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forward to an event which a mere two weeks ago would have seemed like a catastrophe: having a sister, a little sister.

4
    First of all, though, the lodger had to be sorted out, our new source of income. And that was still no trivial matter. We had three callers in as many days; Mother served coffee and cakes to a young woman who was the spitting image of Doris Day, but who exhibited two rotten teeth behind her blood-red lipstick when she forgot herself and smiled, at which point negotiations came to a halt.
    We were visited by an elderly man who stank of alcohol and some indefinable pungent odour and was incapable of explaining himself, so even though he wafted more hundred kroner notes before us than I had ever seen, he too was shown the door.
    Thereafter came one more man, in a hat and coat, a trifle distant, but a pleasant fellow, smelling of after-shave, the kind that Frank wore on Sundays and which I was told – by Anne-Berit – was called Aqua Velva and which could also, in an emergency, be drunk. He had clear, calm, colourless eyes that watched not only Mother but also me with a certain curiosity. He had been at sea, he said, had come ashore, and was working now in the lucrative construction industry and needed temporary digs until he found his own place.
    Neither of us had heard of “digs” or “own place”. But there was something modern and reassuring about this man, as if he had an education, Mother declared afterwards. But in fact he seemed absolutely normal, or the way we had imagined a lodger to be, except of course that he wore a hat and coat, like a film star. What settled it, however, was the following remark, as he was standing in the new doorway peering in at my desk with all my comics and Matchbox cars, nodding slowly:
    “Cosy.”
    “Yes, it is, isn’t it …?”
    “But no room for the T.V., I can see.”
    “Oh, you’ve got a T.V., have you?” Mother said, as though it were natural to have a T.V. set when you didn’t even have a place to live. “We’ll have to put it in the sitting room then,” she said with a coquettish curtsey, upon which he returned her smile with a simple:
    “Yes, of course, I don’t watch it much anyway.”
    In a way that was it, the deal was done.
    His name was Kristian and he moved in the following Saturday. By then I had moved in with Mother, who all of a sudden didn’t know what to do with herself. After a bit of to–ing and fro–ing, she also ended up in temporary digs, in her own bedroom, that is, staying where she had always been, where by the way we were in the midst of preparations to receive the new member of the family, six-year-old Linda.
    “This must be a bit odd for you,” she said, giving me a sympathetic look.
    No, I didn’t think there was anything odd about it, now I had a view of the blocks opposite, and I had plenty of friends there, too. Not only that, we were in the fortunate position of having a bunk bed which Mother had bought cheap three years ago and split into two parts. Part two was in the loft storeroom. It just needed to be brought down and assembled on top of mine, a straightforward procedure for which we didn’t even need Frank’s help.
    But there was something else worrying Mother, and that was that the T.V. set, which had indeed been installed in the sitting room, just stood there and was never switched on, because after Kristian moved in, we didn’t see a great deal of him for a while, apart from his hat and coat, which hung in their appointed place in the hallway beside Mother’s two cloaks and my
peau de pêche
jacket. He hadn’t asked whether the room came with access to the kitchen, which of course it didn’t, it came with access to the toilet and bathroom, one bath a week. So he must have been eating out, or he kept some provisions in his room, in private, if he was ever there, that is, we never heard a peep out of him. One evening Mother decided enough was enough, went into the hallway and knocked on his