imagination, he turned his back.
'Get - fucking - IN!'
Simon began to emit the low, animal noise, unique to him, that matched his aggressively wadded face.
'Uhhlll ... uhhlll ... CUNTING THING! You fucking do it! You! You've got pissy little girl's fingers!'
Simon slammed the control and the batteries into Paul's chest. Paul's hands shook as he fitted the little metal tubes into place; he snapped the plastic cover shut and held the controls back out to his father.
'Thank you, Pauline.'
Simon's chin was still jutting like a Neanderthal's. He habitually acted as though inanimate objects were conspiring to irritate him. Once again he placed the mouse on the mat.
Let it work.
A small white arrow appeared on screen and swooped cheerily around at Simon's command.
A tourniquet of fear was released; relief gushed through three of the watchers; Simon stopped pulling his Neanderthal face. Andrew visualized a line of Japanese men and woman in white coats: the people who had assembled this flawless machine, all of them with delicate, dextrous fingers like Paul's; they were bowing to him, sweetly civilized and gentle. Silently, Andrew blessed them and their families. They would never know how much had hung on this particular machine working.
Ruth, Andrew and Paul waited attentively while Simon put the computer through its paces. He brought up menus, had difficulty getting rid of them, clicked icons whose functions he did not understand, and was confused by the outcomes, but he had descended from the plateau of dangerous rage. Having blundered his way back to the desktop, he said, looking up at Ruth, 'Seems all right, doesn't it?'
'It's great!' she said at once, forcing a smile, as though the last half-hour had not happened, he had bought the machine at Dixons, and connected it without the threat of violence. 'It's faster, Simon. Much faster than the last one.'
He hasn't opened the internet yet, you silly woman.
'Yeah, I thought that too.'
He glared at his two sons.
'This is brand new and expensive, so you two treat it with respect, you understand? And don't tell anyone we've got it,' Simon added, and a gust of renewed malice chilled the room. 'All right? Do you understand me?'
They nodded again. Paul's face was tight and pinched. Unseen by his father, he traced a figure of eight on the outside of his leg with his slender forefinger.
'And one of you draw the bloody curtains. Why are they still open?'
Because we've all been standing here, watching you behave like a prick.
Andrew pulled the curtains shut and left the room.
Even after he had reached his bedroom and lain back down on his bed, Andrew was unable to resume his pleasurable meditations on the person of Gaia Bawden. The prospect of his father standing for the council had loomed out of nowhere like some gigantic iceberg, casting its shadow over everything, even Gaia.
For all of Andrew's life, Simon had been a contented prisoner of his own contempt for other people, making his house a fortress against the world where his will was law, and where his mood constituted the family's daily weather. As he had grown older, Andrew had become aware that his family's almost total isolation was not typical, and become slightly embarrassed by it. Friends' parents would ask him where he lived, unable to place his family; they would ask casual questions about whether his mother or father intended to come to social events or fundraisers. Sometimes they remembered Ruth from the primary school years, when mothers mixed in the playground. She was much more sociable than Simon. Perhaps, if she had not married such an antisocial man, she would have been more like Fats' mother, meeting friends for lunch or dinner, busily connected to the town.
On the very rare occasions that Simon came face to face with a person whom he felt it worth courting, he adopted a salt-of-the-earth bluff persona that made Andrew cringe. Simon would talk over them, crack clumsy jokes and often stepped, unwittingly, on all kinds of sensitivities, because he neither knew anything, nor cared much, about the people with whom he was forced to converse. Lately, Andrew had asked himself whether Simon even saw other humans as real.
Why his father had been seized with the aspiration to perform on a wider stage, Andrew could not fathom, but calamity was surely inevitable. Andrew knew other parents, the sort who did sponsored cycle rides to raise money for the Square's new Christmas lights, or ran the Brownies, or set up book clubs. Simon did nothing that required