Marty jumped to his feet. His heart beating.

“Marty?”

Marty shook his head. It was so ridiculous. He took his fingers in his hand. He must have imagined it. He looked up at Grandad.

“N-nothing,” he stuttered, “nothing…”

“Okay,” Grandad said, clapping his old hands, “now tuck it in, say good night! Shall we sing it a lullaby?”

“No!” Marty smiled distractedly, gently patting some raked soil over the seed.

Grandad slapped him on the shoulder and smiled back.

“You and me are going to have so much fun!” he said before going into the shed to boil the kettle. Marty brushed the soil off his fingers onto the side of his trousers, his fingers still tingling from the touch of the seed.

FOUR

HE’D BEEN DREAMING about the seed when he heard the noises in the night. To be honest though, it was quite normal in Marty’s house to hear landslides at three o’clock in the morning. It didn’t take much, maybe a breeze from a window left ajar, or a truck vibrating past on the road outside, and it was enough to send a pile of paper or boxes sliding away. Mum always tried to stack things carefully and safely; it was just that sometimes, something would give and then it was a bit like those videos you see of dominoes. One pile would hit another, and suddenly half a room of contents would shift sideways. Marty would wake up sometimes in a cold sweat, dreaming that he was suffocating under a mound of things.

This morning, he’d gotten up, pulled on his trousers (he always slept in his school T-shirt and socks and underwear) and made his way through the narrow corridor to the back of the kitchen.

Marty couldn’t actually believe it. The whole room was cleared. The whole of the back room. The carpet was in a poor state—dirty and stained—but other than that, there was nothing in there. Only his mum and her chair. And their old record player. She had never managed this before. All the stuff had been bagged and stacked outside the back door, so high that it touched the eves of the bungalow. She’d even spread a little blanket on the floor and had laid out a kind of breakfast picnic, if you could call it that—a few packets of potato chips and some juice.

“Happy birthday, Marty!” she cried.

Marty wondered for a moment if he should tell her his birthday had come and gone, but he decided to go with it.

“Thanks, Mum!”

“What do you think?!”

“I … I … I don’t know what to say…,” confessed Marty. “I mean, did you stay up all night?”

“Almost,” she said. “I’m having a good old spring clean! Come on, sit down…” She patted the floor by her side. Marty sat hesitantly.

“Tuck in…” She chucked a packet of potato chips at him and opened one for herself.