Then I went to get my own felt tips and coloured in the picture’s clothes: turquoise tights and a stripy top. I also drew eyes, cheeks, a mouth and hair bobbles. I thought, this is what’s best about renovation days! Bread eaten standing up, sharp objects pushed into sockets, walls decorated with felt tips and space to dance in the living room.

Mum and Dad started on a panelling job. Dad sawed planks in the backyard and Mum carried them in through the porch door. Dad used a spirit level, a tape measure and a pencil; Mum just her eyes and a hammer. After three planks, they started on a renovation argument. Though Mum and Dad always did renovation work together, they always thought the other one did it wrong. This time Mum started it because she thought it was stupid to use a spirit level in an old wooden house where all the floors, walls and corners were all wonky anyway. Dad thought Mum didn’t do anything properly and never finished anything she started, leaving him to patch up all her unfinished jobs. The quarrel was always the same, because neither of them changed their way of doing things. This time Mum was annoyed just because Dad had recently bought a new spirit level.

Even so, we had new, light, wood-panelled walls by the evening. No one had the energy to look at them properly, though, because it was dark in the room by then and everyone was too tired. But in the morning, Mum came downstairs and saw Dad had tidied up before going to bed. Mum smiled at the new white walls, and inside the wall, in my tights and a stripy top, I smiled, too. Then Mum decided to make pancakes for the whole family.

MUM IN THE MORNINGS. In the mornings, Mum wears glasses and she walks straight to the coffee machine. She only goes for a wee once she’s pressed the button. Her thin dressing gown billows as she crosses the living room and opens the curtains. Mum opens the window, or, if it’s a warm summer morning, the porch door, and says, ‘Ah.’

That’s what Mum’s like in the mornings.

9

9

In fairy tales, maidens are confined, and then a birch tree grows out of the wall. Mum told me it once happened in real life.

There’s no room for maidens in the sawdust walls. Once, I found a handmade wooden boat in the sawdust in the attic, and another time, a salt cellar shaped like a girl, and I’ve pushed apple seeds into a crack in the wall, but nothing grew from them.