When I was eight and we were moving for the third time in a year (a real bad patch—Jim, I think, then Danny, then Joe), I tried to stop the move from happening by tying everything in my room down with string. I got a ball of it and I cat’s-cradled the hell out of my bed and my radiator and my toy cupboard and my bookshelf and then I waited like Charlotte in the middle of her web to see what I’d spelled. Mum used to tell that story to people like it was funny. I’ve heard it a hundred times over the years, and I’ve smiled and nodded and put up with being laughed at. She even laughed at me when it happened. She opened the door and she opened her mouth and threw her head back and I could see the undersides of her teeth, the biting edges, and I remember thinking, How could she? because it was the opposite of funny, to me. I was dead scared of losing something. I didn’t want things to change. Not again. But they did, and they do, and I guess I started learning way back then that you can’t stop your world from turning, however tight you tie it down, however hard you try.

So. Here we were again. Move number thirteen. Mum was on her own, not counting me. She was acting out and we were packing up and I was all set to repeat, all set to be brand-new in another place. I could feel it coming—the unknown, the sudden onset of lonely. First-world problems, sure, but still. Problems all the same.

THREE

The estate agents and lawyers weren’t above making the prospect of this Henry Lake’s death a kind of sweetener on the deal. Our sitting tenant was old, apparently, and not in great shape, and I heard one of them tell Mum on the phone that she wouldn’t have too long to wait to get the whole house to herself. A euphemism if ever I heard one. “Health problems,” he said, the same way he probably said “detached garage” and “en suite bathroom.” I listened and I sat on my hands and tried to laugh, which is the only way to deal with outrage sometimes, the only safe way to breathe out and be gentle and just watch it pass.