They knocked and wanted to come in, but my mum leaned out and said she was busy. I was sitting behind her at the bottom of the stairs as she talked on the doorstep with one leg crossed behind the other, keeping the door with her shoulder.

‘How many people are living in the house?’ asked the woman who looked and spoke like a teacher. The man was wearing a suit and was asking for people’s names for the register.

I counted up the people on my fingers – us in the front room and my mum and dad in the bedroom on that middle floor, six. The three Carthys at the top, and Mr Babalola and Florence up there in the back room, that’s nine ... eleven. Nana who was staying with us in the front room, twelve, and Mr and Mrs Singh and Marie in the front room on the ground floor, fifteen ... then the two Nigerian students sharing the room towards the backyard with Mr Ajani.

‘Eighteen!’ I shouted, and put my hand up.

‘I was going to say we’d some guests staying from Nigeria,’ my mum was saying, ‘short-term, like, and family had come over from Ireland until they found a place, but he didn’t let me get a word out. I said, Ah, he’s only a child, but you should have seen them scribbling. I didn’t know where to put my face.’

My dad was shaking his head as she spoke. And then she laughed and they both looked at me.

‘He’ll be the death of me!’ she said. ‘So I told them to come back when you were in.’

They were looking at me, and I still didn’t know the answer. I counted up again in my head because sometimes I had the feeling there was one of us missing – it still came out wrong. Eighteen? But I knew that was the wrong answer, so I kept my mouth shut.

‘Do you know how serious this is?’ my dad said. I could feel it was but I couldn’t work it out, so I frowned. ‘Overcrowding? I could go to prison.’

I felt I was falling. Those people could put my dad in prison and I’d been showing off that I could count.

They moved out to the kitchen to let me get ready for bed. I heard them talking about the Carthys moving out as I put on my pyjamas, and stop when I went in to wash and brush my teeth in the sink. My mum came to fold me in to the sheets and give me a kiss on the cheek, and tell me not to worry.