At the hospital, they went through magic glass doors that slid open without you touching them. Mother talked to a lady behind a white desk, then Father was taken into another room to be seen by a nurse. He came back, closed-faced and quiet, and they went into a room full of people sitting in plastic chairs. The people were blank and stiff. Children rolled restlessly on the floor. Miki wondered how long they had all been there, waiting for who knows what. She hadn’t seen other children before, only the boy who came every few months with the wood-delivery truck, sitting high on the front seat and staring down at her. Here in the hospital waiting room the children were fidgety and wild, and they argued with each other and moaned at their parents. A small boy tugged his mother to a large-windowed metal box in the corner; she plugged coins into it and pressed buttons, then something dropped down. The boy put his arm through a flap-door, pulled out a crackly packet and opened it, releasing the smell of salt and oil. ‘What has he got?’ Miki asked Kurt.

‘Chips.’

‘Are they good? They smell good.’

‘Shh.’

Miki kept looking around. On the wall, a screen shifted with constantly changing pictures. She was transfixed by it; she clutched Kurt’s hand and ogled. She wondered who made the pictures, and how they moved on the screen. She was so busy looking, she almost forgot the esky on Kurt’s lap containing Father’s finger.

A man in a green uniform called Father’s name, and they followed him through a door into a wide room lined with white beds and people with grey faces and sagging eyes. They were shown to an empty bed on which her father sat, and a blue curtain was pulled around. The man in uniform had a weird thing made of black tubes hanging round his neck. He said he was a doctor, and Father explained what had happened to his fingers. The doctor opened the esky and peered in, then he unwrapped the tea towel on Father’s hand and his face tightened. He reached towards Father’s bloodied hand with a pair of scissors—and then, in the palm of his hand was another finger.

Miki felt floaty again. The room was swaying. She heard the clickety sound of shoes and wheels on lino floors, felt darkness descending. But there was no time for dizziness. The doctor barked for assistance, and another man in uniform came through the curtain and wheeled Father away.

They sat again in the waiting room. For a long time, Miki was alert: looking at everything, thinking about what had happened. What if Father’s fingers couldn’t be fixed? Would she get in trouble? Was it her fault? And what about everything around her right now? How could she make sense of it all?