Sometimes it’s sort of creepy, how calmly they sit together. I remember the cleaning day, before the move, when they were shoving things into rubbish bags. Not a word, no crying, either: nothing. They just stuffed the old things into black sacks. They worked in silent agreement. But it made me shiver. The girl was chucking away all the board games, all the soft toys, all the cartoons on DVD, all the old clothes. I tried to say we could take the stuff to the recycling centre but they just wanted to get rid of it all, so we drove to the dump.

I hadn’t even been to a dump before. You can’t get to one if you don’t have a car. I didn’t know a dump was like the top of the world. The road winds up a slope. We followed other cars, each carrying a loaded trailer. And at the top, the sky opens. The scenery stretches out in all directions; the motorway roars somewhere below. On top of the mountain of rubbish is a rumbling and rustling, and every so often everything is drowned out by the screech of breaking glass as a whole load of shards gets tipped out on to the ground.

There was a platform at the summit of the tip. Pekka lifted the eight sacks of former life on to that platform. Gulls flew in the sky and a yellow tractor pushed scrap metal into a compact heap with a clanking scoop. All the stuff, all the life, became part of the landscape. It was a land of plastic cobbles. Tractors drove on top of it and clouds of gulls flew overhead. Everything on this mountain is broken, I thought. The sky is open, glass screeches, metal clatters.

And then we drove off with nothing. The wind was fresh, the trailer empty; we glided down the side of the rubbish mountain and back into the world, along with the wind. The girl sat in silence. The motorway flew with us, the wind flew with us, the gulls tried to fly with us but were left helplessly behind. And so we started a new life.

It rustles and crackles here. Detritus falls into the flue and things move inside the walls. Beetles drop off the ceiling. They’re big and black and once they’ve fallen, they lie there, twitching on their backs. When you press your heel on top of them, you hear a dry crunch. What on earth are they doing here?

When the baby is born, I will understand it. I will protect it, run to it when it has a nightmare, and I will no longer fear anything. Splash splash, it flips over. The doctor can say what he likes.

2

2