Dad’s annoyed because after Auntie Annu disappeared, having gone out into the big wide world and started collecting stories, Extra Great Manor has become his responsibility. Winter’s coming, the Blue Room has no wallpaper, no one has ordered logs for the winter and we don’t even know what we should do with the sheep.

I look at the rug Auntie Annu wove. She was still in her square phase at that point. The rug is slightly longer than I am, and if I were to lie down in the middle of it and wrap it round myself, I could just fit inside, like a caterpillar in a cocoon.

The whole of my old wardrobe is in that rug, cut into even strips for the weft and slammed on the loom. The clothes I had when I moved to Extra Great Manor all that time ago. The rug has cotton stripes, denim stripes, frilly stripes and even two thin knicker stripes. It’s got pink, orange, faded blue and green in it. A red raincoat glints here and there. I was quite a colourful girl back then. Fairly frilly, too.

Auntie Annu has sewn buttons and decorations braided from zips of different colours on the edges of the rug. The colours blending into one other make me think of water stirred in with oil. Everything is mixed up but I can still see each garment separately.

But the really amazing thing about the rug is the fact that it’s so solid and compact, so even. Somehow Auntie Annu has managed to weave a clear-cut rectangle out of something that was so loose and flowing, so shrill and unreal. Both ends have been finished off, and the colours have been matched. There. It starts here and ends there. And that’s the end of that.

I go upstairs. My new room has a blue-grey wooden floor. I can see the Wendy house and the veranda steps out of the window. Perhaps Dad doesn’t want to sleep here because the window faces the garden steps. Mum’s vegetable patch lies behind the steps, and Mum used to look out of this window first thing in the morning to see from the sky what kind of weather lay ahead.

I’ve got new curtains: blue butterflies on a white background.

I spread the birthday rug from Auntie Annu on the floor; it fits well there, almost as if she had guessed that one day the big upstairs bedroom would be mine. Almost as if my old clothes had known that one day they would be cut into strips and the floor would be blue-grey. Dad didn’t even ask what room I wanted. He said I’d have my own space this way, and a bit of privacy, and put me upstairs. I didn’t know I wanted my own space, a bit of privacy. The manor house had fifteen bedrooms; that was more than enough space.