mahogany steering wheel, black leather seats and alloy wheels.
He stole all that she wished of clothes and gold jewellery. She was a ballerina, he says. She got everything she asked for.
– She had gold worth nearly 150,000 kroner. Jewellery, diamond rings...She was dripping with gold!
They began traveling around Europe and he showed her how to live for free at fancy hotels: Never just show up at the reception, but call in advance and book a room in a polite voice – that way you avoid paying up front. Dress nicely. Make use of all the facilities. Take long, hot showers. Empty the minibar. Put the restaurant bill on the room.
And most important of all:
At «che
She’s sitting on the terrace of a café somewhere in Germany; it’s 1989, and she’s moving as Helmer takes a picture of her. Her blonde hair curls over her shoulders, her head tilted to one side. She’s looking away with an air of contentment and the charming gap between her front teeth in full view.
On the back of the photograph someone, probably Helmer, has written:

BEAUTIFUL LITTLE Siw. Many YEARS – LOTS of LAUGHTER. BONI end CLAYD’

«They travelled around Europe and lived in hotels for extended periods of time,» noted a psychiatrist many years later. «The relationship lasted for seven years.» And she «smoked hashish, although her partner wasn’t aware of it.»
– He was decent and kind towards me, she told the psychiatrist. She always had good things to say about the man who would go on to become a lifelong companion. But once she said:
– I should have listened to them, meaning her parents.
They weren’t happy that she and Helmer were an item.
– I changed a lot after I got together with him.

The party that never ended
Teenagers supplied with LSD at parties.
Village in shock after rave.
Lost their daughter for a single pill.
Life is bleak without ecstasy.
Ecstasy may lead to brain damage.
He used to pop pills at parties. Now he’s a mental patient.
At the beginning of the nineties, the Norwegian tabloids began sounding the alarm:
WARNING ABOUT SEX PILLS
The drug police announced that they had joined forces with the tax agency and the alcohol licensing authority in order to “bring an end to a youth culture that has spread across the country like an epidemic.”
Wild, illegal raves and house parties were no longer something that only took place in abandoned warehouses in London or on the continent.
Oslo, Bergen and Stavanger had become major centres for house music.
The whole of the Norwegian Bible belt read about a rave that had taken place inside one of the Civil Defence’s mountain installations in bourgeois Våland, Stavanger.
The eighty youths in attendance had been good-natured when the police made their 5am raid, but LSD, hashish, amphetamine and drug paraphernalia were found spread throughout the entire 1000-square-metre installation. Thirty of the youths were issued on-the-spot fines for drug consumption.
Siw was one of those who threw herself into the new wave of rave, house and techno. She was one of the ones who would dance all night long, usually several nights in a row, often in Oslo, Stavanger, Kristiansand, or further out into Europe.
She could dance for hours on end, something that was only possible because she had a voracious appetite for those substances that gave her body an almost inhuman level of stamina: ecstasy, speed, LSD.
There was always someone there with E in their pocket.
And Siw was never one to say no.
– She never took just one E, says Helmer.
– She would take ten!
Presumably the partying was one of the main reasons that the Dance Loft fizzled out.
– It bombed because she was smoking so much hash that she couldn’t deal with it, says Kjell.

Ecstasy. A moment of happiness.
Helmer recalls how he met her outside a rave in Kristiansand. She had white powder on her face and was refused entry.
She was devastated.
All she wanted to do was be part of it.
Presumably she wanted nothing more than to spend one more night on the dancefloor, eyes closed, shrouded in the smoke and strobe lights that turned everyone there into stars for a night.
The only thing she wanted was to dance to the repetitive thump of the bass drum and the wild sound of the synthesizers. Just doing what she loved. Just doing what she knew best of all, and what gave her the nickname that she would bear for the rest of her life: Techno Siw.
And then, after a couple of years, most discovered that the party was over and that more serious times lay ahead of them. But there were always some who couldn’t let it go.

«It’s your fault»
He could still hear her, three years after she died.
– It’s your fucking fault, she would say, sitting on his balcony. She looked like a ghost. Somehow she was still sitting there on his balcony, just like she had done when she was alive.
While she was still alive, she might make an appearance at any time. In the dead of night. Or sitting there when Helmer came home from work.
He might turn into his parking spot in front of the high-rise and, as he was stepping out of the car, he would hear her behind him. She would be talking to herself in a loud, hoarse voice. One time she was sitting there in a red wig, long high-heeled boots and a miniskirt.
– She was a real sight, he says.
– People would end up driving off the road.
– Yeah, it’s your fault, that’s what she would say.
She used to do that, talking to herself, he says.
– It’s your fucking fault.
Then he would take her inside, feed her, let her take a shower.
She would shower for an eternity, and there was never any soap or shampoo left afterwards. She would use it all up.
Then he would have to ask her to leave.
– She would steal like a magpie, he says.
She would rearrange his living room.
That’s how it was in the final years. He let her take a shower and get a bite to eat, maybe let her nap on the sofa. Then he would send her back downstairs again.
Back down to her municipal rehab apartment at 28 Haugås Road, or the pigsty, as Helmer called it.

The LSD trip
It all went to hell for Siw when he had to go to jail, says Helmer. It may have been when she was around twenty, in which case it would have been 1989. He doesn’t remember exactly – he’s been to prison several times. But when he was released a few months later, she was a different person, he says.
His apartment had been smashed to pieces. Everything of value was gone. The Beetle, jewellery, clothes. Even his own clothes had vanished, so he had to ask permission to keep those he wore in prison.
Siw was unrecognisable, and spoke only nonsense.
Others on the scene told him what had happened while he was inside – about how his apartment had been turned into a party joint overflowing with speed, E and LSD. About what had gone on in their bedroom.
And about the trip to Amsterdam.
Siw and a few others were trying to smuggle LSD from Amsterdam to Norway, and that’s when it went wrong for real, he was told.
Other drug users in the city have confirmed this story about Siw independently of one another, but the details vary, and the cast of characters shifts.
The short-and-sweet version is that Siw had gone along on this smuggling caper, but had been careless – or perhaps somebody wasn’t looking out for her properly. Someone said that she hid the LSD, in the form of stamps dipped in acid, under the soles of her feet. Others said that she bundled the drugs around her legs with plastic wrap, but that she screwed up by not covering her skin in a protective layer first.
Perhaps she didn’t know any better.
Maybe she was high and took the chance anyway.
No matter which version, if any, is the correct one, the point remains the same:
The LSD soaked into her skin, then circulated to her brain, thus damaging her – perhaps for life – say several people on the scene.
It was the reason, they say, that she spent the following decades doing the craziest things.
– She got so high from that trip that she fucking never came down again, Helmer says.
He got rid of everything after her death. He threw out his entire living room. The black sofa where she used to nap. The Chesterfields she loved sitting on so much. He threw out everything that might remind him of Siw.
No matter what, she wouldn’t let him go.
When he came home from work she would suddenly be there again.
As he was getting out of the car he would hear her voice on the balcony on the other side of the building.
The girl who never swore when she was younger.
– It’s your fucking fault, she would say.
Siw was supposed to be a closed chapter.
But there is so much he still thinks about.
Like the time she escaped from the psychiatric ward.
Like the time she stopped by his place after being tortured.
Like the time he knocked on her door for the very last time.

Siw’s ex boyfriends name is not Helmer. The name is fictitious.

 

 

Chapter 3:
«I’m just kidding. I know full well I’m no princess.»

After several years on drugs, Siw has become Head of the KGB and is set to build herself a palace in Møllebukta. But first she moves into municipal housing with her new boyfriend, where she continues to prostitute herself. Siw is given an infamous psychiatric diagnosis. One day, she and her boyfriend fly through the air in a white car.

In the fall of 1992, Siw is mentioned in a news article in Stavanger Aftenblad. It is about three concerts to be held in the Stavanger region on the occasion of the 25th anniversary of what many consider rock history's biggest record release: Sgt. Pepper´s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The musicians and artists photographed for the article are dressed pretty much the same as in the world's most famous record cover. To the left in the picture, and slightly behind the front figures, Siw, with large white and grey feathers attached to a headband around her long, blonde hair, is staring straight into the camera.
The article states:
“At the end of the concert, they bury Lucy in The Sky after she dies of an overdose ... or?”

In November 1996, while she was admitted to the Radium Hospital in Oslo, Siw’s mother wrote a letter to the Chief of Police in Stokke. The letter was headed: «Request for help in relation to problems at home»
Siw, who was 27, had moved back home with her mother in Stokke a few months earlier. Having a substance abuser in the house had eventually become intolerable. Siw was temperamental and to some extent violent, her mother wrote, and it had not been possible to get any help from the social services to find her somewhere else to live.
In addition to all of this, her mother had also been given a serious cancer diagnosis. She was facing a rough course of chemotherapy. She needed peace and quiet.
I can’t cope with having Siw at home with me any more.
One of her sons was already living with her. He could stay. But Siw had to go, and that was what her mother needed help with.
She wrote:
I hereby inform the office of the Chief of Police about my [...] situation and ask for help regarding a compulsory eviction, and possibly additional help in connection to Siw’s problems. I hereby grant the office of the Chief of Police full authorisation to carry out the contents of this letter.

The princess of Lake Mosvatnet
Nine years later, a psychiatrist knocked on the door of a white house owned by Stavanger municipality. Rain and sleet was falling from the sky. The wooden building was a stone’s throw from the E39 highway, just after the roundabout at the beginning of Henrik Ibsen Street, on the other side of the road from the corner store. Just where the house stood, there was an opening in the noise barrier to let cyclists and pedestrians through.
The house butted up against the busy road and a nursing home. To the rear was a copse stretching down towards the campsite alongside Lake Mosvatnet. It was hardly the sort of place you would choose to build a house if starting from scratch.
It was an unusual moment to speak to a psychiatrist. Saturday morning, a few hours before New Year’s Eve in 2005, a year in which people had been talking about things such as the tsunami in the Indian Ocean, the Nokas cash depot robbery, or the departure of Viking football club manager Roy Hodgson.

The psychiatrist had been chasing Siw since the autumn.
Stavanger city court had decided that she should undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Eventually the police were given the orders to arrest her. They called the psychiatrist two days earlier – they had finally got hold of Siw.
The psychiatrist was not able to come immediately, so fixed an appointment to visit her at home. And now, a few hours before the fireworks would be shooting skyward, she was knocking on her door. Siw was 36.
– I’m doing better now that I’ve got a boyfriend, she said.
The boyfriend was sitting next to her – Tom, a slim, taut guy with long, dark, greying hair and kind eyes. He was in his mid-40s.
After things came to an end with Helmer, her great love, at the beginning of the nineties, she had been alone for a decade. The nineties had been a rough time. She had taken a lot of drugs, moved frequently, and felt insecure. In 1998, her mother passed away.
Tom met her at the beginning of the new millennium. They had now been living together for five years, the last year of which had been spent on Henrik Ibsen Street.
She was under less pressure now that she was with Tom. Things were going better. She hadn’t had a job since the Dance Loft at the beginning of the nineties, but recently had actually been out looking for one.
So she said.
Baker Brun at Arkaden shopping mall. An ice-cream parlour at the Kvadrat shopping centre.
– I’m motivated to work now.
So she said.
– I’m more motivated to work than I was before.
But Tom disagreed with everything she said.
– She lives on another planet.
They were often high, but even when she was clean she could be completely gone. At the age of 36, for example, she insisted that she was a princess. She was a princess with a property and retail empire.
– It’s a joke, Siw went on.
– That’s what all my...
She certainly behaved as though everything belonged to her. She had been convicted and fined a series of times since the beginning of the nineties. In addition to car theft and possession of hash and pills, she was regularly caught shoplifting.
She took what she needed.
According to her latest prosecution – which was the reason that the psychiatrist had come to visit – she had, among other things, stolen:
• 2 apple juices and 1 Grandiosa frozen pizza from Rema 1000 supermarket
• 1 nightdress, 1 gift package and 1 hairbrush from H&M
• Candy worth 30 kroner from 7-Eleven
And so it continued.
It was as though she believed that everything was hers, said Tom.
– But I know full well I’m no princess, she added.

The invisible ones
– Another thing is that speed completely transforms her, said Tom.
She would become totally out of control, could go for several days without sleep, and would imagine and do the most outrageous things.
Like stripping naked.
– People give her speed so she’ll take her clothes off.
When she was on speed she didn’t know the difference between right and wrong. She thought she owned the whole city. And people took advantage of her.
– Steal that, they would say.
– It’s your shop, after all!
So she would.
They would spike her with speed, he said, and then she would either get a kick and talk non-stop, or disappear into herself. She could just sit there and chatter away without actually speaking to anyone at all.
– It’s as though I hear impulses from my own thoughts, she had said.
– If I think about another girl it’s like I can hear her speaking. It’s happened when I’m clean, too.

She often behaved so strangely that people would call Tom to let him know.
– I wanted us to get married, he said.
He wanted to be there for her, to take her back home with him to the other side of the world. He had friends and family there. They could start afresh.
– But, he sighed, she would nevertheless come up these absurd ideas. She would suddenly lose all trust in him, imagining things he had done.
She was jealous. A few days before the meeting with the psychiatrist, she had paid a visit to her ex-boyfriend, Helmer, probably to take revenge on Tom. It ended with the police picking her up and arresting her for stealing from her ex. Then she came back to Tom, shamefaced, and spent four or five days coming to her senses again.
– It’s tiring, Tom said.
He wasn’t exactly a model of health, either. He had been on heroin for several years, but now he was planning to get drug treatment through opioid replacement therapy.
He just needed to sign up with a general practitioner, he said.
And when he got a GP, he was going to get Siw a GP too.
And when he had done that, he would make sure she got treatment.
– Do you manage your own money? the psychiatrist asked.
– Yes, said Siw.
She had become more and more distant over the course of the conversation. She was smiling, but not present – would suddenly burst out into laughter, but at the wrong times. Her mouth moved as though she were talking, but no words came out.
It seemed as though she was hearing and seeing things that only existed in her own head, noted the psychiatrist after the meeting.
Her partner begged to differ. Siw manage her own money?
– It’s me who has to manage her money, he said.
– It’s me who has to make sure she eats well. She’s in no condition to be living on her own.

The three-year-old
Had Siw lost her mind? Did she know what she doing? When we read through the police’s investigative documents, all the stories popped up one after the other, each stranger than the one before it.
One of the incidents, from January 2007, was titled: «Abnormal behaviour towards children.» At the checkout of a branch of the Ica supermarket chain on the outskirts of Mandal, a woman had bent down to give a 10-kroner coin to a three-year-old girl.
– What a pretty girl, she had said.
The girl’s grandfather later described the woman as swarthy with shoulder-length hair. She was well dressed, tanned, and wearing a little too much make-up, her accent a blend of eastern and western Norwegian dialects.
He walked away to get a bag of candy that the girl could buy with the 10-kroner coin, but when he returned to the checkout, she had vanished. He looked around only to see the stranger leading the girl out of the shop by the hand. He shouted after his granddaughter, but the stranger wouldn’t stop.
– We’re just going outside to the car to say hi to my grandchildren, she said.
The grandfather abandoned his shopping trolley and went after her.
– Come back now, he said in a louder voice to his granddaughter.
The stranger leaned forward to wave towards a car parked outside the shop.
– Alright, you’ve had your wave. Now get back here!
It was only then that the woman let go of the girl, who ran straight back to her grandfather.
After a sleepless night, he called the police the following day.
There never were any children sitting in the car, and the woman seemed drowsy and in no state to drive.
He was not the only one to call the police that day. Further to the south, several onlookers witnessed a woman who seemed distant and intoxicated.
She was picking up empty bottles and cans behind a sports hall.
Or had driven into a ditch and got stuck.
Or said strange things to a man outside Sørlandet Hospital before strolling into the children’s ward.
At 3.30am the next day, a police patrol found Siw standing on a roundabout in Flekkerøy, outside Kristiansand.
The wind was rushing through her dark, shoulder-length hair, but there was no risk of her freezing. She was wearing a grey poncho, a red fleece jacket, and two leather jackets – one beige, the other pale grey.
– I’m waiting for someone, she said, and unfortunately could not, therefore, leave with the patrolmen.
– I can let them know so they won’t worry about you, said one of the police officers.
– Are you trying to be funny? Siw snapped.
She told them that she had arrived by train, but a stolen car was found nearby that could be linked to her.
She would have to go along with them.
– I am the police of all Norway so you’ll have to watch your backs, she said.
– If you arrest me you’ll be getting fired.

Permanently impaired mental abilities
“Permanently impaired mental abilities.” That was the conclusion psychiatrists landed on after observing the world-renowned writer Knut Hamsun. The ageing poet had not only chosen to side with the Nazis during their invasion of Norway, but had even praised Hitler in public after his death at the war’s close.
Was Hamsun insane?
No, said the psychiatrists. Hamsun knew what he was doing, but he had «permanently impaired mental abilities.»
His personality and emotional life were impaired.
In 2001, Siw was examined by a psychiatrist for the first time. She is reported to have been committed to Rogaland Psychiatric Hospital against her will for the first time in 2000. The following year she was committed eight times in total.
She spoke incoherently, often about «bizarre sexual matters»
She could be paranoid and feel that she was being watched, particularly by the police. She feared that «people can steal her thoughts, that microphones have been placed all over her body» and that «experiments were being conducted on her DNA»
The psychiatrists’ conclusions were that she was oblivious and insane at the time her crimes were committed, and that she had deficient mental faculties and permanently impaired mental abilities.
Siw was one of the last to receive this infamous diagnosis before it was removed from the psychiatric lexicon.
• Read interviews with criticized parties at the end of the story
The conspiracy
When Siw first arrived in Stavanger aged 16 or 17, people would think: What a lovely, sweet-natured girl, just what Helmer needs after several years of hard partying. Perhaps Siw would be able to pull Helmer into shape.

Ten to fifteen years later, she was meeting her social worker for the first time. He was to visit her at a dilapidated house beneath the Stavanger City Bridge.
«Well hello there, Siw, is that you?» said the police officers who had come along for the visit.
Later, while she was out of earshot, he heard them refer to her by their own nickname: The mattress.
In 2007, Stavanger’s social services noted that she had lived in seventeen different places in the municipality. In addition she had lived in several places outside of the city, plus stays at some of the city’s shelters.
Prosecutors long chose to take pity on her. Between February 2001 and October 2002, more than twenty criminal cases against Siw were dismissed. The reason: doubts over her ability to take responsibility for her own actions.
Police officers who arrested her sometimes reported that she appeared to be on drugs, such as the time she was lingering around a military area in Sola and proclaimed that she was the head of the CIA and KGB. Or this, from 2006:
The accused behaved politely and calmly. At the same time, she seemed very confused. She often provided answers that bore no relationship to the question.
The accused declared that there was no criminal offence since everything was a conspiracy between «the newspapers» and the state. The accused added she was in Møllebukta because that was where she was going to build her palace.

Ashamed of empty cupboards
In 2006, she was sent to prison after a second psychiatric evaluation arrived at a different conclusion than the first. She was behaving as wildly as she had done before, but now the psychiatrists believed that she could be considered criminally responsible.
In 2007, she was examined for a third time by expert psychiatrists appointed by the court. As usual she was picked up by the police and committed to hospital.
– It’s so bad that I have to be here for all these weeks, she said.
She neither liked watching TV nor reading, so for the most part, she slept.
– It’s so dull.
The psychiatrists wrote long reports, with many passages such as this:
Her house rent has, moreover, been paid by the social security office for years. She does not know which branch. She has been in touch with several of them. She now believes that it is the police’s fault that she doesn’t have a job, and that it is also the police’s fault that she is forced to steal. She steals because she cannot afford to buy what she needs. She claims that she would prefer not to steal, but that she has to do it more and more. She doesn’t care, because she has no money. When she steals she doesn’t think about the possibility of being caught and being sent to prison, because «they won’t put me in prison straight away!»

She has been in prison once. She was there for several days, but does not know why. She makes it clear that she does not steal «from people’s houses and that kind of thing.» She usually steals food, from shops. «I just have to do it sometimes, especially when I have a boyfriend, because I’m ashamed to sit there with empty cupboards.”
Or:
«Suddenly shows up in a ball gown»
It had been three years since she and Tom and got the house between the grocery store and Lake Mosvatnet. How they ended up there is a story in its own right.
By the start of 2004, Siw had gained a reputation for herself at several of the city’s shelters.
A complaint from one of them read like this:
They say that she is too crazy to stay there. She argues with everyone, suddenly shows up in a ball gown. One night she arrived dragging a beam, she was going to make an ironing board out of it. She was wearing an ambulance jacket and, since she was now the boss, set about firing everyone.
Records from this period show that a team meeting about Siw was held between the psychiatrist and the municipality’s social services.
«This is also the first time that Siw [surname] has mentioned that she wants help from the support services,» the municipality wrote.
«She herself says that she has not considered getting treatment, and is not sure if it would be the right thing for her now. It was a new idea for her.» But Siw gave the psychiatric hospital permission to start drug treatment. She was given antipsychotics, but fled before the medication took effect.
The hospital’s outpatient team attempted to follow her up, but conceded defeat in summer 2004 after Siw had said that she saw no point in the treatment.
After once again being committed to the psychiatric hospital, she made an appearance at the office of the social services dressed only in a stilettos and a sweater, to the alarm of other clients.
– What’s happened to your clothes? asked her caseworker.
– Don’t you think this new dress is pretty? replied Siw, twirling around on the floor, utterly convinced that that was what she was wearing.
– If you think I’m wearing too few clothes, maybe I can borrow your trousers?
– What would I wear then? asked the caseworker.
– You can borrow my dress.
– I was perhaps a little too quick to accept that Siw no longer wished to receive follow-up from me, acknowledged one of members of the outpatient team.
She was homeless. Penniless. The only things she did have were a boyfriend who was trying to take care of her, and support services that were struggling to keep track of her. In the summer of 2004, the municipality offered her apartments in places where it would not be possible to live together with her boyfriend Tom.
«They prefer to continue living together, and he wonders whether we are aware of how sick she is,» wrote one caseworker after speaking to him.
«He wants to go to the newspapers, something we have told him he is well within his rights to do, but that this is something imposed on us by the deputy mayor and is not up to us.»
But by Christmas 2004, a solution had been found. Siw and Tom were offered a chance to move into the municipal house by Lake Mosvatnet.

Love & prostitution
The house was a rehabilitation home, meaning that they were obliged to let the municipality’s care workers in once a week. Since Siw and Tom were often not home, or did not open the door, in practice the care workers did not see them more than once a month, one of them told the psychiatrists.
Siw and Tom took all manner of substances, amphetamine and heroin included. But getting them clean was not the care workers’ goal – the aim, rather, was that «conditions at the home were satisfactory.»
How was Siw doing?
She was, thought the care workers, a confused woman. She behaved strangely, spoke a great deal of nonsense, and was difficult to understand. In practice it was Tom who looked out for her. His care included buying Subutex for her on the streets so that she wouldn’t shoot too much speed. But Siw would help herself to every drug she could get hold of. The house was full of stolen clothes. Siw stole everything she could get her hands on.
She left all the practical housework to her boyfriend.
In these later years there were several times when she had black eyes. The care workers had been given somewhat differing explanations for this. The municipality had also been called on a couple of occasions regarding violence against Siw by individuals whose identities were known to them.
– I’ve been thinking about cleaning up my act a little bit at home, Siw told the psychiatrists.
– Is your partner violent towards you? they asked.
– No.
– Are you prostituting yourself?
– No.
She said that if she had said something like that on a previous occasion, she had only been joking.
– Do you want the support services to provide follow-up for you?
– No.
All she wanted was to get out of Psych and go home to her boyfriend.
– This place is killing me, she said.

Kjell: «I think Tom was a fantastic guy. He was honest. He spoke from the heart. He spoke about him and Siw in a completely honest way. I respected that.»
Tove: «He even came up here and asked if he could marry her.»
Kjell: «And Siw liked him a lot.»
Tove: «I think she was very fond of Tom.»
Kjell: «She was fond of Tom in a completely different way from...yes...»
Tove: «I’m pretty sure they got up to some crazy things too. But the way they were...whenever we would meet. When we were together they were clean. They never came here high or out of it. He would come over and make some food. Or we would sit here and chat. We could chat about most things. He seemed to be an honest and straightforward guy.»
Kjell: «Yes, it’s no use sitting here and lying to my face. I see through it right away.»
Tove: «And it seemed as though he was...»
Kjell: «Yes, she would try his patience.»
Tove: «That’s probably true. But I hope I’m right in saying I think he treated Siw okay. I hope so, in any case.»

He even came up here and asked permission to marry her, says Tove By: Anders Minge
One care worker who had worked with them believed it was true love. They took care of each other as well as they could. They decided whom it was safe for her to do business with, and who it was not.
In the world that Siw inhabited, the rules and standards of the normal world did not apply. The sexual services Siw performed in the municipality’s rehabilitation apartment, or beyond – she would also visit clients in the city, such as in hotel bars during the Christmas party season, where she would hook tipsy older men – was a question of survival.
She stole to survive.
She prostituted herself to survive.
She was egocentric, the psychiatrists wrote. She had little compassion for others. She lacked a sense of responsibility. She lacked respect for social norms and obligations; she had been sexually suggestive towards random patients at the psychiatric hospital, and she herself said that she had been unfaithful to her boyfriend on several occasions.
Yet, the tests that she underwent in 2007 showed that her IQ was in the normal range for the population. She scored weakest on knowledge and social skills. It was possible that, after many years of drug abuse and the psychotic episodes it triggered, her brain was somewhat damaged. But she wasn’t disabled. She had no “significantly reduced capacity to make realistic judgements.”
Seven years earlier she was assessed as having been insane at the time her crimes were committed. She had permanently impaired mental abilities. Now the report to the court was utterly different: Siw was criminally responsible.
She could be prosecuted.

The flying car
A school bus almost veered off the road as a white car lurched towards it a blistering speed. It had been two months since Siw had been discharged.
A woman on her way to work in a station wagon had reached Hovsherad, close to Moi, when she suddenly saw a white car flying through the air.
– So high, she thought, as it whistled past.
It hung in mid-air for a moment before its front wheels crashed back to down to earth. As its rear wheels slammed down, it careened through the side of a roadside garage.
There was a violent crash.
The side wall of the garage opened up like a crater.
– Everyone inside must be dead, thought the woman, according to the police report.
When the owner of the garage heard the commotion, he ran outside. He stood there looking at the gaping hole from which, one after the other, the car’s occupants were staggering.
First a slim, lanky guy with groggy eyes.
Then a larger man with a bloodied face. He was walking barefoot with a pair of Crocs in his hand after stepping on a nail.
Finally a woman, thin and tired in her face, her eyes spaced out, in a hooded jacket and miniskirt. Fishnet stockings. High-heels.
Which way to Stavanger?
Then she and the groggy-eyed guy began walking in the direction of Stavanger, a hundred kilometres to the northwest.
– You can’t just leave, said the homeowner.
But they breezed onwards, unruffled – he with a majestic but unsteady gait; she swaying in her stilettos.
The homeowner turned to face the third man and asked what he was planning to do about the ruined garage.
The bloodied guy was a little difficult to understand because he had suffered paralysis of the mouth in the collision, but his proposal was clear enough: What he felt like doing most of all was smashing the owner’s head in with a rock.

The mountainside
After that unfortunate episode with the garage in Moi, Siw and Tom ambled in the direction of Stavanger until they passed a red Mazda with the keys in the ignition.
Tom was so high that he drove in the wrong direction, he told the police later during his interrogation, so they ended up in the mountains instead of Stavanger. He thought he remembered filling the tank in Tonstad before they drove down the Hunne Valley, tipped into a ditch and crashed into a rock face. It started smelling of petrol, and they helped each other out of the Mazda in a hurry.
They stood at the roadside, thumbing a ride until a kind elderly lady drove them as far as Oltedal. She gave them enough money to take the bus home to Stavanger.
Siw nevertheless ended up in Egersund, but nothing in either the police’s investigation files nor the psychiatrist’s notes explains why.
People in Egersund noticed her presence all the same. The police were called, and she was arrested and taken to the psychiatric hospital.
It was the twenty-first time she had been committed.

She attempted to explain to the police and doctors how the whole story hung together:
For years she had been expecting a package to be sent to her from police in the US. She had also previously worked as a gynaecologist, but was now working for the Russians. In addition, she was the leader of a notorious biker gang, which meant, unfortunately, that she could not remain at the hospital.
Besides that she was also a pilot, but did not dare to do «this» unless she was accompanied by a doctor.
As she began to come to her senses, she started missing Tom.
They had had a huge fight. Something had happened.
But she wanted to forgive him. She wanted to go home.
She wanted to go home now!
And so it was time to pull out one of her occasionally successful party tricks. She had performed it many times with Helmer, her ex, on their trips around Europe.
1. Break the glass on the fire alarm.
2. Wait a few moments until the situation turned mildly chaotic.
3. When the exit doors were opened – which happened automatically when the fire alarm was sounded – walk calmly out into freedom.

Siw’s boyfriends are not called Helmer and Tom. The names are fictitious.

 

 

Chapter 4:
The carnivores take over

2008–2010: The love of Siw’s life ends up in jail. She loses all control. From his prison cell, Tom sounds the alarm. Two social workers come up with a bold plan to help her. In the meantime her house is overrun and she is tortured. Then she’s moved – to a notorious drug den.

The bomb dropped in the summer of 2008.
That was when they took him away from her.
When they took Tom.

It began relatively innocently. The police arrested him at home in Henrik Ibsen Street. They found a gram-and-a-half of heroin; and, in a safe under the living room rug, a sawn-off rifle.
He had been picked up several times before, but only ever for petty thefts. He would probably have dodged a few months in prison if it hadn’t have been for the phone call.
He called Siw from prison and instructed her to dig out a tea box. A metal box with Twinings written on the side. He explained where it was buried.
Perhaps he hadn’t imagined that prison officers regularly eavesdrop on such conversations. Perhaps he was taking a calculated risk.

Siw, nevertheless, never found the box.
A couple of days later, however, the police did.
It was buried just where he had said, around forty metres from the house, at the foot of a tall, smooth tree in the copse between the house and Lake Mosvatnet.
Investigators first found a small, unnatural pile of twigs and leaves.
They dug down a little and came across a package wrapped up in silver tape.
They pulled off the tape and found a tea box.
In the tea box was a plastic bag.
In the plastic bag was a ziplock.
And in the ziplock lay Siw and Tom’s fate: a ball of brown powder. Around two hundred grams of heroin. Estimated street value: 400,000 kroner.
They went back into the house and arrested Siw.
Both the police and judges said they believed Tom. He was no drug baron or ring-leader, just a washed-up junkie and petty criminal. Someone – he wouldn’t say who – had asked him to store the heroin for a few days. In return he would be given three grams for his own use.
– I’m a slave to heroin, he said.
– To me it felt like Christmas Day.
– Did Siw know that you had packed heroin into that box?
– No, she’s got nothing to do with it.
The charges against Siw were dropped due to a lack of evidence.
After many years of heroin abuse, Tom had begun a rehab program from prison. He had also been quick to plead guilty, so was handed a reduced sentence. Furthermore, the heroin had been cut. He was given just three years in prison, with six months suspended.
But for Siw it was a bombshell.
The love of her life was gone.
Now there was no one there to protect her.

Worries from the prison cell
– The situation is out of control, said Tom.
He had been inside for a few weeks, but from the letters and phone calls he was receiving he realised what had happened on the outside. She had lost all control. The others had taken over. That was why, in October 2008, he approached a prison officer.
Someone had to help Siw, he begged.
They parked outside the house in Henrik Ibsen Street and rang the doorbell. The door was damaged and Siw had to prise it open with a knife.
Care worker Pål Holden, who had been working with Siw for a few months, introduced her to Karianne Borgen. She was a welfare officer in Stavanger’s outreach team, what they called the Alert team.
Karianne reached out her hand and smiled.
Chaos. Disorder. Smashed windows.

It was three days before Christmas 2008.
Pål had filled Karianne in on Siw’s situation before the visit. There was a stream of people in and out of the house, mostly criminals and drug addicts who had sex with or abused her. Siw was prostituting herself. She was getting high on heroin, amphetamine and any other dope or pills she could get her hands on. She was in and out of the psychiatric hospital and was severely mentally ill.
She was living dangerously.
They saw Tom’s concerns from prison as an opportunity. They had come up with a plan, one in which Karianne would play a major role.
– I’m worried about you, said Karianne.
She also said that Tom was anxious about her and that that was why they were there.
– I’m alright, Siw replied, smiling evasively.
– I don’t need any help.
In her notes, Karianne Borgen later wrote that Siw had tears in her eyes when she said this.

They staked it all on one woman
What do you do if, as a social worker, you are face to face with a person in deep need who says that she doesn’t need help? Do you walk away? Do you keep on knocking at her door?
It was Karianne Borgen’s job to keep on knocking.
Stavanger’s Alert team had been set up two years earlier as a collaboration between Stavanger city authorities and the University Hospital. In the years that followed, more cities established outreach teams. The welfare state was struggling to help some of those who were most sick and at risk, those who had both a serious mental disorder and an extensive drug problem. When working from a hospital ward or requiring meetings at the social services office, these people were difficult to reach. These teams would travel to where these people were and where they lived.
Siw was at the core of this new frontline for the Norwegian welfare state.

In addition to being physically and mentally exhausted by years of drug abuse, she was regularly subjected to violence and exploitation.
Most people had given up on her.
This was precisely when the outreach teams would sense the opportunity.
While the Alert Team’s authority was a little fuzzy – being both municipal and statal – Pål Holden worked for the municipality’s Rehabilitation unit, or Rehab, as it was called. This was the first time that the Alert team and Rehab had really made a joint effort regarding Siw.
Pål Holden and Karianne Borgen had set some goals for themselves. But in order to succeed, Siw would have to have confidence in them.
They had to start building trust.
Pål had got along well with Siw, but she had a tendency to see men as objects to be flirted with. And she had her old habits. They had to explain to her, for example, that she should stop answering the door naked – if not for her own sake, then for Pål’s.
So they staked it all on Karianne.
A woman, and one just a few years younger than Siw. She had done a lot of work with drug addicts, and had been through tough times of her own.
Would they see eye to eye?

The tears
Before their next visit, in February 2009, Siw had thrown the TV out of the window. She was more forthcoming. The TV had begun making strange noises, she said. She was scared that it was going to explode.
– It’s tidier than last time, said Karianne.
– Yes, said Siw.
Her ex-boyfriend, Helmer, had dropped by. He had demanded that she be better at keeping things shipshape.
She borrowed Karianne’s mobile so she could call the prison and speak to Tom.
After the conversation, she started crying. It was not often anyone saw Siw cry.
– How are you doing? Karianne asked.
– Living alone isn’t easy.
So many men would show up at the door. Men who mistreated her.
– Do you think I should fight back to defend myself? I can fight if I need to!
She was smiling and laughing, but also trying to play down the situation she was in. When asked if she was prostituting herself, she was dismissive.
– I don’t walk the streets. People come here. People who need something from me.
Karianne told her about the Alert team and what kind of help they could offer.
Siw was positive.
She would be happy to stay in touch with Karianne.
Was there anything that Siw would like to be checked by a doctor? There was. Siw had her worries. It had been a long time since she had seen a doctor.
– Can I book an appointment for you? asked Karianne.
– Yes, Siw replied.
In the months to come there would be many failed visits. Karianne never got as close to Siw as she had hoped. There was never a «Hi, Karianne!» moment.
But Siw recognised her, at least, and remembered certain things they had done together.
Each time they met, Siw would switch to a Trondheim dialect. Karianne was from Trondheim.
Karianne wondered if Siw was making fun of her. Was this perhaps Siw’s way of saying that she thought it was dumb of Karianne to come here thinking she could help?
– I hear you’re from Trondheim too, joked Karianne.
But Siw didn’t get it. It seemed she had switched dialects without even noticing it herself.

Words in the waiting room
The protocol for visits was that the team would always consist of two individuals, but this made it difficult to get through to Siw. In an attempt to solve this, Karianne’s colleague would hang back a little, as in March 2009, when at long last they got her to visit her general practitioner. Karianne’s colleague stayed in the car as she walked up to the waiting room with Siw. They had a few minutes alone, and Siw said things such as:
– It’s not often that I go out. I’m no good with people. But I get a lot of visitors.
There had been a break-in recently, she said. Intruders would get into her house while she was sleeping.
– But I’m not frightened of living alone, she was quick to add.
– I get some help from my ex now and again.
She was afraid that she had been infected with HIV. She had shared needles with a girl who was rumoured to have AIDS.
Is there an antidote for AIDS
Just as she was about to take the blood test, she almost backed out. Karianne persuaded her to take it.
It showed that her worries about AIDS were unfounded.
However, a letter from the doctor informed her that she had hepatitis C. This is an inflammation of the liver that is transmitted via unclean syringes and unprotected sex, the doctor wrote, and can be fatal if left untreated.
«I ask you to book an appointment so that we can discuss it. A precondition for any hospital treatment is that you stop using narcotics. Nor should you be sharing syringes, under any circumstances,» wrote the doctor.
We don’t know if Siw ever read the letter. The only thing we do know is that she never booked another appointment.

Siw’s merry-go-round
The plan was to take the opportunity the next time Siw suffered a psychotic episode. They knew it would happen again sooner or later. She would be arrested by the police somewhere or other in the city, then driven to the emergency room, where she would be committed to the psychiatric hospital and discharged a few days later because she was too well to be held against her will.
This was Siw’s merry-go-round.
Karianne thought that there was something unnatural about Siw’s repeated psychoses. They happened so frequently that it would be strange if all of them were triggered by drug abuse. In spite of all her previous admissions to hospital, there were still many unanswered questions. The next time Siw became psychotic, they would inform her general practitioner and attempt to make some changes. They wanted to get her into a ward where she would be thoroughly assessed. They could then also get her clean and talk to her properly about treatment and follow-up.
But they were balancing on a knife’s edge. Siw was suspicious by nature. It was difficult to tell her everything they were thinking. At the same time, they couldn’t go behind her back.

– I can see that you’re not doing well. I know that this life is no good for you, Karianne might say, without ever mentioning solutions that they had in mind: a care facility or a staffed residential home.
– Wouldn’t it be good to be in a place where you can feel safe? A place where you can recover? Where you can eat well?
Siw rejected such ideas.
During March, Siw was formally approved as one of the Alert team’s patients. On many occasions, Karianne was left standing at the door. She would stand on the steps and shout for Siw. Then she would write a greeting on a card and leave it in the gap between the door and the frame. She carried a pile of picture cards in her handbag.
She often felt a sense of unease when patients didn’t open up. Might Siw be lying dead in there? Might that be the reason she didn’t answer or reply?
Once Siw didn’t answer the door for an extended period of time, so Karianne called the police.
A patrol car drove up to the house.
Siw was home, and was fine, the police reported back.

One day in April, Tom called from prison. He had been on day release for a few hours and had visited Siw. She was up and around, but thinner. He thought she wasn’t getting enough food. Could they take her to the Salvation Army food bank on Tuesdays?
Tom had been granted opioid replacement therapy. Could they evaluate ORT for Siw too? She would do it if they did it together.
They also ought to help her work out what she was entitled to in social security, he said.
And take her to the dentist.
The very next day, Karianne rang the doorbell. Siw’s face appeared at the attic window. She looked at them, then walked away.
The last time that Karianne Borgen visited Siw, she was in a good mood, smiling and laughing and chatting away. The sink in the bathroom was smashed. She had been robbed the day before. Karianne took her to the social services office in Madla to collect some emergency funds and food, and then to Rema 1000 supermarket, where she had been blacklisted for shoplifting. But she didn’t want to go to the doctor. She feared being sent back to hospital, she said, as if she had caught a whiff of her carers’ plan.
I can’t bear the thought of being locked up.

The occupation
When summer arrived, Siw vanished. Nobody in the support services had the slightest idea where she was.
A little over a week into July, Karianne was called up by care worker Pål Holden.
– Someone else has occupied her apartment, he said.
– If she comes home, they won’t let her in.
The rumours were that Siw had been forced to live in her own garden for a while, and to steal from the elderly care home next door. Then she had simply disappeared. Pål had been in to take some pictures. It looked even more hellish than usual, as though someone had tossed a hand grenade into every room. The sun cast a harsh light over a garbage dump of an apartment, one that the intruders were never going to put back in order. Traces of Siw could be seen among the junk, such as a black shopping bag
It was neither the first nor the last time that Pål would have to order a skip to clean out Siw’s apartment.
Kjell: They would occupy her apartment sometimes. Then they wouldn’t let her back in, so she would come here because she had nowhere to live. Then I would have to go over there. When they saw me they would scuttle away.
Aftenblad: Why? You don’t look like a dodgy character.
Kjell: No, they didn’t want me to see that...
Tove: Tell it like it is. They were scared you were going to set the dog on them. That’s how it was.
Kjell: They didn’t want me to see that they had thrown Siw out and that she couldn’t get back in to her own apartment. They occupied it and used it as a...
Tove: ..party joint.
Kjell: Then they would get sick of her, because she would want to put things straight and...
Tove: She could lose the plot and start speaking her own language. It was too much stress for them, so they wanted her out of there.
Kjell: It was too much for them. They saw she was ill, so they just chased her away.

A notorious drug den
The house next to Lake Mosvatnet was too big for Siw. Moreover, they would regularly receive complaints that she was “visiting” the elderly care home next door. The building was also in a terrible condition. The municipality had taken the decision to renovate.
While Siw had gone astray, the care workers moved her furniture and possessions to another apartment in another neighbourhood.
That was how she ended up at 28 Haugås Road, in Åsen, Hillevåg. The city’s two duplexes were notorious. These were what they called “municipal rehabilitation apartments”. The place was a magnet for drugs, dealing, crime and violence. Complaints from neighbours, ambulances, and police cars were all par for the course.

Exactly how did 28 Haugås Road seem like a reasonable place to move Siw to?
Pål Holden doesn’t recall. Those kinds of decisions were taken further up the chain of command.
They couldn’t live in a regular housing association. She would have stolen the neighbours’ garden furniture, door signs, clothes hanging out to dry, and anything else besides.
He does remember some discussion about municipal building complexes that were not suitable for her to be moved into. The first place was dominated by younger, harder people who were dealing heroin. At the second were several older drug addicts – not a good match, since Siw’s body was her method of payment and older men formed an important customer base for her.
It was rare for them to have a choice. In the main, people in care were moved to the first apartment available, and this is presumably how Siw ended up at 28 Haugås Road, which was, as far as Pål remembers, intended to be a temporary move.
Welfare officer Karianne Borgen was not informed about the move before the decision was taken. The Alert team was never involved before their patients were moved. Helping Siw was a difficult task. Now, if it was at all possible, it had become even harder.
In the summer of 2009, the municipality’s care workers were searching for her. They were trying to inform her that she had been moved – and to hand over the keys.
On 4 August, Karianne wrote in the Alert team’s journal:
«Nobody knows where the patient is staying. The last time Rehab was in touch with her was four weeks ago.»
What should they do? In the autumn, Karianne called a meeting about Siw’s situation. There were several reasons. One was that she was about to go on maternity leave. Now she had to help those she was leaving behind to set out a plan.
Siw had just turned 40 and had been abusing drugs since her teens, but this seems to have been the first time the support services had joined forces in a serious attempt to help her.
At the meeting, Karianne made it clear what she thought was the real reason that Siw had never received the help and treatment that she needed.
Now they set themselves the following goal: to reduce the damage of the harsh, destructive life that Siw was living.
They formed a responsibility group. It consisted of one new person from the Alert team, Siw’s drug consultant from the health and social office in Madla, her case handler from Nav [Norwegian Labour and Welfare Administration], and care worker Pål Holden from the Rehabilitation unit.
Now it was all about making contact with Siw again, building trust, and getting across her need for treatment.
Karianne Borgen was on the way out. Another colleague was preparing to take her place.
There was another drama unfolding during the same period. In the spring of 2009, Siw appeared at Stavanger city court accused of several minor crimes: possession of 0.4 grams of heroin and 1.5 grams of hashish, shoplifting of food items, a knitted sweater, a pair of trousers, underwear, cosmetics and a night dress. And for the theft of 11,000 kroner from a taxi driver’s money pouch.
But the case was adjourned just as it was getting started. The judges remarked on her behaviour, suspecting she was psychotic. Once more the judges ordered a report into whether she was criminally responsible.
– How do you manage at home?
– It’s fine.
The expert psychiatrists had filed reports on her twice previously. Now they were sitting face to face with the 40-year-old woman, and she was making no secret of the fact that she hated being committed. They made note of a series of her strange assertions.
Such as: «I have a brother who looks after me. He lives in another time.»
Or when she confided in a police officer that she was really an aristocrat, but had been kidnapped by her parents when she was young.
As usual, she came to her senses after a while.
Now she was cold, concise and alert.
– How’s it going?
– Slowly.
What did she have to say about the psychiatric hospital?
– They just discharge me.
And the rehabilitation services? How often did they visit?
She didn’t know.
How many care workers usually came?
She didn’t know.
What were they called?
She didn’t know that either.
– What do the care workers help you with?
– Nothing.

The men
The levy broke. The care workers’ conversation with the expert psychiatrists became a never-ending concern report about a defenceless person in dire need.
Siw had been off the rails ever since Tom was put in prison in the summer of 2008. Since that day, anybody could walk into Siw’s apartment and exploit her.
They recounted that the neighbours were always complaining about Siw – that, for example, she would take out the garbage as naked as the day she was born.
They reported that they were supposed to see her once a week, but were not even close to achieving it.
She often wouldn’t open the door. She didn’t show up to appointments. She could vanish for days and weeks at a time.
At about this time, autumn 2009, she was keeping things in the new apartment in quite good order. She could make a little food, but had become very thin. She was able to do the laundry, but the washing machine had fallen apart.
The windows were often smashed. They were forever changing the locks.

Siw was not capable of taking care of mobile phones. If you wanted to speak to Siw, you had to meet her face to face. She couldn’t keep hold of a bank card. She had to go to the social services office twice a month to collect her social security, but never asked to be driven there.
She never asked for any help whatsoever.
But you couldn’t say a word against her personal hygiene. Siw showered non-stop. Often ten times a day. This, perhaps, was also a sign of just how ill she was.
When her gaze was clear it was possible to speak to her.
She never betrayed any feelings, said the care workers, except when she spoke to her boyfriend on the telephone. She never opened up to them. Never mentioned her family – they didn’t think she was in touch with them. She never spoke about her own life, about her plans and thoughts for the future.
Siw was not much to be seen around the city. For the most part she stayed at home. But there were always men coming and going from her apartment.
Whenever she didn’t open the door for the care workers, they assumed these men were visiting.

The torture
When Siw arrived at the hospital, several nasty wounds were discovered on her inner thighs.
– What happened? asked the psychiatrists.
Siw responded with silence.
– They burned her, explained Pål Holden.
He remembers visiting her after the incident. Although Siw was often lightly dressed, this time she was wearing jogging pants that were several sizes too big and a baggy shirt. She limped in towards the living room as though she was injured.
But the jogging pants slipped off; it was then that they saw the burn marks beneath her navel. She was red and purple on one side, as though she had been kicked or beaten. Her hair had been roughly shorn, like the «Germans’ sluts» after the liberation of Norway in 1945. There were scorch marks from a clothes iron on the living room floor.
Somebody had burned her in several places with an iron: on the groin, beneath her navel, and presumably on her crotch.
It was difficult to understand the hell she had been through because Siw never squealed on others. Not even on those who abused her.

She had staggered over to visit her ex-boyfriend Helmer, who drove to a pharmacy and bought pain relief cream. She had pulled at her ruined hair and said:
– No, what the fuck am I going to do with this, then?
Then she cut off the rest.
The rumours in Stavanger’s underworld were that she had been paid a visit by some «big lads». The kind you «don’t fuck with». They said she was accused of stealing speed. And it was said that they had come round to force her to tell them where the drugs were, or to punish her. Or both.
This, thought care worker Pål Holden, was Siw’s world. He would have liked to tell the city’s leaders and politicians about this world. They had tried to warn their superiors how inadequate what they were offering Siw was. But at some point or another, the message came to a grinding halt.
Siw was left to her own devices.
She was abandoned to the carnivores, as he called them.

***

We wrote "The Story if Siw" as long as we thought it was worth. Over a hundred thousand have read it in Norwegian. Hope you feel for the same, even though it pushes the limit of 17.000 words by far. To read the rest of chapter 4 and the story´s last four chapters, please continue at: www.aftenbladet.no/siw