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weight of the wrench by swinging it into the cup of his left hand.
    ‘I told you not to,’ said his mother after she had kissed and cooed over her grandchild. ‘I told you I’d get a man in. That’s what I wanted. I wanted someone in.’
    ‘Not to worry,’ said Noel.
    She smiled at him as he passed. His wife said it was like a romance, the pair of them these days. And maybe there was something in it. Since his father died, they were on the phone a lot more. They talked about things Noel would not usually talk about – not just about skirting boards and damp, but gardening, and people’s lives, and who said what to whom.
    ‘What’s that?’ he said, looking up from under the wash-hand basin.
    ‘The Dempseys up the road. I said he’s off the sauce. Those poor girls, what they put up with.’
    ‘Did I ever tell you I had a thing with the middle one? The blondie little one.’
    ‘The one you liked?’
    ‘How did you know I liked her?’
    He came out from under the white ceramic. Both of them felt it – something clear and possible in the air between them – because, let’s face it, she had been talking about the neighbours for years.
    ‘Ah now,’ said his mother. ‘Sure I know everything.’
    And she went back downstairs to make a cup of tea, leaving the ghost of the girl who lived up the road with him. The amazing fact, if you ever got your hand down there, that girls actually sweat. It only happened once, and briefly. But it was quite a shock.
    Not as much of a shock now, though, as the realisation that the girl in question could not have been more than eleven years old. Too young for him, even at fourteen. What calculation had gone into all of that, he wondered? What style of a little shit was he, in those days?
    Downstairs, his daughter was parked in front of the cartoons, sucking her hair.
    ‘Out of your mouth,’ he said.
    She looked over at him – his beautiful daughter – with her skirt up and one leg thrown over the arm of the chair. The leg was covered in bruises, and the streel of hair cut across her cheek.
    ‘Have you been to the toilet?’ he said, as his mother came in behind him with the tea on a tray.
    He could barely sit to drink it, sitting between daughter and mother – his agitation was so sudden and fierce. Noel bundled his daughter into the car and drove at speed with the wrench on the seat beside him and the match turned up high. The child wanted an ice cream – he had promised, she said, if she went to her gran’s; he had promised . So he pulled in at the local shop and sat, holding the wheel, thinking about the woman with the second grin, inside there in her blue coat behind the till.
    ‘You go in,’ he said finally. ‘Go on, give her this. Give the lady this.’
    He handed the outraged child a fiver and, with a loud show of reluctance, she opened the car door.
    Noel did not know what he was looking for. Or avoiding. He sat there trying to figure it out. He did not want to kill the woman with the scar, or kiss her, but he did want to do something, if possible to a woman, and he felt that it was all her fault.
    ‘Are you happy now?’ said his daughter, still sulky despite the Magnum in her hand.
    ‘Put your seat belt on,’ he said, but she was too busy with the ice cream. He pulled out into the traffic anyway – he did not want to go home, but home was the only place there was to go. He knew what he was looking for – as he let his daughter in under the arm that put the key in the door. He was looking for the kind of pain he could bury himself in.
    ‘Are you back already?’
    ‘That’s us,’ he said. And he looked at his wife.

C ARAVAN
    The clothes hissed as she wrung them out and a little fizz of bubbles sprang out of the weave.
    ‘I thought we were supposed to be doing well?’ she said.
    ‘What?’
    Michelle was bent over the shower tray. Dec was just behind her, standing at the cooker.
    ‘I thought we were doing well?’
    ‘We’re not doing well,’ he