I rolled out my sleeping bag in the living room. Upstairs was a bit too creepy. Though Dad was the one who actually died in this house, it was my mum’s presence I could sense upstairs, as though each moment I’d spent with her here had turned into a separate ghost that haunted her bedroom. I sat up on top of my sleeping bag and tilted my head back on the sofa that had come with the house. Recently, I’d read a post on Facebook about rituals to do with moving out of homes. It said that moving out of a place you’ve lived in for a significant amount of time can leave you with all sorts of spiritual baggage, if you don’t move out in the right way. The post included pictures of a woman with long blond hair in loose clothes blessing all kinds of different rooms, throwing salt on the carpets and doing some sort of full moon, new beginnings ritual. I couldn’t imagine anything like that taking place in this house. It was, I felt, beyond new beginnings. I let my head slip off the sofa cushions and land with a thud on the floor.

That evening, I’d finished mine and Mum’s last bucket of pig blood from the butcher’s, slightly warmed and from a wineglass to create a sense of ceremony; the other remaining bucket had been poured carefully into flasks and stashed in Mum’s fridge at Crimson Orchard, along with some human food—cheese, microwavable meals, milk, sausage rolls, vegetables—that was there to act as a decoy. I’d drunk what blood remained in the house, sitting alone at the kitchen table where for years and years—for my whole life—I’d eaten meals with my mum. I wasn’t allowed to eat upstairs. Because the blood would stain the carpets if I spilled any, Mum had said; but I think the real reason was that she didn’t like eating alone.

Before dinner we always said a prayer. Our table was a small white-topped one from the 1950s, with metal legs. I sat at one end and my mum sat at the other. Our arms reached toward each other and met in the center. Our fingers interwove so that our linked hands were standing upright and our wrists were pressing down on the tabletop. Mum would wait until I closed my eyes, and then she would close her eyes too and recite a prayer. It wasn’t directed at a god, like the grace said before food was in films and TV programs. When I asked why our grace was different, when I was around six years old and learning about God and the Nativity at school, she looked at me impatiently.

“Lydia,” she said, using my full name, which she only did when she was angry. “Do you think God would feed a body like yours?”