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it. I had spent the first eighteen years of my life growing up here, and everything about the old house was familiar. From the tree I had fallen out of and cracked a collarbone to the garden path where I had learned to ride my bicycle. I hadn’t really noticed it before, but empathy for the familiar grows stronger with age. The old house felt warmer to me now than it ever had before.
    I took a deep breath, picked up my suitcase and trundled the stroller across the road. My pet dodo, Pickwick, followed with her unruly son, Alan, padding grumpily after her.
    I rang Mum’s doorbell, and after about a minute, a slightly overweight vicar with short brown hair and spectacles answered the door.
    “Is that Doofus . . . ?” he said when he saw me, suddenly breaking into a broad grin. “By the GSD, it is Doofus!”
    “Hi, Joffy. Long time no see.”
    Joffy was my brother. He was a minister in the Global Standard Deity religion, and although we had had differences in the past, they were long forgotten. I was pleased to see him, and he I.
    “Whoa!” he said. “What’s that?”
    “That’s Friday,” I explained. “Your nephew.”
    “Wow!” replied Joffy, undoing Friday’s harness and lifting him out. “Does his hair always stick up like that?”
    “Probably leftovers from breakfast.”
    Friday stared at Joffy for a moment, took his fingers out of his mouth, rubbed them on his face, put them in again and offered Joffy his polar bear, Poley.
    “Kind of cute, isn’t he?” said Joffy, jiggling Friday up and down and letting him tug at his nose. “But a bit . . . well, sticky. Does he talk?”
    “Not a lot. Thinks a great deal, though.”
    “Like Mycroft. What happened to your head?”
    “You mean my haircut?”
    “So that’s what it was!” murmured Joffy. “I thought you’d had your ears lowered or something. Bit . . . er . . . bit extreme, isn’t it?”
    “I had to stand in for Joan of Arc. It’s always tricky to find a replacement.”
    “I can see why,” exclaimed Joffy, still staring incredulously at my pudding-bowl haircut. “Why don’t you just have the whole lot off and start again?”
    “This is Hamlet,” I said, introducing the Prince before he began to feel awkward, “but he’s here incognito so I’m telling everyone he’s my cousin Eddie.”
    “Joffy,” said Joffy, “brother of Thursday.”
    “Hamlet,” said Hamlet, “Prince of Denmark.”
    “Danish?” said Joffy with a start. “I shouldn’t spread that around if I were you.”
    “Why?”
    “Darling!” said my mother, appearing behind Joffy. “You’re back! Goodness! Your hair!”
    “It’s a Joan of Arc thing,” explained Joffy, “very fashionable right now. Martyrs are big on the catwalk, y’know—remember the Edith Cavell / Tolpuddle look in last month’s FeMole ?”
    “He’s talking rubbish again, isn’t he?”
    “Yes,” said Joffy and I in unison.
    “Hello, Mum,” I said, giving her a hug. “Remember your grandson?”
    She picked him up and remarked how much he had grown. It was unlikely in the extreme that he had shrunk, but I smiled dutifully nonetheless. I tried to visit the real world as often as I could but hadn’t been able to manage it for at least six months. When she had nearly fainted by hyperventilating with ooohs and aaaahs and Friday had stopped looking at her dubiously, she invited us indoors.
    “You stay out here,” I said to Pickwick, “and don’t let Alan misbehave himself.”
    It was too late. Alan, small size notwithstanding, had already terrorized Mordecai and the other dodos into submission. They all shivered in fright beneath the hydrangeas.
    “Are you staying for long?” inquired my mother. “Your room is just how you left it.”
    This meant just how I left it when I was nineteen, but I thought it rude to say so. I explained that I’d like to stay at least until I got an apartment sorted out, introduced Hamlet and asked if he could stay for a few days, too.
    “Of course! Lady