She gives the vanity case a push so that it slides out the other side of the bed. She clambers over the untidy mattress and unsnaps the locks on the case, catching sight of her own fingers in its internal mirror. She wants the red lipstick that sits in a top tray, the one she wore at Halloween, but there is only a small black obelisk in its place. She rummages deeper inside the box and finds it is filled with stones: fluorite and rose quartz and pebbles of labradorite, among her mother’s make-up. She finds a lipstick eventually, but it is a different colour, pale pink in a rose-gold case, rather than the deep red of Halloween. She picks out a small palette of silver eyeshadow and brushes it around her eyes until she looks like a girl from the future. She pretends she can read people’s minds.

In the back room downstairs, seventies rock thumps and the table is laid for two. She draws the hall doorway’s velvet curtain behind her but Jameson snuffles through and sits under a forbidden dining chair.

Her father calls from the kitchen, ‘Nearly done now.’

She leans through the steam of the food hatch. ‘What is it?’

‘Making a pie.’

‘Is … today special?’ She wonders whether he is drunk, like the summer he made pancakes at four in the morning.

A clump of hair is hanging between his salt and pepper eyebrows. ‘Nope!’

She hurls herself backwards into the main room like a rock star. Further away from the kitchen, she begins to smell something sour that isn’t his cooking. It is the same smell as under the bed, and when Ann-Marie came to babysit her. She keeps dancing. The same smell that is not rotting meat or dead flowers or a mouse trapped in the walls, but something like it. After a couple of minutes, she realizes her father is watching her dance from the kitchen hatch, his face pink like ham. ‘You know,’ he says, moving in time, ‘I should show you how to play this. I think you could pick it up, if I showed you.’

‘No I couldn’t!’

He disappears, and she hears the clanking of plates and metal. She stops dancing. A current of frosty air brushes her skin, even though the fire is steadily building. Shadows start to grow from under the doorway curtain, like a tide edging in. For a second she is sure she sees the shadow of a person behind the curtain, and then it is gone.

Lauren shivers and lights a stubby candle in a piece of carved antler. She can hear the utility room dripping under the clatter of cooking.