When they first viewed the house, my mother said it appealed to them, to be on their own. Detached. No one listening. And the garden: an acre of it, a tamed patch, the wildness at its edges always trying to get through, my mother and father fighting it with seed packets, weedkiller, a common enemy. The house itself was always cracking and dark at the corners, but my mother tried to keep it nice: she scrubbed and fussed, just as I had fussed and scrubbed. And my father helped, just like Jake, and he fucked other women, just as my husband had.

I’d heard them screaming about it, right in this room, could, if I squinted, see their voices moving across the walls, as clear as the mould, a palimpsest of their presence. When he finally left, just before I did, what struck me most was the silence: the way my mother and I, together, made almost no sound. For years, I would forget that she had died – suddenly, her heart simply giving up one afternoon – would want to ask her questions, ask her opinion, create noise to replace the time when we didn’t speak.

The last I knew of my father, he’d left the country, gone somewhere sweet and hot. It made sense to me, that he had run away to that place, where people’s lives seemed to swim with pleasure: good food, clear light, beautiful bodies. He would never have to return to this dampness, see the garden as it was now, a jungle at the windows.

I trailed through the rooms, looking for things I knew I would never find: old toys, my best picture book. I looked for the place where I had scratched my name, below the windowsill, but found only faded white paint, a blank silence. Underneath the quiet, I could feel the people who had been here after us, shifting traces of their unknown lives.

There was a mattress in the corner of the room, a scrappy old blanket. I lay down on my side, feeling my back settle as I did, my mind now filling every pore of my skin, starting a gentle fire, the tip of a candle along my arms, my legs, my shoulders. I was drained, entirely exhausted, but this surface was flaring, flocking into the edges of myself, the places where I touched the mattress, the points where I ended and the world began.

There was still some light at the window: the last of this day, weak and indifferent. There was no one wanting me, nothing to do. There was the window, asking nothing. The door, simply itself, no needs, no loud voice. The sound of my heartbeat, the feel of my limbs against the blanket. My skin, warm and restless. I began to take my clothes off, piece by piece, thinking of the dirty mattress as I did it, other sensations stronger, more import­­ant.