I helped Mum do a few things, and then I got away as soon as I could, on my own for the first time all day. Upstairs, my new room in the attic was a mixed bag, two parts brilliant, two parts the opposite of that. It was the place where all the flies came to die. I watched them flitting and buzzing at the windows like crowds at the turnstiles, exiting their weightless corpses across the sills and along the very edges of the floor. Henry Lake’s boiled soup smell was strong up there too, but the space was massive, the whole width of that massive house. I’d never had so much space in my life. I explored a bit, poked around in its dark corners, tried to picture it all cleaned up and perfect, but the dust in there was threatening to kill me, so I took my book, made my exit, and climbed up through the skylight and down onto the flat roof below.

I was shielded by trees up there, kind of hidden, with a view of the street in front and the sea behind. I sat with my back against the wall. Warm bricks, salt breeze, sunshine. I took some pictures of the sky on my half-dead phone. Through the cracked screen it looked like someone had taken a hammer to the clouds. The sun was bleeding rainbows round their edges. Way above all the mess and the action, the world is forever a beautiful place. I read for a bit but my head was too crowded, so I shut my eyes and let the light push through my eyelids, coral and warm. Henry’s open window offered up some weird record, grown men singing through their noses, moaning all together like ten types of wind trapped down a well. There was a cricket match playing on someone’s radio, the low bellow of the docks, the muted crash and roll of all that water, and above me, when I opened my eyes again and looked up, the long straight out-breath of a passing plane in the blue.

The breeze dropped. I looked down sideways over the edge of my roof to the floor below. The straw-yellow bird was dancing about on Henry’s window ledge, the gulls on next door’s roof sizing it up, deciding just how and when to rip it to pieces and fight over the spoils. I waved my arms at them, international bird-speak for leave the little one alone, and they stood up, flapped, and shifted, flinging their eyes at me like stones.