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feels the floodgates of his temper open and it is a glorious relief, a wonderful, raging release. “Let me get this straight. You’re asking me, who has a family and a full-time job,to come and help you with a lost shed key. You’re not asking my sister, who has no children to look after and no job, because she’s
got a lot on
?”
    How he loathes that phrase. He and Aoife use it to each other sometimes, as a joke. But, really, their mother’s partiality for her middle child, her endless sympathy with her, her ability to forgive Monica anything, isn’t a joke. It’s annoying. It’s ridiculous. It’s really time it stopped.
    He hears his mother inhale sharply. There is a silence between them for a moment. Which way will she jump? Will she shout back? She can always give as good as she gets, they both know that. “Well,” she says, in a quavery voice, and he sees that she’s opted for hurt and just a tiny bit brave, “I just thought you might be able to help. I just thought I could ring you in my hour of n—”
    “Mum—”
    “I mean, he’s been gone for eleven hours now so I’m just not sure what to do and—”
    He frowns and holds the receiver closer to his ear. This is the other thing that can happen in conversations with his mother. She has an odd inability to sift important information from irrelevant information. Everything is crucial to her: misplaced shed keys and an absent husband take equal precedence.
    “Dad’s been gone for eleven hours?”
    “—it’s not as if he’s gone off like this before and I wasn’t sure who to turn to and Monica’s so busy so I thought—”
    “Wait, wait, did you tell Monica that Dad’s disappeared?”
    There is a pause. “Yes,” his mother says uncertainly. “I’m sure I did.”
    “Or did you just tell her you don’t know where the shed key is?”
    “Michael Francis, I don’t think you’re listening to me. I do know where the shed key is. It’s on your father’s key ring but if he’s gone, then so has the key and—”
    “OK.” He decides to take control of the situation. “This is what’s going to happen. You’re going to wait by the phone. I’m going to call Monica and speak to her and then I’ll call you back, in ten minutes or so. OK?”
    “All right, darling. I’ll wait for you, then.”
    “Yes. You wait there.”

Gloucestershire
    For Monica, it began with the cat. For years afterwards, her father’s disappearance would forever be associated with its death.
    She didn’t even like the cat—never had. Peter’s daughters loved it, though, and had grown up with it. When the girls arrived on Friday evenings, after Peter had collected them from their mother’s, they would streak up the path, through the front door and, without stopping to remove their coats, run about in a loud, shrieking clatter, searching for the animal. When they found it, curled on the sofa or stretched out by the range, they would hurl themselves upon it, burying their faces in its flank, crooning its name, playing with the soft triangles of its ears.
    They conducted long conversations with it; they made it elaborate houses out of newspaper; they wanted it to sleep on their beds at night, and Peter allowed this. They carried it about like a furry handbag; they dressed it up in dolls’ clothes and pushed it about the garden in an old, squeaking pram they extracted from the barn. Monica hadn’t even known the pram was there (she avoided the barn, a dark, spidery place full of twisted, rusty shapes) but the girls had. She had watched through the kitchen window as they dragged it out through the barn door, as if they had done this many times. It gave her a peculiar, tense feeling, the notion that these two girls, practically strangers to her, knew her home better than she did.
    She had remarked on this, airily, she thought, laughingly, when they were making biscuits together at the kitchen table (or was it that she was frantically cutting out biscuit dough with the