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this crap?’
    ‘Not much further,’ Mum offers from the kitchen. ‘Another phone call like yesterday’s, and they’ll probably take you at your word.’ There’s a long pause in which Dad seems to be replaying yesterday’s phone call, enjoying the recollection of what was obviously a choice exchange. ‘They love it,’ he says. ‘Panics the accountants. They won’t know what they’ve got unless they’re made to sweat blood for it.’ When it comes to work, Dad likes a bit of passion to enter into things. I don’t think he’s happy unless emotions are aroused, and certainly where his current scam is concerned—a bloody great steel and glass pyramid for a Korean bank in Docklands—he’s played devil’s advocate from day one. Bad enough that he has to work for these wankers, he says—no reason to make it easy for them. But I think it’s a bluff. I think his work is what drives him, and coming down here to Devon has nothing to do with getting away from it all, it’s just another way of giving them the finger. Dad peers in the direction of the kitchen, stuffing the torn envelopes he’s been opening into one of the big manila ones. ‘Why?’ he asks Mum. I stare at his eyes, his mouth, my dad, my chum, and see him pointing his dick at Jessie. ‘Does it bother you?’ ‘What?’ Mum is slicing carrots or something, chop, chop, on the wooden board. Jessie darts through the room and goes upstairs, trying to avoid my eye but not quite succeeding. ‘The phone call. Would you care if I just said forget it?’ Mum appears in the kitchen doorway, knife in hand, and lets him have her shrewdest gaze. ‘The only way you’d forget it would be if you could take it away from them, and even then you’d want to twist the knife an extra turn. We could be in Peru and you’d still find a way to fight them longdistance.’ This seems to satisfy Dad, which is no doubt what it’s designed to do. Mum’s great strength is that she’s a master bullshit-detector; she keeps us all on course, and how do we repay her? ‘You’re right,’ Dad says, suddenly restless in his chair. What’s he thinking now, is it the way Mum’s holding the knife? A thought knocks through my mind—it’s chaos in there. ‘Peru wouldn’t solve a thing.’
    Jessie is upstairs, doing whatever it is sisters do in their rooms by themselves. I burst in. She’s got one shoe off, one bare ankle on the bed, the other decorating the floor, her back to me, her leg twisted sideways out from under her, an incredibly awkward position which seems to have her deep in thought rather than involved in any change of footwear.
    She turns as I come in, guilty, lost, absolutely aware of the power she has over me. ‘Are you happy?’ she asks. ‘Why, don’t I look happy?’ ‘Don’t know.’ She brings her foot down to the floor, kicks the other shoe off. ‘How do you look when you’re happy?’ ‘I’ll let you know. Jessie, I want to talk.’
    ‘Right.’ She’s marvelous. Her guilt—if that’s what it is—is instantly banished. ‘I’m looking for something. You can help or keep out of my way.’ She dives into a large cardboard box crammed with the stuff she wouldn’t let the removal men touch when we came down here. I don’t know how to start. I stand staring at a postcard tucked into her mirror, a Rodin sketch of a woman contorted into a far more uncomfortable position than Jessie’s when I entered, her muscles all pushing against her penciled flesh like life trying to get out. ‘If you hide your real feelings all your life,’ I ask her, trying to edge into this and wondering why I don’t just go on the attack—‘Fuck it, I saw you! What were you doing?’ But I don’t. Instead, brother-sister conundrum number four thousand and forty-eight: ‘If you hide your real feelings all your life,’ I ask, ‘which are your real feelings—the ones you use as cover or the ones you never use?’ She turns, looks up over the seat of her jeans