Having the Small Girl home was music to my ears... most of the time

So The Small Girl came back home, because apparently she hadn’t spilled enough tea on the carpet when she lived with us. There was a bigger reason as well which she and I talked over in a series of long phone calls that went on for several weeks. The bijou, boho house into which she’d moved five months ago was turning out to be just a little too bijou on occasion and although she still loved her independent, grown-up surroundings, there was a lot to be said for on-tap central heating that she had to neither worry about nor pay for. In the end, though, there was another clincher: “when I first moved in here,” she told me, “I’d wake up every morning and hear other people writing songs and think, ‘brilliant, somebody is writing a song.’ Now I wake up and I think, ‘Christ, not another f***ing song.’” That, I suggested, was as good a reason as any to take a break. And after a couple of false starts — literally, two comeand-get-my-stuff-at-three-o’clock-todays followed by a phone call at two changing her mind — she was home.

And honestly, I don’t know how other people live with her. Fastidious about Covid, the first thing she did when she landed, after accidentally touching my phone with her elbow, was drown it in so much hand sanitiser that now it will no longer play her — or anybody else’s — songs. Of course, I didn’t know about this until the pool of liquid trapped between the phone and its case oozed out into my own hands several hours later. Then she washed the sofa she’d been sitting on, also with hand sanitiser.

For her lunch, the first day, she had tomato soup, and when she’d finished she shoved the dripping bowl into the dishwasher, which was completely full of clean dishes, all of which had to be washed again as they were now spattered with drops of tomato soup, like a delf-related crime scene. We had been managing fine for cups with four people in the house for months: suddenly, the addition of just one more person meant there was a dire scarcity. At one point, I saw her drinking tea from the tooth mug.

I had foolishly hoped she might have learnt how to empty a bin while she was living with civilised people — a life skill I have been singularly unable to pass on to any of my children, all of whom regard a brimming bin as a challenge to the laws of physics. But here she was again, filling the two bathroom bins to such an improbable extent that they looked like ice cream cones with a whipped kitchen-roll topping. When it became literally impossible to balance any more on them, she just left her detritus neatly on the floor beside the bin. She is, after all, not an animal.

She robbed my deodorant and my hair band. This is what she does. In addition to creating “genre-hopping anthems that flaunt grit and glamour” (the NME: we’re very proud), she robs deodorant and hairbands. The deodorant thing I was expecting, and I quickly re-adapted my morning routine to incorporate the traditional excursion into her bedroom to retrieve it.

But I loved hearing her running up and down the stairs — The Small Girl never has time to walk — even if I knew there was a high chance there was a cup of coffee in her hand at the time. And when she stopped using her headphones — one thing she has learnt from living with people to whom she is not related — and her new music spilled out into the house, it was a joy to hear how those songs are coming together, an affirmation that being away from us has helped her creatively, just as coming home again was the spoonful of sugar she needed to get them finished. And we’d a couple of evenings of takeaway pints and laughter and only a single meltdown which I, full of the former, miraculously managed to resolve by drawing on Eddie Murphy’s advice to the Operation Transformation leaders, which is literally, the only psychology I have room for in my brain right now.

She stayed for two weeks. It might have been longer, if she’d managed to sublet her room. But she was happy to go back and though I loved having her, I know she needs to carry on in a different direction. Her parting gift to her younger, bigger sister was a pair of jeans that were “too big for me, so you can have them.” It was only after she left we realized they were The Boy’s jeans.