I force my eyes to examine the photos. Well, she was under a bookshelf, so there had to be enough space for it to fall; that means nine is out. It was pretty gloomy in there . . . just because I didn’t see the bed or walls doesn’t mean they weren’t visible. I imagine the room again, the dark, the heavy smell of human, the flypaper hanging from the ceiling. I bite the inside of my mouth and focus on the pictures, and circle six.

“The living room’s next. I didn’t go in there.”

“You walked past it, it was the room on the right on the way out.”

“The door was shut.”

“The door doesn’t shut.”

“But there was—” Oh. I look at the images, and nine is a wall of clutter: no room visible. My hand hovers. It was dark inside and I wasn’t really looking . . . I circle eight.

That’s it for the images. I read the bit down the bottom. A rating of 4 or above for any room is indicative of a problem with clutter of clinical significance.

Lettie’s watching me from her chair. “How’d I do?”

I look from the sixes and eight I circled to the word clinical. “We’ve still got the other one to do yet.”

There are five questions. I look at the first two. How would you rate the level of difficulty you experience using the rooms in your home because of the amount of clutter or belongings? How would you rate the level of difficulty you experience in throwing away, selling or recycling things that others would discard?

“You need to answer these. They’re about you.”

“Read them out, then.”

I clear my throat. The shadow-rat’s starting up a sharp nip and nibble beneath my bottom left rib. I take a deep breath and read. “Answering from one to nine, one being not difficult at all, nine being extremely difficult . . .”

The first question, after consideration, she gives a six. “Because I’m used to it, aren’t I? And you got around okay, didn’t you?”

I think of the pile of things waiting to fall on me as I balanced my way across the unsteady rubble on the floor. “Uh, well . . .”

“Okay, seven. And that’s my final offer.”

I write it down.

The discarding question she gives a five, then changes it to a six. I glance at her pocket, where she put the empty bottle from before. Despite the fact the recycling bin is sitting behind her chair. She’s watching me. I see her fingers twitch toward the little bottle sitting snugly at her hip. Her cheeks go redder. “Seven, then.”

I write it down carefully, putting a little line through the stem of the seven and a full stop after it.