‘The birds sing beautifully here,’ I offered after a while. Marlene, her face haunted, looked into my eyes.

‘No,’ she corrected, ‘they say Kaddish and recite Psalms, but they do not sing. The birds don’t sing in Auschwitz.’

Sharks on the Bedroom Floor

Rhodri

The first you knew of the pirates’ ambush was the blow to your head. In the disorientation that followed, and to the sound of excited screeches and a gutsy ‘Com’on mi hearties’ from the children, you worried whether Justin had put his pyjama bottoms back on after you’d made love. Your unease became palpable on realising that they might discover your own morning stand bulging in your boxer shorts if they got under the duvet. Sensational headlines from tabloid newspapers jarred your mind. And where had the knotted condom ended up after you’d fallen asleep in Justin’s embrace?

Penri, his left eye covered by a make-shift eye patch, jarred his knee unknowingly against your erection and pushed onto your aching bladder as he raised the pillow and struck again, hitting you hard across your bare chest. Tirion, by far the more placid of the two but looking fierce brandishing a loofah, bounced into the air before launching herself with a near primal scream across Justin, who caught her before she fell from the deck of the imaginary ship into the sea of sharks on the bedroom floor. You lifted your nephew an arm’s length into the blue sky above the besieged schooner, dropped him gently into Justin’s arms beside his sister, and avoiding the sharks that snapped at bare feet and indecent exposure, escaped to the bathroom.

Justin

You had always seemed more at ease with Tirion and Penri, probably because you never felt the need to second-guess the multiplicity of motives, ignoble or otherwise, behind your actions like Rhodri did. You pacified the marauding pirates by agreeing to read more of Prince Caspian and the children’s adventures (two of whom just happened to be called Tirion and Penri) in Narnia. They liked it when their uncle Justin read to them in English. Sometimes they stopped you to ask the meanings of words and you would realise again that they spoke only Welsh with their parents in a home where the use of English was not encouraged. You remembered the heated argument with Gwydion, their father, who’d maintained that because English was so dominant anyway, discouraging its use in their home wouldn’t disadvantage the children. You, whom Rhodri considered as English as Colman’s Mustard but retaining ancestral vestiges of taste for Caribbean spices that were much less bland, had suggested that Gwydion’s politics might have skewed his acute intelligence. Loving you for the stability brought to Rhodri’s life, Gwydion had reacted with uncharacteristic tolerance, thinking deeply about what you’d said. But then he hadn’t changed his mind. After that family storm, your reading to the children, whenever they came to stay, had become a mission. As well as all of Lewis’ Narnia tales you read them Roald Dahl and even poems by Larkin and Robert Graves; how many times had they shouted ‘Again uncle Justin… Again’ after the final ‘I was coming to that’ in Welsh Incident?