‘She knows you do…this?’ I gesture to the obscene balloons, each one three or four times larger than a standard balloon. Each one irregular. Deformed.

‘We pay triple price for units on this floor. Discretion guaranteed with Premium Hive storage. Only we have the keys, you see. No copies. No master keys.’

‘We?’

‘The customers. The Premium customers. You can bump into all sorts up here. People from Karlstad and Torsby. I saw a senior politician from Munkfors here one time. The nurse from the dental surgery: the young man, he keeps his medicines here. He’s a prepper, that one. The Hive is better than safety-deposit boxes. More secure and less visible.’

‘And you use your secure unit to…blow up balloons.’

‘Come, see.’ He points over to the workbench. There’s a bowl of chicken breasts or turkey breasts next to the vice. ‘Watch me.’

He takes a bag from his jacket pocket. He removes tiny rubber balloons. But they’re not balloons, they are his watchmaker’s finger gloves; single latex covers for each digit. ‘Old habit,’ he says.

He sinks his hand into the steel bowl and picks up a turkey breast. He pulls off membranes and veins. He manhandles it onto the end of a nozzle attached to a tube, attached to one of the gas tanks.

‘What are you doing?’

Hans Wimmer pulls the turkey breast further onto the nozzle and secures the neck with a metal clamp and a knot of string.

He looks up at me and smiles and I notice he has two eye teeth growing over each other. ‘Cross your fingers, Tuva.’

I don’t do it.

He opens a valve and air rushes through the nozzle. The breast grows slowly in size to Dolly Parton proportions and beyond. Well beyond.

I stand back.

‘This one’s a moose,’ he says. ‘Cow moose. It can grow very large indeed before it goes bang.’

The thing enlarges. Bigger and bigger. An irregular, lumpy skin-coloured beach ball.

‘What is it?’

‘It’s a moose bladder,’ says Hans. The rest are pig and cow. For the big night.

‘Pan Night?’

He ties the end of his new moose-bladder balloon and I once again question what shitty life choices led me here, to this hill town, this secret storage unit, with this Austrian watchmaker, and these dozens of inflated bladder-balloons. Which God did I disappoint? How many of them?

He uses a long stick to hang the moose bladder from a ceiling meat-hook.

‘The black ones are already dry.’ He points to the painted balloons. ‘All pig bladders. The others are bovine, cow as you might say, and will get painted later tonight. The moose aren’t for Pan Night, in fact, they’re for Halloween, for a private function next week.’

‘Lovely.’

‘You don’t approve?’

‘Whatever ticks your boxes, man.’