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be? Will you love her into a lunatic too? The way you loved Camille Claudel, the way you loved me? My life goes over the precipice, out of sight, out of mind. Rilke pulls the wooden shutters across, a lunette peeping like a delicate crescent moon. (Do they have a telescope in their room? Do they get a look at the Sea of Tranquillity, the Sea of Cold, the Sea of Crises, orient their movements by Syrius the dog star, the Archer?) My shadow wakes in the grit of the Oyster Shell , rises with the pearly surf and the seagulls, cold, hungry, dry as old whitebait.

Moth
    Bounce and Rhyme
    I walk Roan to school, half dragging, half carrying Dove along too. Past the cinema seat cemetery (all munching their popcorn as our trailer trails by), past Mr Chan’s takeaway still smelling of prawn crackers and crispy duck. I’m hungry, wails Dove, and I tell her off for messing about with some badge that says “I am three” on it instead of eating her breakfast. Past the new estate going up ninety-nine to the dozen. How fragile their infrastructures are. How precarious.
    â€œWill Daddy put the lights on in them?”
    â€œMaybe. If he gets the contract.”
    We see a white van in the distance and lay bets as to whether it’s Drew or not. Dove shakes her dandelion hair and the seed thoughts disseminate, take root, spring up somewhere. “It’s a different man in a little white van.” How clever she is.
    Over the disused railway track where coal-black cats with smouldering eyes bask between the girders, as if they’ve been tossed off a wagon on its way from the opencast mine that once sparked the valley.
    â€œJonah’s here.”
    Ah, yes. Jonah’s grandmother is reversing her black Skoda into a spot on the corner by Ebenezer’s beds. We wait for them to catch up. Jonah might as well be stuck in a friggin’ whale, he takes so long to get out of the car. We pant up the hill together, Jonah telling Roan about a computer character you can plug in like some kind of air freshener, and Roan, who’s barely played a computer game in his life, nods wisely.
    â€œI’m thinking of giving it a go with the new fella,” Jonah’s grandmother confides. In two years of panting up a hill together I still don’t know her Christian name. “Moving in with him.”
    â€œOh, well done you.”
    â€œWell done you,” Dove parrots on my shoulder, irritatingly.
    â€œYou’re a little cough drop, aren’t you. Trouble is, I don’t know what to do with Woody.”
    Woody is Jonah’s grandmother’s late husband.
    â€œI’m thinking of putting him in my son’s garden till I see how things pan out.”
    â€œWhy can’t he stay where he is?”
    â€œI’m letting out the dormer for the summer.”
    â€œOh, well, he’ll be safe in your son’s garden won’t he?”
    â€œI just don’t want him getting knocked over and flying about all over the shop.”
    I try not to laugh at the thought of ashes from a purple urn disseminating, taking root, springing up somewhere like Dove’s dandelion seed hair.
    I affect a cool calm nonchalance at the school gates. I always have. None of the goo-goo Lady Ga-Ga stuff the working mums go in for, leaving lipsticked imprints on their children’s cheeks before leaping back into their massive jeeps because, let’s face it, they have to cross some mountainous terrain before reaching their offices ten minutes away. Most of the mums round here go back to work and the grandparents take over the childcare. The only other full-time mum I know is in hospital with a brain tumour. Doesn’t that tell you everything you need to know about full-time isolating parenting? I never really had a job to go back to. Miss Carmarthen at twenty-two didn’t leave me many career options except getting laid by the best-looking sparkie in town, which happened to be Drew, then getting pregnant,