After the union exams, nothing was much better at home. We couldn’t remember a fight between Mum and Dad lasting this long. In the past there had been noisier ones, where Mum would scream she was leaving and walk out the door, and Dad would let her go for half an hour and if she didn’t come back, he would get in the car and look for her and bring her back. Usually by the next morning they were a bit careful, as though there were actual bruises on their hearts but that were clearly starting to heal, and we were careful and didn’t make the situation worse, which usually meant if I didn’t make the situation worse by the next teatime we could all breathe a sigh of relief.

We were coming up to a record for the coldness in our house, and it didn’t look like it was going to end anytime soon.

CHAPTER 14

Caleb consulted his best friend Lincoln Waterford about Saint Joan of Arc.

Lincoln was as large and noisy as Caleb was small and quiet. Caleb loved him and considered him the last word on most things, and started a lot of his sentences with ‘Lincoln Waterford said …’ Lincoln was a tall child who had the look of a person who had been put together out of bits left over from other people. He had long, straight, shapely legs with enormous knobbly knees and thick ankles. He had a flat tummy and broad shoulders, but also a large round bottom that didn’t seem to belong to the rest of him. He had thin, elegant arms and wrists that supported enormous, square hands. He had a charming smile, flashing beautiful teeth, because his mum made him wear a wire mouth plate at night to keep them straight, but he also had three huge warty things on his chin. I allowed him to be in one of my plays once because he was quite theatrical, looked older than he was and could quickly imagine things. But he needed to be the centre of attention, which could be tiring, and he had a habit of changing my scripts to words he liked better.

Lincoln insisted that Caleb and a little girl called Janet get his milk bottle in the recess times and fetch his lunch from his locker and bring it to him in the schoolyard. Lincoln also expected Caleb and Janet to take turns finishing his homework. We told Caleb to stop, but he and Janet both seemed to like working for Lincoln. When Caleb heard the headmistress telling Lincoln he was a born leader, it reinforced his view of his nine-year-old hero.

Lincoln was unable to shed much light on Saint Joan because he said there were thousands and thousands of saints and there was no way he could keep up. He said his father’s favourite was Saint Brigid. She was a Catholic celebrity because she changed her dirty old bathwater into beer. She also changed bathwater from a whole pile of leprosy people into beer too, but why you would want to drink either beat me. Surely there would be bits of skin and scabs and even fingers and things in the leprosy beer? When we asked Lincoln about this, he said his dad just said, ‘Beer is beer, and all the better if it’s holy.’