It was amazing. She didn’t have to do anything or be anywhere, and it was so cosy here, like living in a children’s programme. There were pictures on the walls in delicate gold-rimmed frames: holiday shots of a bird in a shawl wearing glasses perched on her beak, sometimes standing with other similarly dressed birds in front of the pyramids, or the Eiffel Tower.

‘Where is she?’ Thea asked.

Rosie crammed a scone into her mouth leaving a purple smear on her lips. She swallowed a few times before answering. ‘The cuckoo? She jumped,’ she said casually, eyeing up another scone.

‘But who’s going to call the time?’ Panic rose in Thea’s chest.

‘Oh, we can’t do that. Don’t worry. They’ll kill us if we go outside.’

The fire crackled and a log split with a hiss. Thea was suddenly angry with the cuckoo for jumping. She had a job to do; this was her responsibility. You couldn’t trust anyone these days. An empty wing-backed chair stood by the fire with a single feather on the seat.

‘One of us has to call the time,’ she said.

Rosie broke open another scone and tapped the knife on her teeth; there was the sound of metal scraping on enamel. ‘No, we don’t,’ Rosie said.

It was too warm in the room. She pushed the woolly blanket from her and let it slide to the floor. She didn’t want to go out there. Rosie should go. It wasn’t her problem. Rosie should volunteer because the time had to be called and it wasn’t her job to do it.

‘You should do it,’ she said to Rosie.

‘Do it yourself,’ Rosie snapped back, impatiently flicking her hair back from the eye it had covered. Except there was no eye, just a red, gaping wound where her eye should have been, as if someone had taken an ice-cream scoop to her face. On her temple there was a heart drawn around the metal disc. ‘I don’t know why you have to spoil it. There’s nothing else to do. Just have a scone, relax.’ Rosie dug into the jam again and smiled as she spread it onto the scone, but the smile wasn’t like before, perhaps it was the eye that gave it menace.

There was a diving board contraption in front of the double doors, on which the cuckoo stood before it shoved her out of the clock to call the time.

Thea didn’t want to.

She got up. She didn’t stand on it but edged around it, leaning over to push one of the doors open a little, just to see what was going on.