‘A lawyer, like Silas and Alec,’ Mireille said. Mikey knew she was mocking them, but they seemed not to notice, continuing to smile sleepily, their faces happy and sated; after all, it was Christmas, a time for getting drunk and forgetting.

Auntie Gracie and Uncle Alec's twins, Gregory and Devin, were next. No more than thirteen. ‘Bankers,’ they answered, no hesitation, no doubts. A vanity learned from their father. Just as they too would learn to fuck their wives without bothering to remove their socks. Aunt Gracie, in full swing now that her own children had answered so sweetly, pressed on: ‘And you, Mikey?’

‘A writer,’ Mikey had answered, ‘I'm going to be a writer.’

A simple, truthful answer, he didn't have to think about it for a second.

He remembers the silence, his mother's smile, the cloud that passed across his father's face, the way Uncle Alec laughed, Grandpa Jackson saying something about it being better to become a ‘legal hijacker’ like Silas and Alec.

Mireille, slightly drunk from the wine and the heat – adults and their ill-timed sense of indulgence: ‘Let them each have a glass of wine’ – took the wrong cue from Mikey. She giggled and said that if he could be a writer, she could change her mind. She wanted to be an actress. She let out the high-pitched, false laugh that she used to make fun of people who took themselves too seriously. Afterwards, when the adults retired to the garden, to play cards, doze off, get their psyches hyped up for the New Year, Mireille was left alone with Mikey, all surly and hurt by the way he had been mocked.

‘Let's go to my room,’ she whispered.

They often did that, took refuge in her room, their adolescence awkward and out of place with both the adults and the younger kids.

‘What's the matter with you?’ Mireille asked, when Mikey lay down on her bed, still morose and disconsolate.

‘Nothing,’ he answered.

She sat down next to him. ‘You meant that, about being a writer, didn't you?’

‘Yes,’ he confessed.

‘I'm sorry, we can be so insensitive,’ she said, practising for when she had truly grown up. She started to undress, to take off the hot, satin-and-ribbon dress she had worn to church and had had to continue wearing throughout lunch because of the ‘occasion’. Watching her undress was nothing new for him. They had grown up together, knew each other's bodies, each other's smells. He could tell her farts from her fanny-smells. Their intimacies were innocent and unrestrained.

Then he started telling her about this book he had read on the life of Mahatma Gandhi. Perhaps to show off, to demonstrate that he was not a child, even though he was only fourteen then, or to escape from the sudden consciousness that she was in her underwear, from the heat in the room, from the smell of her sweat. Anyway, in this book, he told her, the author describes how Gandhi put himself to the test by going to bed with young girls, soft naked girls (like you, Mireille, he may have wanted to say but cannot now remember).