Her dad was wearing his work T-shirt, covered in paint and sweat stains, his round face looked ruddy and his clothes dishevelled, as though he’d been doing jobs all morning and hadn’t got around to taking a shower. He winked at Minnie and she shook her head. Minnie heard her mother shouting up the stairs inside, something about it not being funny to make crude jokes to the whole goddamn street.

‘What you hanging around outside for, Minnie Moo? In you hop,’ said her dad, waving her in.

The house was part of a 1930s terrace. It looked the same as most other houses on this particular suburban street of Brent Cross, north London. Theirs had slightly rotten wood on the downstairs window frames and an unruly front yard swamped by brambles and wild roses, but otherwise, there wasn’t much to distinguish it from the neighbours. From the back garden you could see lots of the other houses on the street had added kitchen extensions, or done loft conversions, but the Coopers’ house looked pretty much as it had nearly a hundred years ago. When Minnie mentioned Brent Cross to people, they thought of the huge out-of-town shopping centre, or the busy motorway flyover. For Minnie, Brent Cross would always mean this house, this street, this tiny spot of London she called home.

Inside, number thirteen looked like a pretty normal house; well, normal if you didn’t look at the walls. Every inch of wall space was covered in clocks, a testament to her father’s interest in horology. He had spent the last thirty years collecting and repairing antique clocks. He had a workshop in the garden full of boxes and tools, and spent his evenings scouring the internet for broken clocks or half-repaired clocks that everyone else had given up on.

Sometimes her Dad spent years on one clock, waiting for the right piece to come online or trying to fashion a missing cog himself. The time and effort that went into each piece meant he never wanted to part with one. So the clock army grew, ticking, tocking, some tick-tick-tocking; it was an overwhelming sound when you first walked through the door. Neither of her parents noticed the sound any more. ‘It’s the heartbeat of the house,’ her dad once explained, ‘you don’t spend all day being annoyed by the sound of your own heartbeat, do you?’