I’m in the middle of drawing something. I put my palm on a piece of paper and draw round it with a pen. I’ve got five fingers. The little finger is a bit apart from the others; the index finger is slightly crooked. I swap hands. A familiar hand. Once, at school, everyone was allowed to draw their hands on a big wall, and even though there were two hundred hands on the wall, I recognized my own straight away. That’s how familiar they were.

‘Stroke me!’ Dad shouts behind the wall, because Auntie Annu has already gone back downstairs.

I don’t really want to go. I pretend I’m the lord of the castle who has trapped a maiden inside a wall.

Once upon a time, there was a maiden who lived in a castle and who fell in love with the wrong knight. This was judged to be punishable.

I thought of a suitable punishment for the maiden.

The maiden shouts: ‘Help! Somebody stroke me!’

But the maiden was carried into the castle courtyard where a new wall was being built. The maiden was placed inside the wall. The whole time the stones were being laid, the maiden shouted and screamed, but in the end she was fully covered by the stones and her voice fell silent.

This was a familiar business to the lord of the castle. He had confined naughty maidens many times before, and he didn’t care one little bit about the maiden’s cries, or her toes.

Even the next day, moaning could be heard from inside the wall. On the third day, the moaning stopped. Three years went by, and a birch tree grew on the spot where the maiden had been buried.

In the evening, Dad comes downstairs. He sits at the table and strokes the wall, deep in thought. The bowl of fish stew Auntie Annu made sits in front of him, getting cold.

‘This sort of surface, you never know what’s inside it at the end of the day.’

‘I can tell you it’s timber,’ Auntie answers.

‘Yes, but what condition is it in? You never –’

‘Yes, yes,’ Auntie Annu says, tired of Dad’s talk.

But Dad presses on: ‘You never know. You see a wall, and it looks like a wall: it’s got wallpaper and skirting boards, and everything is as it should be. Just as it should be. Then one day, you decide to replace the wallpaper with wood panelling. So you tear off the chipboard and realize something is crumbling there at the back. You hit a log with the hammer and feel it sinking. You dig into the timber with your fingers; your whole hand goes through the wall. What was meant to last is rotten. I’ve heard these stories. Then people ask: did you really not know? How come you didn’t notice? Didn’t you have any inkling at all?’