I stand in front of the mirror in a new turquoise shirt. My wrists poke out of the sleeves. The legs of the jeans are long enough, but I can’t do the button up.

‘They’re quite nice, aren’t they?’ Dad says, looking at my mirror image.

I turn to face him, then tear off the clothes. The shirt collar is so tight I can barely get my head out. Hasn’t he bothered to look at me all summer?

‘Stupid! You can’t do anything right!’ I shout, marching out of the room.

I’m so annoyed I don’t talk to Dad all evening. Even though he’s made macaroni bake for tea. The macaroni is hard and white. It stands on the plate, a cube cut out with a knife.

26

26

Auntie’s sheep are in the pasture. They smell of Auntie Annu, and that gives me a cosy feeling. I sink my hands into Bruno’s brown, or black, wool and stroke his head. He twitches his ears, one straight, the other one wonky, to shoo away flies. Bruno has become an ordinary sheep, and he can’t comfort me. He still follows me, but he’s stopped skipping and being a sweet, funny lamb. Now he’s boring, and looks as stupid as the other sheep in the enclosure. He chews grass and dashes around.

Auntie once said that she can’t eat mutton. According to Auntie, sheep is the only animal whose butchered meat smells the same as the living animal. A pork chop doesn’t smell of pig, minced beef doesn’t smell of cow, but a rack of lamb smells of sheep. And that’s why Auntie Annu won’t touch lamb casserole.

I don’t know if the sheep have noticed Auntie Annu’s absence. They have stupid eyes, their mouths chew stupidly away, they’re startled by the smallest thing and they fire out droppings without even noticing it. One day, a white sheep got caught in the barbed-wire fence. There it stood, having been there all night, for all I knew, looking as if it had decided to lose all hope and die.

When I got there, the sheep took fright and gave a small, startled skip. And that little skip was enough to free the wool from the barbed wire and so the sheep ran back to the others as if nothing had happened. I looked at it and thought: you could have made a bit of an effort, if that was all it took. But sheep don’t really do effort.

I scratch Bruno’s neck. I’ve heard that there’s a spot on every sheep’s neck that is so itchy that the animal just has to lift its head higher and higher if you scratch it there. And when a sheep looks up long enough, blood stops flowing to its brain and it passes out.