Writing, mostly.

“He wrote poetry.”

“No, I mean what did he do during the war? Did he fight or tell other men to fight? Or did he stay at home like, you know, one of those conscious people. My grandad says…”

“I know what you meant, James.”

James liked that she called him by his proper name. Everybody else called him Jimmy. Made him sound like a baby. May didn’t. May said “James” like he was some kind of king. Or a gentleman. She treated him like a grown-up. Like a friend.

Ever since the old lady first smiled at him, James saw her as a friend. Asking how his morning had been as he hurried home she had quickly become a part of his lunchtime adventure. She would offer him drinks, a biscuit and, eventually, a seat at the little table in her back room. The room where dainty tea cups and freshly baked cake fought for space against bottles of sterilised milk and jars of buttons.

That’s why he could ask her anything. Once he’d asked what nipples were for. His friends were so wrong and he told them so, relaying her perhaps slightly too detailed explanation. But they didn’t seem to care, preferring the myths they had created to the repeated wisdom of an old lady.

James cared, though. He liked the details. Which was why he wanted to know what her brother had done during the war.

“That was what he did, James. He wrote poetry. Lots of men did. And those who didn’t wrote letters or sketched or sang or told stories.”

The little boy eyed the sponge cake, lying uncut beside the tarnished knife.

“But they couldn’t all have done that. Some of them must have killed people.”

“Yes. They killed people. But that wasn’t what they did, James. That was what they had to do. People have to do all sorts of things but they don’t see those things as what they do. My brother wrote poetry. You can read it if you like. One day.”

Giving his talk in class wasn’t going to be easy. He couldn’t very well stand up in front of his friends and the girls and tell them that his friend’s brother went to war and wrote poetry. Nobody would be interested in that. Even if, truth be known, he found it interesting. It would be like the nipple thing all over again.

He decided to try something else.

“So what do you do?”

“Ah James,” she said, placing one hand on the table between them, “I kill people.”

Dedicated to two aunts, and the little boy they killed by dying.