This was something I’d heard her say before, to my father, after they’d had people round. She often sniped at him like this. She wanted him to hold forth like her friends’ husbands did, droning on over dry-roasted peanuts about restructuring, and she’d question him brightly, especially in front of others, hoping he would relent. He wouldn’t. He was obstinate too, in his way. ‘Nobody wants to hear shop-talk,’ he’d say. At the time I took this for mordancy – people liked him for it – but now it seems more like despair. Things were not going well for him at work. Eventually I came home from school and found him on the sofa, still in his dressing gown and pyjamas. He’d been sidelined, my mother explained. Mr Fisher and Co. had squeezed him out. My father hung around the place in his dressing gown for months, like a smelly ghost. I didn’t sit for the Fishers again.

During the time when I was earning no extra money, I filled two pages of my notebook with a want-list of CDs: Offspring, Green Day, poppy punk for teens who weren’t even born when the real thing died. I considered myself rebellious, though not enough to steal what I couldn’t afford. My father stayed in the computer room with the curtains closed. Liam stayed in his bedroom. Only my mother busied around, tidying and washing dishes and sighing and turning the television up and down. And then one day, at the garden centre, she bumped into Dr Harmer from down the road, and he complained how difficult it was to find a reliable girl to look after Elizabeth: he needed someone on Thursday nights, when he and his wife went to amateur dramatics at the Methodist church. My mother suggested me. I was very independent. I’d done it before. Dr Harmer would pay ten pounds. Hadn’t she done the right thing? When I just shrugged and went on crunching crisps, she said, ‘For God’s sake! It’s bad enough your Dad moping around all day. Can’t you do something useful?’

The Harmers’ was a Victorian house with a shabby, lopsided look. The lawn was boggy, the swing half-sunk, the bed of black poppies almost always in the shade. They’d have bought it for the hedges, the detachment, the good state school on the hill, but prioritising these qualities, ignoring the gloomy aspect and unmanageable size, meant that the house would get the better of them. It was that kind of area, where either the house or the occupant won.