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the butter Grandma had plastered on. When we came back, our abandoned dinners were shrunken and black in the oven like yesterday’s coals. Grandma was asleep in front of the blaring television with a box of jelly-babies under her feet, her slippers in her hand and Deborah shrieking “Mammy.”
    Victor and I ate Ritz crackers and cheese on our laps with a jar of pickled onions wedged between us and him crying all the way through The Ken Dodd Show .
    When they row, Mum and Dad always stir the silt at the bottom of the grudge-pool.
    “All families do the same, duck,” Grandma keeps saying. She holds one of Victor’s hands and one of mine while we glance inside the other cars on the road as if hoping to see all their insults flying about.
    “At least your mum and dad never throw punches,” Grandma adds. And, as if this is a souped-up version of I-Spy, Victor and I look out for black eyes too.
    Was it Neville Chamberlain in his “peace for our time” speech who said we should go home and get a nice quiet sleep? Well, I wish he was here now. I don’t want to be one of those car-people who fall asleep with their mouth open and their head thunking against the window-pillar.
    I’m tired because of Dad’s terror last night. Grandma reckons the war shredded his nerves like a cheese-grater. He had to shoot a very young German, not much older than me, who spun round three times before he fell, like a dancer in a terrifying ballet.
    ***
    Night-terror
    I wake up to the gasping. It explodes through the wall into our room. The luminous hands of my clock, evil in the dark, point to half-past one. Half-past one on a Thursday should mean I’m halfway through my warm school mince and lemon-curd tart, but the night version is a time I shouldn’t see, or hear.
    Victor and I used to stay in bed and plug our ears with plasticine, but now I’d rather be with Dad.
    I get up to help, but the room has no shape. I can’t find the door and crash into the dressing-table. My hairbrush and Victor’s Action Man clatter to the linoleum. Why do things that fall never land on the rug?
    Victor’s Commando slithers off the nylon sheet. How can a half-ounce of paper actually make a thud? He stops grinding his teeth and mumbles, “Argh!” That’s a German soldier. And then “Aieee!” That’s a Japanese one. Nothing to do with terror in Victor’s case. Just comic war.
    I stuff his pillow into his ear, but it springs back again because Mum bought the new foam kind. He wakes up.
    “Will Dad say the bit about the soldier having a mother?” he asks, as if comforted by this repeating pattern. That’s seven-year-old boys for you.
    “Yes, he will.”
    “Will he take aim?”
    “Probably.”
    “Is it a real gun?”
    “No, it’s the pole with the hook for hoisting up the Sheila-Maid.”
    “What about the trigger?”
    “Oh use your blasted imagination, Victor, can’t you?”
    There are only so many questions a sister can take.
    Dad’s gasps grow louder, more rasping, with a horrific pause between breaths, as if all our good breathable air has been sucked out of the house. Has he died? My heart thumps like a road-drill. Ah, the mattress springs are twanging. He’s alive. His feet are out. I can hear his callouses scraping on the floor. And he’s off.
    He gallops across the landing, almost tumbling down the stairs. The first time I heard him, I thought a horse had come into the house. The landing shakes and the bannisters tremble.
    I take a deep breath, wishing I could extract it from my lungs and send it to him. Mum used to follow him down. Once, in his desperation to breathe, he thrashed his arms about just as she reached him and caught her with an uppercut. The next morning, Mrs Pither saw Mum putting out the milk bottles, spotted her black eye and threatened to call the police. Not for putting out the bottles. She thought Grandma had thrown a punch.
    A while ago, Dad started being nasty to Mum during the terrors. He kept telling her she