Dad went to the sauna alone in Sawdust House, because he found it easier to breathe that way. Mum talked too much in the sauna, about things that were too serious, and she also forgot to ask if it was OK before throwing more water on the stove. Mum threw three ladlefuls of water on at once and then ran into the snow. Dad couldn’t stand that sort of thing.

Sometimes, when we sat on the bench, just the two of us, I tried to touch Mum’s breasts. Then Mum would slap my hand.

‘I did it when I was a baby.’

‘That was different,’ Mum answered.

‘Just this once,’ I pleaded.

‘No.’

One of Mum’s nipples sagged because I sucked it too hard when I was a baby. The other one was normal.

6

6

Time passes, and Mum moves backwards. Trousers and long, straight hair: that’s all you can see of her now. A breeze lifts her hair. One hand’s holding a cigarette; the other’s supporting it. Mum smokes, and moves into the distance.

When Mum leans over the bed, her hair spills out from behind her ears and touches my face, along with her kisses. When I say Mum leans, she’s still here. When Mum leaned, she’s already going. Dad doesn’t talk about Mum, because he can’t say leaned. He can’t talk Mum into the past; every now and then, he starts a sentence with Mum’s name, but he stops halfway.

Mum stopped halfway.

Dad does talk about Mum’s belongings, because they still exist. ‘Hannele’s skis are in the cellar,’ Dad will say, in a completely normal voice. ‘The cupboards Hannele painted.’ ‘It’s there, by Hannele’s boots.’

You can draw a line round a real person, just as detectives do when there’s a corpse on the floor. It’s easier to understand death when it’s got an elbow and a knee and its own place on the floor. And when the dead body is carried away, only a white outline remains: no one left within it. A bit like a lottery win, which would be easier to grasp if it were a pile of money. But memories have no bodies.

In a film, memories appear in black and white.

A person is left standing by the roadside, the car drives off and you can see the person dwindling and disappearing altogether through the rear window. That’s the way they die in films.

But it doesn’t really look like that. Time doesn’t make Mum dwindle, nor do the colours fade. Mum just explodes into pieces and the pieces remain floating in the air. All the fragments are clear – hair, fingers, chuckle, furrows in the skin, nostrils, clicking knees, stomach rumble – but Mum herself is missing.

7

7