Things Left Behind on the Moon

I was ten, I didn’t want to change school. But my father died. It wasn’t important he left us with nothing. We had nothing before, his death made no difference. We moved from a flat in the town to a house in wretched country. A suburb, tethered meaninglessly five miles from anywhere. Overnight I lost my friends. My mother never explained.

I hated school and yearned for summer, the way a prisoner strikes days on the wall. I did nothing all summer. My mother worked to support us. I built fantasies from TV and the glimpsed, distant woods. Dissonant, shifting leaves, and jagged clouds chasing the moon.

Beyond our long, featureless garden, a concrete track joined a string of seeping garages to a high, bullish gate that opened the grounds of a house right-angled to ours. Reluctant to leave indoor occupations, only boredom took me outside, drawn to impetuous colour among the leaves. Beyond the tall gate, a blue tent floated on shadows that stretched across grass parched by scrounging tree roots. Towards the house, an inflatable pool was a circus of blind reflections. Windows gaped, drowsy with heat. A confidence unreflected in our rust-shut windows and stony plots that my mother dug and abandoned.

The girl from the tent rose with springy tension. In jeans, first thing I saw. Young women on TV wore jeans. The girl’s flowered shirt kicked purple and pink. Curly black hair drenched her shoulders. Ashamed of my stripey T-shirt, my shorts that were too small the year before, I hid from her. She was older.

Often, I got sent to bed early, so my mother could play her old records. Light enough still to watch the blue tent through truculent branches. The tent was astounding. A thing of families with fathers, with money to spend. I couldn’t place myself on our dented lawn, curled among ants and earwigs. Open to night’s flowing shadows, wrapped in the unknown. As night tamped down, the tent glowed, sapphire with torchlight. Mistrustful of outside, I craved to be there. To be what she saw.

When my mother went to work, she left instructions. Don’t open the door. Don’t answer the phone, except to her special signal. Two rings, then stop, then ring again. I watched cartoons, the news and soaps, whatever was on TV. TV was the world, more real than our routine streets. TV came from elsewhere and was better for it.

I didn’t belong to summer air, to music slung from windows, the squall of babies, dogs barking blind at back gates. Shared moments, for those born to share. I couldn’t fight, couldn’t shout cocky obscenities through torpid, heat-bricked streets. I could only be scared. Between low branches, spider silk propelled bolts of sunlight. At the fleecy margins by the fence, where my mother’s patience with mowing the lawn ran short, grasshoppers scratched and sometimes ditched on the path, heaving and mechanical. Old books in the school library showed families of fair-haired, outdoors children catch grasshoppers in jars, go fishing, sail, inveigle themselves in adventure. Their summers were admirable.

Pinned open, the tent enticed sunlight to touch pillows, a wad of bedding, a mirror. An escape from stifling rooms. I had no choice where to sleep. My mother wouldn’t understand the question. Sun drenched the girl’s white shirt as she walked from the house. Her shadow rippled through the lawn, moving as though with delight. Barefoot in jeans, hair slung back, adult without intransigence. I gawped like a mindless baby as she folded cross-legged in front of the tent. Her shirt described neat highlands that compelled my thoughts as I scuttled away.

Heat rose early, swilling dust through the air. My mother wore her jacket to work, indifferent to the weather. The garages at the end of our garden were near-derelict. Men were there sometimes, hunched over dismembered engines. I stayed inside when I saw the men, unable to manage their presence. When they'd gone, I crept to the fence, scavenging their lost coins. Just pennies but I was ten and my mother told me every penny counts. With a twig I fished the coins together, trying not to feel ants explore my bare legs as I knelt in the grass. I reached to the huddle of coins through fence wire, loose and unravelling. Then a rip, a bright hum of blood, the leaden heat ringing with pain.

“Was that you? Are you alright?” The voice blanketed me. “You. What have you done?” Stood on the second slat of the gate, she waved bare arms, frizzy with black hairs.

I flailed, blood spackling the grass.

“Come here. Show me.”

Scrabbling to my feet, my dusty, buckle-up summer shoes suddenly ridiculous. Unmoored by tears, I stumbled to the scrubby wedge between our garden and hers.

“Come here. I’ll fix it.”

“The fence.” I wept hopelessly.

“Climb through the fence. Look.” With absurd simplicity, she unhitched the wire. “It’s easy.”

Snot bubbling over my face, I let her navigate me to the sunlight. Not squeamish she wiped my nose, pinching it shut. She rinsed my cuts from her water can, binding torn skin with plasters from a First Aid box, green metal, like in school. Her hands had a pleasant roughness, like the boards my mother used to smooth her nails. She talked, small remarks needing no answer. “Soon have it done. Nice and tight. It’s not as bad as it looks.” Shaded by fine, luxurious hairs she showed the pink scar on her arm, like the rotted spine of a fish. “I did that in France last summer. Fell off a horse – bomp! – straight onto a flint. Had to go to this hospital full of nuns. Quelle malchance pourrie.”

I stared, the pain of torn skin crowned by the ache of her touch.

“Don’t you learn French?”

Unable to think of anything, I said, “I’m not at big school.”

She had a gap between her front teeth. Laughter came like a fairground whistle. Sparse strands of hair on her upper lip glinted. “I thought a brave boy like you would be older.”

The truth unmade me. “I’m not brave.”

“Should get a tetanus jab or something. Just in case. I learned French in France. My dad owns a house near Lyon. What’s the matter? Thirsty?”

Warm cherryade, its bubbles sluggishly sweet. When she shared the bottle, I thought I could taste her, without knowing what taste that was.

“We haven’t been introduced. Most remiss. Heather.”

“Keith.” Could barely say it, baffled by the wrong-side handshake she tried to give me, my right hand stiff and swaddled.

“It’s a pleasure,” she said. “C'est mon plaisir. One has to be terribly polite in France. All the old codgers expect it.”

“Are you from France?”

 “Not properly.” Her smile wearied. “I lived there a long time.” She glanced over my head. “Is that your mum? She’s wearing a suit.”

Home from work to find the back door unlocked. She stood in the garden, gauging the houses and trees, as though these everyday things were coarse and malicious.

Heather nudged me. “You better scoot. She looks rather miffed.” A sparse touch but its sensation endured, after the sting of my mother’s slaps warmed out.

Too young to grapple intentions, I searched TV for clues. In afternoon dramas people pursued gesture, mishap, sly connection with blind certainty. Men and women in complex crosstalk displayed to each other, entangled through reproach, denial and acquisition. After my father died, my mother never mentioned him. I didn’t know how to ask what he’d done to convince her, if he spoke like men on TV, with curt assurance. Those moments of gain and retreat must have happened, but stayed locked inside her.

My mother hid the back door key, but the windows were low and need overtook my fear of hard landings. With nothing but instinct, I sat in the dirt at the end of the lawn, sifting dry earth through my fingers.

“You escaped.” Kids from different streets had different voices. Tone, cadence, the attitude that formed their words. Heather’s self-possession shattered the stale afternoon. I only spoke when I had to. She didn’t care who heard. “Your mum looked a bit cross, pegging out her shirts.”

I turned to the drunken washing line propped on its splintered stick. My mother’s work shirts, never new, rinsed and wrung by her scrupulous hands.

“Come over. Mine have gone out for an argument.”

Heather gave me the remains of her lunch: slick, tangy pâté in chewy bread with sharp, sticky cheese that I thought smelled of toilets. She had a pack of postcards of Lyon.

“It’s a big city, down south near Switzerland. In the department of Rhône. See the mountains? Les Alpes.” Hasty excitement coloured her breath. “This is a panorama from the roof of the Basilica of Notre-Dame de Fourvière. You see the whole city from there. It’s built on the old Roman forum. That’s what ‘Fourvière’ means. Nothing Roman round here.”

We did the Romans at school. I couldn’t draw the centurions properly. Everyone laughed. Even the teacher.

“That’s the Place des Terreaux where the museum is. That’s the Fontaine Bartholdi, a very famous fountain. I’ve seen it freeze in winter. People here have paddling pools, not fountains. There are two rivers, the Rhône and the Saône. That’s the Saône. The road just there is Quai Romain Rolland. It’s named after a very famous and brilliant writer. Not like these roads named after trees. We used to go to this lovely little bar on Quai Romain Rolland.”

My mother didn’t drink; she despised it. Men and women had drinks on TV, rehearsing that language of chase and escalation. “You?” I was so small.

“I am fifteen.”

“With your mum?”

“Don’t be dense. Look at this.” The blue-box dancer weaved through smoke with a gesture of release. Something hopeful, some farewell. The textured name leaned into the smoke as though racing a hard wind. “Gitanes,” said Heather. “Très chic. I’m not meant to, but pah! Want one?”

My mother didn’t smoke, though her friends did. They spread rich clouds through their hair, shrouding themselves as they described complex, fathomless troubles. My mother would make coffee, stare through smoke, rinse the ashtray the moment they’d gone. She referred to these women obliquely: ‘She’s unlucky’, ‘She has a good heart’. I’d stay in my room, embarrassed, as they talked and wept, stabbing their cigarettes cold in the onyx ashtray with its dense, unexplained fracture.

Heather smoked as though giving a blessing. The Gitanes twirled between her fingers, bestowing a scent of necessity. She blew funnels of smoke at ants mountaineering her knees, popped halos, and told me, “I’ll get a holder. Ebony with an ivory mouthpiece. Gitanes, black jeans, black sweater. Très élégante.”

When she passed me the cigarette, its hot paper, damp from her lips, stirred me to breathless urgency, before my stomach erupted. I managed to roll aside, to puke under the trees, the Gitanes drowned in slurry.

“Ooh.” Heather smiled. “You need more practise.”

Sent to bed early, I crept through my mother’s old music as it soaked the floor. Heather’s torch stretched against the darkness. No one told her to sleep. Longing for that fearless light to lead me away. She bewitched me. Her small, quick-rising chest, her legs as they’d fold and unfurl. Strong, grainy fingers, the faint hairs that shaped her lips. Her concern that became amusement. Her pleasure that stung like a dare. My tangled unease with my mother’s friends was indebtedness with Heather. Obliged to her kindness, her secrets, her indifference to my failings. I fretted at want, while my body chased release.

The women my mother knew had lives where things happened. As the least eventful among them, they seemed to gain assurance from my mother, though I didn’t recognise how. Aunt Carol lived two streets away, in a stunted block that broke the line of houses like a thrown weight. She wasn’t my aunt. She was Aunt Carol because she lived round the way, an echo of my mother’s childhood where families absorbed anyone close and useful.

Busy with housework, my mother let me run the errand. I knew there was money in the envelope. She handled it delicately, rolled in her fist. Told me to scrunch it deep in my pocket and don’t let go. But my shorts were tight, I looked stupid, it hurt to walk with my hand pinched into my leg. I wanted jeans. But my shorts still had wear.

I feared boys at school who shoved and called me names. They were daylight terror. My fear of Aunt Carol was opaque. Glad of the errand, yet my babyish buckle-up shoes dragged the corner of her street. Anticipation stung when I waited for Heather. But Carol was caustic hunger.

Climbing the concrete stairs to her flat was a TV nightmare of hard boots and breathless echoes. From height I saw dead streets all around, too distant to be real.

Shocked by noise, I clutched the rail as the man jogged down, released from above with busy impatience. I saw nothing but the possessive limbs of a grown man. He chased by, angry at me.

Aunt Carol’s door swayed open. I couldn’t tell anyone’s age, but Carol had to be years younger than my mother. More sly, less enthralled by hurt. She listened to young music. Glad and alarmed to see her, on the couch in a gauzy nightdress. She was often undressed; that seemed – from my upbringing – wasteful and rash. Smoke wickered around her, insisting against thin nylon. Smoke lingered in Carol’s flat as though to preserve her hours. Her skin looked damp and often weary. Her tight blonde hair fussed the light. Raised to be frugal, of course I noticed the money stacked on the table.

Instead of the armchair, she told me to sit on the footstool between her waxy legs. “Where I can see you, Keith,” she said, as if that was important. She took the envelope two-handed, her bright rings and soft skin swamping my small fist. As instructed, I said, “Mum says thank you very much. She appreciates it.” Wondering how my mother appreciated anything.

Carol tore the envelope with a loose clatter, adding the notes to the pile. “It’s fine. I don’t mind, tell her.” She swept the money into a black handbag. Its worldly creases glinted, bright as teeth. “Want a drink?”

“No thank you.” I inherited my mother’s distrust of hospitality.

When she laughed, lines squeezed her nose. “Such a polite little gent.” She lit a cigarette, her dark lashes batting off the burn. “And how is young master Keith?”

My mother would never ask such a question. In her rigidity and dismay, I thought her weak. Carol had less quarrel with life. “Alright.” A shallow sound, my groin choked by the vicious, stupid shorts.

As Carol leaned forward her breasts swung and settled. I stared, open to any kindness. “Young master Keith.” Her cigarette tapped the air. “I know more about men than you ever will. When a man says he’s ‘Alright’,” she copied my voice, “he’s not alright. Tell Auntie Carol.”

It wasn’t telling an adult. My mother was adult, hard and busy. Carol was smoky warmth. “This girl.”

Contentment rippled around her face. “I thought so. You like her.” She prodded my belly. “You feel it here.”

“I don’t know what to do.”

“Get her. If you like her, you must get her.”

I had no idea of the rules or the cost. “She’s at big school.”

“That’s good, though. She can show you new things.”

I must have looked savagely lost.

“It’s not all cops and robbers.” She gripped my shoulder. It hurt, but it was okay. “Girls don’t always go for the big man. The tough guy. Talk to her. Take an interest. That’s half the battle.” She squinted at her fussy gold watch, luxurious ribbons of skin stacking round her eyes. “Got to chuck you out, sweetheart. Got visitors. Give Auntie Carol a hug.”

I stood between her knees, smelling cigarettes and flowers. With swift assurance she clutched me, my body against hers. Intense heat repelled me. Stern longing drove me back. Sharp, shameful pain crippled my gut. I jolted, crying, the ache tight to burst.

Firmly, she set me back on my feet, loose and falling with pain.

The fingers that pinched my nose made rich with tar. Her gruff voice gentle. “It’s called an erection, sweetheart. It’s nothing to worry about. It means you’re growing up just fine. Your mum’ll tell you.”

But she didn’t. She never explained.

“Tell your mum me and her should go out one night. Have a laugh.”

As I stumbled to the concrete walkway, a man rose from the stairs. Different to the one before, yet the same impatience, as though I kept him from some vital task. He called to Carol.

She shouted, “Come in, lover,” her voice grazed and expectant.

As he slammed the door, his eyes tore through me.

Thoughts of Carol were tense heat. And Heather, though I couldn’t picture her so unguarded, sparked a deeper fire. Her tent glinted through the trees. My room stifled me. My treasured things were toys, and useless. At home, everything was my mother. Furniture and tools, sobriety and hurt. Her instinct for the hard way.

The dry air that filled that summer hung, scratched by voices. Sounds I knew from TV. My mother scarcely raised her voice, her anger astonished and restless. Fragmentary breeze spread the garden with words, a man shouting, a door’s decisive slam. Heather billowed through the afternoon, a slick of hair and action. The door screeched open, a woman yelling, I tingled with forced attention. The door slammed again.

Heather’s kick took a stone through the sagging fence. It struck concrete with a dead cry. Anger coloured her skin. Darkened and strange, she glared blindly.

Though Carol’s breath instructed me, I was too stubbornly stupid to learn her lessons. So stupid, I said nothing to Heather, as passion enlarged her. As she grabbed a fallen branch and smashed it against the tree, wrecking and shredding till splinters spattered the earth. “Lovely family.” Her voice metallic. “So successful. So charming.” She flung the stump of wood, staring beyond me. “Your mother again. She knows when to arrive.”

Drawn to my mother’s irresistible duty, compelled by Heather, I shook, torn in two.

“Your mother has really nice skin.”

Friday night, Carol arrived in a shiver of perfume and nylon. Bare legs in tall heels driving unconscionable welts in my mother’s carpet. My mother distrusted the night. My father’s death was a midnight ride, laborious hours debased by strangers with questions. But, even before, my mother never went out. The night seemed to enrage her. Our house was small, nothing moved without my mother’s hand. Against that rigor, Carol was an excitement of furious laughter and startling hair. “It’s a wig.” She fanned my cheek. It felt like string.

“Why you wearing a wig?”

That playful knock left alarming warmth. “Why wouldn’t I?”

I wasn’t told why my mother said yes. She frowned at Carol’s offer, it seemed forgotten. Now Carol was smoking in the lounge, ash carelessly snowing the table. When my mother went to get ready, Carol drew me close. “How’s that girl of yours?”

Vivid, but I was too narrow to describe it. “Her parents, always shouting.”

“She upset?”

I floundered.

“You should comfort her when she’s upset. So she knows you care.”

Useless, I shrugged.

“Women aren’t from the moon. They want kindness. You can be kind.” Carol slipped her arm around me. “I’ll teach you to proper kiss. Women like a good kisser.”

My mother’s smart suit smelt sharp and sour, plastic and camphor, uncanny. Jacket and trousers fiercely brushed, its nap glowed like whey. Substantial and exacting, beside Carol’s thin dress. Not caring Carol was there, my mother gave me instructions: keep the curtains shut, switch lights on and off so the house looked busy, lock the door but don’t lock her out, have the TV for noise but not loud. Bed by ten. Leave the hall light on. Still speaking as she closed the door, their mismatched silhouettes fractured through iced glass.

Summer condensed to a fevered late August. Days shortened, leaving trapped and turgid heat. Soon, school would start. A return to the punches, the names, the waste and futility. Days fled from me like smart, unbuttoned girls. Night coalesced. Trees seeped into each other and bled to the ground. The sky swallowed servile houses that one by one went dark, as street upon street surrendered to hasty estrangement. To that discipline my mother was charmed and enraged by.

First breath of night, that warm, rigid staleness, coarse with what went before. At the spilled edge of light, the garden sank to viscid, intricate darkness. The garages a hunkered slab. The houses a buckshot of windows. Striped with choking wire, the blue glow of the tent gave the only release. Heather showed me the ease to unhitch the rackety fence. But in blinding sun not watchful dark. Stumbling, afraid each step, I reached the scrubby border where nothing was planned and nothing planted. The evasive distinction between our arbitrary worlds.

I never went to her garden uninvited. I never went anywhere I shouldn’t. Greasy heat pursued me. A heavy indecency, it bound me to Earth as the moon crept through the trees. Breathless with daring I gaped at their house, spilling its wasteful affluence, its voices tussling against vast night.

That growl took me down. “I’ll show you what we do to strangers.”

Sat by the tent, shaking and wretched, with Heather beside me still laughing. “Sorry, I couldn’t resist. Really, I heard you right through the bushes. You wouldn’t make much of a spy, Keith.”

“Don’t want to be a spy.” Scratched words like Mum’s old records.

“Everyone wants to be a spy.” She smoked in the hollow of her hand, ash flaking through her fingers. “Have one. It calms your nerves.”

“Made me sick.”

“Only because you don’t practise.” The cigarette jabbed towards the house. “She’s doing her diva. Again. Bloody operatic cow.” She held smoke in her hand and flung it aside. “Really, my mother’s a bitch.”

A word from TV. My skin tingled. “Why is she angry?”

“She has nothing else. She’s made Dad’s life a misery. She wants mine a misery too. She’s a cancer.”

I nearly said ‘My mother’s Taurus’ but some small instinct stopped me. Struggling for Carol’s wisdom, I offered, “My mother gets angry.”

“I don’t hear her screeching noon and night. Or throwing tantrums that can only be soothed by shopping for ugly clothes.” She spun her cigarette into the dirt. It fiercened but died. Heather leaned back, silhouetting her chest. Tightness wrenched me again. “Look there.” The moon crested the trees, slender and awkward; thirsty leaves batting its face. “Remember the moon landing? Apollo 17.”

I was six when that happened. “I saw on TV.” I remembered the disappointment. No miracles, just fractured rock.

“I was at school in Lyon. We did a project about ‘L'aventure américaine sur la lune.’ ‘La lune’ is a girl.”

We watched the moon break free of beseeching trees. Pressure gripped me, a restless excitement.

“Each time men went, they left things. All this nasty rubbish on her lovely face. You know the buggies they rode around? They left them there. They crashed orbiters into her. Flags and boots and cameras. Bags and blankets, space food packets. Even a statue to dead astronauts. Imagine. All these things left behind on the moon because going there isn’t enough. Piss and shit and puke – it’s all still there. You shit in a bag and leave it on the moon and it orbits the Earth forever. Even after you’re dead.”

Other kids said those words. I didn’t dare.

“We learned in lovely French about courage and discipline, these things you need for that beautiful girl la lune. We weren’t told about the bags of shit.” Hardness possessed her. “These people can’t ever be trusted.”

Stars swarmed the wasted sky. The moon eclipsed them. A garbage heap of soiled adventures.

Heather lit a Gitanes, her face lengthening with the flame. Dark and downy, her beauty choked me. Heather said, “If I went to the moon, I'd take nothing and leave nothing. I wouldn't even tell anyone.”

Need, and all I couldn’t reach, consumed me. “My mother’s gone out.”

“Does your mum always wear men’s clothes?”

“It’s for work.” All I knew.

“My mother thinks she’s so right on. Bloody old hippy. Imagine. She wants to wreck my life. But I won’t let her.”

Teachers weren’t people and girls just shrieked. My mother’s friends lived in absorption, haunted by smoke and unease. Carol was the change I craved and feared. And my mother, she brooded, lost to old music. My touchstones, these women. And Heather, cross-legged beside me. There was shouting behind us. I heard something break. “You don’t like your mum?” My words sufficient only for tangible things.

Heather trailed smoke from her mouth as though, inside, was on fire. “What’s the matter?”

I scrubbed at my shorts. “They’re tight.”

“And you’re big. It’s okay. I don’t mind.” She kissed smoke, drawing it back within her. “Do you know what ‘intact’ means? Because what it is, I’m not ‘intact’. Someone loves me. That’s what she can’t stand. He’s in Lyon. I’ve got to get back there.” She had a picture. A young man whose dark curls spilled over his loose-buttoned shirt. A stubble beard and dancing lights in his eyes. She held the picture to her lips to bless with smoke. “Stéphane. He’s named after Stéphane Grappelli, a very famous and brilliant musician. He’s my man. Our hearts and bodies are one. No matter what that bitch says.”

The ebbing of hope, quick and total, burned with the shame of being a fool. She had someone. In my smallness and stupidity, life’s pattern was already set.

She didn’t notice. She talked to the bruised, indifferent moon. “She’s jealous of Stéphane. Dad doesn’t love her, you see. She made us move here to ruin my life. But I’ll fix her. If Dad leaves her he’ll go back to France. He has business there, friends. I’ll go with him. Go back to my man. He will leave her.” She drove the lit cigarette into her hand. “I’ll make sure of it.”

Crushed beneath fevered dark. By the light of the moon.

She sucked her burnt skin. “It’s good of you to listen. You are nice to talk to. When’s your mum home?”

How could I know? Time brought no change. Each moment led to the next and there was no end.

“You don’t want her to catch you again.” Heather dabbed my knee. A casual touch. Its devastation stretched far ahead. “Don’t worry, about the you-know-what.” She pointed at my shorts. “The girls will love you. I absolutely guarantee.”

I locked the front door but didn’t lock Mum out. I left the hall light on. From my window, the blue tent glowed endlessly into the night.

At some bewitched hour, a car pulled up. Its engine shattered the street. Laughter bounced from stagnant houses. That had to be Carol. The car’s rebel horn rocketed through the estate to the sly wooded valley. For a long time nothing happened. Then my mother’s key turned the lock. She walked upstairs, her breath achingly loud.

School’s dead hours and pointless routine showed me what life had to offer. The tent was gone, a stain of yellowed grass and chewed cigarettes left behind from its mission. Each day, shouting came from the house. Then it stopped.

In babyish buckle-up shoes, I went around the corner, along the street of upmarket, impenetrable homes. Rising from gravel, the For Sale sign was a relic of some lost time.

On the driveway, a small, bloated man rang a bundle of keys, chasing one round. He unlocked the door, watched by a silent, impatient couple. Their awkward son – he looked stretched, grown too fast – squared himself into the wall as though he might sleep there.

“It’s a steal,” said the pudgy suit. “We have it listed for quick sale. The vendors can be most flexible.”

“Nothing wrong with the place?” Though he spoke to the man, the husband glanced at his wife, keen to be shrewd.

“It’s tip-top.” The man swung the door. The hallway had a scrubbed emptiness, stripped of its past. “I think, some family matter.”

The boy looked at me with disgust. His fingers curled to fists.

Last day of summer, my mother at work, the estate in its afternoon torpor. I sat still, doing nothing, so time would go slow. A girl shouted along the street. Calling a name, I was certain. I ran to the window, but there was no one. Just an echo fading away.

My mother never asked and I never told. She never mentioned my father. She played old records. Conscientious, she filled her days. Sometimes Carol walked by the house. Mum never asked her in.