In 1978 Cat is fourteen. She has one mother, one father, one sister and one dog. Cat's parents, Ted and Billie, are opposites: he is big, she is small; he wants caravans, she wants hotels; he is uncouth, she is well mannered. Billie furiously cleans, suffers migraines, never swims on holidays and sees being married to Ted as the central achievement of her life. Ted is large, sexual and unfaithful. Alison, Cat's older sister, is all that Cat is not; slim, attractive, intelligent and destined to break away from the family nest.
As an adolescent Cat struggles for a sense of herself but, concealed within her family, Cat feels the fogginess surrounding her getting thicker and her outline vanishing. It's also in 1978 that Cat's father dies and everything changes. In death Ted becomes larger and more powerful than he had been in life.
In 1998 Cat is thirty-four. She is a gentle, reflective, solitary woman still looking after her mother, discussing diseases and house cleaning. At times Cat feels like a woman trapped inside the womb of her mother, growing old inside her, squashed against her ribs, unable to straighten and stretch. Plaiting together the past and the present, Cat recalls her childhood, the way her family fitted together, feeding off each other, and discovers something entirely unexpected.
