'Could I have a word with you?' This was what our dad would say when he was annoyed or seething, and his children all learned early to interpret those seven words, always spoken quietly and calmly, as incipient doom and looming penalty, which generally meant being sent to your room.
Funny how being in your room was refuge and relaxation except when you were confined to it, at which point suddenly it was a beautifully painted prison cell from which you stared longingly into the backyard, where your brothers would be capering and making vulgar gestures and mooning you and savouring every moment of your period of incarceration, in much the same fashion as sparrows taunt a housebound cat; though the cat takes careful notes as to faces, and stores up his resentment on small interior shelves designed just for this purpose.
You would be walking briskly through the house, having just committed brotherly battery, and sensibly wishing to get as far from the scene of the incident as possible, and there would be our tall silent dad, sitting in his brown chair by the brown radio, and just as you thought you were clear, and loosed into the hallway to choose among several excellent escape options, you would hear him say could I have a word with you?, and even though he said it so quietly that you would think no one more than a few inches away from him would catch it, you would be thoroughly wrong about that, for his words rang in the air with a clarion shout, and you instantly froze in place, and all brothers within hundreds of yards also froze, thinking for a second that those words had come for them and they were totally and completely screwed. But no, those seven words were for you and you alone, my lad, and you turned slowly and sat down on the brown couch, and dad leaned in gently and said something quietly, and you went to your room for a thousand years.
He hit me once, our dad, and I deserved it, having driven drunk in the only car we had. But even then it was a short sharp sudden slap, to wake me up to the depth of his anger and fear, and to the danger in which I had put myself and our family, and dozens of innocents on the road. And he hit our