This was unusual enough to give me pause. My dad’s in his early seventies and doesn’t move about much. I figured it had to be a major occasion, a wedding or a christening, for my mum to dress him up and drag him out of the house. I figured I’d hear all about it when they got home. I made myself a cup of tea with condensed milk and sugar and ate a couple of supermarket own-brand biscuits. Thus fortified, I went to my old bedroom to see if there was room for me to sleep in it.

As soon as I’d moved out – and by this I mean about ten minutes after the door had closed behind me – my mum started using my bedroom for storage. It was full of cardboard moving boxes, each one stuffed to capacity and sealed shut with packing tape. I had to move several off the bed just to lie down. They were heavy and smelled of dust. On roughly a two-year cycle my mum collected clothes, shoes, cooking utensils and non-perishable beauty products, stuffed them into cardboard boxes and shipped them back to her family in Freetown. The fact that a great deal of her immediate family had already immigrated to the UK, the US and, strangely enough, Denmark never seemed to cause a reduction in the flow. African families are notoriously extended but from what I could gather, my mum was related to about half the population of Sierra Leone. I’d learned from an early age that anything I owned that I didn’t defend was subject to arbitrary seizure and deportation. My Lego, in particular, was the subject of a running battle from my eleventh birthday on, when Mum decided that I was too old for such things. In my fourteenth year it mysteriously vanished while I was on a school trip.

I prised off my shoes, climbed under the covers and was asleep before I could wonder where all my posters had gone.

I woke briefly some hours later to the sound of the bedroom door being stealthily closed and the muffled sound of my dad’s voice. My mother said something which made my father laugh and, comforted that everything was all right, I went back to sleep.

I woke again, much later, with the morning sunlight slanting through my bedroom window. I lay on my back feeling refreshed, with a solid erection and the vague memory of an erotic dream about Beverley. What was I going to do about Beverley Brook? That I fancied her was a given, that she fancied me was pretty obvious, that she wasn’t entirely human was a worrying possibility. Beverley wanted me to go swimming in her river, and I had no idea what that meant except Isis had warned me against doing it. I had a strong feeling that you didn’t shag a daughter of the River Thames without getting out of your depth – literally.