‘Yeah,’ the girl replies, stirring her cereal. ‘I heard the click in my dream. But then the bone was a key but I lost it. And I had to cut off my little finger with scissors so it could be a key.’

‘Lucky it was just a dream,’ I said.

‘No, it’s from Grimm’s fairy tales.’

‘There’s one like that?’

When I changed the girl’s sheets over the weekend, I found a huge pair of golden scissors under her pillow. They were probably her mother’s: they’re like the ones used to cut velvet in fabric shops. I didn’t feel like asking about them; I just put them in the desk drawer.

5

5

The cold slinks about on the floor and makes my ankles hurt. Somehow, in this house, the border between outside and inside is not as clear as in a block of flats. The weather comes in, the mud comes in, the wind comes in, creepy-crawlies and bats come in. We haven’t got a doorbell, either. Or we do, but it doesn’t work. Here, people just stroll into the hall. But Pekka keeps a close eye on the interior doors; you’ve got to shut all doors after you or he gets uptight. One day he explained that the brickwork at the centre of the house is like a warm heart jointly heated by separate fireboxes. And I thought: the centre of this house is an ice-cold hall, more like. We heat the rooms on the edges and keep the cold out with these thin interior doors, but in the hall, a chilly draught blows.

Yesterday I was at home on my own and it got so cold I decided to light a fire in the stove. Pekka had shown me the dampers and the hatches but I couldn’t remember which damper was for what, so I opened all of them to be on the safe side. I lit the fire and thought about how cosy it looks when you’re arriving home and there’s smoke coming out of the chimney.

There was smoke all right, but it didn’t go up into the chimney. First it came curling out from the edges of the stove plates, then from all sides of the stove. All of a sudden, the whole kitchen was full of smoke. I opened and shut the hatch, added fuel to the fire, opened the dampers wider – nothing helped. How on earth could I put the fire out? Should I throw water on it? I pulled the charred logs out and a whole load of ash spilled out with them. Smoke poured out of the hatch into the room and pushed its way through every joint of the stove. Quite a lot of joints, a stove has.