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suppose he meant we'd have devils sticking forks in our mickeys. He was funny.’ He paused, and poked at the embers with a charred twig, faintly smiling. ‘Do you know what I did? After school I had to burn the dustbins, out behind the camp.’ He sniggered. ‘I did it into the fire!’
    Did what? I laughed uncertainly, wondering what he could mean. Some happy thought struck him and he laughed again.
    ‘ I nearly put the fire out’
    Then I heard them. They were above us. I heard their low voices, soft laughter, the crunch of dry leaves under their feet, and soon they appeared, flickering through the trees, a fat man and a fatter woman, a tall thin figure in a black coat, two girls and a youth, a small boy. Michael had not taken his eyes from the fire. I tugged at his sleeve, and he turned, unhappily, irritably, and snapped,
    ‘What do you want?’
    I shrugged, obscurely angry at him, and looked up again and watched the crowd climb the hill diagonally and disappear over the ridge into the birch wood. I was not frightened, not exactly, but I felt a mingled excitement and dread, and a sensation of controlled and not unpleasant panic. I turned to Michael again, silently questioning. He glanced at me, away, nonchalant.
    ‘What's up? Did you see something? The fire's going out.’
    I stared at him. Why should he lie?

THEY SEWED UP Granda Godkin's ear and bathed his black eye back to its former jaundiced shade, but they could do nothing for his maimed brain. Now he shuffled between the poles of his existence, the dining room, the lavatory, his bed, wrapped in a numbed impenetrable lethargy, crouching under imaginary blows. Sometimes he would disappear for hours, to be discovered at last in a shuttered room standing bolt upright with his back pressed to the wall and his stricken wide eyes glowing faintly in the gloom. These periods of catalepsy terrified Mama. In her first year at Birchwood he had thrown, if that is the word, two epileptic fits, and although she had not witnessed them she was convinced that one day he would fling himself down at her feet, snapping and foaming, to expire slowly, with a great clamour of rattling heels and gnashing teeth, while she stood over him helplessly, gazing back horrified into his numbed beseeching eyes. Doc McCabe had once warned her that the old man must never be allowed alcohol. Now she fitted a rusty padlock on the rosewood cabinet in the dining room, and, sure that she had hit on a cure, walked out into the hall and found Granda Godkin teetering on the stairs, knees bent and arms outstretched, his fingers twitching, emitting through clenched teeth a high-pitched birdlike screech, and she was forced to admit finally that his mind was forever frozen in that moment of collision and clatter, feathers and blood, when that furious winged great creature had flung itself upon him in the dawning garden.
    He ventured less and less often out of his room, and then took to his bed permanently. I was made to sit with him, I suppose on the principle that an old man should want the youngest carrier of his name and seed near him at the end. I suspect Granda Godkin could have managed without me. These vigils were excruciating. He lay motionless, watching his hands on the counterpane with profound suspicion, as though convinced that they had slipped into the bed an immensely patient, crafty assassin who was only waiting for a chance to throttle him. I sat on a hard chair trying to remain absolutely still, for at the slightest movement his lizard eyes flickered venomously at me. The air in the darkened room was viscous, tainted with faint odours, wax and excrement. My indifference toward the old boy turned to hatred. I wondered where his thoughts could possibly be during all those long days of immobility and silence. Old men have their interests, collecting stamps, antique matchboxes, interfering with little girls, but the most I could recall of his life was a wicked grin shuffling down the hall and a