I didn’t see her for a couple of days, and then she waved to me after the nurse had been. She had been to see her legs. So after the nurse had gone round the corner I waved back, and then she waved to me, and I liked that. Joan told me she had heard screams coming from our place. ‘What do you mean’ I said
‘You know, screams, yelling and all that stuff.’
‘Don’t know what you mean,’ I told her, lying.
‘I’ve heard it a couple of times now, probably three or four times at least, all that yelling business, all that screaming.’
‘Must have been next door’.
‘I know your place when I hear it, especially as you are just over the road. I bet your old man bashes up your mum’
‘He does not’
‘Bet he does’
‘Does not. Anyway, so what if he does, it’s none of your business, none of your business’.
‘I’m going in now’ she said.
‘Ok’
The nights were the worst, that’s when the screaming got real bad, real bad. I heard my mum telling him to stop, calling out that she did not want it tonight or something like that. I heard her call out real loud, and a thumping sound and little whimpers and more of this thumping sound stuff. That’s what I kept hearing. And in the mornings, before I went to school, my mum would be all quiet and not say all that much and I knew something must be wrong. And there were bruises or deep marks on her face and she looked sad, sort of lost, as if she was somewhere she did not want to go, somewhere where she had been in some sort of private hell.