Simone’s chest tightens, but she tries to remain breezy. “Maybe just leave it, Tel. Don’t play into their hands. It’s probably what they want.”

But Terry has already stopped listening. He has turned and stumbled back down the stairs onto the street where Polly is possibly just a road away. When Simone and Dominic look down from the window, hands again interlinked, they see Terry curling himself around the railings that separate their doorstep from their neighbours’. He steadies himself with the shared black iron, then raises his fist, using it to pound hard upon the neighbours’ door. With the window open, they can hear the noise even from upstairs. But they watch calmly. This pounding on wood is less dreadful than the sound of pummelling flesh.

Veronica

There had been nothing to do but ignore the thudding. Veronica had been too scared to move from the couch or look out from behind the shutters, let alone answer the door, but she had also been too proud to call George, and too worried about Dominic and Jasmine to press the panic button or phone the police. So she had sat, listening to Terry hammer at wood.

It crossed her mind that she may have misjudged things. The previous night, watching Terry shrink into himself in front of her husband, the matching of men had felt so simple and animalistic. Outclassed at every turn, Veronica had almost felt sorry for Terry in the inevitability of it. And the hammering now was proof. He was so witless. There was no logic to it. It was broad daylight so the best he could do was what? Assault one of them, or kill them she supposed; but then his life would be over too. It was all so stupid.

The problem was, in Terry’s stupid, reckless battering of her door, there was still a chance she might answer, or the dodgy latch might cave in, and then all at once it would be just him facing just her, and everything would be animalistic again, wit irrelevant. He was bigger, stronger, angrier, and a man with something to inflict, while she was a woman, forever a recipient of things forced.

It had not been a conscious intention to protect her parents, but hallway-hung telephones never seemed like the place for confession. Besides, she could cope without them, and aged thirteen, she could never be sure anyway if a young, male teacher complimenting her on her legs was inappropriate, or just flattering. She’d liked that teacher – the smell of his cologne when he leant over to read her work, the jokes he threw about the classroom, the heat of his body pressed ever so slightly against hers. At first, she looked forward to his lessons, sat in the front and tried to catch his eye to smile at him. But then one day in the lunch queue, his hand found its way beneath her pleated skirt, grazing her bottom. Only briefly, only faintly. But something had felt different about that, and in the lessons that followed she’d sat in the last row at the very back. Somehow, however, everybody had already clocked the vibe between them, and whether or not she joined in and confirmed it, they made jokes, and passed notes about it, and watched for sparks. She could have flat out denied it, but there was a certain admiration attached to such attention, and besides it was only talk, which died down eventually. Until she turned sixteen, and then suddenly she was ‘legal’, and either the teacher or one of her classmates started the rumours up again with a new, rampant energy, so that by the time of the Christmas dance, when they were all dolled up in tiny dresses, and he was there as a chaperone, it seemed inevitable and expected that she should consent to his hands beneath her bra. And later, more than once, in the darkness of dorms, more.