How the teacher laughed in his grey beard cos no one could answer Norum’s question(s) – least of all a runty little night-school student. The best minds of many generations had been driven starving hysterical and naked by that Norum question(s) and not a one of them had solved it.

Grief started her homework on the bus back to the ghetto and when she got home she was already ‘deep in thought’ ©. Finding her mum asleep in front of the TV (watching NEW ADVENTURES OF ZEBRA-HEAD) and surrounded by old packets of crack (or crackers) she went straight upstairs and sat at her desk.

This was her big chance she thought to get some work done before her mum woke up and started playing Bloody Hell ®.

In the night’s dark Grief studied the equations, rearranging them in her head and scratching at her scalp with the broke and bitten end of her biro. Down below her in the city there were the sound of some cop cars screaming to a rescue, and of some blind kids throwing stones at bottles and of some leaves falling from the advertisements for trees. It was autumn.

Grief sat there thinking hard and she got stiller and stiller in thought until in the end you could hardly see her breathing even so thoughtful was she and when Lars Frederick Klokkerfaldett (her latest uncle) came banging on the door he could not wake her (or Wendy) or raise her or gain her attention or break her reverie or bring her to the door to let him in.

It was the Spring in fact when Grief awoke at last and a full six (6) months had passed since she first sat down at her desk, so deep in thought had she been. Her mum was dead on the couch of course and smelt real bad but the TV was still on and its bright Technicolor scenes filled the house with sounds and sickly sights.

Love is blind. Grief didn’t cry but it wasn’t for lack of sadness. She did not cry when the paramedics took her mum out of the house in polythene boxes and she did not cry at the funeral and she did not cry when Lars Frederick Klokkerfaldet came round for some books that he’d leant Wendy before she died.

Grief only cried a year later in fact, when she got drunk one night and got lost in a city called Copenhagen. Everybody has their own kind of mourning and Grief was no exception to this.

Only after the funeral and everything did Grief return to her homework and then she certainly did get a big surprise that would change her pathetic life for good.