Who is the girl? I really don’t know. But I want to follow her inside. There is a curtain across the door, made up of long strips of multicoloured plastic. She holds out a hand – a thin silver bracelet circles her wrist – and looks back to where the children are still trying to dislodge the tiger piñata, then ducks through the curtain into the shop.

‘Don’t you like my piñata?’

The voice comes from the corner of the shop. It belongs to an old woman, a grandmother, no, a great-great-grandmother – so old she might be a hundred, or even a thousand, to the little girl. She looks like a witch from a story book, all wrinkles and eyes and clutching hands. In one of these she holds a cup; and from it, an odd scent reaches the little girl, something heady, intoxicating.

All around her on the shelves are bottles and jars and pots and gourds; dried roots hang from the ceiling, giving out a cellar smell, and there are lighted candles everywhere, making the shadows grin and dance.

A skull looks down from a high shelf.

At first the girl thinks it’s a sugar skull, like the others at the carnival, but now she isn’t so sure any more. And in front of her, on the counter, is a black object about three feet long – the size of a baby’s coffin, perhaps.

It looks like a papier-mâché box, painted a dull and uniform black except for the sign – which looks almost like a cross, but not quite – painted in red across the lid.

Why, it’s a kind of piñata, she thinks.

The great-grandmother smiles and hands her a knife. It’s a very old knife, rather blunt, and looks as if it’s made of stone. The girl looks curiously at the knife, then back at the old woman and her strange piñata.

‘Open it,’ urges the great-grandmother. ‘Open it. It’s all for you.’

The scent of chocolate intensifies. It’s reaching the correct temperature now; the thirty-one-degree threshold beyond which the couverture must not rise. The vapour thickens; the vision blurs; quickly I move the chocolate away from the heat and try to recapture what I have seen—

Open it.

It smells of age. But from inside, something calls to her; not quite a voice, but coaxing, promising . . .

It’s all for you.

What, exactly?

Strike one. The piñata echoes flatly, like a crypt door, like an empty cask, like something much larger than this small black box.

Strike two. It cracks; a split appears along its length. The girl smiles, half-seeing the hoard of tinfoil and trinkets and chocolates inside—

Nearly there now. One more strike—