Then there was the garage where he found some old fireworks, bangers, whose sole purpose was to make a bang, probably too damp on bonfire night but now, months later, dried out. The fourth prompter into action was as non-sequential as the other three. There was a soda syphon, red, with the press down arm, and the place where the sparklet of gas was inserted was in chrome. Plastic chrome. When the gas had gone into the water and had been shaken for ten minutes or so, you got the miracle of soda. Leaving an empty mini torpedo of metal with a pierced hole at the top. It was an ancient contraption. It was obvious really: fill an empty sparklet with the gunpowder from the fireworks. Compress it in tight, pack it. Create a pressure. There was a bomb, that would explode and send the metal, shrapnel-like, everywhere.

After this preparation he took the bomb into the garden, laid a long trail of gunpowder that he could light and that would travel up to the bomb.

And.

He laid it on the bit of terrace that dropped down two steps by the fence and the posts that held the washing line. He spread the trail of gunpowder, the fuse, up the path away from the washing line until the gunpowder ran out. Quite a way up the path. He wanted to be safe. He lit it.

Then his mother came out with a pile of washing in a pale blue plastic version of a latticed basket, with a cigarette in her mouth. And he shouted.

‘Hang on Mum.’

And repeated the shout.

Did he shout loud enough?

She ignored him as was her way, or didn’t hear him, and the crackling trail of flame was heading towards the loaded sparklet.

His mother put the basket down; she had pulled the first sheet out of it to hang on the line when the explosion happened.

Explosion was the word.

The noise was deafening, the metal did indeed shatter and fly everywhere, most of it towards the sheet, but some buried into his mother’s leg. Neither of them could hear anything as the noise had left them in a ringing mime show. Completely deafened ears. His mother, he could tell was screaming, by the shape of her mouth and body; he was in shock. About, he thought, to cry but was not sure what the appropriate emotion or action was when you have nearly blown up your mother.

The first thing was to see the extent of the damage to her leg. She was hopping on the other leg. As far as he could see, there were several pieces of sparklet embedded in her flesh, and blood; there was bleeding; he hoped, in a moment of startling banality, that tweezers could purpose the extraction.

At least that was his thinking.