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the skin. I was dying to show someone my own injury. I was looking up for a sympathetic face when I remembered the man from the shed. I found him treading water halfway between the raft and the beach. How far away he seemed right then at that moment—almost, I felt, as if having taken this pause to see what was happening at the beach he might now drop his head back in the water and swim away out of our lives.
    We drove home together. Mum, Dad and me. No one mentioned Mum’s car. Hours later it was parked in the drive.
    The next morning I came into the kitchen to find Mum at the table drinking tea and watching Dad eat his breakfast. I almost got away but she heard me. She closed a hand over the opening of her dressing-gown and swung around in herchair. She wanted to show me something. She pulled her dressing-gown off her shoulder to show her wound beneath the right shoulder blade. Then she asked to see my arm. She inspected the tooth marks then handed back my arm and thanked me. She said how brave I’d been to put up with that and not say a word. I didn’t hear a whimper, she said. She asked Dad if he’d heard anything and he shook his head down at his plate of eggs. Nope, not a thing, he said.
    Six weeks later beneath a screaming blue sky I trail after Dad along the coastal hilltops with the wind tearing at our faces and our eyes streaming. The same wind hares through the long grass. Pathways open up wherever the eye pitches next. Seagulls are blown sideways over the fence and farm gate, down beneath the gorse into ravines of shadow. Only a hawk holds its course.
    We are looking for a place to bury a baby. I caught a glimpse of him after Dad pulled him off Mum and after he wiped the blood away. The baby is at home lying in a bed of cotton wool. A tiny wee thing—a boy, I noticed—curled up with spina bifida. Poor little bugger. That’s his name at this point. Years later I will discover a different name on the death certificate. For now though he is poor little bugger. Dad is looking for a place to bury him and I’ve come along to help. Without saying as much we know the perfect place. It’ll be where no one will notice a shovel scar left on the tops.
    With the premature birth and death of poor little buggerI thought the man in the shed would leave our lives. But he didn’t, and he showed no sign of going, and things began to slip back to how they were before.
    Dad decided I would go and stay with Pen while he sorted out the ‘mess’ at home. School had started but that didn’t seem to make any difference. His mind was made up. He drove me to the motor camp, as far as the white traffic bar at the entrance, and I was bundled out. He gave me some money to give to my sister, plus a cake on a plate covered with a tea towel that Mum said she wanted back. A face came to the window of the office. When he saw who it was he waved me through. Along with the cake I carried my school bag with my toothbrush, underwear, a change of clothes and a sleeping bag.
    There was a brilliant sky. The air smelt of dry heat and dog shit. Just about everything about the camp felt wrong. It was too good a day to be in a place such as this. I wished I was at the beach. The fine smell was from the soap factory across the golf course that backed on to the motor camp. I arrived at the caravan section. Most of them were shut up and their windows looked stale. The door to my sister’s caravan was open. The radio was playing a Bee Gees song. My sister sat on the step with her nose in a magazine. She was unhealthily pale. Her legs were pink and white and under-exercised. Once upon a time she’d have been at the beach turning heads. But she no longer seemed to be of that world. She’d come out of another formed by plastic laminations and stainless-steel sinks and stale air. I poked my head inside. There was the table and the narrow beds where I guessed she and Jimmy slept. I waswondering where I was supposed to sleep when she pointed to the next