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go!’ my mum shouted from upstairs. Those were her words exactly, I know because I recall thinking how even when she had her face on she made an excuse not to answer the door. My mother hated answering the front door. She wasn’t lazy, but she’d started to hate seeing people – or people seeing her, I wasn’t sure which.
    I opened the door and a tall young man in a suit stood on the doorstep before me. I don’t remember the details of his face, but I know that it was handsome and that I regretted answering the door in my leggings and Dad’s old Ramones T-shirt. I was going out with Danny at the time, but I was stilltwenty with plenty of hormones, and the man before me had put those hormones in a Magimix and whacked it up to full speed.
    ‘Hello. So sorry to trouble you.’ He sounded posh, like Conservative party posh. ‘I couldn’t help knocking on the door. It’s just that this house is so beautiful.’
    I smiled at the strange, handsome, posh man. I agreed with him. My childhood home was beautiful, although people didn’t usually knock on the door to tell us.
    We were just off the busy Chamberlayne Road, but our house felt like a sleepy idyll away from the mayhem. That’s because it doesn’t sit next to the other houses on the road, it’s perched behind them, hidden by trees. There’s a tiny driveway, which most people miss, which leads you to our house. It doesn’t look like the other houses nearby, either, which are all three-storey red-brick Victorian monsters. Our house is made of grey stone, similar to the stone you find in Bath, and it’s square with two floors and a porch with a little Gothic turret.
    The posh man stood in the porch and looked up at the carved stone arches above him.
    ‘Beautiful,’ he said again.
    I pointed at the floor beneath his feet.
    ‘What’s this?’ He said, stepping aside.
    ‘It’s a gravestone,’ I told him. ‘The man who built the house buried his wife there so that every time he walked into the house she would be with him.’
    ‘A love story,’ the man murmured as he stared at the stone.
    ‘Hmm. Although, according to the Christians her soul would have burned in hell because she’s not buried in consecrated ground.’
    He looked up suddenly. ‘Is the house haunted?’
    I paused for a moment, unsure of what to say. If you asked my mother she would say the house is undoubtedly haunted, but in my honest opinion I’ve never noticed any otherworldly activity. And believe me, I was definitely on the lookout for it.
    ‘Not really,’ I said.
    He laughed. ‘Is there a garden?’
    ‘Yeah.’
    ‘Is it gorgeous?’
    ‘Yeah, there’s a fig tree and a pear tree and a silver birch, and the birds really love it. It gets sun in the afternoon and evening, so you can sit out all day. We’ve got a swing seat under …’ I stopped myself. I was sounding like a plonker talking about trees.
    ‘Gosh. Sounds lovely. Listen, I’m an estate agent. Don’t get out the garlic,’ he said, which I thought must be some strange posh-person expression. ‘If you ever wanted to sell this house—’
    I stopped him then.
    ‘We’ll never sell it. Sorry. It belonged to my dad’s parents and they gave it to him. It’s always going to be in the family.’
    ‘Oh, right, good,’ he said, and he turned and walked away.
    It was that strange posh man’s visit that put the idea in my head. I wasn’t doing much with my life at the time – you might say I hadn’t started living at all – but all that was about to change, because shortly afterwards I walked into all the estate agents on the Chamberlayne Road to see if they had any vacancies. Everyone I spoke to was completely unimpressed by my lack of qualifications, except for Lube, who said, ‘I need an office dogsbody on a Saturday. Key duties are answeringphones, making the tea and getting bacon sandwiches. I’ll give you a month’s trial.’
    I was still on trial and living at home when I wrote my five year plan. As you