omething I’ve learnt over the last six months must have finally stuck.

My body and my brain are actually working together, instead of reluctantly with open hostility, like two work colleagues who secretly hate each other.

I slouch carefully against the glass sides of the box, tucking my knees in and poking my elbows out. Then I move so that one arm is over my head, pressing against the roof of the box. I draw my feet up so that they’re stretched in the opposite direction and my head is at a right angle. I use the dress and the edges of the glass: leaning and pressing and bending and unwinding and bending again.

At one point, I’m actually almost upside down: legs in the air, feet on the ceiling, head on the floor, doll clutched in my hand. And – throughout – I try to keep my face as still and as wide-eyed and as expressionless as I possibly can.

Every time I move into a new position, my grandmother pays less attention to the food on her collar. Shion starts bobbing around like a happy stripy pigeon and Naho high-fives the hairdresser. Even Haru looks mildly jolly.

“Sugoi, jyan?” he shouts. “Kore wa subarashi desu! Iketeru jyan!”

“Haru says you’re doing brilliantly,” Naho says straight away. “The photos are incredible.”

I flash a quick grin at Naho, and then look at Yuka. With every click of the camera, something is happening to the corners of her mouth: they’re starting to move almost imperceptibly upwards.

Yuka Ito is actually smiling. In a few clicks, the skin around her eyes might even crinkle.

I’ve finally done it. I’ve finally achieved something on my own.

Filled with a bright, hot sense of relief, I’m just shifting my position when something moves.

Something in the box moves.

OK. This is precisely the kind of thing that happens when you’ve watched Toy Story 1, 2 and 3 too many times, and then written a letter to Pixar asking when the fourth one is due.

I crouch between the dolls with my arms out at the side, and stretch my neck upwards. I’m just reaching out a hand to lean carefully against the other side of the box when the doll nearest it does a little jiggle.

I’m going to say that again. The doll does a little jiggle.

I squeak and grab my hand back.

“What’s going on?” Yuka snaps.

“The doll,” I say before I can stop myself. “It jiggled.”

My grandmother looks fascinated. “Did it say anything, sweetie? I make a point of listening to anything inanimate that tries to communicate with me.”

Yuka shoots her a look of death and then turns back to me. “Dolls do not move, Harriet.” The corners of her mouth are back in their normal position. “Get on with it.”

I nod and go back to what I was doing before, except with one small alteration: I’m now numb with fear.

The doll moved. I saw it.

Apparently forty per cent of all British people believe in ghosts, and I think I’m now one of them. What if these are the trapped souls of hundreds of children? What if I’m in a haunted arcade game?

Chilled to the core and filled with visions of hundreds of tiny, cold, grasping fingers, I try to keep my face still and make my arms graceful, my legs less rigid, my movement fluid …

Something starts tickling my ankle.

Dolls don’t jiggle, I start repeating under my breath as Yuka’s eyes narrow until they’re almost shut. Dolls don’t jiggle dolls don’t jiggle dolls don’t jiggle dolls don’t jiggle dolls don’t jiggle.

But the tickling gets more and more pronounced, until I can’t take it any more.

I look down.

A ginormous cockroach is slowly climbing up my bare leg.

Entomophobia = fear of insects.

Herpetophobia = fear of crawling things.

Fear of enormous black beetles the size of your palm creeping up your leg?

That’s just called normal.

I look down, and then up again. “Oh,” I say calmly to nobody in particular. “There appears to be a large semi-tropical insect of the order Blattodea and the subclass Pterygota currently meandering up my tibialis anterior.”

Or – you know:

GETITOFFMEGETITOFFMEGETITOFFME.

In one graceful, seamless movement, I lurch in blind panic straight into the glass side of the box.

And straight out the other side.