‘What have we got here?’ I ask.

‘A whole sheep,’ Pekka answers.

‘Which sheep?’ the girl asks, but Pekka doesn’t respond.

He’s opened all the parcels and the table’s covered with meat. He puts the pieces in order: neck, ribs, shoulder, roasting meat, sirloin, tenderloin, shanks. Mince he places in the middle, as if forming a stomach. There it is: a sheep cut to pieces.

‘We were supposed to get Bruno!’ the girl shouts. She bursts into tears and stomps upstairs.

‘Well, we didn’t really…’ Pekka starts. He stops because the girl has already disappeared. ‘Oh dear.’

Pekka fetches a carving knife and a chopping board. He marches between table and cupboards as if excited by the smell of the blood and the meat.

‘We should really chop them into smaller pieces before they go in the freezer,’ he declares, handing me the kitchen scissors. ‘You could take off the membranes; this one hasn’t been trimmed terribly well, from the look of it.’

Then he pushes a lump of meat towards me. It’s still got blood in the creases. The membrane shines, rainbow-coloured.

Pekka’s knife grinds into bone as I cut. The smell of bloody meat fills the kitchen.

I try not to think about muscles and the order all these pieces were in under the skin. I cut into the red meat and try not to think of the small, splashing creature who lacks a kidney and a rectum and God knows what else. I try not to think about how it’s been put together: what sort of lumps and the order they’re in. I think of rosemary, garlic, salt and potatoes. I think of a chicken. It’s white and slimy and doesn’t smell.

When I was little, my favourite parts of the chicken were the cheeks. The two soft pieces of meat at the bottom of the chicken were what I called ‘cheeks’. Dad took them off for me with his fingers; they plopped out of their sockets like eyes and they were deliciously tender as they’d been simmer-ing in the juice of the meat. I don’t know what part of the chicken the cheeks actually were. They weren’t cheeks, of course, because the whole head was missing. I expect they were in the chicken’s back, near the tail or the neck; I don’t know which. Maybe they were the flight muscles.

Everything’s all mixed up, topsy-turvy. I bump into door frames, I shove kindling into the wrong holes and even my own shoelaces disappear from view. I looked up images of embryos on the internet. The worst were like chickens. There was nothing identifiable about them, whichever way you looked at them, from the top or bottom.

The girl doesn’t come down to eat in the evening. She sulks in her room, refusing to answer when Pekka goes to the door to talk to her.

8

8