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sliced through the other’s fury. Thearguments seemed to be the same ones, going around and around again: the best bug-out location, city versus country, equipment, guns, knives. The noise would reach a crescendo, then a door would be slammed, the flare of a match as a cigarette was lit in the dark garden, and the next day all would be forgotten.
    One evening I heard a noise from the hall, and it took me a moment to realize it was the phone. When I picked it up, Ute was on the other end.
    “Liebchen, it is Mutti.” She sounded a long way off. “I am sorry I haven’t called earlier. It has been difficult.” I thought she must mean that there weren’t many telephones in Germany.
    “Papa and I have been living in the garden.”
    “In the garden? That sounds nice. So you are OK, and are you happy now that school must be finished for the holidays?”
    I was worried she would ask about the lessons I hadn’t been to, but instead she said, “Has the weather been warm in London too?” She sounded sad, as if she would rather be at home, but then perhaps trying to make me laugh, she continued, “Last night, a fat lady fainted from the heat when I was on the second bar of the Tchaikovsky. I had to start again from the beginning; it was absolute shambles.”
    “I’m very brown,” I said, rubbing dust off my legs and realizing I hadn’t had a bath since the day Oliver had arrived.
    “How lovely it must be to have time in the sunshine. I am inside every day, in the car, or in the hotel and then in the car again to get to the performance.”
    “Do you want to speak to Papa now?” I asked.
    “No, not yet. I want to find out more about what my little Peggy has been doing.”
    “I’ve been cooking.”
    “That sounds very helpful. I hope you’ve tidied the kitchen afterward.”
    I didn’t answer her; I didn’t know what to say.
    After a few seconds, in a voice I had to strain to hear, she asked, “Perhaps you could get Papa now.”
    I placed the receiver on the padded seat beside the phone and saw that my hands had made dirty marks on the yellow plastic. I licked my fingers and rubbed at the smudges.
    When I told my father who it was on the phone, he jumped up from the swing seat, where he had been lying in the sun, and ran into the house. I went down to the bottom of the garden, where I had been baking burdock roots in the hot ashes of a fire I had made by myself. Without understanding why, I thrashed at theembers with a stick, scattering them like glow-worms into the evening. A few landed on the tent, burning black-rimmed holes through the canvas and the liner. When the fire was a grey blotch on the threadbare lawn, I walked through the house and up to my room.
    An argument between my father and Oliver was building in the kitchen. It moved to the sitting room and on into the glasshouse; I put my head out of the open window. Below me were two shadows, lit by the lamplight that spilled from the sitting-room door. When I put my fingers in my ears to block out the sound, the black shapes became silent dancers, their movements choreographed, each action planned and rehearsed. I pressed my fingers in and out again in quick succession, which made the argument come to me in bursts of noise, disjointed and staccato.
    “You f—”
    “—ker. What—”
    “—itch. How cou—”
    “—you’re pathet—”
    “—an anima—”
    “—ucking ani—”
    And then Oliver laughing, like a machine gun, jerky and uncontrolled. A dark object, an ashtray or a plant pot, broke off from one of the man-shadows and flewpast the other into the glass roof. There was a pause, as if the glass sheet were holding its breath; then it trembled, rippling outward and splitting apart with a tremendous noise. In a reflex action, I ducked even while the glass rained down on the men below. The father-shadow crouched, his hands over the top of his head. Oliver yelled, “Whowwaa,” as his shadow backed toward the sitting-room door and disappeared