They listened. There was something special about the men’s loud voices and guns and boxes of ammunition that fascinated them, that made them hide on the sofa to listen and watch more often than was perhaps good for them. Dad’s cheeks had been so red, which they weren’t normally, only sometimes at home, when he had been drinking straight from the bottle and sneaked up behind Mum and pressed himself against her bum. Of course, they had no idea that Lydia noticed what they were up to and she didn’t let on. He’d always drink just a bit more and Mum would have a taste too, her mouth to the bottle and then they’d go into the small bedroom, chase everyone out and close the door.

Lydia liked to see her dad’s flushed cheeks. At home or with the other men, polishing the weapons in front of them all. He seemed more alive then; he didn’t look as old as normal, after all he was twenty-nine.

She peeped cautiously through the window.

Her stomach hurt even more when the bus started and then hurtled along roads full of potholes, and every time one of the front wheels bumped over an especially rough bit, her seat shook and something sharp jabbed her insides, somewhere under her ribcage.

So this was what the big world really looked like. The unexplored world, the whole stretch of land between Klaipeda and Vilnius. She had never been allowed to go before; it was expensive, and the important thing was that Mum went, as she had done every second Sunday for almost a year, with food and the money she had somehow managed to get from somewhere. It was hard to tell how Dad really was, what he would say. He probably missed Mum more than her.

On the day with the hand grenade, he hadn’t even seen her.

Leaning forward out of the sofa, she had rooted around in the boxes of plastic explosives and grenades, shushing Vladi with her finger against her lips; he had to be quiet because the men didn’t want to be disturbed. She had known by then how all these things worked, the explosives, the grenades and the small handguns. She always watched when they practised, and if she had to, she could handle the weapons at least as well as some of the men.