She seems to be holding her breath. Or if she isn’t, she exhales, sharply (for no discernible reason), when Charles and Avigail enter the room.

Charles ignores Ying Yue. Ying Yue is freaking him out. Instead he glances over at Avigail and wonders if there is anything about her – anything at all – that might be worth emulating. Avigail must be all of twenty-five years old (Avigail is actually thirty-five years old) and has a funny way of tensing her right cheek and glaring intently at a person when she’s concentrating. It’s a kind of grimace – almost a tic.

Her dedication to her work – her … passion? Drive? Focus? Diligence? It’s certainly notable – interesting – almost admirable. But no. No. That’s not something Charles would want to impersonate. He fleetingly wonders whether Avigail is a perfectionist. And whether Avigail herself has any role models; people she aspires to emulate?

There is actually someone.

Avigail aspires to be like Lucy Molloy, the Perth-based YouTube housewife/tattoo model.

Given a thousand guesses, Charles would never have imagined Lucy Molloy was Avigail’s role model. This is mainly because Charles has no idea who Lucy Molloy is. And he doesn’t know Avigail very well. But there are other reasons, too.

Ying Yue knows, though!

Ying Yue knows who Lucy Molloy is!

Ying Yue also worships at the altar of Lucy Molloy!

This is a powerful tie – a profound connection – between Ying Yue and Avigail, but unfortunately neither of them is aware of it or is likely to find out about it, either, during this brief, twenty-minute house viewing.

Such a shame.

Good enough is more than enough for me!

That’s the mantra. That’s the phrase that Grannon came up with as a perfectionist teen.

Good enough is more than enough. For me.

They are in the kitchen. The short entrance hall leads straight into a dark, poky kitchen. There is some rather astonishing 1970s tilework in here by the famous designer Alan Wallwork, although much of it is obscured by a random collection of stuff (some still unopened and in its original packaging) which litters the counters.

It has never struck Charles as remotely ‘ironic’ that a celebrated designer of tiles should be called ‘Wall-work’. Given Charles’s advanced grasp of this particular comic form/rhetorical device, such an oversight on his part could probably be seen as ‘ironic’.

Ah, but ‘the world is incorrigibly plural … crazier and more of it than we think’, as the great poet Louis MacNeice was oft wont to say (although not quite in that order).

These tiles are definitely an acquired taste. Charles doesn’t like the tiles but he is very, very attached to them for some inexplicable reason probably connected to his mother, Branimira. And, as luck would have it, Charles has recently taken the opportunity to do a load of washing. About five ironic T-shirts – one of which reads: Every time you make a typo, the errorists win – some baggy, black Y-fronts and some black socks are hung over the heated bars of a free-standing electric clothes dryer. A rack.