Finally Mark said, ‘Don’t worry about her, just come inside.’ So we picked our way across all the junk and around the massive pit and went into the house through the front door. I can tell you, it was as rundown inside as it was out. The boarders were long gone and there was mould on the walls, the floorboards squeaked, there was rust in the sinks and rings in the baths, and foam coming out of the chairs. There were dinner plates on stands, including one with the marriage of Charles and Diana, and they were all dusty, and there were lace curtains that had never been washed because the holes between the lace were caked in dirt. The curtains were so stiff they would have stood up on their own.

Mark said, ‘Don’t tell me, I know! She’s a crazy old coot.’

I said, ‘What does the doctor say?’

He said, ‘She doesn’t want to see a doctor, and I don’t need a doctor to tell me that she’s a screw loose. You saw yourself.’

I said, ‘She probably needs to see somebody.’

But Mark said, ‘Good luck with that!’ And that was fair enough because even though I tried a few times over the years to talk Mrs Bannerman into going to see a doctor with me, she wouldn’t listen. She’d stick her fingers in her ears and say la-la-la.

I said, ‘Are you sure it’s going to be okay for me to live here?’

Mark said, ‘Like she’d even know?’ Which was probably true – she wouldn’t have known if I was there or not. He took me through the kitchen to his bedroom – our bedroom – on the ground floor near the front of the house. I said, ‘Where does your Aunt Beth sleep?’ And he said she had a room upstairs but she never used it, and now that I think of it I don’t think I saw her in the house more than once or twice in the whole time I was there. And if she ever saw a person, even down in her patch under the passionfruit vine, she’d run off with whatever robe she had on flapping behind her.

Mark told me, ‘She wants to sleep outside.’

I said, ‘Are you kidding?’

He said, ‘No, in that bungalow, whatever you want to call it, out near the passionfruit. It’s got holes in the ceiling but that’s what she likes.’

I was pretty keen to see inside that bungalow, but it wasn’t like Mrs Bannerman was ever going to invite me in since she’d never even said hello to me, so I crept around the crater one day and poked my head in there, and I saw it had stained-glass windows, and wedged into the window, at the height of the sill, there was what they call a day bed, which was where she must have curled up like a cat and slept.

Mark’s bedroom was a bit different, since it had a big brass bed that made me feel a bit jealous when I saw it – why did he need a big bed like that, when he told me he didn’t take girlfriends around to Mrs Bannerman’s? But then I thought, ‘Maybe it’s been there since the place was a boarding house.’