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that expression on his face.
    When we’d finished I took the tray into the kitchen. He stayed in the armchair in a thickening cloud of smoke. Why didn’t I go over and comfort him? I wanted to get out of the house, but for some reason I didn’t want him to hear. I crept out of the back porch.
    Outside the rain had stopped. It was damp and absolutely still, as if the world held its breath. I stood there for a moment; behind me, where the broken gutter hung, came a plunk, plunk, as the drops hit the concrete. I walked across to the gate. Shirl and Celeste were out, slurping around in the mud. They pulled out their legs with a sucking sound, like jellies. I walked over to Dawn’s container.
    She lay there, just as before. Her eye gazed up at me; a fly settled on her face and she flicked her ear. The three piglets were asleep, flopped across each other. They slept as lightly as puppies, twitching with their dreams. Hadn’t they noticed that the straw was smeared with blood?
    I didn’t stay long. When I went back I found Dad asleep too. I paused behind the armchair; his hair was dry now, his head slumped sideways. I’d never felt so alone. But then I couldn’t think who I wanted to talk to either, which made it worse.
    Blue Peter
was on. It was the children’s programmes I’d been waiting for earlier that afternoon. They were showing the finals of the cat championship, and they had these children there, looking ever so grave, holding their pets. Valerie, who was my favourite, walked from one child to another, bending down, smiling, and asking them questions. I’d wanted to enter one of our cats but I’d never been able to catch them, they were that savage.
    I stood for a while. The winner was a girl my age, wearing plaits. Eyes lowered, she answered a question to the accompaniment of Dad’s snores. I wanted to see the rest of
Blue Peter
, and then the cartoon, but how could I turn up the sound when Dad was asleep? The one thing I didn’t want, for some reason, was for him to wake up. Then I remembered about the Tizer. I went over and felt inside his coat pockets, inside and out, but I couldn’t find a bottle. So I went into my bedroom.
    Later that evening it was Visiting Hours. I wanted to see my Mum badly. But when we got there I felt shy. There she lay as usual, propped up against the pillows, her face sallow in the strip light. She looked like an unknown person, with her neat features and her thin lips. She’d curled her hair and it looked like a wig around her face; below it were the knobs of her collar bone that I wasn’t used to seeing. My Dad sat looking cowed and oversized, as if he shouldn’t be there, with his hands hanging down. He’d stopped bringing her grapes and things, she’d been there so long. He told her about the piglets, in a flat voice, but that lasted about a minute. There was a long silence. I felt the breathing bulk of him beside me, as if for the first time. I glanced at his clumsy, dangling hands . . . He was probably dying for a smoke. In official places he looked hunched and awkward; he shifted in his seat when a nurse passed by.
    The silence continued. I fiddled with the pin on my C & A kilt. Dad half rose when a trolley rattled past. With any luck it was their evening meal beginning. What could we talk about? None of us understood the technical things that were being done to Mum. I watched the bedclothes bulging with her tummy.
    It was hot. Hospitals always are. Dad took out his handkerchief and rubbed his forehead, then round his mouth. In the light I saw how grimy the hanky was. Then I remembered it rubbing my lips; I remembered his wet mouth, and his tongue squashing mine.
    Mum turned her head to me. ‘Lost your tongue?’
    That word started the blush. I felt the blush rising, hot and humiliating. They must both be seeing it, surely. All the people must be seeing it . . .
    But nobody seemed to notice.