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thrashing arms, swimming legs, elbows prodding at the clinging blanket folds. His fingers brushed against bone and hair. Esther’s nightgown was too short and her ankles protruded as specimen for his investigations.
    â€œWelcome to the underwater world of Jack Coo-Stow!”
    Cook’s voice was throttled by the heavy undersheet. In deep winter, Esther layered her bed like lasagne – an insulating strata of thick and thin, rough and smooth.
    â€œThis rare species is a ‘Nana Leg’. It’s hard to capture!”
    He grappled with Esther’s bony foot.
    â€œGerroff! C’mon, Dor! It’s too bloody early.”
    â€˜Bloody’ was rare. It meant Esther was serious, that her indulgence of horseplay had slipped into irritation. Cook slept in his grandmother’s bed for warmth, when the seasonal chill made his unheated bedroom inhospitable. The electric blanket was an impossible luxury. It seemed companionable and organic – a life-giving, heat-radiating network of arterial cables woven into a skin-like membrane. Cook would always wait for it to warm to its highest setting before sliding under the covers for grateful and exquisite smothering. Back in his own bed, swaddled in double pyjamas, flat on his back, entombed beneath a heavy haul of blankets and overcoats, he played a nightly game of distraction – inhale deeply, pinch lips into tiny aperture, exhale, watch breath drift and swirl, repeat until asleep. Esther had finally rescued him last February, when she had leaned in for a morning forehead-kiss and noticed a sprinkle of frost in his eyebrows.
    Esther rose, stepped into her slippers and embarked on her early morning expedition to the outside toilet. With a jolt of excitement, Cook realised it was Saturday. He sprung out of bed, scurried across the landing into his room, opened the corner closet and dragged out a large, thin slab of plywood – rough on one side, smooth on the other. His Uncle Russell had ‘borrowed’ the wood from a college workshop and he had helped Cook cover the smooth side with a green felt Subbuteo football pitch. But as he laid it onto the floor, Cook saw that the wood had warped and the pitch markings were now stretched taut across an alarming hump, with its arc peaking at the half-way line. He abandoned the pitch, retrieved a tatty Enid Blyton hardback from the closet and ran back to his grandmother’s room, huddling back in with the baking underlay. Esther kept a torch under her side of the bed for nocturnal toilet trips, and Cook often used it to read, curled tight and safe in a den of blankets at the centre of the bed. He carved out a narrow tunnel of fabric to use as an air-hole and scanned the torch beam over the back cover of
The Adventures Of Mr Pink-Whistle.
    Mr Pink-Whistle is not like ordinary people. He’s half a brownie and half a person, and he can make himself invisible whenever he wants.
    Cook found this idea intensely exciting and resolved to achieve something similar as soon as he was old enough. He had mentioned this to Esther and been met with a gruff rebuttal.
    â€œThat’s only make believe, Dor. And why would you want to make yourself invisible, anyway?”
    â€œBecause when you’re invisible,” insisted Cook, “it means that no-one can see you and when no-one can see you, they can’t hurt you, but you can hurt them if you really have to.”
    â€œYeah, but they could
hear
you.”
    â€œNot if you’re really quiet. You could wear socks.”
    The front door clanged shut. There were murmurs down in the parlour, then raised, excited voices in the sitting room, then the noise of someone running up the stairs. Cook spread himself flat under the covers. Maybe no-one would notice he was there if he was perfectly still.
    â€œDorian, darling?”
    It was his mother’s sing-song voice. She saw him so infrequently, she could never seem to calibrate her mode of address with