I fled upstairs as the fighting started. I’d learned a lot since I’d stabbed my father in the back of the knee with a paring knife. I knew better now than to come between them. My mother wallowed in her victimhood. Sooner or later, she’d drown in it, and I wasn’t going to get caught in the undertow.

The shouting intensified. But as bad as the yelling was, the silence that came next was always worse, because that meant he was hitting her. I watched helplessly through the bannisters as he dragged her along the hallway towards the kitchen by her hair. I didn’t hide in my bedroom beneath the covers with my four-year-old sister Gracie because I needed to see: to remind myself what happened when you ceded your power to a man.

Mum thrashed back and forth trying to get out of his grip, flopping around like a landed fish, her hands clawing above her head. I wondered if he’d kill her this time. I wondered if I was strong enough yet to kill him if he did.

And then suddenly the kitchen door burst open below and Tom launched himself bodily on top of my father: Tom, nine years old and skinny as fuck, screaming and shouting, his small fists beating my father’s back.

Dad brushed him off as if he were no more than a mosquito, but he had to let go of my mother’s hair to do so. She scrambled frantically away on her hands and knees like a feral cat. And then Dad picked Tom up like he was a bag of flour and threw him against the kitchen wall. Tom smashed into it so hard his head punched a hole in the Sheetrock.

I tore down the stairs, screaming at my father to stop.

My mother grabbed my arm as I reached the bottom. ‘He’ll kill you!’

Dad was lurching around trying to find my mother, a blundering bear of a man. A large cut on his forehead bled heavily into his eyes, obscuring his vision.

I broke free from my mother and ducked beneath his flailing arms. In the kitchen, Tom sat up, disorientated but alive.

‘Run!’ my mother cried.

Mum didn’t defy my father very often. They fought like this all the time: what had happened tonight wasn’t out of the ordinary. Sometimes she’d even hit him back, because in my parents’ world, violence masqueraded as passion and a beating meant you cared. So when she yelled, ‘Run!’ I seized Tom’s hand and we ran.

We didn’t run to Tom’s house next door, or to the neighbours, whose lights were going off as we passed them because nobody wanted to get involved. We ran to the one place I knew would give us sanctuary: the Spar shop on the corner.