Not long after that, the moving van rumbled up to meet our car nose to nose. “Mum,” I said. “The Freak Brothers are here,” and the men who’d stripped our apartment like locusts the day before dropped onto the tarmac in their matching red T-shirts and caps, trailing fat clouds of weed. They opened the back and it made this gunshot noise in the quiet street that ricocheted off the housefronts and upset the seagulls.

“Welcome to our Family Museum,” I told them as they wheeled and cawed in the blue, watching the men unload. “Roll up, roll up for a show of our worldly goods.”

Exhibits included one scrubbed table and four stained chairs. An old pavement-colored meat cupboard and the top, non-business half of an old pinball machine. Our dented fridge, ink-black with mold in certain places and still stuck somehow with a sea of alphabet magnets that pooled together to spell jUDe!*?! and BY m0Re M1Lk FfS and then broke apart again into chaos. Two cheap flattened beds and Mum’s high-backed armchair, a plan chest, an invasion of trash bags (clothes, basically), boxes of books, and some stuff in bubble wrap—that one mirror, that one canvas, that one I couldn’t even remember anymore. The men in red walked everything up the path, tendons straining, teeth gritted, and in through the stale, narrow mouth of our new front door. It wasn’t nearly enough to make a dent on a house that size. The things we owned sat marooned in each sea of room, washed up and adrift, just like wreckage. Just like us.

Out on the street, the movers climbed back into the truck and slammed the doors, and after that the paramedics wheeled Mrs. Midler out of the house opposite on a gurney with the blanket pulled up over her head. Everything was dead quiet, apart from the blunt sound of her rattling down the front path and off the curb. It took them three tries to get the ambulance doors shut, and the noise spun the gulls off the roofs, kick-started a dog-barking relay two streets away, woke up a couple of babies in their strollers somewhere, and life began again, just like that.

Henry Lake dropped something upstairs and it broke and he swore, and the scrape and rustle of him clearing it up above me was like a haunting. Less sitting tenant somehow, more housebound ghost. I wondered how long he had lived there, and what he’d meant, exactly, by the old guard, and how he felt about us just moving right in, and how many other people he’d watched come and go from his place in the middle of that house. The way of things, I know, the ebb and flow, but still, relentless.

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