Thomas sat on the sofa in Ella’s sitting room, facing the big window. A brutal shaft of light was coming over the lawn. He thought sometimes of moving. Getting up, getting a drink. He was hungry too. But there was so much to do that he couldn’t move. He should go into the bedroom and speak to Ella. There must be something he could say to her, something that would make her snap out of it, beg her to get up, shout at her to stop loafing around. There had to be some single phrase that would help but he couldn’t think clearly enough to work out what it was. And he needed to talk to Moira, apologize for knowing about Theresa, make her get a lawyer to protect them. He should call Squeak as well, find out what he was doing, telling Sholtham. He should chase up Dr. Hollis and ask when he was coming back to see Ella. He couldn’t stand guard outside her bedroom for the rest of his life. And he was hungry.

Small tasks all, but they seemed insurmountable to him. He couldn’t focus hard enough to identify the first action towards either of them.

Please don’t kill yourself, Ella. That wouldn’t work. It’ll hurt Moira. No, that wouldn’t do either. The phrase came to him, abrupt and heartfelt: please don’t leave me here. He started to cry, his face yawned open, silent. I can’t do this anymore.

He ordered himself to think other things.

He sat, blinking into the blinding light from the lawn, listening to the gentle burble of the television in Moira’s rooms. Adverts.

She knew about Theresa now. And she knew that he knew as well. She’d be in there, in front of the telly, crying, gouging her scalp with her nails, feeling let down by Lars and him and everyone. Smoking certainly, maybe even holding a bottle of antidepressants. It was going to get worse. Theresa was smart and nasty. She’d sue Moira and get all the money. Other people must have known too, not just him. Lars must have taken Theresa to formal receptions and they’d feel the same as he did: he preferred Theresa.

He looked through the door to Ella’s bedroom. She was on the bed, pinned to her back, her bare feet visible through the doorway.

The minute he went to the toilet or fell asleep Ella’d creep downstairs and get the gun and shoot herself. Lars had shown them all where the safe key was. She probably wouldn’t do it right, either, just blow her eye out and bleed to death, shoot her nose off or something. Then people would laugh about it and say they couldn’t even get that right, this family, couldn’t even shoot themselves in the fucking face. Stander.

People emigrated at his age. It was up to him. Indignant self-disgust propelled his head up until he was looking straight into the sunshine. He stared into it until his eyes flashed white and ached. It was up to him. He stood up and walked out of the room.

Vision blurred from the brightness of the sun through the window, he ran his hand along the dado rail to guide himself to the top of the stairs, and stepped down, holding the banister until he got to the bottom. He blinked hard to restore his sight.

Lars’s office was a cushion of quiet. Thomas stepped inside, looking left to right, which was silly because he knew exactly where the safe was. He walked halfway across until he was just past the desk, and stopped to brush his fingers over the desk top, where Lars’s hands had been just before he walked out to the lawn. He felt better. As if Lars had given his approval or something.

He stepped over to the bookcase, to the phony book that looked no different from the real books because they were just as likely to be read. He pressed the sky-blue leather with gold writing on it and the spine of the book sprang towards him. The keys sat in a small, green felt insert.

Two keys, not big, old-fashioned, shackled together with a ring. Thomas took them out and found that he was sweating, for no reason really, and his mouth was filling up with saliva, as if he was going to be sick. He wondered if this was what Lars felt as he unloaded his wallet to the desk drawer and wrote his nasty suicide note, blaming Moira for what he was about to do, laying the blame at her door for him choosing to excuse himself from the coming years of humiliation.

Thomas shut the spine, hiding the fact that he had taken the keys, in case Moira glanced in and saw that he had been in the safe. He stepped over to the desk, crouched down to the footwell underneath and lifted the edge of the rug, revealing a brass handle fitted flush to the parquet. He flipped it up, lifted the small section of floorboard out and set it to the side.

There, the beige metal lid with red plastic finger holes. He slipped his fingers in and lifted it off like the lid on a cookie jar and found the safe lid. More beige metal, a cheap-looking brown plastic handle and the keyhole in the middle, like a navel. He fitted the key in, turned it and took the lid off. He dropped down, snaking his hand in through the narrow neck to the two-square-foot space underneath. Papers. A book. Some jewelry in suede envelopes. Thomas reached further down, leaning in so that his whole arm was swallowed by the floor, and felt the sharp edge of a box. He pulled the box out and, reverently using two hands, took off the lid: the snub Astra Cub, a solid, heavy handgun, the handle and barrel a single molding. Next to it, like bridesmaids, two spare magazines to match it.

A silly gun. Girl’s gun. He looked at the barrel: Guernica, it said, Made in Spain. He saw Picasso’s horse screaming at the sky, seen it in a book at school, Beany showed it to them but Thomas wasn’t really listening. What he did remember was the image of the horse and he knew that the horse with the cartoon eyes was dying, that it didn’t live to see the horrors of the Second World War, and that seemed relevant somehow, a mercy.

He sat back on his haunches and looked at the gun. Guernica.

Playing a part, he stood up, put the gun in his back pocket and adjusted his stance. Wide legged, sneering, taller. He reached back and pulled the gun slowly—because he didn’t know if it was cocked—pulled it slowly out of his pocket and held it in two hands, pointing it at the door to the hall.

“Ptchew,” he said, lifting his hands in a slow-motion recoil. He smiled to himself. Felt better. He did it again. “Ptchew.”

Still smiling softly he looked at the small black gun. Weighed a ton. A solid little friend. He put it on the desk and bent down, shutting the safe door but not locking it, leaving the keys sticking out and stacking the lid and floorboard panel under the desk.

He shouldn’t leave the spare rounds lying around though, in case there was another gun somewhere. He put one in each front pocket of his jeans. Heavy. Maybe six rounds in each? Maybe eight in each, plus what was already in the gun. The gun. He lifted it, looked at it closely.

The trigger was silver and as solid as a knife. He squeezed it a fraction, felt it come to the point, graze the firing mechanism and let it fall back.

Do not, he remembered from somewhere, a film or a documentary or something, do not lock your elbows or the recoil will shatter the bones. Was it a sci-fi film? Maybe that was laser guns that did that. He should keep his elbows soft anyway, if he fired it, which he wouldn’t.

He stopped suddenly and gave a small surprised laugh at himself. Why would he fire the gun? He only had it to keep it from Ella. He shook his head at the floor. What was he thinking?

His gaze bounced around the crescents and dots of the poplar-burr desk top. He was thinking about shooting someone. Part of him was thinking about it. A bad deep-down part. He didn’t even know how to shoot.

It couldn’t be that hard. In Uganda kids were soldiers in the army. They handled guns, shot people, cut arms and legs off, and they were drunk or on glue. Couldn’t be too hard.

He was getting stuck here, the way he’d been stuck on the sofa upstairs. His eyes came to a rest on an inverted comma on the desk top. He was getting stuck. I can’t do this. But he was doing it. He had saved Ella from this gun. He was doing it.

He looked at the gun in his hand.

Solid. It had one button on it, a sliding button right next to the trigger, and he guessed that was the safety lock. He pushed it up and felt it click, pushed it down and up again, and down and up and down and put the gun in his back pocket.

Better. He felt better. His trousers were heavy now though. He took a few steps towards the door and found that the weight was comfortable to walk with. Better actually. He felt tethered to the ground, as if he was sinking into the earth.

He stood by the study door, hands gunfighter-wide at his thighs, elbows bent so recoil couldn’t shatter his bones.

From upstairs, a whisper of sound, the voices and music from Moira’s TV.

I am doing it, thought Thomas, and he walked off up the stairs.