Titch’s flat is in Chiswick. You say ‘Chizzick’. The Underground is the Tube. By the time they arrive they’ve managed to find seats, and the Tube is no longer even underground. Rose steps lightly, buoyed up by excitement. The station they get off at is small, like a pretend station. It’s almost dark, but the sky still has a blue glow to it. The streetlamps are on. The air is warm, the street is clean and bright.

They walk to Titch’s flat, in an ornate block, with red bricks and white bricks and a huge window over the door. There are neat, cropped gardens outside, narrow hedges the height of a cat. The bells at the entrance are brass, shiny, with typed name tags. In the hall, the tiles loop and branch across the floor in curled geometric patterns. At the bottom of the staircase you can see up, and above the hard flights of straight stone steps the bannister twists towards the skylight in a flattened spiral.

Titch takes her post from a wire cage by the door. They climb the stairs. Rose runs her fingers along the wooden rail. The nicest house she’s been to is Yannis’s, at his party, but it’s different when people are vomiting. She doesn’t know what to expect. Graeme’s house is nice too. The first time she was there she thought it was the cleanest place she’d ever seen. It had a sofa and two armchairs that lift up when you pull a lever. It had a kitchen with shining surfaces, and a picture of cows on the wall. To imagine some place even better would have been to enter the realm of pure fantasy. She knows that there are palaces in the world, and houses with swimming pools, and people with servants, but the idea that one might actually go to a place like that, or meet the people who live there, seems ridiculous.

But not so ridiculous now.

Titch opens the door. A long corridor stretches before them. Rose steps forward with a sense, not of shock, but of liquid strangeness.

The corridor is grand. The ceilings are high. At the far end is a mirror, and in front of the mirror, a sculpture. But on hooks on one side are coats, piled high and beneath are shoes, stacked on a shelf. There are pictures on the walls. Too many pictures. The floor is wood, inlaid in little diagonal tiles, with a long, shabby, patterned rug on top.

She steps forward. The air is dusty and perfumed. The flat is small.

‘Sorry it’s such a tip,’ says Titch.

The pictures are not pictures as Rose knows them. One has a few lines on a textured piece of paper. Another shows a man standing on a globe, a fierce expression of grief and horror on his face, while he tears with his teeth at a severed human leg, and crowds of goggle-eyed figures stare from the edges.