After the dishes had been washed, and everything packed away in its place, and the leftovers scraped onto a piece of paper and left for the bitch, and a small piece of candle taken to the backyard room where the old woman lived, lighted and left there so that she could crawl into her blankets on the floor and sleep; when finally he had washed, his mother watching carefully, ‘Behind your ears, behind your legs’, and he had slipped into the old vest of hers in which he slept, then they went to bed.

They lay close together for warmth because the blankets were thin and it was the cold time of the year. There in the darkness his mother spoke again, just a little, for a while, using soft words, like love, and father, and better days, and laughing; and the music in her voice made him drowsy and lapped around him like warm water as the heat from their bodies crept into the blanket. It was good to lie there like that, protected by her arms, carried away by the flow of her words which came effortless and soft, until it wasn’t her voice anymore but father being just as soft, and his mother and himself were astride his back, holding on by handfuls of feathers, and all of them laughing because father was flying them away to better times, flapping his arms like a bird. The sky ahead was blue, and the sun bright and warm and lots of birds flew abreast of them and asked them where they were going and why, but they only laughed because there was no longer a need for words that weren’t phrased by the sound of their happiness, and they flew like that a long time, sometimes resting up on trees, then off again, passing over strange places with strange colours, on and on, until suddenly, from nowhere, came the darkness and the sun was gone, the sky grey, and then hail, big as stones, falling hard and cruel, forcing them lower, and the stones struck his father’s head with a short, dull note like hitting something iron, and this note after a slow start was going up into a frenzy of sound because the storm was at its worst, and they were going down down down…

At that moment he opened his eyes. He shook his head in the darkness because the sound persisted in his ears. Then he noticed it was coming from the street and recognized it for what it really was. It was the sound of stones being tapped on lamp-posts. It was the warning to run away and hide because the police had come on another raid.

They were given no time to comfort or be comforted; there was not even enough for him to touch his mother and confirm that she was awake; he could feel the tenseness in her body which had been soft when they went to sleep. The door was broken open. The thin nail they had hammered into the wood and bent to hold the door closed against the wind was torn out by the first savage thrust of shoulders.