Sunstroke and Other Stories by Tessa Hadley Page A

the children were watching television: he was drinking whisky, and erupted with raucous contempt when Penny said she didn’t want that horrible thing in her home. He picked the gun up and held it to Penny’s head while she struggled away from him and told him not to be so silly.
    —Don’t be such a bloody idiot, Keith, Caro said.
    —Shut it, sister-bitch, he said in a fake cockney accent, swinging round, squinting his eyes, pretending to take aim at her across the room. Presumably without its bits the gun wasn’t dangerous, but they couldn’t be sure. They hurried the protesting children upstairs improbably early, bathed them with shaking hands, singing and playing games so as not to frighten them, staring at one another in mute communication of their predicament.
    —Put the kids in the car and drive to my place, Carosaid, wrapping a towel around her wriggling wet niece, kissing the dark curls which were just like Keith’s.
    —Wait and see, said Penny, —if it gets any worse.
    In the end Keith had not been able to put the gun back together, and had fallen asleep in front of the television: Penny hid the ammunition in her Tampax box before she went to bed. She had been right not to overreact: Keith wasn’t really the kind of man who fired guns and shot people, he was the kind who liked the glamour of the idea of doing it.
    Caro could remember going to see Keith’s film at the arts centre in Cardiff – not at the premiere, she hadn’t wanted to see him feted and basking in it, and had made her excuses, but in the week after – and it had made her so angry that she had wanted to stand up in the cinema and explain to all those admiring people in the audience how unforgivably he used real things that mattered and milked them to make them touching, and how in truth whenever he was home on the estate that he made so much of in the film he was bored and longing to get away to talk with his film-making friends. Actually the audience probably weren’t really all that admiring, the film had got mixed reviews. She had seen it again recently when the arts centre did a Welsh film season, and had thought about it differently: only twenty years on it seemed innocent and archaic, and its stern establishing shots of pithead and winding gear were a nostalgic evocation of a lost landscape. The one he did afterwards about the miners’ strike was his best, she thought: it was the bleakest most unsentimental account she ever saw of the whole business, capturing its honour and its errors both together; the ensemble work was very funny and complex (apart from the leads he had used non-professional actors, mostly ex-miners and their wives). His career had neither failed nor taken off, since then: there always seemed to be work, but it was alwaysprecarious (it was a good job Lynne made money with her photography).
    In the end Penny made friends with some of the women from the estate she met in the school playground, and got involved with the tenants’ association, and had her third baby in Prince Charles Hospital in Merthyr, and probably looked back now on her time on the estate with some affection. She grew very close, too, to Keith’s parents in Cwmbach: she saw more of his father in his last illness than Keith did, she really seemed to love the reticent, neat old man, who had been an electrician at the Phurnacite plant and in his retirement pottered about his DIY tasks in their immaculate big post-war council house, putting a heated towel rail in the bathroom, making a patio for the garden. She stayed good friends with his mother and his sister even after she and Keith were separated.
    When Penny eventually decided that he and she should go their different ways (she moved out when he tried to move his latest girlfriend, an actress with a drug habit and a dog, into the house with them), she did the teacher training she had put off for so long, and met her present partner, a biologist working in conservation who was everything