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months. Scandalous! Everyone at that end of the backs is writing, silly buggers. I’ve told them it’s a waste of time, what with one half of you being simple and the other half crooked. Look how unhelpful you all were when that devil next door started persecuting me with his windchimes. Oh, and I don’t expect Mr Carter up the other end will come out of hospital again, unless it’s feet first. I can’t say I hold out much hope for Mrs Al-Khatib, either, given the size of that lump of hers.’
    Colin was shocked into speech. ‘You’ve never
seen
it!’
    â€˜No, but Elsie has.’ A tremor ran down her cheek. ‘Elsie sees
everything.
I must say, I’m very careful to put on my winter stockings when I go past the Emporium. Nosy witch.’
    â€˜You’re getting about all right, then?’
    â€˜I manage.’
    And certainly, thought Colin, you had to hand it to her. Somehow she managed. Maybe he was too quick to get impatient. If making a simple pot of tea took him a good half-hour, and carrying it anywhere became too awkward, and having to empty his bladder afterwards became some great fumbling effort in itself and not just something he did unthinkingly on the way to his next task, then maybe he too . . .
    â€˜Let’s see how that leg’s doing,’ he said, dropping to his knees in front of her on the carpet. She slapped him away. ‘No, thanks! It’s only just getting better. I don’t want your grubby fingers poking at it.’ And clambering, embarrassed, to his feet, he had another of his blinding visions about his father’s famous ‘accident’. Dazzled byoncoming headlights, indeed! Sick of having his hands slapped away, more like. Sick of being humiliated. Sick of her viperish tongue. It was obvious even the police officer bringing the bad news didn’t for one moment believe the tale he was telling. But people were kind, and what was the point in stirring things up unnecessarily? Her horror had been unfeigned, her sense of outrage at her loss deep and real. She must have spoken about their father practically every day (as often as not in scathing terms, but that was the way of her). And it couldn’t have been easy raising a daughter as awkward as Dilys. Or even a son as unforthcoming as himself.
    He made another effort.
    â€˜So, apart from winning the Comparative Shopper of the Year Award, what else have you been doing?’
    She said with relish, ‘It’s really got to you, hasn’t it, this insurance business? You can’t let go of it for a moment.’
    Stop it!
he longed to shout at her. Stop making things so
impossible
.
    â€˜I was just interested.’
    But to the person whose only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. ‘Interested in finding fault!’
    Affecting deafness, he escaped to his shopping bag. ‘Oh, goody!’ she said with unaffected glee as he dropped the great slab of papers he was in the habit of bringing her onto the wobbly little table at her side. Instantly, she started pulling them into sections and dropping half of them in the bin.
    â€˜Don’t do that,’ he complained. ‘It’s like visiting someone in a fundamentalist sect. “Thou shalt not read
Sports
or
Appointments
.”’
    â€˜Moan, moan,’ she chided. But the newspapers had done the trick. She was already feeling in her pockets for one of the many pairs of spectacles she hoarded around the house. Enjoying the silence, he picked the
Business
and the
Foreign News
out of the bin, then promptly fell in a depression, realizing he didn’t want to read them either. Already his world, like hers, was narrowing. He’d noticed it first with Chad, a country for which his school had raised thousands of pounds during his sixth-form year. Colin had signed up for a Sponsored Silence, behaved through the fortnight almost exactly as usual, and, but for his crippling inability to