Dad was waving the gun and pacing the room. He wanted everyone to lie on the bed – the bed where the kids were made he kept saying – everyone had to lie down he said, it was a part of the census – everyone right back where they came from – but it didn’t make much sense cos he wouldn’t lie down and he was making mum nervous. She had blonde hair, the colour of a girls and James could see her eyes working overtime, trying to fix on dad, on the gun, on Harry crawling, on the slow drawling movements which Olivia was making in no particular relation to anything.

Up above their room people seemed to be moving furniture all night – like the sound of thunder thru the floorboards. Dad was talking loud. The phone rang – Dad shot it. No way to know who it was. Then dad was talking, talking again. About what he called right and wrong, about the difference between action and inaction. About magic.

And in the end Mum was talking too, only her shit was less complicated. Just a lot of please, please, please, and a lot of cant we just this and cant we just that. A lot of old shit came up. And some new shit. But the words didn’t mean much to James – it was more like a great angry song, very strong, very long.

At some point mum got up and started gesticulations – a strange dance to go with the long song and then Dad shot her, just like he shot DEAD SOLDIER. And she moved a lot and then after a time she was very very still and then Dad shot Harry and he was trying to shoot James but he missed and he shot Olivia by accident expect he probably would’ve shot her anyway in the end.

Dad laughed a bit and said ‘same price anyhow’.

*

James crawled under the bed and crawled and crawled and started to cry. Didn’t know what else to do. He could hear the rain start up again outside. He tried to think what DEAD SOLDIER had told him once, what seemed like eternity ago, about something he didn’t quite understand, about something DEAD SOLDIER called ‘the futility of art’ and it seemed to James that this knowledge, more than any other, might be of some use to him then.

James sobbed and while he sobbed his Dads arms came groping under the bed with the gun in the fist, a big dark eye looking for him, a big blind snake worrying for heat.

James muttered to himself what he could remember of DEAD SOLDIERS thesis, tumbling it out from under his breath between sobs: “art is futile because . . . because it cant transform the material circumstances of a soldier or a worker or a whore . . . art is futile because it cannot change the world, art is futile because it cannot change the world.”

*

Midnight chimed.