Saturday night, stumbling up curbs and snapping open shaken cans with a fizz. Two hundred unwieldy gazelles tripping past, lopsided, hobbling, screeching, fighting. A stab, a scratch, a nick, a moonlight scar running up (and down and up and) the taut skin of the back, a similar weave of silver criss-crossing tracks scritch-scratched over his wrists. In blind fits of rage he smashes his head against the wall, forehead coming away patterned with the irregular imprints of wooden chips from the wallpaper. Joins the chase, ungainly, hangs back catches up over-takes and stops. From behind a line-up of corrugated tin bins comes the revving, the pounding heart beats, the adrenaline. Two wheels, an engine, one carving knife. Four wheels, two engines, two carving knives. Six wheels. Eight. These gazelles don’t stand a chance.

Always someone waits at the phone, finger hovering over redial.

She is perched on the rim of the cold bathtub, bare legs sticking to the white porcelain, shifting uncomfortably. The picked at broken skin behind her knees weeps. She refuses to move, watches the way the forced cascade of steaming water hammers a relentless dent into the area between her mother’s shoulder blades. She herself refuses to shower. She refuses to leave, despite the choked drowning voice from behind the glass, which drips condensation. She refuses to leave the house. Only once in the past year has she pulled on her coat and climbed into the backseat of the car. Five minutes down the A34 and she’s screaming hollering pounding at the green-tinted glass windows. She refuses to breathe till they get back home. She refuses to look away when her mother pushes against the glass door and steps into her own wet footprints, asks, breathing resentment, for the towel.

It’s the not listening that’s eating him up. The not listening to his clumsy advice, delivered crouched down, eye-to-eye. He’d told her, he remembers, to stay away from boys now, boys and men, to imagine them as vampires. He’d formed with his fingers a cross and hissed. He cringes thinking about it. She had rolled her eyes and he’d laughed awkwardly, feeling decidedly too old and too male. He grits his teeth. He finds out she didn’t listen from the penultimate in a chain of Chinese whisperers, himself at the very end, breaking the circle with no one to whisper the distorted truth back to. He reasons with himself. How exactly would he liked to have been told? Um, you know how you said a few years ago… well I didn’t, and I’m … yeah. He shudders. Best someone else heard it first, maybe.

And on the bus

she asks what if questions and he says you’d kill it? and likens it to pushing a small child from a precipice.