We went all around the house. It was totally cool being able to look in all the windows. It was very tidy. There was this one room which was old Corry’s study and it was full of books still. It looked like this Bowles dude bought everything. If he was such a hot-shot writer why didn’t he bring his own? Writers are always doing selfies in rooms full of books, I remember one of the late Seamus Heaney who is on our course and there were books falling off the table and stacks on the floor, like did he even read some of them? He is boring. We did ‘Digging’ in Primary and then we had to do it again when I came to Secondary, like three times because we changed English teachers. If fucking digging was so much fun how come he didn’t become a builder instead of a poet? He could be putting in foundations. And the one about his midterm break. I have a cousin in England she even did that one.

The moon was shining on that side of the house, a big rough piece of bone in a black box. The next window was the kitchen. It was the same higgledy piggledy Formica stuff, like you’d see in old people’s houses. Not built in at all. Like my grandad’s house was all over the place too.

We couldn’t work out how we might attract their attention to the fire until Serena got the idea of setting the alarm off. So that decided us to set the fire outside the drawing room window because we could see a wire and some kind of a sensor on the glass. Like old Miss Corry always called it the drawing room. So we would set the fire, wait until it was blazing and then give the window a thump and run for the trees.

The plan didn’t come together.