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country graveyards (what’s under that soil?). What I hate about the house is its oldness: I bang my head on a beam every time I go upstairs, those tree roots outside work hard at breaking your legs and at night the timber and plaster that just about hold the cottage together sound as if they’re wanking in unison.
    ‘Tom, you carry the bags in, will you? I thought I heard Jack.’ This is one of the first times Mum’s left the baby with Dad and Jessie. I’ve noticed that although Bratto is already clearly an independent being, she still has some kind of radar link with him. It must he hard for her, I suppose, letting go of something that’s your flesh, though Jake (he looks like a Jake to me, none of this Jack shit)—Jake, I’ve watched him, just regards her as dependable room service.
    I grab the thin white plastic carrier bags, all set to split, and leave Mum to run through the rain to the front of the cottage while I perversely walk around the back, slipping and sliding along the grassy bank on which I’ve already twisted my ankle once since we’ve been here. This route takes me past the bathroom—and the bathroom takes me somewhere else.
    It’s occupied. I know this even before I’m close, because I can hear water (more water, there’s enough out here) swilling about. No voices, just water. Something makes me stop and approach more warily, so that even though the window panes are frosted and rainstreaked, whoever’s in there won’t be able to see the shape of me and the white bags outside. I’m a natural spy, not just a nosy bastard but someone who prides himself on being able to enter a room, give it a thorough search and get out again without leaving a trace of my being there. This time I’m outside, but I’m totally frozen, silent, wet, looking in.
    From where I’m standing, body pressed against the wall in best guerrilla fashion, legs angled against the treacherous bank, I can just see past the small top window, which is open. The bank gives me some height—the cottage windows are low to start with—and by straining I have a clear view of part of the bathroom mirror, opposite. This in turn lets me see who’s there.
    I hear Mum shouldering open the front door, the scrape as it jams open on the hall floor and the double grind as she struggles to close it (I should have done it for her). The effect of these sounds on the steamy figures in the mirror (unless I’m misinterpreting, and I don’t think so) is powerful.
    Jessie is in the bath, her face dripping, her short hair clinging wetly to her scalp as if she’s just ducked under the water, her tits like a burn in my brain, closer than the image in the mirror, so that I can feel the pulse beating beneath them, even while my own has stopped.
    Dad is kneeling, facing her. His knees (I register this in a flash, like part of a puzzle) must be between hers. In the instant I witness, as the first scrape of the front door takes effect, Jessie’s hands are scooping water to pour over the part of him that bobs above the surface of the bath—a string-operated thing, his tackle, a horse’s prick, uglier and more fascinating and more threatening than I’ve ever seen it.
    Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe my mind has just run off through the rain and what I’m seeing is a waking blast from a weird dream. But the bags are at my feet, crammed with cereal boxes, salad stuff, baked beans. The cheap white plastic stretched around these lumps and corners has rivulets of water running off it on to the tangle of dead and living grass on the bank. This much is real, sharp, hyper-real if you like. And in the mirror, my sister’s eyes lock with my dad’s as he lurches forward, struggling to support his hands as he clambers out of the bath, suddenly too big for it.
    I’m frozen for a moment longer as Dad, grabbing a towel, vacates the bathroom with a guilty speed. Jessie is left alone, left with a backward glance from him that in one shot is so much the father I know and