Next thing, the garage door trundles open and in thunders Joan demanding to know what the hell all my things are doing here and archly ordering me to get them out of her sight right now.You should see the vicious state of her; honest to God, it’s like she should be wearing a pointy Dracula cape with a dry ice machine behind her billowing smoke.

‘But…Joan…’ I stammer, momentarily taken aback at the severity of her mood swing. ‘You said this was OK, remember? You said I could store everything in the garage…’

‘Did I say garage!’ she snaps icily. ‘Silly me, I meant to say garbage.Now clear that crap out of here to make room for my car. If you think I’m leaving it parked out on the road at night with Psycho Brady out on the loose, then you’ve another thing coming, missy.’

Bugger it anyway. I completely forgot that she could be like this. Mercurial. Lovely to you one minute, then would clip the side of your face off the next. Her moods are like the moon; they come in phases and are ever bloody changing. Right now though, I don’t particularly care. Because I’m on Zanax.

Chapter Eight

Having lived here in humanity’s petri dish of hatred for almost three long weeks now, I feel somewhat qualified to set the following down in stone: The Heaven of my old life versus the Hell I’m sentenced to live in now.

It’s true what they say, you really haven’t a clue what you’ve got till it’s gone. For starters, in my old life, I never slept. Hardly at all. Dunno how I managed it, but I just seemed to whiz through the day, buzzing on the sheer adrenaline high of having a job I adored, a social life that wouldn’t quit and a boyfriend that even Angelina Jolie might gratefully consider trading up to. Now, I sleep all the time. Ten, sometimes eleven, hours at a stretch. And when I actually am up and about, I’m staggering around the place in a living coma, full of tears that I won’t let fall. Then there’s the small matter of where I’m sleeping. In my old life, I’d crash out in a four-poster bed, on two-hundred-thread Egyptian cotton sheets, wearing sexy nighties straight out of the La Perla catalogue, with my sex god of a boyfriend by my side, more often than not. Now I sleep under a duvet on a three-seater sofa with bum imprints embedded deep into it from my stepsisters. And as for nightwear, these days, I just sleep in the comfiest fleecy pair of pyjamas I can find. Sleep in them, eat in them, go round the house in them, do all my chores in them, you name it. One outfit only. No need for anything else. No one sees me and no one cares. Least of all me.

In my old life, back in those long-forgotten days when I used to have energy, I’d bounce out of bed, zip into the TV studio and then spend most of my day having high-powered pre-production meetings about that week’s episode of Jessie Would,followed by a fabulous, expensive lunch in whatever restaurant happened to be hot at the moment. And lunch, by the way, would usually involve myself and Eva spending a minimum of two hours lingering over three courses, discussing men, clothes and beauty treatments, in that order. Taking the world apart, then putting it all back to rights again. Now, I think, Lunch? Are you kidding me?Between the marathon sleeps and the long To Do housework lists I get flung at me every day, I’m doing well if I can manage to grab a Pot Noodle and a Jaffa Cake in between unclogging plugholes or, I’m not making this up, hand washing the heavy-duty, double-gusseted tights that Maggie wears to work. You should have seen the state of them, honest to God, I picked them up off the floor and wondered where the hell she even goes to buy tights in that size. Harland and Wolff? That, by the way, was item number one on Jessie’s To Do list, which I think the bad bitch wrote purely on purpose to humiliate me. Yeah right, Maggie. Like I could possibly be humiliated any more?

Messing aside though, the housework list that she and Sharon handed me on my first morning here led to one of out bloodiest rows to date, and God knows that’s really saying something. And, yes, I’m fully aware that I’m a person who comes with no boundaries, but what they expected me to do really was pushing things to the giddy limit. It would have taken three highly trained maids working round the clock to get through what they expected me to do in a single day. Gak jobs too, that you’d blush to ask a paid professional to get stuck into. Like clearing out all the drains on the outside of the house. Yes, allof them. Including one that would have involved me climbing up a ladder to the outside of the bathroom window, then trying to simultaneously pour bleach down a gulley with one hand, while clinging on for dear life with the other.

‘Are you kidding me with this?’ I confronted the pair of them as soon as I read the list. Or should I say, page one of the list, given that it ran to well over seven pages long. Double sided. ‘Trained circus performers would demand danger money for doing that.’

‘Think of it like just doing a dare on your TV show, except this time there’s no cameras pointed at you,’ Maggie coolly puffed back at me, in a cloud of cigarette smoke. ‘Remember when you used to have a TV show? It was back around the same time you used to have a boyfriend. Oops, sorry, how tactless of me.’

‘Gee, thanks so much for that, Maggie. One of your kinder and more sensitive comments, may I add,’ I muttered at her as I stomped back to the kitchen, mop and bucket in hand.

The only household job I’m exempted from is cooking, which goes back to my first night here, when I tried to make a chilli con carne that ended up tasting like a cross between paint stripper and dog diarrhoea. Put it this way: with me at the cooker, Nigella Lawson’s job is safe. Anyway, no one really cared, given that this is the house where evening meals invariably come courtesy of Domino’s Pizza or else the local Chinese takeaway down the road. (We’re far and away their best customers and even have the loyalty mugs to prove it.)

But to make up for that, they expected me to spring clean the garden shed, which still has stuff belonging to Dad inside and which I don’t actually think any of them have even set foot inside since he died. Well I took one look inside the cobweb-ridden door of it and could go no further. Because there, flung in a corner on top of a broken wheelbarrow was his favourite armchair, all saggy and torn, with bits of yellow foam and stuffing hanging off it. And beside that was his bookcase; I can still vividly remember him reaching down for my favourite book of fairy stories and reading them aloud to me when I was little. And over in a far corner was yet another container load of stuff belonging to him. Mum dying so young left Dad with a lifelong fear of losing things, with the result that he became a terrible hoarder. And here it all still was; except covered in dust and cobwebs with rain leaking down on top of everything that he’d treasured.

Funny, they say that grief takes two full years to heal but it’s not true. Because it never really does heal, just gets duller and more bearable, that’s all. Bad enough that every corner I turn in this house holds a ghost of his memory, but believe me, all the Zanax in the world couldn’t block out the searing pain of seeing all of his old things discarded into a manky, filthy shed and forgotten about. So I stand my ground and say no: the only job I’m prepared to do here is to bring all his things back inside the house again and restore them back to their rightful place. And that’s it. End of story.

So now, most of the time I settle for doing the bare minimum, which by the way isn’t laziness on my part; that still amounts to several hours’ worth of washing, scrubbing and polishing, then having a fight with them about it when they all come in from work and make me justify what I’ve been up to all day.