I sighed. That damned lullaby. We’d been sparring over it for years, dancing around each other like boxers looking for our opponent’s weaknesses. The argument had gone on for so long, I could barely remember how it had started.

Marieke cleared her throat. I could tell she was getting worked up, assembling her reasons, laying strong defences in anticipation of my inevitable scorn.

‘It started with a wooden shoe,’ she sang, in a wobbly, off-key voice.

‘Okay,’ I said.

She waited for me to say more and when I didn’t, continued. ‘They sailed off, into the night, on a river of crystal light, into a sea of dew. “Where are you going?” the old moon asked. “To fish for herring,” replied the three. “Nets of silver and gold have we.” The old moon laughed and sang a song as they rocked in the wooden shoe, and the wind that sped them along that night ruffled the waves of dew. All night they threw the nets, to the stars in the twinkling foam, then down from the skies sailed the wooden shoe, bringing the little fishermen home: Wynken, Blynken, and Nod.’

She sang the last line again, softer this time, trailing off into uncomfortable silence.

‘That was it,’ she said, wiping her damp eyes. ‘Your parents were Wynken and Blynken and you were Nod, the one who was always falling asleep. I can’t believe you don’t remember. It’s simply not possible, Josefeine. How can you hear something every day of your life and not remember it?’

She was guilting me, expecting me to respond the way I always did. Truth be told, I didn’t remember the lullaby. Maybe that was why I could refute her claims with such absolute conviction. There was a hollow emptiness where that memory should have been. If my parents had sung me the same lullaby every night without fail before I went to bed, wouldn’t I have remembered it? According to Marieke, they’d stood outside my room crooning the song together, my father’s booming tenor balanced by my mother’s soft contralto. They’d met at an audition for the church choir when they were seventeen and married a few years later. I don’t know when, precisely, things had soured, whether the rift occurred soon after the wedding or if some other event was the catalyst for the marital disruption. Had my birth been an accident or had they hoped it would save their foundering marriage? If so, the experiment was a failure.