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beside his brother’s wheelchair. Not hate, exactly. Mick grinned drunkenly at him, lifting his glass and clinking it against Patrick’s.
    â€˜I’m pissed.’
    â€˜I’d never have guessed.’
    Leaning towards him Mick said in a loud, mock whisper, ‘I also need a piss.’
    Men on either side of them shifted uncomfortably. Patrick finished his pint and stood up, manoeuvring the chair around the table, careless of feet that weren’t quick enough to get out of harm’s way. As he wheeled him towards the pub doors, Mick turned back to his drinking partners. Putting on a high-pitched, frightened voice he called, ‘Help! The bastard’s kidnapping me!’
    Awkward laughter followed them into the street, where Patrick stopped and walked around the chair to button Mick’s coat against the cold.
    Sullenly Mick said, ‘I said I wanted a piss. I didn’t say I wanted to go home.’
    Patrick looked up at him. ‘Don’t call me a bastard in front of other people.’
    â€˜Can I call you a bastard at home?’ He groped in his pocket and took out cigarettes. Without offering them to Patrick he lit one and blew smoke into his face. ‘Can I call you a bastard now?’
    Patrick began pushing the chair towards home. ‘Did Hetty’s mother come?’
    â€˜That useless bitch, she knows I hate liver and onions. I threw the disgusting mess at the wall.’
    Patrick sighed and wondered if he really had, and if Annie had stayed long enough to clean it up. Carefully he asked, ‘Did she stay?’
    Reading his mind Mick said, ‘Don’t worry, Jack’s dog ate it. Cleaned up better than that old hag would.’
    â€˜What will we do if she refuses to come back?’
    Mick hunched further into the chair. After a while he said, ‘I can look after myself.’
    Patrick stopped at number six, Ellen Avenue, unlatching the gate and wheeling the chair up the black and white tiled path of their Edwardian villa. Stooping for the key hidden beneath the smiling Chinese lion that guarded the front door, he turned to Mick.
    â€˜Hungry?’
    Mick nodded.
    â€˜Scrambled egg and bacon, how’s that sound?’ He tipped the chair back, lifting its front wheels over the step, and pushed his brother into the dark house.
    Preparing supper, Patrick added up the months since he’d last seen Paul. It had been thirteen months in all, over a year of missing him.
    He’d been one of the lucky ones, discharged only five months after the end of the war. He’d returned to Thorp, to his childhood home, empty since his parents’ deaths in a road accident a year earlier. Walking through the house he’d thrown the windows open, imagining he could still smell his father’s brassy scent, that odd mix of fresh blood and copper coins. In the garden he’d made a bonfire of their clothes, even the brushes and combs on the dressing table that were still matted with his mother’s hair. As he’d carried bundles of their belongings to the fire, he’d fantasised that he was preparing the house for Paul’s return, that they could live together quietly and that no one would think it unnatural or improper that he should take care of him.
    As it was, he brought Mick back from hospital, to a house cleared of their parents’ effects. Even the ashes of the bonfire had been raked over.
    He’d begun on the shop next, scrubbing away the stink of its neglect with bleach and boiling water. A pile of sacks squirmed with maggots, the rotting hessian disintegrating under his brush. Maggots and all were swilled down the yard drain, along with the sweetly rotten residue from a butcher’s shop that hadn’t been properly cleaned since he’d joined the army in 1915. He saw a rat escaping beneath the yard wall and, sure there’d be more, laid down poison, his lip curling in disgust as he remembered the rats in France.
    When