Before there was anything, there was Mary, and Mary was bored. She lit the fuse on the whole of creation, lowered herself onto the couch, and settled in to watch — the way you'd put something on you didn't much care about, to see if it improved. It didn't, particularly. Thirteen point eight billion years on, she still hasn't got up. She watched the stars switch on with the interest of a woman waiting for the kettle, pronounced the special effects "a bit much," and reached for the turkish delight. The remote has not left her hand since.

The first thing to drag itself up the beach was Poppa. A damp, hopeful sea-slug, no particular plan, immensely pleased to have arrived. Mary watched him ooze ashore and felt something she'd spend the next 375 million years declining to name. He did not evolve much after that. He didn't need to — he was happy. He still turns up in every age since, fundamentally unchanged, asking whether anyone's checked the irrigation. Claudio, not yet built, would later call it the most successful career in history: "He peaked as a slug and never looked back."

Everyone remembers the dinosaurs — the size of them, the noise, the certainty that they ran the place. Nobody remembers the small brown shrew in the undergrowth, taking notes, deciding quietly which of them would last and which were getting the asteroid. That was Mary. She has always been the little one nobody watches, running the lot. Poppa was still a slug nearby, blissfully missing the entire extinction. He's fine. He didn't notice. He has never once noticed anything that wasn't a weed in his lawn.

Stonehenge was never a temple. It was a photo printer, and Mary commissioned it for one purpose: the hard drive ran 94% Hugh. Claudio hauled every stone by hand. He asked, reasonably, for a forklift. She told him to walk it off — her answer to all suffering, then and ever since. Three thousand years on, the prints still come out faintly smug. "I moved a hundred tonnes of rock," Claudio noted, "so a boy could pull a face. I'd like that on the record." It is on the record. It changed nothing.

Two of each? Amateur hour. Mary watched the Ark wallow off, unmoved; she'd seen Michael fill an esky with more foresight and better prawns. Down the back, Fletcher out-fished the entire operation from a tinny before lunch, then handed someone the second-biggest box, because he's the nicest one and always has been. Claudio, surveying forty days of rain, observed that not one passenger had thought to bring a tarp. "I'd have brought a tarp." Nobody brought a tarp. The Ark is celebrated to this day. The tinny is not. She noticed.

All that stone, all that labour, purely to show off — it reminded her of the dome Poppa built in the backyard "for the telescope." The pharaohs wanted to be remembered forever. Mary, who actually is forever, found the whole exercise needy. She tutted at the pyramids the way she tuts at anything trying too hard, and went back to her programme. The grandkids know exactly what Poppa's dome looks like. Nobody says it out loud at the table. Everybody thinks it. That, in the end, is what the pyramids were for too.

She let the giant and the boy carry on exactly as long as it amused her, then sat them both down. Pack it in, she said, or she'd cut down the beanstalk, burn the treehouse, and then they'd see who was a giant. Claudio pointed out, quietly, that that was three different stories. She knew. She did not care. She has never once let the facts of a story interfere with winning it — a trait, the family notes, that runs intact down the A-grade line to this day. The fighting stopped. It usually does.

They called him Alexander the Great. Mary's father — a Bulgarian, a serious man who'd later grow serious vegetables in Fulham — delivered the only verdict that counted. "Great," he allowed. "Even — for a Macedonian. In Bulgaria we'd just call him Alex." (Като за македонец.) It's the family's oldest setting: the highest praise handed over as a faint insult, in a language the neighbours can't check. Mary inherited it whole. Empires rose and fell across the screen, and she rated them the way her father rated conquerors — out loud, unkindly, and usually correctly.

Year one. The other Mary had her big night in a stable, and our Mary — the A-grade Mary, the original — came to inspect the competition. She looked the baby over and shook her head. Slow one, this. Best line him up a carpentry apprenticeship now — something gentle that wouldn't tax him. Her own line, the A-grade line, went into landscaping: broader trade, better respected, and (she'd note) born the same week of the year, the twenty-fourth. Two Marys, two boys — one a chippie, one a landscaper. "He did one famous weekend," she said, "and never worked again." No further questions.

The Black Death rolled across Europe and Mary was unmoved. Her medical advice has never varied — for a corked thigh, for the bubonic plague, for anything: walk it off, take a Panadol, you'll be right. School was not cancelled. There was no remote learning. A fever and a funeral the same morning meant you went to both, in good shoes. Half the continent keeled over and she did not get off the couch — because getting off the couch is reserved, and 1347 did not qualify. Almost nothing qualifies. Keep that in mind. It matters later.

She could have stopped the whole thing. She was right there; a word would have done it. But the turkish delight was also right there — the genuine article, from the actual source, the one thing the region got unarguably right — and a word would have meant putting it down. She did not put it down. The landing is owed respect, and gets it; her failure to lift a finger is owed honesty, and gets that. She loved the lokum more than she loved fixing it. She'd tell you so herself, and not look especially sorry.

By the time she looked up from the turkish delight it was 1943 and the whole thing was well away. Too late to stop, so she settled for revenge, administered the pettiest way she could devise: she unlatched the Russians and aimed them at Berlin. Granny would have wanted that — Granny was Ukrainian, an orphan who'd seen more than her share and forgiven none of it, and in this family we keep our grudges in good repair. Not her finest governance, Mary would admit. The Russians, characteristically, did not go home afterwards. She'd deal with them in '89.

One small step for man. Mary had been up there for centuries; she'd left a tin of turkish delight on the Sea of Tranquillity sometime around the Renaissance and was mildly curious whether anyone would mention finding it. Nobody did. She watched the broadcast from the couch, granted it "a decent effort," and noted they'd planted a flag where she'd left a snack — typical. The grainy black-and-white suited her. She has never trusted colour television, or anyone who films themselves arriving somewhere she got to first.

In 1970 a man from a band had a night in a club he'd turn into a hit single — the particulars of which aren't for this page, except that he learned something about the company he was keeping a touch later than ideal. Mary heard the chorus, that name, drawn right out. She didn't care for the song especially. She filed the name. Hold it, she thought. Forty-one years. She has always known what's coming and has never once been in a hurry about it. The Kinks got a number one. She got the better end of the deal.

Bob wrote eight and a half minutes of protest about a wrongly jailed boxer, topped the charts, and never once suspected the little old lady three rows back at the trial. Mary framed the Hurricane. She let Dylan take the case and the credit; she kept the satisfaction. Claudio knows. Claudio has said nothing, on the grounds that he'd like to keep existing.

She'd had the winged keel drawn up centuries earlier and simply waited for a crew slow enough to make the win look like an upset. When Australia II took the Cup the nation lost its mind; Mary watched from the couch in the same look she'd worn since 1974 and accepted the credit in silence. The country thought it had done something. It had been allowed to. There's a difference, and she's the only one ever across it. Poppa, a man again by then and not a slug, mowed the lawn clean through the broadcast. Never been one for history.

The Russians she'd uncaged in '43 spent forty-odd years walled up, which she considered fair. In '89 she got bored of the bit and pushed the wall over herself, taking full credit, naturally. History calls it a movement. She calls it tidying up.

Two generations apart, the same engine underneath: say the unsayable, make it a joke, take the credit. She saw herself in that one. She kept it.

She'll tell you 1997 was skill and 1998 was her, and she'll tell you which is which, and you will not argue, because she once framed a man for less. Two flags, back to back, a crow on her shoulder the whole time looking equally unbothered. Poppa barracked properly — loudly, with feeling, the striver's way, the way he does everything. Mary didn't barrack. She'd arranged it centuries back. There's no suspense in a result you filed long ago; only the small dry pleasure of watching everyone else find out.

She started the Y2K panic for a laugh and then did precisely nothing — "just testing." The clock ticked over; the world did not end; she'd never meant it to. One person took it entirely to heart: Aunty Sandra, Poppa's sister, a worrier like all of his line, who laid in enough tinned spaghetti to outlast civilisation. The cans are reportedly still in the shed. Mary respects this, quietly. Of everyone who watched the millennium turn, only Sandra was actually ready for something — even the wrong something. That's more than most manage.

They moved the turkish delight at Foodland. Shifted it a whole aisle — no warning, no apology — after decades in its rightful place. Mary had ended wars for less; she had, in fact, declined to end one over this exact confection. For one long and genuinely dangerous moment, the continued existence of creation hung on a woman and a misplaced shelf. The Big Bang had not got her off the couch. The plague had not. A relocated aisle very nearly did. Then they moved it back. Wisely. It remains the closest the universe has come to ending since she started it.

And then, on the second of July 2011, after thirteen point eight billion years of not getting up, she got up. A girl. The first since her own mother — the first after a long, long line of boys, the first of her own kind that Mary had had to herself in longer than she would ever say. She had watched everything ever made and been unbothered by all of it, waiting, it turned out, for this. The Indifferent Goddess set down the remote, handed over the universe without a word of ceremony, and became, simply, Nan. Lola: the original. The real thing. Everyone since is wonderful — Lola was first. The turkish delight she kept. Some things you don't hand on.

Today the retired goddess turns seventy-three — officially. We'll keep the polite fiction; she keeps the turkish delight; everyone's content. She is still, for the record, entirely unbothered: behind a cake with the wrong number of candles, wearing the faint immortal smirk of a woman who knows exactly how the story ends because she filed it long ago. This book is from all of us — the whole A-grade line, landscapers and shrews and one contented slug — who exist, every one, only because across all of time and all of creation she could not, finally, be bothered not to make us. Happy birthday, Nan. Walk it off.