‘Snip! Snap! Snip!’ Mum whispers.

‘Please don’t,’ I plead softly.

But Mum just goes on, clicking her scissors to the rhythm of the rhyme:

‘The door flew open, in he ran,

The great, long, red-legg’d scissor-man.

Oh! children, see! the tailor’s come

And caught out little Suck-a-Thumb.

Snip! Snap! Snip! the scissors go;

And Conrad cries out – Oh! Oh! Oh!

Snip! Snap! Snip! They go so fast,

That both his thumbs are off at last.’

The ghost turns to me, wielding the scissors. I hide my hands under my back and press my chin against the edge of the cover. The ghost looks for a way in under the bedclothes, its long hair swinging as it turns its head. Then it sits down on the floor by my bed, grips a corner of the cover and starts cutting a strip off the edge. The scissors click.

Snip, snap, snip, and the edge of the blanket comes loose.

‘Too big,’ the ghost croaks.

It seizes the blanket again and carries on cutting it into strips, this time along the upper edge. Snip, snap, snip, go the scissors under my chin.

The ghost crawls across my chest. I feel Mum’s hair swipe my cheek.

‘Too big,’ the ghost mutters again. It turns at the corner and starts cutting a similar strip off the third edge.

When it turns to the fourth side, I pull my knees up to prevent the scissors touching my toes. Snip, snap, snip, it cuts off the lower edge.

Then it stops and turns towards my face. It looks at me for a moment, in the same blank way as before.

‘Too big,’ the ghostly voice says again.

Then it disappears, all of a sudden.

The chill gets in underneath the cover. I’m cold. I think of Bruno. His own mother tried to bite off his ear. I never did understand why. I don’t understand this, either.

I lie quietly and wait. Mum doesn’t come back; there’s no clicking from the scissors. In Extra Great Manor, I could go inside a wall when I wanted to, but here, there’s no room for anything like that. This is a healthy house with breathing structures, but that doesn’t help.

8

8

I remember us eating the last jar of frozen strawberries labelled 2010 in Mum’s handwriting. Auntie Annu had just emptied out the freezer of Sawdust House.

We ate the strawberries slowly. They were covered with a crisp layer of ice and sugar and they tasted wonderfully cold and sweet. No one talked about Mum’s vegetable patch or about crushed ice or the veranda or the strawberry pyramid, which never got built once Dad’s tyres had tumbled down the steps.