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happened too quickly. In your mind, Michael was still gowned up, in charge; the surgeon. Eyes closed, you wondered how to kiss him, where to touch him. The harsh graze of his stubble made your face sore. And the brown circle of rubber, powdery in its box – you never thought to put it in until it was too late, a halt in things, running to the bathroom and messing around while Michael lay on the bed talking and pulling himself about. It’ll get better, you told yourself. You’d mentioned something to Jean. She said, ‘Well, we’re not supposed to enjoy it that much anyway, are we? Women, I mean.’
        Your mother had. You’re sure of it. Hoggie had once talked about being the single child, a mistake; about being excluded because her parents only really wanted each other. As she spoke, you remembered one summer holiday in St Leonards-on-sea, a fortnight in a furnished flat on the sea front, you and Jean running along the promenade to the ice-cream van, every day, coins clutched in your hands.
        ‘Why not sit out on the wall and eat them so as you don’t drip ice cream all the way up the stairs?’ your mother suggested one day.
        After that, you and Jean always did, you sat on the brick wall that scratched the backs of your legs and you looked across the promenade at the silvery railings and the stall with the multicoloured plastic windmills that rattled round in the wind. Once, you’d not had enough money, or Jean had dropped hers down a drain, you can’t remember what made you turn back and run up the dark stairs. You burst in. Their flustered movements – your mother smoothing down her dress, your father coughing, his back to you as he walked into the bathroom – it came to you in later years that they had not been sitting drinking the tea that had grown cold in their teacups.
        Your father picks up the freesias again, lifts them to his nose before laying them in the vase at the base of the headstone. Does Michael know now, freesias are your favourite flower, as they were your mother’s?
        ‘Time to go, Dad?’
        When he nods, you have the sudden urge to prolong this weekly hour in the graveyard, this hour away from the children.
        Beside you, your father limps between the gravestones towards the car. You lean over to open the door for him. He lowers himself slowly into the passenger seat, lifting up his leg to ease it into the foot-well.
        ‘Going rusty.’ He tut-tuts at himself, in the way your mother used to cluck her tongue at him. ‘Have we time for The Copper Kettle, duck?’ He pats your leg and nods. ‘Talking to your mother has made me yearn for some tea and that chocolate cake they do.’

Chapter 9

    Susie leaves with the boys to buy bottles of water and other ‘essentials’. Silence settles like dust. I sit at the kitchen table. A leaf litter smell from the rotting lino; curled husks of dead woodlice everywhere. Bakelite door handles and chipped Formica surfaces; a blue metal cooking stove on legs. And a shadow in the room, like a warp in time. Nobody has been here for years, by the looks of things. Susie said Father paid out for someone to cut the grass and mend the roof if necessary; basic repairs. Not much else has been done.
        She has written a list, ‘TO DO’ at the top, underlined twice. I’ll look at it later. In the living room, I lower myself on to the faded cushion of a lopsided wicker chair and place my palm on the cool glass top of a wicker table. Then, through the salted glass of the window, I glimpse the roof of the shed.
     
    ‘Flipping heck, Andrew! What a mess.’
        Susie’s voice makes me jump. As I turn towards her, the bottom of the cardboard box in my arm gives way. A jug and half a dozen striped beakers clatter on to the grass.
        ‘What on earth are you doing in there?’ She starts to pick her way towards the shed, stepping between rusted shears, cans of creosote, broken deckchair frames and an assortment of