To enter the kitchen would be to move into the tree’s clutches, but I somehow found the strength. Wood scraped against glass.

‘It’s a panic attack,’ I said to myself, and I liked how confident I sounded. ‘You’re having a panic attack. You’ve been having them every day. There’s no smoke in the room, there are no evil birds, the tree isn’t coming to get you. You’re not well, that’s what’s happening.’ I needed to see how the tree could have come so close, to dismiss the mystery as I had the others, to blink and end the hallucination. If necessary I could climb the garden wall again, anything to make the real snap back into place.

Even if I really had wanted to climb the garden wall again, I could not. It was gone. Not quite all of it – but a car-long bite had been taken out of it, visible through the cold jungle that now infested the back garden. I opened the back door to confirm what I could see, and, letting go of the door, it continued to move, falling further open before banging on its hinges. It had never done that before. Once I stepped out, I felt the slope in the poured concrete surface of the garden. A black fissure arced across the ground in front of me, under the dirty white plastic table, to disappear under the kitchen. Everything on one side of this fault line, my side of the fault line, had developed a distinct and novel camber.

No climbing was needed to look into the neighbour’s garden today, but I had to push through the rain-soaked boughs that had descended into my path. Cappuccino-brown water had filled two-thirds of their expensive pit, almost submerging the machinery that had been left at its bottom. It was into this mire that the half-moon section of garden wall had fallen, and so had a portion of the concrete slab I was standing on. Creeping towards the precipice, the swamp-shore, painfully aware of the tilt that was consuming the garden, I could see that the sides of the pit were dissolving away in the rain. The pyramid of retained dirt that had supported the tree had collapsed, exposing a ghastly white fist of roots, and the tree had toppled over, coming to rest against my house and the roof of my kitchen. It was incredible to me that the kitchen roof had not simply caved in under the weight of the tree, and I could only conclude that it must have fallen gradually, silently, and that the house itself must be taking its weight. I started to look for signs of damage on our side of the wall, and at once I saw a thick black crack running vertically from where the kitchen roof met the rear wall, up to the lower sill of the ground-floor window. But it didn’t stop there, it reappeared above that window and ran up to the sill of Bella’s, above; and it continued again through the uppermost level as well, where it was joined by an ugly twin.