Mum didn’t even realize what the house really looked like. Sometimes, when we looked at photos that showed, say, windows with no flashings, electricity cables dangling like Christmas wreaths, old wallpaper half torn off the wall, or other unfinished things, Mum would exclaim: ‘How awful, just look at that wall! When will that get done? I do have new wallpaper ready and waiting…’

Our home was called Sawdust House because its walls were filled with sawdust. Every time Dad did some work, he was showered with sawdust. When you slammed the cellar door, out scattered a handful; when a doorway was widened, out spilled a sackful. Sawdust rested on top of the ceiling lights and on the attic floor. It even buzzed around in the cooker fan.

All the sawdust was collected. It was shovelled into sacks and poured on to the attic floor. Dad said that the attic was the woolly hat of the house and the sawdust kept us warm.

Every now and then we had renovation days. Then Mum and Dad ate their breakfast standing up and no one could spare the time to be with me. Often no one even remembered to make cocoa. On a renovation day, it was cold inside because both downstairs doors were open, and Mum and Dad walked in and out with pieces of bread in their hands.

Once, all the things in the living room were carried into the kitchen. The whole of the downstairs had suddenly shrunk and two rooms had been squeezed into one: dining table, sofa, cheese plant, fridge, armchairs, dresser and TV had all been sucked into one room, where you barely had space to walk.

By contrast, the living room had grown. It was so big it echoed. I wanted to dance, but Mum and Dad said no. Mum said I should watch TV, but the remote control had gone missing and the TV was stuck on channel five, so I was allowed to dance a bit before work started.

Only the bookcase stood in its plastic wrapping in the middle of the living-room f loor. The bookcase had always leaned against the same wall, and now it seemed as if a piece of the wall itself had been moved to the centre of the room and packaged in white plastic, making it ghostlike. Behind the bookcase, yellow wall was revealed. Elsewhere in the room, the walls were pale brown, but you could see patches of yellow where shelves, pictures and the dresser had been unscrewed and taken away, leaving sharp shadows. The shadow of a shelf, the shadow of a dresser, the shadows of three pictures. I stared in amazement: I had never realized there was so much wall behind the furniture!

Dad stroked the wall with his hand and twisted nails out of it with a hammer. The shelf screws had left big holes, as had the curtain rails and windowsills.

Then Dad unscrewed the wall sockets.