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that they have found a body, but nobody will say that the body is anything to do with the man who went missing or vice versa though it is obviously what they mean. It is something to do with the war. The prime minister comes on surrounded by cheering Americans and having his hand shaken by men in suits. After the news a woman in a tv studio talks for ages about what happened to her bowel movements since she started putting her food into special combinations. Not just a pretty faeces, the woman presenter says. Everybody in the studio laughs. It is juvenile. A man phones up the programme and says he has been drinking his urine. The people in the studio discuss whether it would make you feel better to drink your own urine. Astrid is glad that Michael isn’t here since he would probably think the urine thing was a good idea and make them all do it.
    This tv only has thirty or so channels on it and most of them are rubbish. It is typically substandard. There is a 1980s music video show on another channel. It is okay to watch it because neither of them is around to act like a loser going on and on about when pop music was political or do the stupid jerky dance. The video comes on about the girl who is in a café having a cup of coffee and reading a comic then the comic comes alive and she becomes part of the story. The boy from the strip cartoon winks at her, then he holds out his hand, right out of the picture into her world and she takes it in her real hand and goes inside the cartoon world and becomes an illustration like him, but out in the real world the woman who owns the café can’t work out where the girl has gone and is angry she left without paying for her coffee so she screws the comic up and throws it in the bin which in comic world is i.e. a total disaster and makes men with crowbars break in and start being violent. So the boy actually rips his world open for the girl (his world is made of paper) so she can escape through the ripped paper of the comic back into her own world. The woman in the café in the real world finds the girl, who’s real again, collapsed on top of the café rubbish bin behind the counter. So the girl grabs the comic all crumpled out of the bin, goes running out of the café, runs all the way home and sits in her bedroom and tries to smooth it out. The end of the video is the boy from the comic (who is the lead singer from the pop group too) trying to smash his way through into the girl’s real world to become real, not just an illustration.
    Astrid goes through to the kitchen and breaks the loaf in two without touching anywhere any knife will have been. She fists out the bread from the inside. She eats it. On her way back through she pulls her t-shirt up over her mouth and breathes into the cotton, then smells the cotton where she breathed. It smells quite nice. She wonders if this is what she would taste like, this sweet breath-smell taste, if she could taste what it was she tasted of, or if someone else was maybe to. But what if she tastes disgusting? She worries about tasting disgusting through two more videos. Then she switches the tv off.
    She fits the battery into the camera and checks it’s working. She tucks the charger, still charging the other battery, in behind the old horrible crime and mystery paperbacks on the lowest shelf of the bookcase. She listens in the hall but there is no sound of Magnus. She leaves the house by the front door. Her mother and Michael keep saying how amazing it is to be in the country where you can trust people and leave your car unlocked and the doors of the house unlocked or even wide open. Astrid checks that the front door is locked behind her. If people want to rob the house they can go through the open French windows in the garden and her mother can be to blame. They won’t find the charger unless they’ve come specifically to steal old Agatha Christie novels, which would be an excellent ironic crime.
    She walks down the lane that leads to the