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D’s minutely planned excursions . This one involved a Saturday-night dinner and West-End-show combination. The restaurant was a fancy one and I was supposed to wear a shirt and tie. I actually liked wearing a shirt and tie – getting dickered up, as Mum called it – but I was kicking up stink. I wanted to wind Derek up, force him to intervene so I could tell him he wasn’t my dad and where he could stuff his poxy show. Mum kept on at me in this ineffectual wheedling voice, until finally she turned to Big D with a help-me-out-here shrug. Big D wheeled round from the mirror, where he was briskly folding a four-in-hand, and surveyed the scene. Then he turned back to the mirror, still knotting his tie, and, addressing no one in particular, announced: ‘He’ll do what his mother tells him.’
    This was cute, I thought. It sounded decisive and authoritative , but it still left the onus on Mum. If I’d really wanted , I could have picked a fight at that point, but I went to my room and got ready.
    I was fifteen when this happened, a surly six-footer in a cut-off T. Roddy and James were still babies. What chance did they have if Adam turned heavy?
    My acoustic was propped against the fireplace. I ran through some blues riffs but they sounded stale – I’d played them too often and I was a shade out of tune. I footered with the tuning pegs for a while but it was no good; something was always a semitone out.
    What worried me was Roddy. I knew what Roddy was like, how maddening he could be in that wild half-hour before teatime. He would leap around on the furniture and howl like a coyote. And I knew how quickly you could lose the rag. It was scary how abruptly I could turn. One minute I’d be asking him, in a tone of studied evenness and balance, to please not climb on the sofa, and the next I’d be springing from my armchair in a crash of crumpling newspaper and yanking him by the arm right up the stairs.
    It startled me as much as it did him, this instant murderous rage. Where did it come from? And this was my own son, a boy I would cheerfully die for, a boy whose life’s load of pain I would gladly endure in his place. If your own kid could rile you like this, what about someone else’s? Every day, the inside pages carried the same scenario: a toddler shaken to death, a baby taken to hospital with multiple injuries. And always, without fail, it was the boyfriend, some boorish lummox with a Friday-night skinful, the big cat who killed off the other cat’s cubs.
    I thought about this, taking big pulls on my Rolling Rock and forcing myself to imagine it. I opened another bottle and something struck me. What if Elaine was right? What if Adam was this big benign guy? Captain Benevolence. Mister Pacific. Wouldn’t they choose him over me? Wouldn’t they be right to? Maybe I’d got it all wrong. Maybe my departure wasn’t a burden to the boys. Maybe it was a deliverance. I had lightened everyone’s load.
    I sat for a while, not knowing which worried me more – the mean Adam or the good one. I opened the last beer. The couple from the flat below came home. There was a splash of dropped keys and some laughter and the guy’s voice, low and smooth and sexual. Then music came on, low, an alt/country thing with pedal guitar. I listened till the beer was done. I checked the boys and went to bed.
    *
     
    I woke in the small hours, panting, hunched on my side, sweating like a racehorse. My knees were stuck together and as I raised one leg and flapped the covers the night air rushed wetly in. I was in a house. It was our house in Conwick but also it wasn’t: it was a large, wood-framed mansion of a kind familiar from black-and-white films. To Kill a Mocking Bird. It’s a Wonderful Life. Elaine was there with the boys. Some people were coming to kill us and we were looking for a place to hide. From an upstairs window I watched two men come down the path. One of them stopped to close the gate, and as he turned back to the path he