Every morning she would wake up the girls – except Aggie, who an hour earlier would have woken her, standing at the bottom of her bed with a night-time nappy sagging heavily round her hips, smelling of sweet grass and piss. She would toast bread and spread it with honey, pour cereal into bowls, gather up damp towels and dirty knickers and balding socks, pieces of Lego that stabbed her bare feet, dolls and swords and soft toys with splitting seams, jam jars filled with blades of grass. No matter how thorough she was, it was as though chaos couldn’t be held at bay. She opened cupboard doors, and jigsaw pieces showered down on her, shiny beads poured out of split plastic containers, sheets of thick white paper with drawings on drifted down from shelves and slipped behind radiators. Lavatories weren’t flushed, plugs weren’t pulled out of baths and sinks, crayons never put back in their cases. In Sasha’s room, which in other ways was orderly, there were shreds of paper and card everywhere, little squashed models she’d painstakingly made from old shoe-boxes and scraps of material. In Aggie and Clem’s room, Irene battled daily with a maelstrom of possessions: sticky, plastic broken figures; soft, torn animals with bright eyes, staring up at her from wherever they lay; sheets of thick soft colouring paper covered in drawings and doodles and splashes of poster paints; mutilated cardboard boxes that they were forever in the process of turning into houses, kennels, whole new worlds; grubby socks and twisted vests under the beds; brown, shrivelled apple cores and dried-up orange peel; strange potions of rose petals rotting in a mug.

She washed faces, brushed teeth, searched for matching socks and errant shoes, tied Sasha’s hair into neat plaits or symmetrical pigtails, tugged a brush through the knots in Aggie’s hair while she squirmed and screamed, checked Sasha’s maths homework, dabbed disinfectant on Clem’s scabby knees, rescued Aggie’s pink jersey from the washing machine, tried to divert her from the fact that she’d cut her toast in half when Aggie had wanted it whole, that she’d spread the jam more thickly than Aggie liked it, heated the milk too much, too little, that Clem had finished the pack of frosted flakes, that Sasha had ignored her … Irene would look at her two-year-old and know, like a sailor knows a squall is riffling over the water, that a tantrum was approaching. The mutinous mouth, the eyes that glittered, the voice like a seal’s bark.