One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway by Åsne Seierstad

life, Net was to become part of the established art world.
    ‘Consept was after us and the law took us,’ Anders went on in his immigrant speak, his ‘Kebab Norwegian’. ‘It was, like, well sick!’
    There was furtive laughter from the steps.
    Not many West Enders came to Egertorget, so Net had noticed Anders, the nobody with a craving to be let in. But Net could also see that Anderswanted more than simply to hang out there. He was ambitious and determined, not just vaguely interested like so many of the others. Should they accept him?
    It was a feeling that ran deep. You just couldn’t trust that lot from the other side of town. The West End might have the capital, but the East End boys owned the street: the walls were free.
    And anyway, Morg was so ordinary, in Net’s opinion.Mediocre. Average. No particular asset to a crew.
    Becoming part of a crew was the next step for Anders. Before he could be King. Put his name alongside the greats. But to be part of all that, you had to be invited to join. And the invitation was slow in coming.
    As the hard layer of trampled snow turned to slush in March, Morg found himself arrested again. Again he kept his mouth shut. And againhe walked free.
    *   *   *
    In the fifteen years of Anders’s lifetime, the number of non-Western immigrants in Norway had risen almost fivefold. In Oslo, the change was even more marked. By about the mid-1990s, a third of those living in the eastern areas of Oslo city centre were from immigrant backgrounds. The largest group was the Pakistani community, who had come to Norway for work in the 1970s.Their children had one foot in each culture; the girls were closely supervised and generally not allowed out after school, the boys had a freer rein.
    In Anders’s eyes, the foreigners were the heroes. Their gangs were rougher round the edges and tougher than those of the Norwegian kids. The Labour-run city council had bought flats for refugees on the western side of town to counteract the ghettoeffect in the east. The flats were in the blocks and terraces round where Anders lived, and were referred to as ‘the slum’ by the snobs who lived further up the hill in the same school catchment area.
    There were sharp contrasts between the socially sheltered Norwegian middle class and the immigrants. Inherited codes of honour that were alien to Norwegians explained some of the conflicts thatarose, but often it was just that people found it hard to get along. Wenche grew more and more vocal in her annoyance with the Somali children running round the blocks of flats and making a noise at all hours of day and night, while the foreign arrivals could be bitter about Norwegians who welcomed them by throwing firecrackers onto their balconies. One Somali father on an adjoining staircase armedhimself with a bat so he could administer a good hiding to the boys who had sprayed water at his son. ‘Don’t water my son!’ he yelled out over Silkestrå.
    It wasn’t worth picking fights with the gangs. One of Anders’s friends was beaten up by a foreign gang as a payback for something. A few days later, the gang leader was clubbed down by two Norwegians outside the Rimi supermarket and left bleedingin the street. Revenge had to be countered with yet more revenge. One evening, some of the gang members climbed over the wall of the Bygdøy mansion belonging to the shipping billionaire John Fredriksen, the richest man in Norway. His fourteen-year-old twin daughters had friends round at the time, and the boy who had carried out the revenge attack – the boyfriend of one of the daughters – wasthere. The gang got in through an open window. Their intended target hid in Mrs Fredriksen’s wardrobe. They found him, dragged him out, beat him until he was covered in blood, broke his fingers and threw him down a flight of stairs. Leaving the boy lying unconscious on the floor, the gang calmly left.
    The gangs had their territories and defended them like young wolves. Where