‘Why do you smell of grass?’ I ask Auntie.

‘I mowed your lawn,’ Auntie replies. ‘It was a jungle, the whole garden.’

‘When are we going back home?’

‘I don’t know,’ Auntie replies. She thinks of adding something, I can tell, but decides not to.

I put on the sun hat. I think of Sawdust House, standing in the middle of a jungle, and of the living-room wall, my picture smiling under its panelling. The picture stands and waits, frozen there as it was one renovation day two years ago. It wears a stripy top and turquoise tights, and has its back against the sooty wallpaper, with the wooden panel of the living room acting as its cover. And no one’s told her we’ve left. And no one knows when we’re coming back.

I go into the sheep enclosure. Bruno runs up to me and says baa. He still follows me even though I don’t give him milk from a bottle any more. I tickle him above his tail, which makes it twitch and look really funny and silly.

Sheep always want to be as high up as possible. The lambs climb on to their mums’ backs and stand there, and the grown-up ones are always fighting over a place on the roof of Dad’s car. They’ll climb into the fountain and jump on to tree stumps and wooden blocks and the wheelbarrow.

‘Sheep are quite thick,’ Auntie Annu has to admit.

That evening, I lie in my hospital bed in the summer nightie Auntie fetched for me. When I turn over, the lowered side rails clatter. One of the wheel locks below is broken, causing the bed to move.

I look at the walls around me. I draw a line around them, and my room stays inside the line. Apart from the secret room, that is: my room is now the one with the panel that clicks to open a door into another space. I stop drawing to wonder whether the secret room belongs to my room or the one next door. Or does the secret room belong to itself ? Or doesn’t it have a line at all, because it’s secret? Are secrets precisely the sort of thing that remain outside lines? Is that the way detectives solve murder mysteries, by seeing the gaps that secrets leave in the lines?

Sometimes too many thoughts crowd into my head. That makes the grey cells boil; it’s like everything’s about to burst out of my brain. That’s when I call my favourite Belgian detective for help. He takes a chalk and draws a white outline. When my thoughts are inside the line, they settle down. He knows the number of guests has to be right – not too many and not too few. The thoughts have to fit into one room. And if some thought or object is of no use, then out it goes.

18

18