“That sounds nutty,” says Rat, grumpily. A father who doesn’t answer the phone doesn’t sound half as good as a father who drives a red Ferrari.

Rat and her mother, and Jérôme’s family, too, live at Mas Cargol, just outside Saint Féliu.

Fifty years ago, Mas Cargol would have been a working farm with orchards, arable land, pasturage for sheep. Today, the farmhouse and its outbuildings have all been converted into apartments, and the surrounding fields into an industrial zone of garages and warehouses. All that’s left of the Mas’s agricultural past is a garden and some cherry trees gone wild.

There are six households living at Mas Cargol. Certain neighbors Rat leaves alone—an elderly couple who have a gift shop at Canet Plage and a Yorkshire terrier called Cuddles who likes to bite your ankles; an ambulance driver who works the night shift and yells if you make too much noise in the daytime. Most of them, though, are her friends—Cristel, who works at the town hall; Laurent, who has his carpentry workshop in the courtyard.

The Cabreras, Jérôme’s family, live in half of the farmhouse. The other half belongs to Monsieur Bordon, an elderly doctor from Toulouse who only comes there in the summer, and who owns a couple more apartments in the Mas, including Rat and Vanessa’s.

Rat and Vanessa’s apartment is in the old cave where they used to make wine. It’s small but cozy. There’s a living room, with a kitchenette at one end, two tiny bedrooms, and a shower. They have a backyard where you can sit and eat when the Tramontane isn’t blowing, and a shed where Vanessa stores her flea-market goods.

Vanessa dreams of one day living in a house big enough for a bathtub and a proper closet; she complains about how whenever it rains, the living room floods, and the toilet backs up. But Rat wouldn’t want to live anywhere else in the world.

Nine months a year, Rat and Jérôme and the littler kids run wild, making themselves amusement-park rides out of the rusty threshers, rotting cart wheels, and old wine barrels that still sit in the courtyard. They build tree houses in the cedar tree at the bottom of the garden, they collect pinecones and smash them open to extract the tiny yellow pine nuts, they hunt for frogs in the irrigation canal that runs down to the sea.