Time all but stopped when Novo and I were together. The afternoon I followed him through town to the beach, whole days passed inside the world we created. But back at our house, at Henry Lake’s house, time had hardly moved. Mum was on her way down the stairs when I opened the front door, and she just about registered my presence, as if she’d knocked on her bedroom window and frowned at me in the yard seconds before, as if that had only just finished happening. She still wasn’t dressed. She didn’t see Novo because he stayed back, behind me. I felt him hold back. I felt him pause.

“Coffee?” she said, and I said, “Not for me,” and she carried on into the kitchen, her slippers face-slapping the floorboards all the way. I heard her slamming cupboard doors and banging stuff down on the counter, crashing through still-packed boxes to find the coffeepot. A one-woman symphony of rage. I didn’t know what it was this time. There was always something. Like it was just built in. My mum never closed a door if she could slam it. She stomped when she walked, like she was crushing bugs. She held things like she wanted more than anything to break them. She shouted, even when she said she wasn’t angry. She’d done it since I was born, as far as I could make out. She probably did it before. My earliest memory is of her playing a room like a set of drums, bashing out rhythms with the sheer force of her disappointment and fury, and who knows? That might even have been when I was still in the womb.

Novo stepped inside and stood next to me in the hallway. I took his hand and we started up the stairs. Henry’s door was shut as we passed it on the landing. I told Novo not to expect much. “We only just moved in, remember. I’ve hardly touched it,” but the room we walked into was completely different. Not full of dust and dead flies. Not unclaimed and empty at all. The floorboards and walls were a clean bright white and covered already with my rugs and posters. My bed was in the corner under the skylight, my books were unpacked and on shelves. There were plants and candles, an angled lamp and a slender wooden rocking chair I’d only ever seen in the pages of a magazine. It was the room I didn’t know I’d been imagining for years.

“Who did this?” I said, and Novo smiled.

“This was you?”

He shrugged. “It did itself, really. Same as mine.”

“It did itself.”

“Is it okay? Do you like it?”