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things you can buy there. And can you guess how many traffic signs I know now? About a hundred, mebbe. How about this: if there’s a blue round thing with an arrow pointing somewhere. Dead easy. I got that straight away. No problem. I didn’t even have to ask you or Dad. It mines you have to drive to there – to where the arrow’s pointing. And if there are arrows inside a round circle. Do you know what that mines?”
    “Trousers! Now!”
    “Yes, I’m putting them on. It mines a roundabout.”
    “Means,” said Petter, who was passing his little brother’s room on his way to the kitchen.
    Mella managed to get Gustav’s trousers on and dragged him into the kitchen while he went on and on about various traffic signs and the lessons in swordsmanship that Link gets from Oshus when he has left the cave. She sat him down in front of a bowl of sour milk and muesli and an open sandwich while making a now-you-can-take-over-before-I-do-him-an-injury sign behind his back to her husband. Robert was already sitting at the breakfast table, focusing all his attention on the
Advertiser.
    Their sixteen-year-old daughter Jenny was hunched over her physics textbook. Mella had long since given up any hope of beingable to help her with her homework. The death blow had been a test on Euclidian geometry.
    Petter, the eleven-year-old, was staring at his bowl of sour milk and muesli with a helpless expression on his face.
    “I haven’t got a spoon,” he said.
    “But you’ve still got legs, I assume,” Mella said, pouring coffee into her mug and sitting down with a thud.
    “Mum, do you know what?” Gustav said, having been quiet for five seconds since his mother had shovelled a spoonful of sour milk into his mouth.
    “Can’t somebody shut him up?” Jenny hissed. “I’m trying to revise. I have a test tomorrow.”
    “Be quiet, you,” Gustav said indignantly. “You interrupted me!”
    “I forbid you to talk to me,” Jenny said, putting her hands over her ears.
    “If I get a Lego Mummeleo Falko for Christmas I’ll be quiet for a whole month. Can I have it, Mum?”
    “It’s called a Millennium Falcon, you nitwit,” Petter said. “Mum, do you know what it costs? Five thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine kronor.”
    “Come off it!” Mella said. “Who pays six thousand kronor for a Lego set? It’s not on.”
    Petter shrugged.
    “It’s you who’s a nitwit,” Gustav shouted.
    Petter made a rapid series of gestures with his fingers: first at his face,
face
; then up to the heavens,
up
; then two fingers,
to
; then he waved them in a fuck-off gesture,
fac
; then held his left index finger upright with his right one horizontally across the top of it,
t
; and finally drew a letter S with his right index finger. Face up to facts.
    “Stop it now,” Gustav yelled, with a sob in his voice. “You should face up to the fact that you are a fat nitwit!”
    “For God’s sake shut up now, all of you!” Jenny screamed. “Thatdoes it! I’m not coming with you. I’ve got a test tomorrow, can’t you understand that?”
    Gustav gave his elder brother a shove. Tears came flooding into his eyes. Petter laughed scornfully. Gustav set about him with his fists.
    “Ouch,” Petter squeaked in a loud, unnatural voice.
    Robert looked up from his newspaper.
    “Put the dirty stuff in the dishwasher now,” he said, apparently unmoved by the world war that had just broken out.
    Jenny stood up, slammed her book shut and yelled, “I’ll do it!”
    At that point Mella’s mobile started ringing. Where on earth had she left it? Not too far away, judging by the volume.
    “Be quiet now, everybody,” she shouted. “Can anybody find my phone?”
    She struggled to her feet and followed the noise, ending up at a pile of clothes on the chair in the hall.
    Silence had fallen in the kitchen. Her family was observing her. It was not a long call.
    “Hello,” she said. “What the hell … ? I’ll be there right away.”
    “What’s