Georgie Sinclair's husband has left her; her sixteen-year-old son is busy exploring fundamentalist Christian websites and becoming more distant by the day; and all those overdue articles for Adhesives in the Modern World aren't looking too appealing either. So when she spots Mrs Shapiro, an eccentric old Jewish émigré neighbour with an eye for a bargain and a fondness for matchmaking, rummaging through her skip in the middle of the night, it's just the distraction she needs.

And although they mistrust each other at first - Georgie doesn't like the look of that past-its-sell-by-date fish while Mrs Shapiro thinks it's prize produce - a firm friendship is formed over the reduced-price shelf at the supermarket. So when two slimy rival estate agents (one with a taste for bondage) start competing to trick Mrs Shapiro into selling her rickety old mansion, home also to seven stinky cats, Georgie must step in and help her new friend. Along the way she uncovers the long buried mysteries of Mrs Shapiro's past…

The gluey smell

The first time I met Wonder Boy, he pissed on me. I suppose he was trying to warn me off, which was quite prescient when you consider how things turned out.

One afternoon in late October, somewhere between Stoke Newington and Highbury, I’d ventured into an unfamiliar street, and came upon the entrance of a cobbled lane that led in between two high garden walls. After about fifty metres the lane opened out into a grassy circle and I found myself standing in front of a big double-fronted house, half derelict and smothered in iv, so completely tucked away behind the gardens of the neighbouring houses that you’d never have guessed it was there, crouching behind a straggly privet hedge amidst a thicket of self-seeded ash and maple saplings. I assumed it was uninhabited – who could live in a place like this? Something was carved on the gatepost. I pulled the ivy aside and read: Canaan House. Canaan – even the name exuded a musty whiff of holiness. A cloud shifted and a low shaft of sunshine made the windows light up momentarily like a magic show. Then the sun slipped away and the flat dusky light exposed the crumbling stucco, the bare wood where the pain had peeled away, rag-patched windows, sagging gutters, and a spiny monkey puzzle tree had been planted too close to the house. Behind me, the gate closed with a clack.

Suddenly a long wailing sob, like the sound of a child crying, uncoiled in the silence. It seemed to be coming from the thicket. I shivered and drew back towards the gate, but expecting Christopher Lee to appear with blood on his fangs. But it was only a cat, a great white bruiser of a tomcat, with three black socks and an ugly face, who emerged from the bushes, tail held high, and came towards me with a purposeful glint in his eye.

‘Hello, cat. Do you live here?’

He sidled up, as though to rub himself against my legs, but just as I reached down to stoke him, his tail went up, his whole body quivered, and a strong squirt of eau-de-tomcat suffused the air. I aimed a kick, but he’d already melted into the shadows. As I picked my way back through the brambled I could smell it on my jeans – it had a pungent, faintly gluey smell.

Our second encounter was about a week later, and this time I met his owner, too. One evening at about eleven o’clock, I heard a noise in the street, a scraping and scuffling followed by a smash of glass. I looked out of the window. Someone was pulling stuff out of the skip in front of my house.

At first I thought it was just a boy, a slight sparrowy figure wearing a cap pulled down low over his face; then he moved into the light and I saw it was an old woman, scrawny as an alley cat, tugging at some burgundy velour curtains to get at the box of my husband’s old vinyls half buried under the other junk. I waved from the window. She waved back gaily and carried on tugging. Suddenly the box came free and she fell backwards on to the ground, scattering the records all over the road, smashing a few of them. I opened the door and rushed out to help her.

‘Are you okay?’

Scrambling to her feet, she shook herself like a cat. Her face was half hidden under the peak of the cap – it was one of those big jaunty baker boy caps that Twiggy used to war, with a diamante brooch pinned on one side.

‘I don’t know what type of persons is throwing away such music. Great Russian composers.’ A rich brown voice, crumbly like fruitcake. I couldn’t place the accent. ‘Must be some barbarian types living around here, isn’t it?’

She stood chin out, feet apart, as if sizing me up for a fight.

‘Look! Tchaikovsky. Shostakovich. Prokofiev. And they throw all in a bin!’

‘Please take the records,’ I said apologetically. ‘I don’t have a record player.’

‘Thenk you. I adore especially the Prokofiev piano sonatas.’

Now I saw that behind the skip was an old-fashioned pram with big curly springs into which she’d already loaded some of my husband’s books.

‘You can have the books, too.’

‘You heff read them all?’ she asked, as though quizzing me for barbarian tendencies.

‘All of them.’

‘Good. Thenk you.’

‘My name’s Georgie Georgie Sinclair.’

She tipped her head in a stiff nod but said nothing.

‘I’ve not lived here long. We moved down from Leeds a year ago.’

She extended a gloved hand – the gloves were splitting apart on the thumbs – like a slightly dotty monarch acknowledging a subject.

‘Mrs Naomi Shapiro.’

I helped her gather the scattered records and stow them on top of the books. Poor old thing, I was thinking, one of life’s casualties carting her worldly possessions around in a pram. She pushed it off down the road, swaying a little on her high heels as she went. Even in the cold outside air I could smell her, pungent and tangy like ripe cheese. After she’d gone a few yards I spotted the white tomcat, the same shaggy bruiser with three black socks, leeching out of the undergrowth of next door’s garden and trailing her down the pavement, ducking for cover from time to time. Then I saw there was a whole cohort of shadowy cats slipping off walls and out of bushes, slinking along behind her. I stood and watched her go until she turned a corner and disappeared from sight, the Queen of the Cats. And I forgot about her instantly. I had other things to worry about.

From the pavement I could see the light still on in Ben’s bedroom window and the computer monitor winking away as he surfed the worldwide waves. Ben, my baby boy, now sixteen, a paid-up citizen of the web-wide world. ‘I’m a cyber-child, Mum. I grew up with hypertext,’ he’d once told me, when I complained about the time he was spending online. The square of light blinked from blue to red to green. What seas was he travelling tonight? What sights did he see? Up so late. On his own. My heart-pinched – my gentle, slightly too-serious Ben. How is it that children of the same parents turn out so differently? His sister Stella, at twenty, had already grabbed life by the horns, wrestled it to the ground, and was training it to eat out of the palm of her hand (along with a changing ménage of hopeful young men) in a shared rented house near York University which, whenever I phoned, seemed always to have a party going on or a rock band practising in the background.

In the upstairs window the coloured square winked and disappeared. Bedtime. I went in and wrote my husband a curt note asking him to come and remove his junk, and I put it in an envelope with a second-class stamp. First thing next day, I telephoned the skip hire company.