If only they would come upstairs soon. Hanne’s eyes were starting to smart. The day after tomorrow was Sunday, and she was going to visit her real father and his new wife, who was much prettier than her mother, but still repulsive. Goodness knows her father didn’t really love her, because they didn’t have any children, and people only had children if they loved each other very much, like her mother loved her new father, back when she had her little brother. But luckily that passed, because after that there were no more babies who could be strangled by their harnesses or who could set the house on fire. Loving someone couldn’t be helped. It came and went like whooping cough. But it was no use if only one person was the loving one, and that was a good thing, because Hanne loved her math teacher and her real father and her mother of course, and of the three she was only certain that her father loved her back. And she couldn’t marry her father since he was old, like she would be when she grew up and got breasts and things like that, and you couldn’t get married before then. If only she had been just as big as her father’s new wife, whom she was supposed to call Grete-mom, when she stayed with them. But her father just called her Grete. Boy, was she dumb. And she had so many fancy dresses, a lot more than her mother. ‘Don’t worry about that,’ her mother said. ‘Only dumb people concern themselves with dressing up all the time.’ But that her father, who was so smart, liked to kiss and be nice to such a dummy! Even though she had those long curls and eyes that always looked damp, as if she had just been crying. And she always laughed at everything, even when Hanne misbehaved. Last time she was there, Grete had put on a long silk gown with nothing on top, and spun around in front of Hanne and said, ‘Don’t you think I look pretty?’ And Hanne had borrowed a joke from her limited, newly acquired vocabulary from school: ‘Yes! From behind and in the dark!’ But then they had both laughed so much that Hanne ended up crying and had to be comforted on her father’s lap like a little baby, and she drew out her crying until Grete-mom stopped laughing. Served her right!