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tall and narrow, the second one in a terrace of four, with a small living room downstairs onto which
a kitchen and a bathroom had been added at some point, and just one room on each of the three floors above. I’d never been in a house quite like it before. The front door opened straight into
the living room, and stored in there among the usual furniture of the sofa and TV were various outdoor things such as bicycles and skateboards and, on that particular day, the broken-up parts of
her oldest son Jake’s motorbike.
    ‘Oh excuse this,’ she said, as we climbed over the various pieces of metal. ‘It’s my boy Jake’s. He’s got a problem with the fuel pump. He’s waiting for
a part. Told him he could keep it in here out the rain.’
    When Jake was there, and his girlfriend was staying too, they slept on a mattress on the living room floor, squeezed in between the bikes and the sofa. ‘Jake used to share with Max,’
Melanie told me. ‘But I don’t want Kelly up there too. That wouldn’t be right.’
    That day, the mattress was propped against the wall behind the TV, out of the way, but sometimes it was left out. Later I’d go round to Melanie’s house and quite often I would step
right onto it when I came in through the front door, and have to walk across the heaped-up duvet, abandoned clothes, Kelly’s hairdryer, and, on more than one occasion, the sleeping couple
themselves.
    If I make this sound like a ramshackle way to live, it wasn’t. It was just different. Different things mattered, to Melanie.
    Where most people might have a picture or two painted by their children stuck on a wall or a door perhaps, Melanie’s children had painted directly onto the walls. All through the living
room and the kitchen, little drawings and paintings, mostly by Abbie, each one named and dated, many of them going back years. Smiley round faces with an arrow pointing at them saying
Mummy
. Little black cats with long whiskers and long, long tails that stretched out across the wall. Here and there some words too, mostly Max’s contribution:
Smelly McWelly had
a big jelly belly
and
Maths is for morons
.
    On the kitchen windowsill, lined up in a row of old takeaway dishes, was Abbie’s mould collection. Some items I could recognize; the green-spotted bread, the furry cheese. Others were
unidentifiable, lost under a kaleidoscopic growth of green and orange and blue. The smell up close was indescribable, but Melanie simply leaned over and opened the window. Then she pushed the
remains of the breakfast things out of the way and put on the kettle for coffee. Someone had started to make pastry, or maybe it was bread, on the counter next to the sink. The dough sat there in a
cracked, drying-out lump, with the imprint of a fist knuckled into the middle of it.
    ‘Max loves baking,’ Melanie said. ‘It’s good for them, isn’t it, all that kneading? Gets rid of the aggression.’
    We sat on the sofa in the living room to drink our coffee and Melanie quizzed me systematically and thoroughly about where we’d come from, and why we’d come. She was measuring me,
like one of those cats scrawled upon her walls. Naturally I played along. I said how awful life was in London, how crowded and expensive and rushed. So much better to live out here, I agreed. So
much better in every way.
    Whatever she learnt about me that day, I found out a lot about her, too. That her house had belonged to her grandmother. That she’d had Jake, who was twenty, when she’d just finished
school. Colin, the father of Max and Abbie, was still around though she didn’t live with him. ‘I wouldn’t want to live with any man,’ she said. ‘Sooner or later
you’d end up hating their guts and rowing all the time, and I’m not doing that to my kids. I’m not sharing them with some man wanting his dinner on the table and his ego pandered
to all the time. No, it’s much better this way.’
    She worked part-time at the primary school, as a