He’d already phoned the planning department (‘Thank you for calling. Your call is important to us and will be answered as soon as a member of staff is available. You are at position… nine… in the queue’), and sent an email (‘Thank you for your email. Your message is important to us and we will respond within twenty working days’). He’d have to make the time to visit in person.

He’d spoken to the local coppers too, and seen the look of resignation in their eyes. They’d already been down to see them, the officer said. They weren’t littering, or causing a nuisance. They’d seemed like nice, reasonable people and they swore up and down they’d be gone again in a few months. It was council land and the dispute would have to go through council channels. He was really very sorry, but…

The kettle had boiled, but he didn’t want the coffee after all. He put the mug back in the cupboard instead, making a mental note to remember which one it was so he could use up the coffee-granules next time.

“I’d choose you,” he repeated to Ellen as he went downstairs.

Alicia heard her father speak as he passed her door, but couldn’t make out the words. He often talked out loud to himself – not often, and thank God never in front of her friends, but enough for it to seem normal. When she was little, she’d sometimes pretended her mother had come back and what she could hear was one side of their conversation. Once or twice she’d even heard her mother’s replies, muffled but unmistakeably her voice. She listened hard, hoping for another kindly haunting, but there was only silence.

Her biology teacher had once told her that every cell in the human body was replaced in a seven-year cycle, which meant there was now no part of her remaining that had known her mother. As she blew out the candles on her fifteenth birthday, she marked the moment with the secret thought: From now on, I’ll always have lived longer without her than with her.

Her diary lay open on her bed, but she wasn’t happy with anything she’d written. She’d begun it with the vague idea of creating a new persona, an acceptable alternate for the person she suspected she really was. But when she read her entries back, they sounded stilted and strange. This morning in class Jake was looking at me and whenever I tried to catch his eye he looked away. What if he asks me out? I don’t like him like that, but maybe I should give him a chance. Alicia slammed the book shut in disgust and tossed it away, then retrieved it and hid it carefully under a stack of sanitary towels. She wouldn’t put it past her dad to read it. Would her mother have looked? And if she was somehow still with Alicia and could read what she’d written, would she even recognise the girl she’d left behind?