Marty’s house was the one at the end of the road with the overgrown garden with the stuff in it. There were washing machines that had never worked and piles of carpet rolled up like soggy cigars. There were coils of cables and old sofas stacked on top of one another. The house was small to begin with, a bungalow with four small rooms and a sort of narrow kitchen and a square room out the back, but ever since Marty was born, the house had been shrinking. Not actually shrinking, like magically shrinking, but it was definitely getting smaller. He didn’t remember ever having been into their living room—it had always been full of stuff—but he kind of remembered sneaking into his mum and dad’s bedroom when he was little, when his dad was still around, and sliding into their bed for cuddles in the middle of the night. But you couldn’t even open that door now as so many piles of stuff blocked the way. After a while, the corridors had started to fill on both sides, leaving only a thin path through from the narrow kitchen to his bedroom. You could only get to one cupboard in the kitchen and to the sink, and that was always full. Mum slept at the back of the kitchen now, in a lounge chair by the back door, and the only time she went outside was when she’d sit on the back step and smoke. In the bathroom, the bath had been filled with old letters and bags of clothes so that he could only have a stand-up wash now with a cloth and some soap and half a sink of semiwarm water.

So far, Marty had managed to save his bedroom. Every time a bag of stuff was put there, he’d push it out again, a bit like standing on the beach and pushing back the waves with your bare hands. So, that’s why he went to see Grandad at his allotment every night after school. Even though they did nothing really except sit outside the garden shed and drink tea from enamel mugs together, it was a break from the squashiness of home, the sense that you were about to be washed away by a tide of stuff.

“All right, Marty boy?” Grandad flashed his toothy grin and passed him a mug of tea so sweet you could live off it for a week.