The Dinosaur Feather

them closely. He, too, liked the ones with glitter babies and puppies the best.
    Cecilie came home and Troels got up politely to shake her hand. The telephone rang at that moment, so Anna wasn’t sure if Cecilie had remembered who Troels was. When Troels nipped to the lavatory and Cecilie had sat down with a cup of tea, Anna whispered that he was the boy they had met in the forest last March. Cecilie paled.
    ‘You can visit us any time you like,’ she said, when Troels came back. ‘Any time you like.’
    ‘Thank you very much,’ Troels replied.
    Cecilie bought a scrapbook and ten sheets of stickers for Troels. Anna felt so jealous, she wanted to cry. Troels unwrapped his gift as though he had been entrusted with a blanket full of precious eggs. His face lit up, then he looked miserably at Cecilie.
    ‘I can’t accept this,’ he said and carefully pushed the present away. Anna picked up the scrapbook and admired the pictures.Big cherubs on clouds, glitter babies, animals and baskets of flowers. If Troels didn’t want them, she certainly did.
    ‘Of course you can,’ Cecilie said warmly. ‘Now you can swap, can’t you? They’re a present.’
    ‘No,’ Troels said, still wretched. ‘I really can’t. I’m not allowed to accept presents.’
    Cecilie narrowed her eyes and studied him.
    ‘Hmm,’ she said. ‘Well, you can’t take them home, obviously. They need to stay here.’
    Anna stared at her mother.
    ‘They’ll still be my stickers, you understand, but I’m not very good at swapping, so I would like you to do it for me. Extend my collection. Do you think you can do that?’
    Troels nodded and opened the scrapbook with awe. With the same deference, he removed the wrapper and gazed at the stickers. Later that afternoon, when it was time for him to go home, he placed the scrapbook on the bookcase in the living room, where it remained until his next visit. The scrapbook lived there for years.
    It was not until four months later that Anna and Karen visited Troels. It was at the start of December and after school they caught the bus to his house, a huge, newly built bungalow a few kilometres outside the village. They sat on the floor in Troels’s room making Christmas decorations out of paper and were listening to music when Troels’s father came home from work. They heard him speak on the telephone in the hall in a loud voice, then he swore at something before he suddenly popped his head around the door.
    ‘Hello, girls,’ he said, showing no signs of recognising them. Shortly afterwards he came back and put a bowl of crisps and three fizzy drinks on the floor.
    ‘Troels’s mum wants to know if you would like to stay for dinner?’
    Karen and Anna exchanged looks.
    ‘Yes, please,’ Anna said quickly.
    Crisps and fizzy drinks! For dinner they had pork tenderloin steaks in a cream sauce and for pudding they had a choc ice each. Troels’s mother was a petite, elegant lady who worked as an estate agent in Odense. Troels’s sister was fifteen years old and really pretty. She had very long hair, she wore lip gloss and she said: ‘Pass the potatoes, please’ in a terribly grown-up way. Anna felt a pang of infatuation and glanced at Troels. He smiled at something his father had said, replied and laughed heartily when his father expanded on and repeated the punchline. Anna took it all in.
    Troels’s father started telling holiday anecdotes. On holiday in Sweden, Troels had fallen off a jetty when trying to measure the depth of the water with a stick, which was far too thin and had snapped under his weight. Troels had wailed like a banshee, he was as scared as that, but the water was less than a metre deep and rather muddy. The girls imagined Troels screaming and mucky, and they laughed. His father hosed him down in the garden behind the holiday cabin. On the same holiday, Troels’s father recalled, they had visited a travelling fair where one of the stalls had a board with a man on it, and if you could hit a red disc with a ball, he would plunge into a tub of water. Troels’s father had persuaded the stallholder to replace the man on the boardwith Troels, who had been moaning all afternoon that he was too hot. Troels got dunked repeatedly and had duly cooled down. Anna and Karen laughed again.
    ‘And then there was the time when Troels wouldn’t stop wetting his bed,’ Troels’s father began. ‘Do you remember, girls?’ he said to Troels’s mother and sister who had started clearing the