The centre cannot hold,
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

The door swings open. A voice like a bell from the door. Una unravels and re-ravels in dizzying succession.

'Hello?'

A shriek to rival Puck's and a firecracker's coruscation of feet.

'Auntie!'

Nine years of girl-child on the cusp of young womanhood barrels into Una's chest and her breath shoots out of her like a star gone to earth. Una's arms go out and around this child that she has missed like a heartbeat, comb restlessly at her hair.

'Iris,' she says like a prayer. And to the woman following behind her, 'Li.' Una thinks she will faint. She feels the way she felt at ten when The Good Conduct Club assigned fasting as punishment. That she does not faint is because she has her arms full of niece and cannot bear to loose sight of girl or woman ever again, even for a half-minute's blackout. She is hungry for them, starved. Una raises a smile. Gladness flows back like blood to a cold-raddled limb. Una thinks she' forgot what this felt like, to feel warm and encircled and…Carl is still not here, says her invisible Iago. Una locks him firmly behind a door of her mind's making. She crosses the door with her poets. Carl isn't here but Li is and Iris is and anyway, maybe Carl forgot he was rostered on to watch for zero-planes. Maybe he was racing a deadline and forgot he had a family, a sister, a monkey, a dog and a buffalo to warn about it. Maybe Una may yet get her chance to murder him in sheer bloody relief that he is not dead or missing or both. Maybe many things.

'Auntie,' says Iris, 'where's Daddy?'

Iris doesn't look like a girl who has queued for days and days under the hot February sun. Her question isn't meant to be the spear circumstance makes it, either. It has all the finesse of raw marble, all the uncertain grace of some ungainly calf. The sensation is of being punched in the stomach. Now, for entirely different reasons, Una once again thinks she will faint. Li's eyes register this, and the impact it leaves on Una but she doesn't ask.

'Daddy's busy,' says Una as lightly as she can manage. 'He couldn't get home last night.'

On Li's forehead her eyebrows plum zero-plane heights, elegant and graceful. Una sees the question in her eyes, reads in Li, What aren't you saying? Una raises her own in answer. She owes them both honesty, and she will give it them, but first...First she wants to drink them in, the women she loves, with all the ceremony of a homecoming.

'Li,' says Una, 'make us tea, will you? I'll tell Mrs Bowen I can't make the school today.'

'Oh,' says Li. Una sees her falter. 'You mustn't…'

'Let me do this,' says Una. 'Let me feast on having you back. The school won't mind.'

Mrs. Bowen doesn't mind. She waves Una away with one casual, unflappable hand. She says of course Una must look after her family. Someone will take over Una's children for the day. Una thanks her and tries to still the sole unquiet thing in her chest. She doesn't succeed. It worries away at her soul whispering, Where is Carl?

Una walks dream-slow back into Trinity House. She does not go via the front door, which is immediately behind her on the veranda, but by way of the garage and Papatee. She wants the wet-breathed reassurance of Papatee's considerable bulk, and he offers it without complaint or bargaining. All night Una made her bargains with God and now, here in the garage, smelling of cut grass and buffalo, her newly-returned sister and niece waiting for her, Una runs out of bargains.

It's all right, says Papatee in Buffalo as she brushes a hand across his nose. God will look after Carl. You will look after the others until he comes back. Una breathes in the leathery, buffalo-smell of her friend and promises unconditionally. It's the least she can do.

When she re-emerges into the kitchen, Li is not there. Presumably the tea is ready. Una picks her way from the kitchen, through the denuded dining room where in old days she sat and marked papers, to the sun room, which is daylight-rich and naked as a newborn, except for the piano. And the end table with Kuan Yin. And Carl's densely-packed bookshelves. All things the Japanese could not carry or did not want. Li stands in the middle of the divot-raddled room, a tea tray of Gladstone Blue Ribbon in her hands. Una watches her survey the remaindered jumble of their lives.

'Una,' she says, and her voice is a musical grace note, all lift and question at the end. 'Una, where is our furniture?'

'Ah,' says Una. 'Well…'She breathes long and deep through her nose. A singer's breath. Holds the breath for ten seconds as she gathers her thoughts, then exhales over another ten seconds. One hand drifts idle and unthinking to Kuan Yin's jade head.

Una says finally, exhausted and hopeful and guddled like a trout all at once, 'The guards protecting us needed furniture for their new homes.'

'Ah,' says Li in her turn.

'And inflation,' says Una, 'makes buying it impossible. But – '

'But there is all this lovely furniture going to waste in Chinese and British homes,' says Li before Una can further elaborate. 'Which are we, do you think?'

On the floor, Iris and Puck play knots and crosses with the divots. They use a coins – wherever from, Una wonders? – and a handful of unravelling God's Eyes – the ghost of Arts and Crafts past – for the crosses. At Li's tone, jagged and spiked as anything Alban Berg could write, child and monkey look up.

Una says evenly, 'Something like that. They don't need the bibelots, though or the extravagances. So we cannot say that we have nothing.'

They laugh the wry laughter of circumstance. It sounds like cut glass or crystal refracting light.

Li nods. She sets the tea tray down on the floor in the spot where once Nenni's footstool sat and Nenni slept. Una watches Li realise this and shift the tray half a dozen paces, mindful of the knots and crosses game. She offers Una an apologetic smile. Una shakes her head.

She drops onto the floor at Li's elbow the better to watch Iris and Puck. Now they're home, Una cannot bear to have her back to even one of them. Li gestures at the tea. Says, 'Will you play mother?'

It is so mundane, so ordinary, that Una smiles and acquiesces. They sit lotus-fashion on the floor, straight-backed and ankles tucked under and over one another, and drink tea on the floor as if it is the most natural thing in the world. Perhaps it is.

Li, as though reading Una's mind, says, 'There are ceremonies that say you can only drink tea like this. On the floor. Though to do it properly you need a tea-table. A low one.'

'I'll look for one,' says Una. Li smiles. The women pause and sip their tea. Puck gambols over on all fours and Una pours out a cup for him using the monkey's own cup and puts three sugars in even though it is ludicrous extravagance in the current climate. She thinks if she can still indulge Puck in the niceties of his taste in tea then the apocalypse is not yet upon them. Puck chatters simian gratitude and skips back to his partner in crime. Knots and crosses resumes with the coins and the God's Eyes and Una wonders in an idle sort of way, why it is they do not own a proper set. Thinks in a fit of irrepressible whimsy that if they did, they would probably be allowed to keep it since you can furnish a house without the heady luxury of the game.

'We still have my sewing table,' Una says, half-turning to Li. 'We can repurpose it for meals. They wanted that, too, but I made a case for it. I needed it, you see, to keep sewing.'

Li's forehead creases. She says, 'And they cared about that?'

Another singer's breath. Another protracted exhalation. This time Una repeats the exercise twice, three times, before answering. Even then, she swallows hard.

'They also needed uniforms,' she said. 'And they needed people who could make them cheaply.'

The words taste tannin-bitter in her mouth. Bitter like gall or vinegar or ruination. They taste like a betrayal, which of course they are. 'I don't know who told them I was any good,' Una says quietly. 'And God knows I didn't want to do it. But I thought…I couldn't fight them, Li, and I couldn't bargain, and I thought maybe as long as I sewed for them…'

Li folds one delicate hand over Una's. 'It's all right,' she says. 'You were keeping us safe the only way you had. That doesn't need an apology.'

Una kisses the other's woman's cheek in thanks anyway. Understanding ebbs and flows between them, part of the invisible web of connectivity that keeps them together. And if Una does not know how to be two in Trinity House with Carl absent, neither does Li, and this is part of the shared understanding, part of the octopus tendril that joins them.

Opposite them Puck manages to upend the playing pieces despite the lack of a board. It's impressive. Una laughs in spite of herself, and so does Li. This time it sounds like laughter is supposed to, silver-bright bell song. Iris doesn't need the prompt to laughter, a grin splits her face already. She's still their Firecracker, even now, even after the heat and the blistering noonday sun and the queuing, hour upon endless hour. Una is glad.

She rises inelegantly, stiff and unaccustomed to sitting so long on the ground Blood rushes stiltedly back into Una's feet, to her ankles. Li, raising the tea tray with her, is slower. Partly the delicate matter of the heirloom china, Una thinks, partly the long days standing in the sun. She whispers the details to Una as they allocate precious water to rinse the dishes. How dizzy they grew for lack of water, how sore her feet, how heavy Iris when finally the little girl could stand no more and Li had to hold her. She whispers, breath sun-warm and tea-savoured against Una's ear about how finally, mercifully, someone made the decision to let a handful of women and children go. Not all of them, because that would be unconscionable sympathy, but some, so that they would know the Japanese were not the enemy. This time there is no wryness to Li's observation. Li spits Japanese the way other people swear, blood-heavy and vengeance-rich.

'You should have said,' says Una, finishing with the china. She dries her hands on her skirt and takes Li in hand. They have no chairs, so she settles Li on the piano bench, which Una knows from experience is an uncomfortable chair because the keys of the instrument eat at your spine, but needs must. Once there, Una sinks back onto her ankles, newly restored to circulation, and slips Li's shoes off with her fingers. She digs her fingers and thumbs into the other woman's feet and works them while all the while the clock ticks away like a heartbeat. Una hears it chime and is grateful her wristwatch only marks the seconds upon endless seconds.

Without knots and crosses to divert her, Iris falls to wrestling with Akela. Puck joins in and Una watches with half an eye until they tumble outside and once again Iris's shout drifts jubilant and myna-glad through the windows. She missed this.

Opposite her, Una watches Li's eyes drift around the room as if acclimatising to the sun room in its stripped and peeled status. It's a room like a shorn sheep or a skinned grape. A guava split down the middle awaiting salting.

'Did the Japanese take our pictures, too?' Li asks, suddenly, and Una stumbles backwards off her heels, caught unaware. Strange how quickly her brain spun an oblique space over the horror of that morning with the pictures on display, how normal the lack now is.

'No,' says Una. She scrubs at her eyes, tired for more reasons than last night's protracted vigil. 'No, that was Carl.'

An elegant lift of Li's eyebrows suffices for answer. Una's heart lunges throatward and she tries to herd it back to its right place, back to mundanity and ordinary life. Which now, the pictureless state of her sun room – their sun room – now is.

'Is there a reason,' says Li when no elaboration emerges, 'Carl had a fit of redecorating?'

Una smiles because Li's voice is the voice she uses on Iris in obstreperous moods. Always Una has appreciated its efficacy. Being on the receiving end reaffirms her opinion of it.

'When they came to ask about the sewing,' Una says, 'well, to order me to do the sewing, have it whichever way you'd rather, they were looking at the photos.'

'So Carl hid them,' says Li. She too, sounds tired. Una hums assent.

'When we were standing in the sun all that time,' says Li, 'we heard about that. About all the things our new protectors needed for their homes. Engineers to rebuild the road, plumbers to repair the water reservoir, carpenters to fix up the bombed houses, young girls who were strong enough to work in houses, and other ones…They had a word…'

Li's voice trails off and she doesn't repeat it. Una doesn't ask her to.

'But they were choosing the Chinese girls from the country, then,' says Li.

'They still might be,' says Una. It's not generosity so much as molten dread pumping through her veins. Una Meredith is and can be generous, but confronted with the facts of a pared down sun-room, an exhausted sister and a now-absent brother, her generosity is spent. Una thinks wryly that it is packed away with the red tea bowls and wedding linens and the family photographs they dare not display. Maybe after the war she will take it out again and dust it off along with her sense of Christian charity.

Li understands. Una sees that plainly in the way her face shifts and the sun plays on her eyes. 'If they were still looking to the country,' says Li, 'they would not be looking at family photographs in a way that made Carl put them away. He's like you. Or maybe like a cat. He doesn't ruffle easily. He just lies there in the sun, content, and watches and watches until something gets under his nose and he swats at it.'

Una smiles at this description, as much because she would not have sketched it as for its accuracy. And because it could as easily apply to Puck, or Nenni or any of Trinity House's kindred spirits.

'Speaking of,' says Li now, 'where is Carl?'

Iago battens the mental door Una stuck him behind. Her soul rattles still and unquiet in her chest. Una soothes it with a prayer, with Yeats on the wing. Never, through all that long vigil did it occur to Una to wonder what to say to Li, because never did it occur to her God would send Una back Li and Iris to counterpoise Carl's disappearance. But of course he did. God moves in a mysterious way his wonders to perform, etc, etc.

'Una?' says Li, puncturing the fragile haven of Una's drifting thoughts. She presses a hand to Una's cheek and Una finds it is sun-warm and sun-chapped, too. Una can only shake her head. She reaches up into the drawer of Kuan Yin's occasion table and fishes out the glass jar of tiger balm. She begins to rub it into Li's palms. Li sighs gratitude and relief. Una finds the strength to say, 'I have absolutely no idea where Carl is or what has happened to him.'

Now Una watches the moths worry at Li. Iago eschews Una's door, climbs out some invisible window and scrabbles onto the mental window-ledge Li offers him. The moths descend on her soul and worry at the silk-spun cocoon of it. Una presses the tiger balm deeper into the crevices of Li's sun-blistered hands and Li closes her eyes. When she opens them Iago is trapped and the moths are pinned under an invisible soul-jar. Li is water-placid again.

'The other thing we heard,' says Li, 'was about Changi. Well, saw. Hundreds on hundreds of the British rounded up and marching. The ones that could were giving away their tins of food. My hands were full or else…'

Water-placidity is fragile as spun glass or dragonfly wings. Una knows this because her own steel-fingered velvet-lined grip on order and normalcy wavers dangerously. She fights for control of both. Wins. Just.

'Never mind,' says Una. This is bigger than tins. Li holds out a lifeline and Una seizes it. The lifeline is that Carl might not be dead. Equally, he might not have forgotten a paper, deadline or scouting vigil, but he might yet be alive and marching endlessly towards Changi. Or he might be somewhere else entirely. It's impossible to know.

With no small degree of surrealism, Una says, 'Let's hope you're right. Let's hope he's with them and alive.' The alternative does not bear consideration.

They eat tapioca for their supper, sitting on the floor. Iris never so much as murmurs about it, which abnormality is itself unsettling. The sliminess and rubber taste feel about right for the way the last 36 hours have gone. Una thinks there should be a feast to mark this reunion, even with Carl away, but there isn't because rice now costs money Una can't spend and beef has skyrocketed to an eye-watering 60 cents a kati. And besides, after weeks of stumbling over any number of dogs and cats that caught the shell-fire, Una thinks they will probably turn vegetarian at the first opportunity that offers itself. Certainly that's Una's plan for herself. So, they eat tapioca on the floor and try to ignore the lack of pictures and furniture, and Carl does not come home.

Carl does not come home. They will have to tell Iris something, but it's only been 36 hours, and Carl can be as absent-minded as a shooting star in the right mood. And selfishly, Una wants to preserve Iris's homecoming as long as possible because maybe it's the end of her childhood. Maybe Una will blink and find herself looking at nine years of young woman. Opposite her, traitorously, Li thinks it too. Una can see it, in the way she moves, her eyes tracking her daughter as she flits from Puck to Akela to plinking half-musically at the ivory of the piano.

'Tomorrow,' Li says, and there's finality in it. Warning. 'Tomorrow, if nothing has changed,' and Una knows Li means if Carl is not back but cannot say it lest it be true, 'we'll have to tell her.'

'I know,' says Una. This also feels like a betrayal.

So they sit and watch Iris and try to downplay to one another the fact of Carl's absence. But they both have wristwatches that pulse like hearts for all the seconds Carl isn't there. On the backside of Li's is written To count the moments until we're together. Once it was an anniversary gift. Now it becomes a portent. Almost Una thinks of taking hers off but she can't face the bonging of the great grandfather clock, so she leaves her slim-banded heartbeat coiled round her hand, all delicate silver with inlaid etchings of poppies.

Still they make a show of normalcy for Iris, because normalcy is like blood. You need it to survive. Una knows this now. And anyway, she can't face another night like last night. But evidently she and Li make terrible actors because Iris won't sleep. Li sings a cradle song vintage of her mother, to no avail. Una, unable to bear that old standby, I Saw Three Ships, sings instead Why weep ye by the tide, lady…but has no more luck than Li. She swaps it for St Patrick's Breastplate, which is both an old bedtime staple and the kind of hymn with heft to it. You can turn it operatic with a flick of your wrist, with the slightest deepening of a breath. Or you can soften it and shrink it down on itself until it is as intimate as a lover's kiss. Una does this now, shrinks and warps the hymn until it is a feathery ghost of a melody against Iris's skin, but no luck.

They take it in turns to walk the floor, Iris in their arms, even though she long ago outgrew this, trying to crane their necks around her sleek dark head for a view out the window. But the city is asleep. Even the shells are asleep. Only the blackout is awake and it is an unhelpful partner at a vigil. Una supposes that at least tripping is impossible in this new, sparser Trinity House. No one will stub a toe on the low-slung coffee table or catch a foot on the leg of the settle, or even on Nenni's pet footstool. Her home feels strange and alien, the child in her arms writhes with nocturnal unease and reality pushes hard with both hands against the silk cocoon Una tries to spin them. But even the mosquito nets are gone these days, because the Japanese need was greater, and the insects buzz, flit and trespass, the lesser but equally persistent enemy in the dark of Trinity House. The clock ticks on relentlessly in the sitting room, too loud in the late-night stillness. Now and then Una or Li, whichever does not have immediate hold of Iris, passes a hand over the head of Kuan Yin. For luck. They are grateful when the crickets begin to hum.

'I want Daddy,' says Iris.

'I know, Firecracker,' says Una. 'I wish I could get him for you.'

Carl does not come home. Una's arms grow heavy with Iris, who is still not asleep. She sits down with her on the little girl's bed with its Sunbonnet Sue quilt, which by some miracle is not repossessed, and rocks her. Li joins them, and so does Akela. No one objects to the dog's presence. Nor to Puck's, when, nervous and chattering he scrabbles up onto the bedspread and chatters at them. Absentmindedly, Una pats his head with her unencumbered arm. Li scoops him into her lap and rocks him like a second child.

'Why isn't Daddy home?' says Iris. Li smooths her hair, shushes her.

Says, 'I don't know, Firecracker. I wish I did.'

They rock, the three of them and Puck, back and forth to the tune of Jock of Hazeldene, favourite song of Cecilia Meredith. Una is back to singing it after a bad spell with hymnody. She's o'er the borders, and a'wa…If only it were that easy.

Still Iris won't sleep. Carl used to sing Gershwin to her, out of key, deliberately so, Una suspects. So they try that. I've got music, I've got rhythm, then because Carl always pluralled it, I've got my girls…But even that doesn't work. The women are too tuneful. Una segues into I've got plenty of nothin'/ And nothin's plenty for me…Beloved staple of Trinity House. But it is the wrong song and the key awkward and the truth too painfully close to the mark.

But then Puck sings, and even though its strange and alien, Iris sleeps. Perhaps she remembers him serenading her as a baby, the way the books say infants remember the womb. She is too big for Puck to cradle now, so he snuggles down next to her and sings his strange, simian lullaby straight into the delicate shell of her ear. He sings and he grooms her hair with long, clawed fingers. He wraps his long tail around Iris for extra security. The noise is unholy and weird, but Iris sleeps. Not fully woman after all then. Thank God, is Una's silent, heartfelt prayer. She kisses Iris asleep, the seven kisses sacred to Cecilia Meredith.

Una does not sleep. Neither does Li. Neither does Puck. Carl does not come home.