There had been no sauce. There always had to be sauce with chicken because otherwise it was too dry and his father didn’t like it. Tommy’s mother seemed distracted so perhaps that was why she’d forgotten the sauce. It made Tommy anxious. There was plenty of butter for the baked potatoes, but nothing at all to go with the chicken. Tommy waited all through the meal for his father to notice and say something about it. He could feel the prickle along his arms and in his chest and he glanced across at Nicky, who was eating his food with that expression of concentration he sometimes wore when he was doing maths (Nicky was brilliant at maths). Tommy thought Nicky was worried too.

Tommy wolfed his own chicken down quickly, to show everyone it was delicious and not dry at all. “Slow down, bairnie,” his mother said, “you’ll make yourself sick,” and for a brief moment Tommy was annoyed with her for not seeing how he was trying to help her.

Then Nicky started to talk about Viking longships, which irritated Tommy further because he was the expert on Vikings, not Nicky. But he thought he knew what Nicky was trying to do: keep everyone happy, keep everyone busy, keep their father from getting annoyed.

And it was true that their father hardly ever got annoyed with Nicky, except for the way his hair wouldn’t lie flat on his head before church. Their father liked Nicky best, and Tommy knew this, and so did Nicky, and so did their mother, even if they all pretended they didn’t. His father said Nicky would be an accountant like him one day because he was so good with numbers. Tommy thought Nicky should be talking about maths instead of Vikings, but he supposed that Nicky had the Vikings in his head because of the project on longboats they were doing at school.

As Nicky talked on about how they built their ships—Tommy could see how cleverly he’d chosen the bit most likely to interest their father—Tommy looked at his mother. He thought she would at least acknowledge that the Vikings were his by turning to him at some point, but she kept on watching Nicky, and when she did turn it was only to look quickly at Tommy’s father, before she returned her attention to Nicky, giving him that special smile that Tommy loved, and saying, “Did they really? That’s very interesting.”

“So they built the outside first,” Nicky went on. “And then put the frame in the middle. It’s called . . .” And here he broke off. “I can’t remember what it’s called. The name for how they make the ships. We learned it today.”

It’s called clinker, Tommy was about to burst out, but before he could speak his father said, “Carvel.”

“It’s not,” Tommy said, without even thinking about it. “It’s clinker.”