Quiet Saturday mornings

Text 1: Living Like Burglars, by Abena Mensah

An original novel extract.

Saturday mornings in our flat were silent until noon. Mum worked nights at the sorting office, and she came home at six, when the milk float was still clinking down the road, and went straight to bed. So my brother Kofi and I learned to live like burglars. We poured cereal slowly so it would not rattle in the bowl. We watched cartoons with the subtitles on and the sound turned all the way down, laughing into our sleeves. When the phone rang, Kofi dived across the sofa and grabbed it before the second ring. ‘She’s sleeping,’ he whispered into it, sounding about forty years old. Once I dropped a saucepan lid and we both stood frozen in the kitchen, staring at the ceiling, listening for the creak of her bedroom door. It never came. She slept like a stone.

Explain why the children are so quiet on Saturday mornings.