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Wash your hands.
Now
. Don’t put that toast back on the plate. We don’t want it. Come and sit down and join us, Sam. Jimbo, you do go and wash. I mean it. And both of you behave. Da will be very upset if the last thing he sees of you is two dirty boys who can’t be at peace. Let’s have a good morning. Before your mother starts to scream and doesn’t stop and has to be taken away to the hospital for screaming people. Who would make your breakfasts then?’
    Her sons showed no sign of having heard her and she wondered again which of her threats they would remember, which would be useful and which would scar. It never was easy to tell, she supposed, if your parenting was mostly beneficial, or bound to harm.
    Ray, there was something in Ray which was nearly dangerous. She’d found him with Jimbo last night – the child with his hair curled and damp from the bath, clean pyjamas, the face she strokes without thinking, cups with her palm while she stands behind him and he leans his shoulders back on her knees and she finds the narrow jolts of his vertebrae, rubs them up and down for luck, reassurance, delight. (She does the same with Sam when he’ll let her, has no favourite. They are her two boys. Inescapable. Irreplaceable. Inescapable.) His father was sitting beside him on the bed, Jimbo’s chest rising and sagging with too hard, too uneven breaths, showing every sign of wanting to run up into a crying bout, a full-blown, wailing fit of it.
    But Ray had blocked him, snapped him to a stop. ‘You wouldn’t want to have no food, would you? Or no house? And none of your things. Juggy the bear over there . . .’
    â€˜He’s not a bear.’ Jimbo using his smallest voice, the one to make you think he was still much younger.
    â€˜Well, Juggy, anyway – there would have been no money to buy him if I didn’t go off and work. Your mother doesn’t earn any money, she just works here. So I give her money and she spends some of that on you and
I
spend money on you and . . .’ He’d smiled as if he’d just worked out something important and complicated and now he could show it off. ‘Your brother and you are both very expensive.’ Ray lifted Jimbo’s chin with his finger so that he could concentrate on the boy’s eyes: the soft, large target they made. ‘Would you want to be a homeless boy with nothing?’
    Jimbo with no answer to this.
    â€˜Would you want to be cold and hungry?’
    Again there was no possible reply.
    And she wanted to feel this kind of bullying might simply be what males did with each other – men with men, men with boys, boys among themselves. She aimed for the hope that it was natural, normal, a minor way of hardening the heart against later misfortunes.
    â€˜That’s why I go away, Jimbo. For you.’
    Something in Jimbo, she could tell, decided then that his father left him, because of his needing toys and wanting to play with Juggy. Jimbo’s hurt was delicately, irrevocably becoming Jimbo’s fault while she watched: there it went, slipping, stealing in. Another year or so and he’d have noticed what Sam has already figured out – that love and pain are names for the same thing. Give one, mean the other. Get one, want the other. Mean one, get the other back for it. Want one, want the other, want both.
    â€˜Don’t tell them that.’ She’d had to mention it in the evening. Although she was all for a quiet life – still, it wasn’t right, to fortify the heart by killing it. ‘I said, don’t tell them that – don’t make it seem like their fault that you go away.’
    â€˜Well, it’s true.’
    â€˜Then particularly don’t say it to them.’
    Ray looked out of the bedroom window, tilted his chin, opened his mouth just a touch and tapped his fingernail against his bottom teeth. This meant he wouldn’t answer.
    She changed