Content warning: wartime-typical violence.

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming

Carl does not come home and does not come home and eventually Iris accepts that this is a new fact of life. Una feels some part of her fracture with the realisation. Their Firecracker should always have questions to ask, even the unanswerable kind. But Carl does not come home and today Li is out when the shells fall.

Una pulls Iris under the stairs, praying under her breath. She hears the mosquitos buzzing near at hand and blames their dwindling supply of standing water, and as she hears them, she allows for the first time that maybe the British and the Australians were right when they said that mosquitos would be all they got from bomb shelters. She hugs Iris close and tries to focus on the closeness of her, their safety under the stairs and not on Li's absence. She counts the spaces between shells the way her girlhood self counted the time between thunder claps. She counts the spaces against the pulse of her heart and the beats of her watch; breathes in the sleeplessness and worry smell of Iris, notices how different it is from coconut oil and orchids. No smell for a child.

And then, miracle of miracles, Li is there.

'I have bread,' says Li, re-entering the house. Under the stairs, still half-hostage to the weight of a sleeping Iris, Una's eyes widen.

'Bread?' she says, incredulous. This in spite of the bundle clutched to Li's chest, so evidently loaf shaped.

It's been days since Una baked, much less bought bread and already these things are becoming past memories. Bread, affordable rice…It goes on. A shame that after all, Papatee couldn't give them cheese. On the other hand, Una doesn't trust Carl with any process complicated enough to require the maker to put things down and return at a highly specific and carefully designated interval. And as long as she works at the ACS, Una doesn't have the time for that kind of complication either. Li might, if she felt like trying to teach Iris, but Li never warmed to Papatee and anyway, there's nothing like the help of a nine-year-old to exponentially complicate the finicky cheesemaking process. Mind you, Una thinks, ambushed suddenly by twins wistfulness and whimsy, Nenni would have adored homemade cheese. Nenni would have sat by the curds and whey purring and helping herself uninvited.

'I was at the baker's,' says Li, joining them behind the stairs. 'The one on Middle Alley. The gate was locked and the people…'Li gestures, a motion indicative of masses. She begins to unwrap the bread, soft crumbly and white, the smell of it, warm and fresh, intoxicating in the close confines of the stairs. Vaguely Una tries to place the last time they have had bread that was not tinned and comes up short. Gingerly, she reaches out a hand to the loaf, as if testing its reality. It is there, real; hard-crusted, and fresh. She looked from it to Li, to Iris, her mouth half-open in sleep, tongue furred with hunger.

'How…'begins Una, but cannot finish.

'A soldier came,' says Li. 'I think maybe he was one of ours. Australian. He looked exhausted, like he had been battling the country as well as the enemy. He shot the gate. It came open. He rushed in – we all did – I stole it. The bread.'

'Stole it?'

Li nods. She says, 'It was very difficult; everyone wanted bread. But you said we needed it, and your God would not let you do it. So I stole it.'

Una opens her mouth to query this too, when it strikes her like a punch to the stomach, Covet not…anything which is thy neighbour's.

'No,' she says, instead. 'I suppose not.'

Would she have done it, Una wonders, looking between them? If it had been her at that bakery when the gate came open? Such an easy thing to say no – the Good Conduct Club girl in her would have said it – in olden days. But there's Iris to think about, still growing, already beginning to feel the pricks of hunger pains, asleep on Una's lap, to consider, and Li before her, her arms like sparrow legs in their thinness. Li and Iris who Carl loves – loved? – who she loves, who Una cannot let die. Gently she eases Iris onto her mother's lap, the easier to fetch a bread knife. The movement seems to rouse her, but then Iris murmurs, a kittenish sound that strikes Una palpably to hear, and she knows to a certainty that she would have done it. God or not, be there ever so many Thou Shalt Nots writ over the bakery door, she would have fought for a stake of that bread.

Finally, the all clear sounds. They crawl out from under the stairs, stomachs heavy with bread and knees and muscles cramped with sitting. Una looks by the light of the dust-filmed windows at the loaf of bread the way she supposes the Israelites once looked at Manna out of Heaven. It smells divine. It smells of elation and sunbursts and the time Before. It feels like that, too.

The feeling punctures when Puck screams. It's not his outraged scream. Not the scream of a monkey feeling shut out, overlooked, neglected. No, this is blood-curdling and hair-raising and it blisters Una's skin like hot oil.

Puck screams.

Una flinches.

Li visibly shudders.

Puck screams and screams his horrifying battle-cry until Una thinks she has gone mad and wonders if Puck already has. Then comes a split second where the monkey draws breath and Una wishes he was still screaming. In the heartbeat's silence they hear the tramp of boots outside. They come up the street, tramp-tramp, tramp-tramp, calling, and Una's Japanese is minimal, is in fact non-existent, but it doesn't matter. Her neck prickles. She recalls a letter Faith wrote during the last war. Faith, her bright, ebullient Faith saying how sometimes you understood the meaning of men without understanding the words. Una doesn't think Faith meant to write it; She didn't then and she doesn't now. Una remembers it anyway. Now, hearing the tramp-tramp of the boots coming up Evelyn Road she understands it as never before. Her eyes must be saucer-wide. Li's certainly are.

Akela joins in. He barks hot vengeance, mouth foaming and frothing. He barks a frenzy of furious, livid barking. He dares the oncoming army to cross and tangle with him.

'Attic,' Li says succinctly. She already has Iris's hand in hers. Una scoops Puck up in both arms. The bread sits on the floor, forgotten.

Puck screams, bears his teeth and leapfrogs from Una's arms. He crouches, screaming and menacing at the door to Trinity House and Una decides to leave him be. She's taking all the protection she can muster, up to and including a monkey with a war whoop to rival a bagpipe and a look like vengeance in his face.

The men keep calling the call they use when they want to draw women from the house. The women of Trinity House do not emerge. They run dragonfly-darting and heartbeat-rapid up the stairs to the second storey and harder, faster, louder up the ladder to the attic. Lightening-flash fast they go, stumbling over skirts and feet and stairs. The hinges of the attic door groan protest against Una's frantic, scrabbling fingers. She claws at them anyway. Her fingers blister and something lodges painful under a nailbed. Still she scrabbles with the old, geriatric hinges. Finds, reaches for and misses the handle. Panic blisters hot and bloody under her fingers, in her gorge, against her skin. It makes Una dizzy and reaching for the door Una wavers. They never go up here, haven't in years. The hinges are stiff with disuse and it's only years of manoeuvring a buffalo that allow Una to pull the trapdoor down with the urgency required. They take the rungs, two, three at a time. Una, because she opens the door, goes first, tripping on the hem of her gown. Iris is next, best, fastest and iris-slender about it. All those years competing with Puck in the trees, Una supposes. Li follows and then Una is pulling the ladder up and the door flat to. Her wavering, trembling limbs take several seconds to solidify again. It's a tentative thing, and Una knows that the least knock could shatter her as a broken vessel, a potter's shard.

Una lies down on top of the trapdoor lest anyone see the pull in the ceiling and try to come through. She lies not as she does in ACS drills in a crouch, knees to floor, palms to floor, head to palms, but flat on her stomach with her mouth against the crease of her elbow. It's as much about holding her body together and unified, this pressed-tight position as it is about protection. She's flush with the floor and it's dust. The last time Una dusted this attic was...Has anyone ever dusted up here? Moats of dust swirl and float lizard-lazy through the air. Dust goes up her sleeves, into her eyes, her ears, her nose. Her sleeve tastes of dust. So do her lips, her hands...The dust prickles Una's nose and she suppresses the urge to sneeze as down below Puck screams like a banshee. Akela harmonizes in horrifying atonality that sounds like biting nails or spitting fire. It's not his everyday bark. Not the bark that says Alert, Child on Bicycle! Or Warning, Cat in Tree! No, it's loud and bass-leaded, as if it comes out of the bowels of the earth. It is deep, sonorous and guttural and it is savage. It says Don't you dare come near my pack. Mine. I will gut you like fish and play coachman spare my horses upon the desiccated strings of your still-bleeding intestines if you so much as look at them. It says, If you cross me you will die. It is loud, fierce, frantic and it breaks Una's heart because in bygone years they joked about Akela being their guard dog. They never meant it.

On and on Puck screams. Akela barks fiercer and more frenzied. Under Li's protective arm Iris bucks as if to sneeze and Li snakes a hand out to pinch the girl's nose. She sneezes open-mouthed and silent instead, and Una's breathing shallows. Below her she can hear the heavy-booted tramp-tramp of strangers moving about. She wonders what, if anything they will pilfer this time. Decides she doesn't care as long as they go away and leave her family in peace.

There's a scuffle. Something springs, someone not Puck screams, something else falls, heavily. For the first time Una begins to wonder if they will kill the animals, these men in her home. In the ensuing, blistering silence, Una counts the seconds long and slow. She feels her heart in her stomach, her knees, her neck, chest, arms and wrists. Blood thrums headily, deafeningly through her ears. For a long moment darkness wavers and Una thinks she will faint, but it doesn't happen. The screaming subsides. The tramp-tramp grows fainter. A door slams deep in the soul of Trinity House. Una exhales.

Li opens her mouth, considers and closes it.

Iris, fearless, says 'Are we safe now?'

Una pushes herself upright and listens hard. She listens with her ears and her feet and her gut, and feels only the stillness of the house. Hears only the groaning and creaking of a house resettling into itself.

'I think so, Firecracker,' she says, and bends to give Iris a kiss. Iris beams at her. Una tries to beam back. She still wonders if Akela is dead. Maybe wounded and bleeding but dying. She pushes the thought away. Harder, Una tries not to think about how often they will have to do this, hide in the attic or allow…But her brain skips and Una cannot process the Or. They will only hide in the attic, she decides. Always, they will be safe. Puck and Akela will see to it. They are not dead. Una will not let them be dead any more than the animals will let her be unprotected.

Gingerly Una pulls the attic door up and lets the ladder fall. She descends it with all the solidity of jelly. At the bottom her foot misgives and she falls the last half-foot. It hurts and she supposes she will bruise but it doesn't matter, because then Akela is there, snuffling at her and washing her face. This is verboten. Una lets him do it anyway. He is not dead. He is not even injured. He's alive and slavering and brushing a wet, warm tongue lavishly across Una's face, his paws webbed and reassuring either side of her silver fish in their everlasting sapphire orbit. His tongue is granular and rough and it says as it brushes ticklishly past her eyes, You are Safe. Again, Safe as it slathers her nose. Safe, safe, always safe as it works from her chin to her forehead and back again, washing traces of dust away. Puck joins the dog. He doesn't wash, per se. He scrabbles onto Una's vacant shoulder and sits there combing her hair, pulling attic detritus from it and whispering simian nothings. Dimly she registers Iris's landing on the floor, Li's soft-stepped descent.

'Are you all right?' says Li from somewhere far away. Una pushes herself upright and the animals off of her. She could bear Puck a little longer, but this is no time for favourites. She thinks too that she is crying, mute but crying, and she cannot have that where Iris can see. Iris must never know the raw edge of her terror. Una thinks that would surely be more frightening than the tramp-tramp of the guards. She tamps it down hard, swallows the tears and swats at her eyes. Aunts, like mothers, are not supposed to cry. Una believed this at ten and sees no reason now to stop Iris believing it. She laughs a rictus of a laugh and says, 'Akela's been bathing me. Otherwise I'm fine. Absolutely fine. You?'

Choruses of agreement and relief from the others. Una sits on the floor a moment longer, telling her bones and assessing the damage. Then she stands up, brushes attic-accrued dust from her dress and her hands and heads downstairs. She treads softly, this time, fairy-footed and young-lady graceful to make a point to someone, somewhere that these niceties have not all died in her. That even in the face of war and onslaught, Una Meredith still makes space for the ghost of Aunt Martha to remind her that young women in want of courting do not run elephant-footed up the stairs on hands and knees if they know what's good for them. It makes the world feel old, familiar and comforting. Which it is, because Akela and Puck, unlikely angels that they are, keep it that way. This is Una's token of gratitude.

Iris, at nine, hears no such ghost, because her only Aunt is Una and Una wouldn't know how to admonish Iris for something so inconsequential if she wanted to. So, Iris tears down the stairs bright and cheerful as a flyaway kite and Li follows after her, all water-fluid and cat-graceful. They note as they go the gouges in the floor where the men came for women and took away furniture oddments. A dresser here – emptied – a basket of Carl's clothes – old khakis only – there.

And then, at the bottom of the stairs, the bread. Of course it is gone. It should be heart-stopping this loss, but it barely registers. It glances off Una like water off a duck and she pulls Puck to her.

'Thank you,' she tells him, and forgets the heart-soaring relief of Li with the bread in the safety of their stair shelter.

But then, Una thinks, what is bread in the face of the certain knowledge that this won't be the last time Puck screams for them?

Nor is it. In the days that follow Puck screams with the reliability of an air-raid siren. He screams all through the war and while eventually the women grow used to it, they continue, always, to be grateful for it.