I pull the handle and the door nearly comes off in my hand. I take a plate as thin as a sucked Polo, thin enough to crack over your knee. Just the weight of it puts me off my dinner. 

Dad’s busy at the sink like all this is normal. Maybe it is normal for him now. But if it’s normal now, then it must’ve been normal before; you can’t just change who you are. All that time he must have been pretending, hiding the fact that he can live like this. 

He turns to me, then turns back without speaking, like I’m miles away. There’s barely enough of him to dry up the dishes. 

*

He takes me to his room in the attic. He shows me the banister over the stairs. He puts my finger on a groove in the wood. He asks what I think made it, the groove in the wood. 

We sit at the table, and I can’t leave until I eat. In Africa, kids are starving. They lie with flies in their eyes, bored as horses. I guess it’s normal for them. 

*

Wednesday’s swimming, so we go to the pool. Dad pays us in and sits on a fold-out bench with his fists on his knees. 

I bob in the water, swim to and fro. The wolf doesn’t seem to be here today. I ask someone if he is, and he says no. Underwater, I open my eyes wide enough to check the grates, blood beating in my ears.  

*

In bed I watch Steven Seagal put holes in people and roll their bodies off his boat. I can hear him in the attic, the man who was here before. I can see him on the stairs, a rope round his throat – perfectly still, as though he’s floating. The plates are his. The plates and pretty much everything else. He made the marks and the rips on the lino, broke the cupboard door. My dad just came and took it all. 

*

The wolf’s back on Wednesday, walking on hind legs and running his claws along the walls – plaster crumbling, wires pissing sparks. One’s dancing like a snake, shooting fire across the tiles, and I wonder what’d happen if it went in the water. Sparks falling like upside-down fireworks, glutting the bottom with gold. 

He takes a woman’s head off and her girl starts to cry. She’s young, maybe five. He takes a bite and drops it, then disappears round the corner to the little pool, through the footbath that connects the two. I look to my dad, but his bench is empty, folded up. A lifeguard’s already coming over with a bucket and mop. 

* * *

Robin Dennis is from the East Midlands, and teaches English in southern Germany. His writing has previously appeared in Stimulus Respond.