She was given food and medicine, she pinched rubber tubes, blinked when they asked if she understood what they said, recited the names of her parents and grandparents, said “ow” when they stuck needles in her and nodded when they hit her below the kneecap with small rubber hammers . . . From the window she could see an electric cable winding like a black snake through the snow from the building where she was to the conical spruce tree, where she was able to count twenty-three dots of light on a grey winter’s day, the only Christmas tree in the town with electric lighting, and at the top shone a star, which suddenly went out.

They said she had to eat more, and she did.

They told her to walk along the corridors and lift her knees because she wasn’t an old woman and there was no reason to shuffle around like one. She went up and down the stairs and talked to people she recognised from day to day and froze in her thin shift. She found her way back to the room without any help and lay down and slept and was visited by the old man, who wanted to sit with her, pensive and silent as a mummy.

“Look!” he said suddenly, his head turned to the window. “Now it’s all going to cock!”

He got up, ran out howling and was down the corridor like a bat out of hell. Ingrid crept out of bed, slipped her feet into thick knitted socks and from the window she could see two men carrying a ladder through the snow and propping it against the tree, one stood supporting it while the other climbed up and changed a light bulb in the star, which – when it was lit – made the ladder and the two men look like a character from some foreign alphabet, and fear was pumped through her as if by a piston.

*

She told the doctor she didn’t want the old man in her room anymore, he reminded her of her grandfather. The doctor said he was harmless, to himself and to her.

“He frightens me.”

“Why’s that?”

“He’s dead.”

The doctor asked when her grandfather had died and how.

Ingrid told him, and he sat nodding until her voice dissolved into a mishmash of sound, and the unease disappeared, he could see that in her face, could she see into his, there was no more to it than that.

But then he didn’t get up and leave her, as he usually did in such moments of clarity, but sat squirming, embarrassed, because, he said, he had something to confess.

Ingrid gazed at him with interest.