‘The next morning the lamb was dead. Even though Auntie took it to a warm place and made it sneeze like you’re supposed to. It still died.’

‘Listen, I’m going to go and rest for a bit,’ Krista says, leaving the kitchen.

I don’t even have time to say that the story isn’t finished yet.

Dad and Auntie Annu drank brandy after the lamb had been born. Dad sent me to fetch the coat he had left in the meadow. I took a torch along with me.

Tree branches always look so strange when you shine a torch on them. As if they were being X-rayed. Black became white, and surprising things became visible. My own light-blue coat shone brightly. I hoped a bat wouldn’t bump into me.

The sheep dozed in the grass; they were faint, faded blotches in the middle of the dark garden. They were behav-ing as if nothing had happened. The lamb and its mother had been carried to the warm barn.

Just as I saw Dad’s coat, in the sheep pen, the torchlight glinted at the edge of the enclosure.

A fox was standing there. Its eyes lit up like two round lamps as the light hit them. I stood still. The fox stiffened a little but didn’t stop eating. Its mouth was wet. What was it eating?

I walked closer and picked up Dad’s coat. There was a heap of shiny, blood-drenched pulp lying between the fox’s feet. I realized it was the placenta from the birth of the lamb.

When I stood up again, the fox gulped audibly. Then it snatched up the leftover placenta in its mouth and slunk away into the darkness.

4

4

Once I saw a programme about an Indian girl who had never seen a man or a boy naked, not even without a shirt. When the girl’s breasts began to grow, she imagined that the man’s chest had two hollows into which the woman’s breasts would sink. That was the way a man and a woman fitted together. She thought so up until the day of her wedding.

I liked the Indian girl and how little she knew. I imagined Indian breasts pressing into male, Indian holes, two hearts beating close to each other and warmth spreading into every nook and cranny.

5

5

I wake up, hearing a noise coming from the direction of the chest of drawers.

Grating, crunching, then the occasional metallic click. I can’t see the chest of drawers; the whole room is too dark. I’m too scared to put the light on; I just lie still under the cover and listen.