It was interesting to Ever that his room was always known as the guest bedroom; he was never allowed to put up posters or anything to stake his claim, show any evidence, a physically imposed kind of evidence, that this was his own personal space. It had another single bed alongside his. So it was a twin-bedded room, the bed covers, or eiderdowns, as they were known, were in the same shade of lilac as those that were in his mother’s bedroom. It was never referred to as his father’s bedroom, although he’d inherited the house, or his parents’ bedroom, always his mother’s bedroom. The wallpaper also made no concession to the fact that a boy slept there. It had a green background, with flowers and tree branches, factory rolled out and printed in pale colours; only after a long study – he was probably the only person who had bothered to give it that length of study – when in the summer he lay awake, the light fading, staring and staring, squinting his eyes, screwing them up to extract some definition, did he find something in its purposeful blandness. Ever questioned the pattern’s integrity, the reason to make it: a sort of a garden feel, with a Chinese influence. But why put the outside on the inside? He was six.

His conclusion, from these times of pondering, was that it was a really anonymous wallpaper and he hated it.

He never felt he belonged in his room: the room that was kept for guests. There was a much smaller room, attic-style, that he would go to on the occasion that guests came to stay. That only happened once, that he could remember, when his aunt and uncle came to stay for one night. His father was hated by his mother’s brother so it was not pleasant and that was probably the explanation for the single stay.

But the room remained in name terms – the guest room.

Not Ever’s room.

Ever.

Even though it was in this bed that he was visited in the winter, when he would fall ill with bronchitis that would then develop into pneumonia, to be given daily penicillin injections by a Scottish doctor by the name of Dr Triptle.

The injections were delivered into his buttock, a slow and increasingly agonising pain, that built and built during the release of the fluid: so he knew that at the insertion of the thick needle there was nothing to look forward to as this was only the beginning of the increasing pain cycle while the serum journeyed into Ever’s system.