‘Once upon a time, there was a horn,’ the ghost corrects itself, starting a new story. ‘The shepherd blew the horn, and the bone began singing: “There’s a girl inside the wall! It’s murder, it’s murder!” Her brothers heard the bone’s song and opened up the wall. A maiden’s skeleton slid out of the sawdust on to the floor. Only one bone was missing, the one that now sounded in the horn. The brothers went to their stepmother and asked, “What is the punishment for one who buries a maiden alive inside a wall?” And the stepmother replied, “Let such a villain be put inside a barrel with sharp nails hammered into it and let him be rolled down a mountainside to the water.”

‘ “You have just pronounced your own sentence,” the brothers said, and shut the stepmother up in a barrel studded with nails. Then they rolled her down a slope. Screaming horribly, the stepmother tumbled downwards before finally sinking into the water beyond the edge of the land.’

‘You’re not my mum,’ I say to the ghost.

Two X-ray images hang on the wall in golden frames. The first is of a shoulder. The second shows my teeth; that was taken when I got a brace. I asked to have the picture and demanded Dad got a golden frame for it to match the first one.

I’ve got real bones in me. The ghost’s joints click, but if a doctor took an X-ray, it might not show anything. There are teeth in me. Some of them still throb inside the gum because they haven’t got any room to grow. But they are there.

12

12

Then one day, when I come home from school, I hear Dad and Krista talking about Mum. I stay in the hall to listen. I want to know if they’ve seen the ghost.

‘Maybe Hannele couldn’t have died in any ordinary way,’ Dad’s voice says. ‘She was such an unreal figure. As if she’d been plucked from a film. Maybe she needed a death like that.’

It’s definitely Dad’s voice. What on earth does he mean? Where’s the bear bell, where’s the chocolate? Mum didn’t need any sort of death. What’s he on about?

Dad and Krista are silent. Maybe Dad’s now planting apologetic kisses on Krista’s head. Still, he soon goes on: ‘I have to say, it’s better Hannele can’t see the garden, given the state it’s in. It’s a jungle.’

My throat tightens. Is he really saying that it was better Mum died so she didn’t have to see the garden was a jungle? The garden would not be a jungle if Mum were alive! The jungle came about because Dad spent a year in bed and then played hide-and-seek after that, driving past Sawdust House as if it didn’t exist!