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with his eyes closed until she had gone, or until something interesting happened, a surprise. Although as a couple they weren’t much prone to surprises. Predictable, was Ray.
    She dressed in a T-shirt and cardigan, what used to be good jeans – as if she were someone who could be stylish, but was presently relaxed – the weekend was when you relaxed – and then she went to the windowsill so she could check on the wasps. There always were wasps. Always dead – or else weak and sleepy, crawling off to a permanent halt behind the chest of drawers. Five today. All goners. As if the house drew them and then destroyed them. Ridiculously fragile wings, perfect stripes and tapered bodies, altogether finely worked – they were like very tiny toys. Of course, you quite naturally worried that somebody would barefoot on top of one by mistake. The boys not really at risk, though, because they were not allowed into Mummy and Daddy’s bedroom. None of that letting the kids burrow in between their parents for the night – could ruin a marriage, nonsense like that. And the bed wasn’t big enough for four. Not even three.
    She cupped the wasps up in her hand, the window frame shuddering beside her as the storm sneaked in a draught to stir the dead wings, their stiffened weightlessness. She patted the glass, smiled and left the room and let the corridor draw her along, then the stairs, another corridor until she arrived in the kitchen, because she would forever and ever arrive in the kitchen – no will or effort necessary: there she would be in unironed clothes, nothing to show what was left of her shape – as scruffy as her children, an inadequate bloodline no doubt apparent in every fault the three of them displayed.
    But no time for morbid reflection – she walked to the back door, opened it and called her sons, opened it and opened her palm, let the clean breeze take the wasps and make them gone.
    And now.
    Sunday today, so she made a proper breakfast: a nice hearty send-off for Ray. He’d be gone before lunch and who knew what he’d be eating while he was away.
    Sausage, fried eggs, bacon, black pudding, toast
and
potato scones, ketchup, peanut butter, marmalade – enough to finally lure the boys into the kitchen on smell alone. As she could have guessed, they were not speaking: Jimbo tearful and Sam brooding, each of them, she knew, on the verge of telling her how badly they’d been treated by the other and how wrong everything was.
    She decided to get in first, impose order. ‘Wash your hands, they’re horrible.’
    â€˜I can’t.’ Jimbo displaying a pretty much unscathed hand. ‘Sam hit my thumb with a stone and made it bleed.’ She settled her fingers on his forehead, felt the race of the storm still caught there: its lightness and its cold.
    â€˜He hit
me
all morning. He always hits me. And you always let him.’ Sam washing his own hands thoroughly, theatrically, with the air of a weary surgeon. As she watched, the weight of an older brother’s tribulations and sad duties hardens his jaw enough for him to look very much like his father. ‘My foot is bleeding. But I never said.’
    She offered him a plateful of everything, but failed to catch his eye, Sam having developed a habit of speaking to their floors. ‘I never said anything.’ He is growing increasingly oblique.
    â€˜Yes, well, you have said now.’ It occurs to her that he’ll be an appalling teenager. Quite possibly Ray was, too. ‘He’s much smaller than you and you mustn’t hit him –’ They maybe had bad genes on both sides, then, her poor boys.
    â€˜See!’ Jimbo crowing this and grasping a piece of toast in his wounded, filthy hand.
    â€˜And you, little man, mustn’t annoy him until he hits you. Sam is your brother and you have to take care of each other.’
    â€˜I hate him.’
    â€˜No, you don’t.