She squeezed the cigarette flat between her lips, so hard was she pressing.

‘Or would you like me to?’

Her eyes said nothing, didn’t want to know.

I swallowed. ‘They came to see you girls. In your room. Who was it? All of them at once? Or one after the other? It was … Harry Kløve, Arild Hjellestad, Jan Petter Olsen and Jakob Aasen, your father…’

‘He wasn’t…’ Her eyes opened wide and she took a breath, like a deep sob.

‘No. But…?’

She removed the cigarette from her mouth, held it between two fingers, rolled it between them while concentrating on it.

She chewed her lips. ‘Pappa … I still call him that even if he … That’s his name, you see … Pappa.’

Now it was my turn to stay quiet. I nodded encouragingly. Sympathetically.360

‘Pappa had done … this … had come in to see me since … forever. For as long as I can remember.’

Her voice fell to a whisper and I had to move even closer to hear what she was saying. ‘I was so small … that… at first, at first I thought that was how it was, everyone did it, the other girls in the street, everyone. Later I realised that … it was special. But then I thought it was me who was … that it was my fault I was … Then I got used to closing my eyes. Just lying there quite still. As if it wasn’t me it was happening to. Or as if it was something I was dreaming. That I was somewhere else, with other people … that I didn’t know about what was happening to … my body. But he’d never brought others with him before. It was supposed to be a secret. Something only he and I knew about. So then – afterwards – I was able to tell Mamma, because he was the one who had broken the agreement.’

She paused, and I said as gently as I could: ‘And that night when all of them visited you…?’

She nodded. ‘They came back home. It was late. Mamma was out. I was in bed. I heard the racket, the clinking of bottles, the music on full volume. But that was quite normal. It had happened before. I remember thinking: So at least he’s got that tonight. So he won’t come to me. I remember hoping they had women with them, but I didn’t hear any female voices. Then … suddenly he came in, stood in the half-light and said my name. I could hear from his voice what he wanted. So I didn’t answer. I pretended to be asleep. Hoping he would go away. But he didn’t. He just lay on top of me, pulled back the duvet, pulled down my pyjama bottoms and … just…’

The cigarette had gone out, but she took a few, long, cold draughts on it anyway. Two narrow lines of tears trickled from her eyes. ‘Afterwards he went away and I lay there in the dark with the same cold feeling between my legs. But then…’361