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Danny.
    â€œI’ll take the fillets along,” he thought. “I’ll put out the shore nets. I could do with the space of the beach.”

    The baby was being fed when the row broke out and he started to scream immediately when their voices went up and the other boy, too, started to cry. Started to cry just with the sheer completeness of everyone’s upset, his baby brother wailing, his mother covering herself angrily and reddening and launching into one of those shapeless female arguments that is just a letting go of all the exhausting little frustrations. And his father just emitting this great, weary uselessness at everything, as if it all fell on him, looking like he was taking in her words like theywere something foul he had in his mouth and was deciding on whether to spit up.
    They can be vicious in argument, women, and she sliced into him over and over, and all his weaknesses that he had offered up to her, in some great amnesty of masculinity, that he had offered her as signs of his true scale as nothing more than a simple man, she sliced at and tore into. And his children yelled, as if they watched this flaying of their father.
    He had not seen her like this before. He realized they had never really argued, and all of this was pouring out of her. She even looked ugly to him, the way she was then.
    â€œYou promised things,” she said. “I left everything behind. You promised we would have things.”
    He felt all the weight of that.
    â€œYou promised things.”

    He knocked and came in through the porch, taking off his shoes, and went through to the kitchen and put the fillets in their newspaper down on the side and she met him in almost a sedate way. When Hold had been on the sea, he smelled of Danny to her and it was difficult for her not to react at that so she quite often had this distant thing about her. She was just making tea and fetched down another cup automatically and put in a teabag and poured on the still boiled water from the kettle that puffed steamup into the underside of the hanging unit. Then she took up her own cup and held it and blew over it and looked at the parcel on the worktop.
    â€œPresent,” said Hold.
    Cara took out the teabag and squeezed it against the side of the cup and lifted it out to the little plastic food tray she had for compost to throw on the border. She bent for the milk from the fridge and he watched deliberately, instead, the steam come off the teabag and curl up amongst the broken eggshells and peelings there like some far away sign. Like the engine smoking across the top of the boat.
    She put in the milk and passed him the cup and he looked down at the fillets on the side, looking at the newspaper they were wrapped in, the black print furring out from itself, leaving some chromatogram-like aura around the words.
    â€œBass,” he said, and she nodded. Her sleeves were rolled up, like she’d been doing kitchen work and hadn’t had time to change her clothes. Hold looked at the way she was dressed in the respectable clothes and said, “How was the bank?”
    She gave the slightest shake of her head.
    He put the tea down and opened a cupboard, mainly so she couldn’t see the flash of anger on his face.
    â€œHow was the sea today?” she said to him. He was going through the cupboards like the house was his own.
    â€œShe’s getting up. Not so soon, though. Be a few days.”
    â€œThanks for the fish.”
    â€œIt’s good fish,” he said. He was thinking of the house, and how he had promised Danny he would have it for the boy. “Where’s he at?”
    â€œHe’s out on his bike.” There was a moment of space. They both noticed at the same time and were uncomfortable with it.
    â€œAre you looking for biscuits?”
    â€œIt’s fine.”
    She looked apologetic that there were no biscuits. Like she had let him down. There was no play. None of the bantered flirting there