The cats were all Dad’s idea. He and Mum got a pair of kittens a few years after they got married. They called them Salt and Pepper, which is about as generic as you can get. Dad always used to joke this was on purpose, that it was part of ‘what you’re supposed to do’.

It’s not as if the cats ever got called by their real names anyway. Dad always called them Bowie and Robert Smith after a couple of musicians that he’d liked back in the 1980s. He’d play me their music sometimes – old records, big black discs that shimmered in the light like oil – insisting that I listened for the moment before the needle touched the vinyl. He said you could hear something in that moment, something like suspense. A magic moment, where waiting and what you were waiting for happened at the same time.

Mum called them Ratchet and Mother, because – she said – they made her feel trapped and tied to the house ‘like a skeleton in the basement’. I don’t know what she meant.

The cats didn’t seem to care what you called them. They never responded to any names.

*

The radio DJs’ change-over at 7 o’clock wakes me up. They howl with laughter at something that one of them has said and I come to with a jolt. I’m sat in the only pool of light in the house, having fallen asleep mid-question, my hand scrawling a smooth arc across the page. I scrabble the books together, stuffing them back in my backpack. In my bleary rush I knock over my mug, the last dregs of tea spilling onto a couple of letters from this morning. Almost instantaneously, I hear Mum’s keys in the lock, the rustle of shopping bags coming through the door. I grab some kitchen towel and mop up.

Mum enters with a loud sigh of accomplishment. She’s always more cheerful after she’s done the shopping, wearing the achievement like a badge as she unpacks food into cupboards and drawers, arranges the fridge with the older stuff at the front.

‘Hello, love,’ she says, beaming at me and the shopping all at once. ‘Good day?’

I wonder (but don’t ask) why she still goes shopping every week. We must throw away most of the stuff she buys. We’ve got at least six tins of kidney beans in the cupboard, probably a dozen of chopped tomatoes. I found a bag of peppers at the bottom of the fridge a few weeks ago, unopened. The contents were almost completely liquid – you could only tell what they used to be from the picture on the packaging. And there are potatoes in the vegetable cupboard that have sprouted long, white tendrils, reaching towards the light like tiny hands and arms.

‘Fine,’ I reply, taking my bag into the hallway. ‘Nothing to report.’