The boy tried not to blame his mother because he could see that she was weak like him, and scared like him. He didn’t blame his father either, because his father, as he kept telling the rest of the family, was a man of high principle who couldn’t help it if lies made him angry. The boy learned that lying was the worst thing ever. It made sense to blame his sister, who couldn’t possibly have failed to notice that she rarely got away with her attempted deceptions. Why did she bother? Why didn’t she admit defeat and start telling the truth?

One day, the boy plucked up the courage to ask her. He was beginning to wonder if she secretly enjoyed the fights with her father. She smiled and said, “Of course I don’t enjoy them. Would you enjoy being screamed at for three hours a day about what a terrible person you are?” The boy said he wouldn’t, and that therefore he would resolve never to lie again. “Often you lie when there’s no need,” he told his sister. “Mum and Dad would have let you go to that concert if you’d asked them. You didn’t need to pretend it was a school trip.” His sister laughed. “‘Let’ me?” she said. “Maybe they would have. I lie to them because they deserve to be lied to. They don’t deserve to have power over me. They’ve persecuted me since the day I was born.”

“No, they haven’t,” said the boy, because, like most people, he didn’t recognize persecution that wore a mask of loving parental concern.

The fights continued. The boy grew more anxious and withdrawn. His sister stopped crying during her father’s tirades, and instead turned herself to stone. She taught the boy how to make earplugs out of tissue paper, so that he wouldn’t have to listen if he didn’t want to when the trouble started.

Sometimes a glimmer of hope was offered by a visiting relative from a different part of the country. Whenever this happened, the boy prayed that there would be a terrible eruption while the relative was in the house and that the relative would leap up and declare, “This is intolerable! Something must be done! No one can be expected to live like this!” Instead what happened was that extended family members turned into versions of the little boy’s mother, perching tensely on the edges of chairs, waiting in silence for the trouble to subside. Sometimes bright, false conversations were had, as the boy’s mother and the visiting relatives conspired to cover up the noise.