For twenty minutes we stand and watch orange and blue star-bursts, rockets, red-balls, colossal roman candles loom over the valley, dwarfing the trees and fields, even the town itself. What, I wonder, do the cows make of this? I can’t hear the bangs and thumps that my mother has described to me, but it hardly matters. Merboy, Special and I have always loved fireworks, because they’re beautiful, because you don’t need to hear them, because they usually mean it’s nearly my birthday.

One night, many years ago, a gangling, nervous, near-bald boy, dressed in a T-shirt and a too-big pair of Levi’s, stepped through sliding doors, let go of Harry’s hand and stood alone watching colours spray against a sky just like this, as the wolf’s breath rasped. I’m not sure how that boy travelled from that shivering night to this silent one but somehow he did. I look at Sonja, lit by fierce firelight, and I see that she’s crying.

JOAN

4 January 2000

Ellen and I have returned to our routines now John and Sonja have gone back to Bristol - I clean and cook, walk the dogs and do the shopping; in the evenings I sit with Ellen, read to her — newspapers, novels, poetry, whatever — and she sleeps and wastes away, taking drugs, shifting in her bed. She hasn’t been out of her bed since John and Sonja left on New Year’s Day. I think Christmas wore her out, sucked out the last vestiges of her life. I also think she chose to do that, chose to use whatever she had left then, rather than eke it out over weeks. She says she won’t go back to the hospital, and I’ve spoken to the doctor and he agrees that there’s little point. A nurse comes twice a day and I sit in the kitchen while she deals with Ellen and I wonder how long this can go on. John offered to stay with me but he has a life, he has work to do and his operation is looming, so I told him to go. He says he wants us to meet more often, that he’ll visit me at home. He wants to fix up my house, build a new deck, convert the attic. Well, maybe. But let me get this over with first.

The day John and Sonja left he spent an hour with Ellen in the library and when he came out he was crying. He tried not to, kept coughing and clenching his teeth, rubbing his hands, reminding me of Merboy when he was hurt. But the tears came anyway. Sonja drove them home because he couldn’t.

I don’t know what he and Ellen said to each other but it must have been a goodbye of sorts.

Is John happy with Sonja? I don’t know. I don’t know. The day she arrived, when they went upstairs to unpack, I heard him shout, I can’t listen to music — I’m fucking deaf!’ but then he’s always had a penchant for stating the obvious. Later still, as I prowled along the landing, fighting the desire for whisky, I heard John and Sonja making love, heard John’s yodels. I suppose Sonja didn’t feel the time was right to twist her fingers and turn down the volume.