‘Get your arse inside,’ Veronica barked from the front door, cigarette hanging out of her brightly lipsticked mouth as I bolted up the path. She stubbed it out on the side of the house and called out to the assembled teenagers at the gate. ‘We’ve got a limited edition drop going live on the shop in seven minutes,’ she screeched. ‘We aren’t announcing it, you’re the only ones that know!’

They silenced themselves with a collective gasp, lifting their phones to their faces as their attention turned from me to whatever delights awaited in the Snazzlechuff shop.

‘What’s the drop?’ I asked, slipping inside, door slamming behind me.

‘Nothing.’ She tossed the half-smoked cigarette butt in a huge bin full of them. ‘But they’ll refresh the website all day before they risk missing out on something so you probably won’t make an appearance on Reddit for at least another couple of hours.’

I frowned at the thought and wiped my shoes on the doormat before following her through the house. From the outside, it looked like a very normal semi-detached house and I assumed once upon a time, it had been. But at some point, it had become some sort of Premiership-footballer-meets-Justin-Bieber Franken-house. The normal-looking front was just the tip of the house iceberg. Gazing around at the bizarre architecture, it appeared number 18 and its semi-detached twin had been knocked into one giant house and extended out at the back, creating an absolutely humungous downstairs area, filled with oversized sofas, armchairs and beanbags bigger than a king-sized bed. And the televisions. So. Many. Televisions. The largest of them all hung on the wall, twice the size of a school blackboard.

Did schools still have blackboards? I wondered. Didn’t seem as though Snazzlechuff was the right kid to ask.

All the soft furnishings were, against all kinds of common sense, stark, bright white, and all the technology was black, giving the room the air of a very fancy chessboard-slash-asylum as designed by Kris Jenner, a feeling only enhanced by the fact that literally everything was either padded or had rounded edges. The effect was at once calming and unnerving. I couldn’t hurt myself in here whether I wanted to or not, and the longer I was here, the more appealing the idea became.

‘Coffee?’ Veronica asked, pushing me through the millionaire’s soft-play centre and into the next room. A considerably smaller but no less swish kitchen.

‘Thanks,’ I nodded, taking a seat at an island in the middle of the room. ‘This is quite a house.’