We had our own inner spaces, just as we had colonised our own secret places on the island. We had a language known only to us, made up of invented words and phrases, and a collection of English words and expressions that Minna believed we had inherited from our parents, though Minna was the only one able to recall the words correctly and pronounce gorgeous, ravishing and voluptuous as she believed they should be pronounced. She whispered the words in my ear, her voice hot, and her cheeks grew shiny and red with excitement and her eyebrows shot up almost to where her hair began, vo-luup-tuo-ooous, and her lips parted in that self-satisfied smile of hers that stretched her mouth like a rubber band and made her look just like the Cheshire cat in the storybook that Johannes had been reading to us. We also had our own, carefully thought-out daily rituals, like the way one of us would stop the other if either of us spotted something especially noteworthy – like a strangely rounded stone, or an abandoned bird’s nest on the field verge, or if Mr Carsten drove past in his Volvo pulling the rattling horse-box trailer – and if I had made a particularly interesting find, Minna would approvingly tap her temple with her index finger, then raise her arm and swing it up over her shoulder in a wide arc while pointing at me with the same index finger, and I, only too overjoyed at a chance of imitating whatever she did, soon learnt to tap my temple and gesture the same way to point at her, and then there was another thing that we did every time we had made one of these interesting finds: we would stand stock-still for a moment or two, continuing to gaze fixedly at whatever it was we thought important, then move away by taking three solemn paces backwards and say fart on you! before we could turn and run from the place. We observed this especially if we were in one of our secret places. We had a whole network of secret places, in the forest and down by the lake. The most secret of them all was the broad stony field on top of Bird Hill, which, according to Johannes, was the crash site of the plane our parents were travelling in when on their way to collect us. Though he was pissed when he told us that, Minna said. Everyone knew what bullshit Johannes would come out with when he was drunk. Our parents were living in America and could come to get us any time, or perhaps send us the plane tickets so that we could go to them. Unaware of the contradiction, Minna all the same insisted on us building a small chapel for our dead parents on the place where the plane had come down. If our dad had been sitting at the bomb-bay doors, he would surely have fallen out and landed here, she said, mixing things up even more, but why should I mind as long as I was an accepted part of her games? She pointed at a reasonably flat piece of ground and we both set about finding stones that we could move along to the spot and then added sticks and bottle tops and Minna’s shawl, which she claimed had once been our mother’s and then, after we had said a home-made prayer for our parents, we were taking the three backward paces prescribed in our ritual and I remember having taken the last backward step and being about to say fart on you, when a large, furry, reddish-grey dog with its tongue dangling from its muzzle bounded towards us out of nowhere, with Mr Carsten following just behind, groaning with the effort of dragging his paralysed leg up the hill and past the large boulders. This was the first time I had seen him up close, and the first time (I think) that either of us had been alone with him in such a distant, exposed place. Mr Carsten stood and looked at us for quite a long time, shifting his weight from one leg to the other and breathing in heavy bursts, the way he did, inhaling with a rasping, painfully tearing sound and then letting the air out in a slow puff, before he bent over to put the leash on the dog, who had been jumping at me but now went unprompted to his master’s side. You young ’uns shouldn’t be here, he said. This is no place for children to be running around. It’s where the plane crashed, right? Minna asked, and I had to admire her courage. As for me, I just stood there, shivering like an eel. I had not been able to stop shaking ever since that big, shaggy beast had jumped at me. It was the plane my dad was in, Minna said, and, once more, I was amazed. Just a little while ago, she had denied all that, dismissing it as Johannes’s drunken chatter. Meanwhile, Mr Carsten stood still and panted and did not take his eyes off Minna for a second while he put his weight first on his stiff leg and then on the other. At the time, I could not work out why he kept staring at Minna like that. Me, he did not even glance at. Yes, it was over there, he said, pointing with his walking stick at a tree, an ash that grew a little further up the hill and had partly lost its leaves. I was one of the first to arrive at the site, he said with a smile, as if this fact gave him particular satisfaction. By then, it was a roaring sea of fire up here. He was hanging there, he said, and raised his stick to point again. And: who was? (This was my question, I couldn’t stop myself.) And Mr Carsten: he had been thrown out of the plane, seat and all, so he was hanging still in the chair, like it was a parachute that hadn’t unfolded. Mr Carsten started to laugh. And my, how he burnt, the poor fucker, like in the fires of Hell! His laughter looked very odd because only half his face was laughing. The other half kept staring at us, with an expression that seemed to say that he was quite terrified by what he had just said. And: you’re lying! Minna screamed, and started to run. Halfway down the hill, she stopped me and said: don’t believe him, he was just trying to scare us! After that, we kept on running until we reached the bottom of the slope, where the ground was ordinary, soft and just grass, and then Minna let herself fall on purpose, rolled in the grass and pressed the palm of my hand against her ribcage, all flat and bony at the time, and inside her heart leapt and splatted. Like a frog, I said, it’s jumping about like a frog in a water bucket. And Minna: would you have guessed, he keeps a heart that behaves just like that! And I: who, Mr Carsten? And she: no, not Mr Carsten, you idiot, Kaufmann of course, he has this heart in a glass jar and he makes it beat by using a lot of electrical wires. And I: what, a real heart, a person’s heart? And Minna tapped her index finger against her temple to show how smart I was and then raised her arm towards me in a long, challenging arc. A human heart, she said. Don’t ask me whose it was.