She looked at the open suitcase on the floor, her clothes spilling out in a mess. The rest of her belongings were in a handful of boxes in the storeroom downstairs. Archie had helped her do a moonlight flit from the Portobello flat last night. Packing up all her stuff had taken a depressingly short time, and she left the crappy furniture as part payment for her rent arrears.27

She couldn’t fathom how it had come to this. Twenty years ago, when they started renting that place on Bellfield Street, she was married, pregnant and in love. She and Craig were skint, both freelance journos, her doing cultural commentary, him covering politics. There was no chance of getting on the housing ladder with no steady income, but they’d presumed things would look up. Instead the journalism industry collapsed, Craig left her, only then starting to make money in PR with the business he set up with Fiona.

Dorothy and Jim had offered to take Jenny and Hannah in. Jim especially was incensed at Craig leaving, furious at the idea of any man betraying his family. He, more than Dorothy, tried to cajole Jenny and Hannah back into the fold, long play sessions and ice creams with his granddaughter, late-night phone conversations with Jenny, pleading with her to come home. But something about that rankled her. The idea she couldn’t provide for her daughter. Which was stupid pride, looking back. Plus she didn’t want Hannah growing up around dead bodies, the way she had. So she redoubled her freelancing efforts, busted herself trying to pay rent, perhaps at the expense of her relationship with Hannah. Maybe it was the wrong decision, one of the millions of wrong life decisions that had brought her back to the Skelf house.

She imagined the thousands of bodies that had passed through this place, pictured them rising from graveyards across the city, hordes of zombies marching towards Greenhill Gardens to reclaim their links to the living. Maybe she was doing that too, trying to get her father back, reconnect with Mum.

She pulled on a dressing gown from her open suitcase and padded through to the kitchen. Schrödinger was perched on a battered leather chair by one of the windows, face turned to the sun glinting through the trees. He didn’t acknowledge her. Jenny grabbed a mug, poured some coffee and water into Dorothy’s large stovetop pot. She could only ever be bothered with instant at home so this Columbian roast would blow her head off.28

She walked to the window.

‘Hey, cat.’

Nothing. She stroked the nape of his neck. ‘Look, we need to get along, I’m going to be here for a while.’

Schrödinger stretched away to the other side of the chair, his claws digging into the leather.

‘Fuck you,’ Jenny said.

‘Who are you swearing at?’ Dorothy came through the door looking surprisingly fresh-faced.

‘Your cat,’ she said. ‘He hates me.’