Lina has his new special phone in her hand. Elvis loves his phone; it is his favourite thing in his new living room, after the television. The phone is so special that you can only make a call when you put money inside and you can only get the money out with a special key that George looks after. Beside the phone sits a laminated sheet with all the numbers Elvis will ever need: a little drawing of a policeman – 999; a photograph of Elvis’s mum wearing the purple hat she reserves for church and having her photograph taken – 018 566 1641; and a photograph of George behind his desk – 018 522 7573. Elvis is trying to learn all the numbers by heart but sometimes when he tries, he gets distracted by the fantastic noise the laminated sheet makes if you wave it in the air fast. Next to the phone is a ceramic dish shaped like a boat that says Margate on it. The dish is kept filled with change for when Elvis needs to make a call.

He watches carefully as Lina feeds the phone with his change and starts to dial, her lovely pink nails hitting the dial pad: 018 557.

‘Go and sit somewhere else,’ she snaps.

But there is nowhere else to sit apart from the perfect squashy sofa, so Elvis goes into the kitchen where he can watch and listen to Lina from behind the door. In secret.

‘Hi … I’m at work. Elvis is driving me nuts today,’ she says into the phone. ‘He keeps bloody staring at me … Yeah I know … Tell me about it … Ha ha. Yeah, true true …’ She slides off her plimsolls and pulls the coffee table closer, putting her little feet up on it. ‘But you know what my mum’s like, always busting my arse over something: look after your baby, wash the dishes, get more shifts. I thought the whole point of having a baby was that you didn’t have to go work no more … Exactly … Especially on a day like this. Bloody roasting out.’

Even from behind the door Elvis can see that the nails on Lina’s toes are the same colour as those on her fingers, but shorter. The colour looks like the insides of the seashells Elvis collected at Margate last summer. He likes Lina’s toes; this is the first time he has ever seen Lina’s toes. He likes them but knows he is not allowed to touch them.

‘Can I have a biscuit?’ Elvis asks as he comes out from behind the door, now peckish and unable to wait for the pie to boil.

‘Hang on. What?’ Lina rests the phone under her chin like one of the office girls at the Waterside Centre, the place where Elvis used to live before he was clever enough to live by himself in Nightingale Point.

‘Can I have a biscuit?’ he asks again.