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scared him, but he never remembered it the next day. We were told not to mention it to Grandma. She would never let Mum forget it. Mum could forgive Dad because his mind was so muddled. It was easier than forgiving him for sloping off to the two-thirty at Kempton on the Saturday she turned forty.
    She resents me for being the one person Dad tolerates during these hellish nights. She cried about it at first and I tried to say something helpful, but mothers are supposed to mop daughters’ tears, not the other way round. When Gaye Kennedy’s grandfather died, her mum kept reaching for her, all blurry-eyed, and Gaye had to keep one eye on the clock because Crossroads was about to start, and she wanted to see Andy and Ruth’s wedding.
    Dad is crashing about in the kitchen, fighting to inhale. When I reach him, I try not to touch him or speak first. Either of those can really rattle him and he goes berserk, so I just stand there. Once he’s breathing properly, he starts a conversation with the German soldier he killed, trying to spool back time.
    “Oh Christ, don’t fire, son.”
    “Shush, Dad.”
    “You’re still a boy. Not ready, mate.”
    “Come on, Dad. Shush.”
    “Don’t shoot. I’m begging you. I’m looking at your eyes. Look at mine. Think of my ma waiting for me.”
    A tear drips onto his pyjamas.
    “Please, Dad.”
    “Mate…it’s you or me. I’m so sorry.”
    “Dad. It’s all over now,” I tell him.
    “Yes,” he says. “He’s down. That’s it. He’s gone. But his mum’ll be waiting.”
    “Yes, I know. But we’re waiting for you too, Dad. Come back to us.”
    Eventually, our Dad comes back from the war. After twenty hours that are actually twenty minutes, he trudges back up, just an ordinary, tired man. Mum’s slippers tap across the floor above. Grandma, famous throughout our home-town of Oaking for sleeping through Doodlebugs, is spared the entire trauma.
    I fill the kettle and press the plunger on the tea-caddy mounted on the wall. It coughs three times into the pot. The mantelpiece clock chimes two when I take the tea-cups upstairs to them. Sometimes it’s later than that if I forget to fire the gas under the kettle.
    “Put the light on, Jacqueline,” Victor says when I come back into our room. My flung-back sheets look uninviting, and I wish someone could tuck me in.
    I pass Victor a hanky from under my pillow and tell him, “It’ll be all right now.” I find him a weary old peppermint-cream and a flat toffee left over from a Jamboree Bag. I even sling my arm round him.
    We listen to the china cups clinking. The tea steam seems to curl under our door. While we fall asleep, the house settles down from the upheaval, although I think Dad wanders on the landing for a minute after his tea, because I hear the floorboards squeak, as well as a gentle murmuring.
    The next few hours of sleep are a blessed relief. My arm is still across Victor’s bed in the morning, his small hand rounded underneath mine like a contented tortoise.
    Nothing is said the next day. Toast is burnt, the wash-basin is stained with toothpaste-spit and milk boils over. Situation normal.
    Like the moon rolling through its cycle and round to the beginning again, the recurring terrors are an oddly acceptable feature in our lives, the same as dentist appointments or the dreaded window-shopping. Awful, but always there, like being too tall or having enormous ear lobes. You have to grin and bear it, and even though the grinning part is excruciating, we are still the same people in the same home.
    The Bad-Moon girls are different, an evil invasion. Dad’s silence makes the house swell. Too much air. Too little sound. His shadow becomes a long ink-stain on the floor.
    The Bad-Moon girls slither in unannounced and uninvited. They coil themselves around the furniture and sometimes stay for days, like the worst kind of visiting cousins, the sort who eat the one shiny apple you’ve been keeping an eye on in the bowl, or the