The white artificial hair hurt her fingertips.

Her father stirred on the sofa behind her, and both of them went stiff until he settled down again.

Grete sat up on the table, because it made her belly hurt to hang over the edge. Next to her lay an orange lipstick, to go with the white hair, and a little case with black eyeshadow, which was wet in the middle from spit. Black and red and white and silver. Her mother’s costume made a nice crinkling sound when she moved, and she smelled nice too. Her father lay there sleeping behind her. He had to work a night shift, and her mother had to make sure to be home early in the morning before he got off work. Karneval festivities might last all night, but a man could never understand that. Men didn’t go to Karneval. There were some pictures of men in the magazine where her mother had found the pattern for her costume, but they just looked foolish. Men went to work, and when they were home they slept. Karneval was for ladies.

Grete was glad she wasn’t a boy.

Finally she was able to put down the heavy mirror and admire her mother, who was standing in front of the sideboard, holding up the black tarlatan gown with both hands to see if the skirt could be taken off over her head. Grete blushed at how pretty her mother looked. Nothing on her neck or shoulders, and the rest a profusion of eleven yards of billowing tarlatan at one krone per yard (but to her father they said it cost half) with glimmering silver sequins strewn all over. Every single one was sewn on by hand, and they glistened in the light from the bare bulb in the ceiling when she turned – slow and rustling, fragrant and unreal in the modest living room.

She smiled at her daughter, careful not to wrinkle her makeup.

‘Do I look fine?’ she asked.

Grete nodded eagerly.

The costume was called ‘Queen of the Night’. It was the nicest one in the whole magazine. Last year her mother was ‘Coachman from the 1800s’ in blue and gold satin with a high, black, cardboard hat and boy’s knee pants. The cloth for that one had only cost two kroner, but her father, as usual, still had to calculate how many bags of oatmeal or pounds of carrots could have been bought with the money. What nonsense. They had oatmeal and carrots to eat anyway, and her mother didn’t get many chances to enjoy herself, and it wasn’t her fault he was unemployed half the year, so she had to go out and clean for other people.