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The house is finally starting to be inhabitable again. I might be able to think about putting it on the market soon, making a fresh start. I could use the money to go somewhere. Anywhere. All those places I’ve always said I wanted to see. With a baby, though?

Today’s dreaded job is to finally clear the fridge out – the warm stench that comes out makes hot vomit squirt up my throat again. Is it even switched on? I throw the kitchen windows open and breathe in the cool air.

On one of the shelves, a rotting tomato is slowly morphing into browny-green sludge; the milk has turned solid and yellow, the bottle bloating out, threatening to explode. A tin of anchovies is peeled open, a thick layer of furry mould gathered on the top.

Anchovies were one of my cravings when I was pregnant with Victoria, although I’m vegetarian and I don’t recall ever eating them before. They give me the creeps, little grey hairy things, but I couldn’t get enough of them. Anchovies, macaroni cheese and this sour cherry pop drink, and sometimes together. I throw the tin of anchovies into the open bin liner and it releases a fresh cloud of the putrid smell.

I throw the rubbish bag in the bin outside and close the kitchen door. I’ve spent almost every minute the last week cleaning this place – when I’m not feeding or changing Victoria, or sleeping. My stomach churns when I remember what it was like when I got here. It’s not just remembering, though. It’s more of a living memory, and it’s not the only one.

I experience it again in nauseating detail when I least want to – smell it and taste it even: the dead flies cluttered up against the windowsill, the shellac-like brown sticky coating on everything. Even now, every so often in certain areas of the house I suddenly catch that overpowering, sickly-sweet smell that makes me gag, and then it’s gone again.

It’s not even so much the disgusting mess itself that turns my stomach. You can wipe that off. More the shame that someone lived like this – my own mother at that. Lived here alone for the last twenty years and died here alone, in her own filth.

I go into the living room, making sure to close the kitchen door, and lift Victoria out of the Moses basket, instinctively pulling her close to me, breathing in the clean, cool smell of her, that gorgeous scent that babies have.

‘We’ll think of something, won’t we, you and me?’ I hug her small, soft body close to me and rock her gently from side to side, kissing the top of her head. I concentrate on how warm she feels against me.

I hadn’t thought about home, about Victoria and that summer, in a while, when they rang me about Mum, to tell me what had happened, that she’d died. I’d been wrapped up in my own world, my own Victoria.

They said mine was the only name and number in Mum’s phone. But I had been thinking about her that week, more than usual. I’d been thinking about how she was, what her life was like now. I’d dreamed about her, vividly. I even thought I’d seen her in the street a couple of times.

I shudder, thinking of Mum found at the bottom of these stairs, in only her nighty, alone. Been there for days. Dying, dead.

Everything downstairs is now much cleaner than it was, but it still looks grubby – dirt ground in; it will never come completely off. Three skips’ worth of stuff has already been taken away; the rest stored, crammed into the rooms upstairs. But I still keep finding it… old mobile phones, flip-flops, second-hand board games with bits missing, VHS tapes, bulk-buy toilet rolls to join the family packs already stacked up – things Mum must have ordered on the Internet, all this stuff she could never use, to add to all the other junk.

My phone buzzes and I take it out of my pocket. It’s Nathan. I look at the screen and take a deep breath. Ignore. It starts up again, insistent. I throw it onto the sofa and it bounces. Eventually, he gives up. I picture our flat in Glasgow. Neat, tidy, white walls, clean lines. Nathan likes it that way; it’s ‘a designer thing’, he says. He couldn’t cope with all this clutter. He has a one-in, one-out rule – for books, CDs, kitchen stuff. His desk immaculate in the spare room.

Not long after we met, Nathan came back early and surprised me when he’d been working away. I’d have tidied up if I’d known he was coming. He tried to laugh it off, but his disgust at the state of my flat was obvious; my natural state, when I didn’t expect anybody to be looking.

Back in the kitchen, I throw the window open wider to let the fresh air in, and my thoughts about Glasgow and Nathan out. Looking out over the garden, something is off. There are colours that shouldn’t be there amongst the long grass and overgrown weeds – solid yellows and bright blues. Something’s moving. Someone. My insides flutter. The boy with the camera again?

I look closer and bang on the window. A small head pops up, then another, followed by one more. Children, but they make me think of little rabbits.

I tap on the glass again. ‘Hey, what are you doing?’

One of them screams and they all run to the gate, barging each other out of the way to be the first out. I didn’t mean to scare them away. I wonder then if they used to mock Mum, call her a crazy old lady. And despite how things ended up between us, the idea of her being unhappy still hurts. I pull the window to again and lock it.

In the living room, the corner of something peeps out of one of the open drawers and catches my eye. An old photo album. I pull it out and hold it closed for a long time before forcing myself to open it. It feels like looking at someone else’s life, not my own. The photos are neatly glued in; the pages well-thumbed, their corners turned up.

A picture of me in a paddling pool as a baby, food smeared proudly around my face. In my Brownie uniform, scowling. Another in front of the house on roller skates in a hand-knitted cardigan, gaudy colours. It was the day we moved into this house. Dad is in the background, caught unawares, carrying a box up the stairs.

There’s one at a theme park. Victoria and me in stupid matching baseball caps. We went with the Prestons, all six of us, just before Dad got ill. We are all smiling in the photo – me, Mum, Dad. Victoria and her parents too.

Mum and Victoria’s dad, Peter, wouldn’t go on the ride. I sat with Victoria, and Dad sat with Judith and we all dangled our legs and wiggled our feet as we waited in the cars for the ride to get going. Dad didn’t want to go on either, at first, but I begged him and eventually his face cracked into a smile and he threw up his hands.

As the ride slowly lifted, the hydraulics spitting and hissing, Mum and Peter were on the ground getting smaller and smaller until I couldn’t make them out in the crowd any more. The ride spun and twisted high in the air. Everything was a blur. I kept trying to catch a glimpse of Mum. It made me panic not to be able to see where she was, for some reason. Instead I could only catch distorted flashes of people’s faces as their car whizzed in front of ours. Dad’s teeth, Judith’s cheeks stretched and pushed back, her hair whipping her face… Now, to think of Judith doing something like that is out of place and jarring – she was always so controlled and prim. And I start to question whether the memory is right, if it was in fact Judith on the ground and Mum on the ride. All the time, I could hear Victoria screaming in my ear.

One of the pictures sets a memory playing of a holiday I’d almost forgotten about. We’re all sitting outside a caravan – Mum, Judith and Peter, and me and Victoria in matching blonde ponytails. We would have been around ten. Dad must be behind the camera. It was Bridlington. Victoria and I cried on the way home because we didn’t want the holiday to be over; no more days splashing in the outdoor pool. Flashes of the week come back to me. Mum and Judith dancing to ‘Wig-Wam Bam’ with me and Victoria on the dance floor. Dad and Peter taking us to crazy golf. Mum getting pulled up on stage with a magician. Fried egg sandwiches back at the caravan.

I flip further through the album: Flower Fairies dolls peeping out, hidden between the plants in the garden, like the children I saw earlier. Dad helped me recreate the Cottingley Fairies pictures and take the photos. The memory is pastel-coloured. It’s soft focus and false-looking. It was to cheer me up because I was upset when I found out the original pictures were faked. I was so angry at the woman for owning up and breaking the magic.

Earlier in the book are pictures of Mum and Dad’s wedding: so many bridesmaids. There’s a picture of Mum and Judith holding me and Victoria when we were tiny babies. In the photos of Mum when she was younger, she seems like a different person from the one I grew up with: she was thin, even thinner than when I was a child, and her hair was cropped into a pixie cut. People called her Mags then, she said, but it was always Margaret when I was young.

In one of the shots, Mum and Judith sit on the beach in Spain, surrounded by men, Mum in a bright red bikini, the colours bleached out. In the next one they’re sitting on a balcony drinking sangria. They grew up together, like me and Victoria.

I slam the book shut, dust clouding out, and shove it back in the drawer, making everything in the cabinet rattle.

I decide to take a bath; it’s a good opportunity to make the most of all my cleaning work yesterday. My stomach lurches again to think of the state of the bathroom: the toilet hadn’t seen any bleach in years, baked-on mess clinging to the bowl.

The bath is old and ceramic, chipped and rough-looking. I bathed in it many times when I was younger. It’s about as clean as it will get for now. I wonder if I will have to replace it in order to sell the house. I don’t know how to do any of this: no one tells you. I keep wondering, When you sell a house, do you have to tell people someone died in it? Explain what happened to them?

There’s a long strand of grey hair in the tub. I am finding them everywhere and it stops me in my tracks each time. I never saw Mum with grey hair. The mum I remember, my mum, had shoulder-length brown hair that kicked out at the ends, with the help of lots of heated appliances. It’s like another different person was here. To think of a living part of her here and yet she is gone… I remember learning at school that hair is actually ‘dead matter’.

When I start to fill the bath up, the taps moan and honk like a dying beast. The water has a yellow tinge. I pour in some of the cheap bubble bath that was already here, turning the water bright, holiday-brochure blue. Another thing here that confuses me, trying to make sense of Mum’s life since I moved out. Bubble bath, flowers – long dead by the time I arrived, and dried to powder, but once alive – all the ornamental touches and home comforts she had, despite living in such a way. Even tinsel still draped around a mirror. How many Christmases ago?

I turn on the baby monitor in the bedroom. Mine was the only room in the house that was perfectly clean and tidy when I got here. It’s almost as if Mum knew I would come and I would need somewhere to stay. It meant that I could keep Victoria in there while I made the other rooms cleaner and safe; we didn’t have to get a hotel.

Like everywhere else, the décor is exactly as it was in my room. The moons and stars wallpaper, the Elastica poster faded and cracked, looming over the bed. It’s comforting in a way that some things stay the way they were. But it pulls you right back into your old life, too, like one of those cheesy body-swap films. The white fairy lights are still around the headboard, the mirror with the draped pink feather boa, a tiara hooked over the corner – Victoria and I had got into the Manic Street Preachers the year before she died. We’d talked for hours about where Richie might be after he went missing.

The cheap make-up I used to wear is neatly lined up, the garish eyeshadow colours dried out. My yellow Care Bear is on top of the dressing table too, its smile fixed and dumb.

I switch on the lamp. It seems to captivate Victoria now too; it always did me, even when I was too old for it. It casts an array of coloured stars on the wall and they sweep around the room as it spins.

I check the monitor is working properly before sinking into the blue warmth of the bath. My back and arms ache from holding Victoria so much; she’s getting heavier now. The water is soothing the pain away; it feels good to stretch out, wallow in the quiet, only the occasional plonk of the taps dripping.

Steam rises. Only my head and feet are above the water, my toes propped against the taps, the turquoise pedicure I had just before Victoria was born almost grown out, chipped off. The rest of my body is a blur under the water, like it isn’t a part of the rest of me at all – detached, disappearing.

Something startles me. I must have fallen asleep and I jolt awake, spluttering. Being in the water, my face half-submerged, I can’t get the vision of Victoria in the lake out of my head.

The letter box clatters loudly in the wind.