‘Joe.’

He gave a final swirl to the water in the sink and wiped his hands on his trousers.

‘Are you in, Joe?’

Didn’t she know well he was in, wasn’t his coat hanging there beside hers?

‘I’m in.’

He went back into the kitchen. She stood out in the passage looking nervous somehow, as if she had come to the wrong house. He sat down and pulled his books towards him.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Homework.’

She came into the kitchen with her plastic bags, bending forward with the weight as she walked. She put them on the table, crowding his books together.

‘Your Daddy?’

She began to take things out of one of the bags. Baked beans, Daz, Typhoo tea, two small packets, six eggs in a cardboard egg box.

‘He’s been down?’

‘Aye. He’s been down.’

‘I can smell the smell of him.’

‘Yes.’

‘Where is he now?’

Her eyes moved for a moment upward towards the ceiling. There was only silence, no sound of the springs moving, the death-rattle cough, the murmuring voice. She crunched the plastic bag in her hands.

‘Is he dead? Where is the hero’s voice that should be calling my name?’

She laughed.

Half a pound of sausages, a crinkled metal pot scourer, that made your fingers sick to touch, a blue and white carton of milk.

‘He went out?’

She stood with a cabbage in her left hand looking for all the world like a picture of Victoria Regina that Joe had seen in a book somewhere.

‘Out,’ he repeated foolishly.

‘What did you let him go out for?’

‘How could I stop him?’

She nodded abruptly and put the cabbage on the table.

‘How indeed,’ was all she said.

She let him get on with his work then. She laid the table just for the two of them.

His father didn’t come in until after he had gone to bed.

He never pulled his curtains at night, but liked to lie in his bed by the window staring out at the changing sky. There had been two explosions and the darkness was coloured by glowing smoke which rose beyond the wet roofs of the other side of the street. He heard the fire engines and the ambulances, the distant sounds of shouting voices. He was warm and his eyes drooped gently into darkness. The smell of burning crept even through the closed window. People laughed below in the street. People always managed to laugh. What’s the joke, fellas? The house trembled as a helicopter rattled over the roofs, the searchlight probing, searching. He wondered if they had X-ray gadgets that could see through brick walls and drawn curtains, see him curled in his bed, see his waiting mother pressing the iron heavily down on the steaming shirts. Even into the blackness of people’s skulls. All things are possible. What does a thought look like? What shape? What substance? Like an equilateral triangle perhaps? He smiled as he tumbled down into warm thoughtless darkness. His thoughts were like birds, there untouchable in front of him, skiting away as he tried to trap them, in a whirl of feathers, and then appearing again, dipping and soaring across the sky of his mind.