We eat pizza then carrot cake while we watch catch-up You’ve Been Framed on TV, but I can’t taste any of the food and each mouthful feels dry and hard, like I’m swallowing marbles.

I sit at one side of the room and Sergei sits at the other. Dad and Angie are glued together on the couch, and when Dad pours their third glass of wine, she hooks her leg over his knee and he puts his arm around her and twists a piece of her hair around his fingers.

I look away and take a swig of my pop.

Sergei will probably call Dad names later, even though his mum is being just as gross.

I keep staring stonily at the television screen. Someone has filmed an idiot swinging on a stringy rope over a stream and, predictably, he falls in.

Out of the corner of my eye I notice Angie whisper something to Dad.

‘You two get off to your room if you like now, Cal,’ Dad says as if he’s doing us a favour. ‘I know you’ll want to watch one of your DVDs or get online, not sit with us old fuddy-duddies.’

Angie giggles and keeps repeating fuddy-duddies as if it’s the best joke ever.

Sergei shoots Dad a dark look, gets up and leaves the room.

I hear him slam his plate down in the kitchen and then my bedroom door opens, which makes want to scream at him to get out. He should be asking me if he can go in there, not acting as if this is his home now.

I don’t want to go to my room while he’s in there but I don’t want to watch Dad and Angie getting cosy on the settee either, so I stand up and follow him.

‘Close the door behind you, young ’un,’ Dad calls and Angie giggles again.

I stand just outside my bedroom door and spy in through the gap.

Sergei sits very still on his thin, lumpy mattress looking down at a small open suitcase. As far as I can tell, it’s full of scruffy old cardboard, the colour of worn-out rope.

After a minute or two I start to wonder why I’m standing out in the hallway like a loser while he’s got my bedroom all to himself.

I push the door open with my foot and step inside. He doesn’t look up.

‘What’s that?’ I demand, pointing at the open case. ‘There’s no room in here for all your crap.’

‘For your information, these are my buildings.’

‘They don’t look like buildings.’ I take a few steps closer, peering down at the black lines and folds in the flat, thick paper. ‘Just looks like a load of old cardboard to me.’

‘It seems that you do not know everything there is to know, after all.’ He smirks at me and I feel like upending his stupid suitcase on the floor.

‘You’ll have to keep all that stuff over your side. My bedroom’s too cramped as it is.’ I climb over his stuff and sit on my own bed. ‘When are you and your mum getting your own place?’

‘I do not know,’ he says. There are a few moments’ silence before he speaks again. ‘The sooner it happens then the better we will all feel, yes?’

‘Too right,’ I mumble, plumping my pillows up behind me. ‘Can’t come soon enough for me.’

‘You have some good film pictures here,’ he says, nodding to the posters that cover my walls. ‘I have seen all the Die Hard movies.’

‘Good for you.’

‘I have never seen so many films.’ He’s staring at the neat columns of DVDs piled up at the end of my bed, against the wall.

I don’t answer him.

He points to the scuffed shelf his side of the wall. ‘Is there room on here for some of my things?’

The shelf is mostly empty, just a few old books and magazines on there that I haven’t looked at for ages. I think about saying no just to be mean but I can’t be bothered. I just want him to go away or shut up. Preferably both.

‘Suppose so.’ I sigh. ‘If it keeps your stuff out of my way.’

‘Thank you, you are very kind,’ he says, but he doesn’t sound as though he means it at all.

I watch as he touches the pile of crappy old cardboard again like it’s something precious instead of the load of garbage it actually is.

On top of taking up half my bedroom, Sergei Zurakowski also talks in his sleep. All flipping night. Gobbledegook that sounds like ‘jar-deck and bark-char’. He repeats it over and over again and only stops when I throw my pillow at him.

It goes without saying I hardly sleep a wink.

Then, when I’m finally fast asleep and on a film set in Hollywood talking to Vin Diesel, he wakes me up.

‘Good morning.’

I open one eye to see him sitting up in bed, watching me. I grunt and pull the quilt over my head.

‘It is seven o’clock, Calum, time to rise.’

I snatch the quilt down and glare at him.

‘Seven o’clock? I don’t get up until eight.’ The quilt goes over my head again.

‘But we have to shower and have breakfast. We have to tidy up this room, yes?’

‘Get lost,’ I growl.

I hear him sigh and start to move around.

He pads out of the bedroom and the loo flushes. I try to get back to my dream, the bit where the director asks me to act as a stand-in for Vin Diesel, but it’s all dissolved now. Gone.

He comes back into the room and closes the door. Then the banging, thumping, sighing starts.

I snatch the quilt off my head again.

‘Can’t you just be quiet? What the hell are you doing?’

‘I am unpacking my things,’ he says. He’s opened the bigger suitcase under the window now, taking up the last small square of space there was to stand there.

‘I don’t know why you’re bothering taking all that stuff out. With any luck, you won’t be staying here that long.’

But he just laughs and carries on unpacking as if I haven’t said a word.

I’m tying my shoelaces in the hallway when Sergei appears.

‘Ready?’

I look up at him. ‘Ready for what?’

‘To walk to school, of course.’ He hoists his rucksack higher on to his back.

‘Are you crazy? I’m not walking in with you.’ Linford’s face floats into my mind. ‘I don’t care when or how you get to school but you’re not walking in with me.’

I grab my own rucksack and push by him.

As I pass Dad’s bedroom, the door opens and Angie appears.

‘You two boys have a good day, yes?’ She yawns and rubs her eyes. She’s tied her hair back and her pink lipstick is gone.

Dad appears in his boxer shorts behind her, his hair stuck up into salt-and-pepper tufts.

‘Good to see you lads getting on,’ he says, clueless as usual. ‘I’m home again tonight, Cal, so see you then.’

I suddenly realize that when Dad goes away on a job again, I’ll be alone with Sergei and his mum.

I’ll be outnumbered in my own home.