Laraine has stayed home with Mum, but you both feel the need to get out of the memory-permeated house. James went into the army at sixteen and you haven’t seen much of him in the last few years. You remember him as the kid who wet himself when you left him to Robert and Reg; now he’s a tattooed squaddie, decorated for valour on the streets of Belfast. You’re afraid to ask what ‘valour’ means. Calmly, without malice, he has said he’d like to be sent to the Falklands. You think he wants a chance to kill an Argie, just to see what it would be like.

The Lime Kiln is full, packed with drinkers whose Dads are still alive or have been dead for so long it doesn’t matter. You think about James. Your younger brother seems to have taken the job of Man of the Family. His eyes didn’t water at the funeral, like yours did. He’s willing to defend himself, his mates, his family, the country. You know you’d still crawl off to the classroom, shirking your responsibility, losing yourself in the abstractions of arithmetic.

As you force your way through to the bar, a cheer goes up. You wonder why, then remember James is in uniform. There’s a drunken wave of patriotism going on in the aftermath of the invasion of the Falkland Islands, a frenzy of kill-the-Argies war-hungriness. The barman is Max Lewis, with whom you were at school though he was never an especial friend. James orders a couple of pints of bitter. A man claps him on the shoulder and offers to pay for the drinks.

James, flinching from the touch, turns to accept... and freezes. Pressed close to James by the crowd, you sense the tension which draws your brother tight as a bowstring an instant before you recognise the man with the money.

It’s Robert Hackwill, grown up.

The Ash Grove School Bully has done well for himself. He wears a sheepskin coat and a trilby hat. His property business is flourishing and he is in line for a council seat. He has a flash car, a Jag. His smile splits the world horizontally in half.

Hackwill repeats his offer.

You look around for Jessup, never far from Hackwill, and spot him in a corner. Reg’s smirk is still there, shaped by the fat in his face. He’s still a sidekick.

What will James do? It’s fifteen years later and Hackwill is off his guard. James thinks he could kill a stranger, much less someone he hates. You know your brother must be thinking of breaking a glass in the grown-up bully’s face.

You remember that day. When James wet himself while being given the worst Chinese burn in history and you ran off. You don’t really know what they did to him then, and have tried not to imagine what it must have been like. For the first time, it occurs to you that it probably didn’t go much beyond a shove and a few thumps. Robert and Reg were only twelve, James just six. Until now, you’d imagined infernal tortures and unspeakable atrocities. That night, at home safe, James looked accusations at you. He never told your parents how he came by his bruises, and you didn’t speak up either. Telling on Robert Hackwill was an invitation to pain.

You have never talked about it with James. You wonder if it wasn’t what led to you and your brother growing apart, living through your teens in a state of armed neutrality. Because you left him to Hackwill, he’s never trusted you. He has found in himself the strength to look after himself.

Max puts two pints on the bar. James picks his up carefully, getting a good grip.

You can see the pint smashing against Hackwill’s smile, glass exploding, blood and froth drenching him.

But James just takes a deep draught and swallows. Hackwill, smile fixed, eyes hardening, repeats his offer, as if James had not heard him over the din. Somehow, the noise of the pub dies down. You know everyone is paying attention.

James does it.

He hefts the half-full glass like a shot-putter, drawing it back level with his shoulder, ramming it at Hackwill’s eyes. The sunburst of blood and beer and scream stills the whole pub.

A circle clears around James and Hackwill.

James kicks Hackwill in the ribs, over and over, grunting ‘fucker’ with each connection. Bones break.

You are on the sidelines, watching. Nobody tries to break up the fight. No, this isn’t a fight. This is a beating. A punishment beating, they call it in Northern Ireland.

James picks up a stool: not a balsawood prop from a Western, but a solidly-made survivor of rowdy nights in the Lime Kiln. The stool doesn’t break, but Hackwill does.

Max is on the phone, talking urgently.

James knows now he is on a deadline. The law will soon be here. He hefts the stool and looks around. His eyes, wild with cold fury, meet yours.

For a moment, you think he’s going to batter you. You want to protect your head with your arms. He knows what you’re thinking and is disgusted with you. Ever since the copse, he’s been disgusted with you.

‘Keith, you’re as yellow as fucking school custard.’

James sees who he is looking for. Reg Jessup, trying to make his way to the door. Someone stands in front of him, barring his way.

Everybody remembers their school bully. No one ever forgives.

Jessup is bowled across the pub towards James, a batsman hefting the sturdy stool. Jessup is thwacked across the face, losing teeth, and knocked down. James kneels by him and darts rapid punches into his face, opening old scabs on his knuckles.

The police arrive. Two constables. A bloke younger than James, and Mary Yatman. You knew she’d gone into the police, but have never seen her in uniform.

She hauls James upright. His rage vanished, he allows her to manhandle him. Limp, he gives no resistance as he is hustled out of the door.

Mary frees James into your care without charging him. You have explained - lied - that he has been upset since Dad’s death. You claim he’s under strain. The real reason Mary lets James off is that she hasn’t changed since school. She remembers Robert Hackwill. She was there that day, running away like you. And she admires James, understands in a way you don’t what he’s just done. As she sees the Marion Brothers out of the police station at dawn, she smiles quietly. You remember the Scary Mary smile from Ash Grove; it’s all the more chilling for being on the face of a grown woman in uniform.

James is quietly satisfied at a job well done. There’s an unbridgeable gulf between you. It’s been there ever since the copse. It’s too late to do anything about. Your brother has grown into an unknowable alien, a force of inexplicable, vindictive nature. When you get home, he goes straight to his old room - with soldiers and tanks wallpaper and a life-size commando poster - and sleeps away the day, undisturbed. You can’t stop shaking and wish you could still have a crying fit. As ever, you can’t tell Mum what has happened.

In the Falklands, James is killed. You aren’t told the details, though the family are sent non-committal commendations and a medal. Reading between the lines, it seems James was off on his own somewhere, away from his unit, and picked a fight he couldn’t win. The letter his sergeant sends you refers to him as ‘a lone wolf’, which gives you a stab of guilt. You wonder if you taught him (by example) not to rely on anyone else; if it hadn’t been for that, he might not have always chosen to go off by himself, set his own goals, and try to get by without other people.

Two family funerals in six months. At a time when you thought you’d struck out on your own, working in London as a journalist on a magazine called The Scam, you are pulled back home. You spend most weekends in Sedgwater, with Mum. It is worse for her, you think. Dad died unexpectedly young, leaving her a fifty-year-old widow; and, though she must have at least considered the possibility of his death as soon as he started seeing active service, James was her youngest.

Laraine is also drawn back to the family home. The oddest side-effect is that she gets back together with her first boyfriend, Sean Rye. He is Acting Manager of the bank and seems likely to accede to Dad’s old job. She is engaged to a bloke you didn’t like, but breaks it off and gets engaged to Sean, which surprises you. You always thought he was a bit straight for her.

Mum discovers an interest in antiques through her new boyfriend, Phil Parslowe. They spend weekends tracking down escritoires and attending estate sales.

Your presence isn’t quite so needed at home, so you spend more time in London. The Thatcher Years grind on and you see victims all around you. The Scam runs a lot of investigative pieces. You have a sense of the unfairness of it all. You get angry about James. He stands in for the jobless, the abused, the disenfranchised, the dead.

You go out with a colleague, Clare. She is obsessed with incidences of police brutality against racial minorities and with early 1970s pop music. She likes to play Abba while making love.

Mum and Phil get married, which pleases and surprises you. Not least because it gets you off a guilt hook. And then Laraine and Sean.

You split up with Clare and go out with another journalist, an American, Anne. Her history of family disasters makes you feel normal, but it doesn’t last. You get back with Clare, on your terms: Bowie, yes; Bay City Rollers, no.

Margaret Thatcher is still in power.

You go on Jobs Not Bombs marches and organise fund-raisers for the miners’ strike. Clare lives part-time at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp. You write a series of profiles of prominent Thatcherite Members of Parliament, showing just how much they have benefited financially from legislation the government has passed. You get a few cheerful death threats.

Clare moves all her records and tapes and her stereo down to Greenham Common. You don’t know where she plugs it in. She comes back sometimes in the middle of the week, but not often.

You think more and more about James.

You write articles about the sinking of the Belgrano, the diplomatic chaos that led to the Falklands Conflict, the resignation of Lord Carrington, reports of British war crimes.

Finally, Anne tells you to deal with the thing that really haunts you. She assigns you to write about James. You have to start with the copse. To you, there is an electric line between the copse and the Falklands. In the end, you have to blame yourself as much as anyone or anything else.

When Anne reads the article, she cries. She persuades the editorial collective of The Scam to run the piece, and you get quite a lot of attention. You go on the radio and television. You get to debate with Tory MPs.

Clare tells you she’s decided on political grounds to become a lesbian. Actually, she’s fallen into a sleeping bag with some rainbow-haired peace bimbo who likes Little Jimmy Osmond. Good luck to the both of them. You would try it again with Anne, whom you think you actually love, but there’s too much complicated pain in her background. You worry that you would become a grief household. Loss isn’t your whole life.

Laraine has stayed home with Mum, but you both feel the need to get out of the memory-permeated house. James went into the army at sixteen and you haven’t seen much of him in the last few years. You remember him as the kid who wet himself when you ran to find a teacher and tell on Robert and Reg; now he’s coming to the end of his four-year hitch and is talking about getting out. The possibility of being sent to a proper war in the Falklands has shocked him. It’s not just about learning to drive a jeep and travelling to exotic places and German brothels, it’s about being shot dead on the other side of the world.

The Lime Kiln is full, packed with drinkers whose fathers are still alive or have been dead for so long it doesn’t matter. You and James have said little about Dad. You think that, as the Man of the Family, you should be able to say something to your brother that will make it easier. Nothing comes to mind.

As you force your way through to the bar, a cheer goes up. You wonder why, then remember James is in uniform. There’s a drunken wave of patriotism going on in the aftermath of the invasion of the Falkland Islands, a frenzy of kill-the-Argies war-hungriness. The barman is Max Lewis, with whom you were at school though he was never an especial friend. James orders a couple of pints of bitter. A man claps him on the shoulder and offers to pay for the drinks.

James, flinching from the touch, turns to accept... and freezes. Pressed close to James by the crowd, you sense the tension which draws your brother tight as a bowstring an instant before you recognise the man with the money.

It’s Robert Hackwill, grown up.

The Ash Grove School Bully has done well for himself. He wears a sheepskin coat and a trilby hat. His property business is flourishing and he is in line for a council seat. He has a flash car, a Jag. His smile splits the world horizontally in half.

Hackwill repeats his offer.

You look around for Jessup, never far from Hackwill, and spot him in a corner. Reg’s smirk is still there, shaped by the fat in his face. He’s still a sidekick.

What will James do? It’s fifteen years later and Hackwill is off his guard. James is depressed enough not to give a shit. You know your brother must be thinking of breaking a glass in the grown-up bully’s face.

You remember that day. When James wet himself while being given the worst Chinese Burn in history and you ran to Mrs. Daye, the Class Five teacher, and told on Robert and Reg. She saw the bullies off, ordering them to stay away from the school, and looked after the sobbing James, sending him home for the afternoon. You watched, wishing it hadn’t happened, wishing you could have done more.

You have never talked about it with James. Dad commended you for doing the right thing, but you always knew you did it out of cowardice. James needed help right then, not to see you running off for a grown-up while he was being tortured. Ever since, James has worked to be self-reliant, self-contained. You realise now that you know very little about the man he has become.

Max puts two pints on the bar. James picks his up carefully, getting a good grip.

You can see the pint smashing against Hackwill’s smile, glass exploding, blood and froth drenching him.

But James just takes a deep draught and swallows. He drains it.

‘Thanks, mate,’ he says. ‘Now have one on me.’

Hackwill insists on buying the soldier boy another.

You wonder if you were wrong. Maybe James hasn’t recognised Hackwill? The bully has obviously forgotten him, one among so many long-ago victims.

Jessup comes to the bar and springs for a round. Your drinks are bought for you too. It is as if you and James were being picked up by a couple of queers, but you know Hackwill and Jessup aren’t like that. What they want from you two isn’t sex but the association with a potential war hero. You’d prefer it if they were just after your arse. The mateyness of these two blokish men, careering towards middle age while still in their twenties, hits you in the pit of your stomach. You think of the school custard that always made you want to puke.

As the pints go down and your bladder fills, you assume you were wrong. James is friendly with Hackwill, even exchanges names with him. He must have forgotten the whole thing. You’ve carried the guilt for fifteen years and he’s wiped the copse from his mind.

This realisation, combined with the drink, makes you light-headed.

Finally, Hackwill eases off the sturdy bar-stool and mutters about ‘pointing Percy at the porcelain.’

‘You sure your mate’s all right?’ James asks Jessup as soon as Hackwill has tottered off. ‘He’s had one too many. Shouldn’t you see if he’s okay?’

Bewildered, Jessup agrees and follows Hackwill into the bog.

Lightning-sober, James tells Max not to let anyone else use the Gents for five minutes.

‘Come on,’ he tells you. ‘This is for the copse.’

James remembers. He has always remembered.

The barman comes out, on his break, and guards the Gents door as James slips in. You follow.

Hackwill stands at the white wall, urinating loudly. Jessup is wheedling, asking if he’s all right, annoying him.

James springs across the room and catches Hackwill with his cock out, shoving him against the wet enamel. He rains blows on Hackwill’s head, driving him into the urine-trickling runnel, scattering disinfectant cakes. The smell is strong. James, grunting with each of his well-aimed punches, dances back and forth, jabbing and kicking.

Blood trickles in with the piss.

James pauses and looks back.

‘You do fat boy, Keith.’

He kicks the whining Hackwill in the side and starts a boot ballet, as if trying to cram the sodden bully into the plug-holes of the urinal.

You look at Jessup, who backs into a stall.

You remember the fat face snickering as James wet himself, calling to you.

‘It’s all right,’ you tell him. ‘I won’t hurt you...’

Relief sweats out of the fat face.

‘Much.’

From inside, violent rage erupts. You didn’t know you were still so angry, that you carried the hurt.

You leave Hackwill and Jessup bloodied on the stinking floor of the Gents. Max has lined up fresh, on-the-house pints on the bar. Everybody remembers their school bully. No one ever forgives.

People gather round. You buy them all drinks. You buy a roomful of witnesses. Hackwill and Jessup slink out by a side door.

Drinking your pint, you catch James’s eye. As one, you make fists in the air and roar. The Marion Brothers are back in business!

In the Falklands, James is severely wounded. He loses his left leg below the knee and is mustered out on a disability allowance. The medal citation commends his ‘initiative and conspicuous bravery’ in holding a position while someone else went to summon reinforcements. You wonder whether you taught him (by example) that he had to bear the brunt of the attack while others took the problem to a higher authority. James comes home changed but not obviously embittered. He is still self-reliant, even if he has to hobble around on a prosthesis. After a few months, he refuses to use a crutch.

The family regroups around James. With Dad gone and you in London, he becomes the fulcrum. You talk with him every week on the phone, and he updates you on what’s happening with Mum - who has a boyfriend, Phil Parslowe - and Laraine.

Wounds heal. Disabilities are coped with.

It’s all been taken out of your hands.

You work as a technical journalist in the daytime but struggle in the evenings with Freebooter, a historical novel. You live with Christina Temple, your girlfriend since university. You sell Freebooter and are contracted to sell two sequels, Buccaneer and Privateer. You follow your hero, Kenneth Merriam, through a career of privacy from stowaway cabin boy to Governor of Jamaica. Once you’ve used that up, you write about Merriam’s ancestors, in Gallant, Galleon and Galliass. You and Christina marry, and have two children, Jasper and Jessamyn. You write about Merriam’s descendants in Crossbones, Cutlass and Cutthroat. Freebooter is turned into a very unsuccessful film, which nevertheless makes you more money than all your publishing deals combined. You are published in sixteen languages. There is a Merriam Quarterly, a fan publication devoted to your books. You take a cruise in an authentic pirate ship for a TV documentary, and try to be good-humoured about seasickness. You write a book about the experience, Landlubber.

In February, 1998, James wins six point three million pounds on the National Lottery. He buys you a yacht as a birthday present.

The Merriam Saga completed, you don’t need to write any more novels. Effectively, you retire.

James invests, speculates, develops. Determined not to squander his winnings, he incorporates.

The Marion Group grows. Jaspers works for James and becomes a Vice-President at twenty-two. James, perhaps because of his leg, never married, though he has been seeing his personal assistant, Kate, for fifteen years. Outsiders sometimes think Jasper is James’s son.

You have a seat on the board but can’t keep track of James’s dealings. You give advice when it is sought but feel cut out of the loop.

This is James’s game.

Jasper has come up fast. He’s a 21st Century man, clued-in to technologies that baffle you, temples shaved to accommodate the decorative plugjacks he wears even though the tech to interface on a brain-level with information nets hasn’t been developed and isn’t likely to come along in the next few years. James relies on Jasper in communications; he is very obviously Heir Apparent.

You love your son, but - as he nears thirty - you find it hard to like him. At school and university, he was erratically brilliant, often depending on you or James to cough up cash to get him out of trouble. He married young, to Robert Hackwill’s daughter Sam of all persons, and made you a grandfather, to little Zazza. Sam has smoothed him somewhat - he had a bit of stimulants habit at university - but he still likes electronic short-cuts and corner-shaving. James is more tolerant of his foibles than you are.

And you are wealthily irrelevant anyway.

James keeps making speeches about luck and merit. The Marion Group is the first Lottery fortune to last, to be the foundation of something. Most big winners are dead inside six months, used up by hedonism or torn apart by vultures. Their money drains away into the sand. James’s win is the seed money of an empire. He always credits you with demonstrating the difference between burying treasure, frittering it away and using it. He has turned his treasure into a treasury.

As the new millennium whooshes on, you face sixty.

Christina, five years younger, asks if you’re content. You wish you’d done some things differently and had tried harder in other areas but can’t deny that you have been a success.

Then, one Spring morning in 2020, your daughter visits you on the latest yacht.

Jessamyn wears living tattoos on her breasts and magenta knee-length shorts. She’s had her cheekbones done, ridges of coral implanted around her eyes. It’s a look.

‘Daddy,’ she says, air-kissing you.

Jessamyn has never been as focused as Jasper. Born to wealth, she has pleased herself, not quite making a go of careers as a sound sculptor or an estate agent. Currently unmarried, she is engaged to a woman. Though she’s has two husbands, Mandii will be her first wife.

‘Jess.’

You’re pleased to see her. She was at your Big 60 party, but so was everyone else and you didn’t get to talk to her much.

Her smile is serious. You know this is not good news.

‘I’ve had my Family Area scanned,’ she says, tapping her skull. A current fad is cat-scans of brain regions. Apparently the walnut-folds can be read like palms. ‘I know you always loved Jas more.’

‘That’s not true, Jess.’

It isn’t. Everyone thinks parents loved their siblings more. You certainly felt yours did.

‘No, it’s all right. I was a drip as a little girl. What was the word Uncle James used, ‘sneak’?’

Whenever Jasper committed some naughtiness - which was often - Jess would run and tell you, the model of public spirit. As you strode off to admonish or punish, Jess’s rectitude would be replaced by unlovely glee.

‘Are you glad I told you?’ she would ask.

An impossible question. You needed to know about Jasper but no one likes an informer.

‘I’m obliged to sneak again, Daddy.’

‘I beg your pardon.’

‘It’s Jas, as usual. I’ve known for weeks but not known what to do, who to tell. I thought I’d warn him I knew and he’d make things right and seal the record. But he wouldn’t. If you want to know, I’m afraid of what he’d do. You know what he can be like.’

Her tattoos swirl around her nipples like twin dragons, reacting to her minutest skin secretions. They’re supposed to match her emotional state.

‘He’s been transacting in his favour. From the Group, from Uncle Jimmy.’

The dragon’s eyes are blood-black.

‘I think it’s long-term. I know it’s major.’

She leans forward and hugs him, miming crying.

‘Are you glad I told you, Daddy?’

Laraine has stayed home with Mum, but you both feel the need to get out of the memory-permeated house. James went into the army at sixteen and you haven’t seen much of him in the last few years. You remember him as the kid who wet himself when you were being beaten up by Robert and Reg; now he’s a Marine, newly-promoted to Sergeant, trained to kill. It’s likely that he will be sent to the Falklands.

The Lime Kiln is full, packed with drinkers whose fathers are still alive or have been dead for so long it doesn’t matter. You and James share a feeling that now you have to be grown-up, that the job of Man of the Family must be split between you. At least James has a direction in life; you’re still not sure if you’ve been making the right decisions. Dad’s death, from a cerebral haemorrhage no one was expecting, has made you think. In your mind, you’ve been going back, reassessing, wondering if you could have chosen better, if you could have changed things.

As you force your way through to the bar, a cheer goes up. You wonder why, then remember James is in uniform. There’s a drunken wave of patriotism going on in the aftermath of the invasion of the Falkland Islands, a frenzy of kill-the-Argies war-hungriness. The barman is Max Lewis, with whom you were at school though he was never an especial friend. James orders a couple of pints of bitter. A man claps him on the shoulder and offers to pay for the drinks.

James, flinching from the touch, turns to accept... and freezes. Pressed close to James by the crowd, you sense the tension which draws your brother tight as a bowstring an instant before you recognise the man with the money.

It’s Robert Hackwill, grown up.

The Ash Grove School Bully has done well for himself. He wears a sheepskin coat and a trilby hat. His property business is flourishing and he is in line for a council seat. He has a flash car, a Jag. His smile splits the world horizontally in half.

Hackwill repeats his offer.

You look around for Jessup, never far from Hackwill, and spot him in a corner. Reg’s smirk is still there, shaped by the fat in his face. He’s still a sidekick.

What will James do? It’s fifteen years later and Hackwill is off his guard. James is depressed enough not to give a shit. You know your brother must be thinking of breaking a glass in the grown-up bully’s face.

You remember that day. When James wet himself while being given the worst Chinese Burn in history and Robert and Reg, astonished that you had come into the copse to rescue your brother, took a great delight in beating you up. They knocked you down and kicked you until your sides were black and blue under your filthy clothes. You never explained your bruises to your parents or a teacher. Telling on Robert Hackwill was an invitation to pain.

You have never talked about it with James. But you’ve been close ever since, sharing a hidden purpose, a hidden hurt. You’ve known you could always count on your brother and he on you.

Max puts two pints on the bar. James picks his up carefully, getting a good grip.

You can see the pint smashing against Hackwill’s smile, glass exploding, blood and froth drenching him.

But James just takes a deep draught and swallows. Hackwill, smile fixed, eyes hardening, repeats his offer, as if James had not heard him over the din. Somehow, the noise of the pub dies down. You know everyone is paying attention.

‘You can fuck right off, Hackwill,’ James tells him, verbally slapping the generous grin from his face. ‘I’d rather have a drink on General Galtieri than you.’

Hackwill plainly doesn’t recognise or remember either of you, the Marion Brothers. For a moment, he looks shocked, as though he - the bully - is about to cry. Everyone in the pub notices and laughs a little louder, talks a little more raucously. They are all delighted to see the squaddie see off Robert Bloody Jaguar Hackwill. Everybody remembers their school bully. No one ever forgives.

You clap your arm around James and try to pay for your pints. Max, emboldened, refuses to accept the money and says the drinks are on the house for you both.

Hackwill is still there, smile frozen.

‘And Reg,’ you shout, across the pub, ‘you can fuck right off too, fat boy.’

Everybody cheers.

Hackwill and Jessup drink up fast and hurry out. Neither you nor James has to buy a drink all night.

In the Falklands, James, practically on consecutive days, gets close to a Victoria Cross - only this isn’t a declared war, so they aren’t handing them out - and a dishonourable discharge. On one day, he fights on while cut off from his own unit and brings in three wounded men. Later in the week, he trains a rifle on an officer he claims is about to summarily execute a sixteen-year-old Argie who is surrendering. These actions, officially processed simultaneously, cancel each other out. James has to take an early bath, removed from active duty even before the brief conflict is over. You wonder if you taught him (by example) his have-a-go foolhardiness. This possibly dangerous streak makes him, in a real sense you aren’t ashamed of, a hero.

You live in London with Chris, your girlfriend since university. When you got together, you were accused of cradle-snatching but the difference between eighteen and twenty-three is different (legally, apart from anything else) from that between fourteen and nineteen.

You supervise adventure holidays for deprived and not-so-deprived kids. You yomp around Dartmoor or the Highlands of Scotland with spooked inner city teenagers. The lack of streetlamps at night freaks them. To give the week-long courses shape, you construct them as treasure hunts, burying prizes and giving teams treasure maps full of puzzles to solve. After a few days’ resistance, most kids fall in and enjoy using their minds and limbs. When the first ‘treasure’ is discovered to be a cache of beer, even the most recalcitrant come round.

One day, you’d like to take your treasure hunts overseas, preferably to Tortuga. You’ve sailed since university and you and Chris get out on the water most weekends. Chris calls you ‘Captain Blood’ or ‘Seaman Staines’; you call her ‘Mr Smee’ or ‘Anne Bonney’. It’s not really appropriate to fly the Jolly Roger from a Mirror Dinghy, but you do. You name your boat Hispaniola, after the one in Treasure Island.

You try to spend as little time as possible under roofs.

Chris gets her first degree, in History, and starts Post-Graduate work on a forgotten Irish turn-of-the-century feminist writer, Katherine Reed. She plans to turn her thesis into a biography and is often in Dublin, delving in records and libraries, while you’re out and about, climbing trees and rocks and braving the elements.

You get scars but aren’t seriously hurt. You have a few accidents - the odd snapped bone or bruised bonce - but never a fatality. Whenever anyone as much as trips up, you recite your mantra of ‘haven’t lost a kid yet’.

Chris falls pregnant but loses the baby. This makes you both think. You decide that, after another six months, you’ll either split up or get married.

Meanwhile, James knocks about the world a bit, coming home to Sedgwater to roost every few months. He takes international courier jobs and you twit him about becoming a mercenary or a pirate. He helps out on one or two expeditions into jungles or deserts, and an amateur interest in archaeology leads him to attach himself to the odd dig, where his survival skills and outdoor capabilities come in handy. He even joins you on a few of your rougher adventures.

Chris comments that she could do with a Marine to help her get through those Irish archives. You point out that her heroine would probably have been in favour of assassinating James, which leads her to recite at length Katie Reed’s actual position on armed rebellion and her war journalism. Like a lot of your ‘disputes’, this one ends in bed.

Mum remarries a bloke called Phil Parslowe, an antique dealer. Laraine gets divorced from someone called Fred whom you never liked and floats around, a brittle thirty with a too-frequent sour expression.

The big upheaval in the Marion family is a road-widening scheme. In 1989, Mum receives a compulsory purchase order for the family home. It’s an end of the row house, the only one in the street signalled for demolition. You and James converge on the old home to give support. Phil has got hold of maps and plans and shows you exactly what will be done. The planned extra lane on the Achelzoy road cuts through your living room and completely demolish the garden.

Will the workmen find those marbles? Phones the cat, in his grave under the forsythia bush, will be disturbed by the spread of the road on which he was tragically run over in 1972.

You can’t understand why the road is to be widened on your side. Across the way is a scrap of parkland hardly worth keeping. There was a swing there when you were kids; now it’s a hollow where rubbish collects. The council claims it is favouring community resources over individual ones.

You and James agree there’s something bent about this. It turns out that behind it all is Robert Hackwill, District Councillor, Chairman of the Planning Committee. The road widening is supposed to cope with the extra flow of traffic anticipated when Hackwill Properties finally get his Discount Development - a major, controversial project - finished.

‘He has a long memory,’ you say.

‘Well, we have too,’ James replies.

As part of the ongoing re-evaluation of your relationship, Chris insists you have monthly truth-telling sessions. This sounds to you like an infants’ kissing game, but it turns out to be her way of admitting to you that on one of her trips to Dublin, she has had an affair with another graduate student, someone her own age. It is over, she insists. She says she loves you. You almost wish you had an infidelity to match hers - there have been crush-struck jailbait temptresses on your courses, but you’ve strayed away from them - but all you can talk about in the sessions is Sedgwater. As you are explaining about James and Hackwill, she bursts into tears. You end up in bed, but you are still not sure which way you’ll vote. If anything, the truth-telling has made you less certain how you feel.

James is staying with you in London for a few days. You’re going through the Action Plan. Chris doesn’t understand.

‘You think this Hackwill is knocking down your Mum’s house because you wouldn’t let him buy you a pint?’

‘Essentially, yes,’ you say.

James nods.

‘That’s silly,’ she protests.

You and James remember the copse.

And all the other times. All through school, Hackwill was there. After the copse, it was less concerted, but if either of the Marion Brothers got a boot in the back or a thump on the head, Hackwill was there.

After Primary School, he didn’t even do it himself. He had his sidekick Reg Jessup for that, and a coterie of hangers-on. Mack McEwan, Pete Gompers, Shane Bush.

‘He was the school bully,’ you say.

‘And you two were heroes. You stood up to him. Good for you.’

Chris is being sarky.

‘We just looked out for each other, Chris. Tried not to take any stick.’

‘Has it ever occurred to you that you ought to be grateful to him?’

This is hideous heresy. You and James both blurt out ‘What?’

‘If you hadn’t learned to take care of yourselves, Jimmy’d have been killed in the Falklands, and you’d have broken your neck hauling some kid out of a well. Your bully forced you to become the macho, outdoors, competent, capable Super Marion Brothers you are.’

‘Fuck off, Chris,’ you say.

‘Them’s fighting words.’

She biffs you with a cushion. James laughs and she batters him too. By now, you’re all a bit drunk.

Weeks dribble away. You’re so caught up in appeals and turn-downs on the house - which you still think of as home - that you worry less about Chris and the Marriage Thing. James sets up camp in Somerset and sends reports about the Organised Resistance.

However, the M Thing starts to grow in your mind. It’s not so much the decision that bothers you - though you still aren’t sure - but the actual show-down. How are you going to manage it? Who goes first? Is this like scissors-paper-stone, where you count to three and come out with it? If so, then it’s fine if you both come out with the same thing. But if there’s a split decision, one of you wants the open road and the other wants to settle down, it could get nasty.

More and more, you just want to carry on - living together, when you’re both in London, going out together, thinking maybe about a family when you reach that unimaginable age of thirty (two years off, gack!). It’s perfectly comfortable and works for both of you, so why change?

Why change anything?

You like things as they are. It’s the same with the house. You’ll never move back, and Mum and Phil certainly won’t have kids to take over the three extra rooms, but you like the idea of the Family Home being there. It’s as if, because the site is preserved, your childhood and adolescence are accessible to you, still there on some level. The marbles are still buried so you’re not a proper grown-up. And that’s what you want.

Which would be worse? If you voted for a split and Chris wanted to get married? Or the other way round? If you voted for a split and Chris agreed, would you still feel you’d been chucked? If Chris voted for marriage and you agreed, would you feel trapped? Whose idea was this Six Months Guillotine anyway?

The house goes. Mum caves in and accepts meagre compensation. She and Phil pool their savings and buy a smaller place in Sutton Mallet, a little way out of town. With the housing boom, they find themselves back on the mortgage hook in their fifties, working harder at Phil’s business to make payments. James says they should have fought on but Mum always hated conflicts. Sean Rye, Laraine’s old boyfriend, is now bank manager. He eases things a little for Mum, but James reports he’s firmly in the Hackwill camp and probably gets a kickback for forcing the deal through.

The house isn’t knocked down at once. There’s a delay in the road-widening. It sits empty. Windows are broken by kids.

James reports this is Hackwill’s real victory. Taking the house and not doing anything with it is worse than knocking it down. He says he is going to take the war to the enemy. Then, he sends you a cutting from the local paper. Robert Hackwill’s Jaguar was stolen and driven into a ditch. There’s a picture of the councillor looking stern next to the crash site and a report of his speech against joy-riding thugs. In the picture, you see James leaning against a fence in the background, grinning. A band of hippies, including Graham Foulk, another of Laraine’s exes, squats your vacant house. Hackwill condemns the invading wasters.

You’d worry more about James’s War but the decision deadline is coming up.

You love Chris. Don’t you? And, despite straying, she you?

Think about it?

Which do you decide?