House guests.

There is now someone else, in addition to Norman, staying at the house. I have no idea who she is.

I got the call on Friday afternoon from Top to go round, get away from the house for a bit. Pele, Cobber and Fuzz were there, with no girlfriends and yet a box of red wine. I don’t much care for the drink myself, but the expense was appreciated. After the first couple of glasses Pele called for hush and toasted “To Origami,” which is me, “may he find his future.” And everyone else raised their glasses. The toast is from a novel he’s lent me about reinventing the past and competing time travellers. It embarrassed me a little, but no one’s said anything finer than that in a decade. No one’s properly stopped to think. Norman offers his sympathy daily, but only ever as a precursor to his latest theories about anti-aging potions and my father being some sort of alchemist.

We watched Lord of the Rings as the wine kept coming, aiming for another marathon session, but we’ve never got to the sixth disc after five attempts. The final victories are forever postponed – but then Top always says he’s disappointed by the way they hurried the ending. He’s not joking – he wanted more of the return to the Shire and a reprise for Christopher Lee.

Halfway through, Fuzz went into the kitchen, took all the pans out of the pan cupboard and climbed in. I think it was to demonstrate something. He wasn’t hiding. He might have been protesting. Anyway, we all forgot he was in there and he fell asleep. He fell out of the cupboard in the morning and spent an hour straightening his back.

We waited at Top’s for most of the day, weighing the disapproval and silence of his parents against the chance for a break in the gale outside.

I came home at eleven tonight, having taken a lift back that was more of a boot out, and found Norman under blankets on the sofa. He’d made himself useful around the house and deserved a rest – which wasn’t what I was asking. He wasn’t in the spare room because it wasn’t available – which was closer to the point but still evasive.

I eventually learnt, through unbelievable persistence, that a girl arrived this evening – by which he means a woman who’s younger than he is – and she was asking for my father. She said she was a friend of his; she’s known him for years. She started crying when Norman told her my father is dead. She started talking to herself and then practically screaming. He was worried that the neighbours would hear and call the police and then he digressed for ages about what would happen if they had called the police, avoiding the core question I was trying to ask – which was, why is she still in the house?

She has no car, and has travelled up from Devon over two days of hitch hiking. He's taken pity on her. He wouldn’t say if she’s pretty or not. I suppose it’s an unfair question to ask him.

Apparently she said that my father would have the answer. Now I have to wait until tomorrow to find out what she means.