In the morning, Sarah sat Anna down for a heart to heart.  She wanted to know everything that her daughter had endured at the hands of the wicked fiend and his accomplices.  The nasty experience shared might lesson its intensity and power. Anna was glad that at last she felt safe enough to open up to her mother about the true horror that she and David silently but stoically sustained.  Mother and daughter sat cuddling and crying together, both happy to be close and loving, gaining comfort and consolation from each other.  Anna felt the need to re-live the horror and pass it on to her mother to deal with and Sarah wanted so desperately to take the hurt and pain straight off the shoulders of her children and to transfer that negative destructive energy into her own body, so that it was no longer their problem, but hers.  And in the doing alleviate her unbearable negative mental pain - her GUILT.  It was the lesser of two evils.  It was easier to be troubled herself rather than to watch her children in agony.  But to be the cause of their pain was deeply disturbing and unendurable.  She was the adult, the one who was supposed to protect them, ensure their sweet childhood innocence and take all their worries away.  But she’d failed spectacularly, just because she’d been weak and had put a callous abusive man before the safety and welfare of her own little dependents.  Well it would never happen again; of that there was no doubt.

            Sarah prayed from the depths of her very being that David and Anna would not suffer any permanent damage as a result of their harrowing childhood experience and felt that the only way to ease their sorrow, even if only slightly, was to strive for some form of justice.  Greg would have to be punished.

            As if reading her mind, Anna declared:

            “I feel a bit better now that you know everything; but I’ve still got a bad feeling in my tummy.  It is hard to describe but it bothers me and it won’t go away and all the time I know it is there.”

            “The only thing that’ll get rid of that awful thing inside you is revenge.  You need to hurt Greg.  You need to get him back for everything he’s done to you.   That’s a healthy feeling.  Maybe you’ll get that chance.  Keep spying from upstairs and if you see him prowling around, send him a couple of arrows.  In the meantime keep practising.  Also, think about this, you are getting older, bigger and stronger.  He too is getting old – too old, and one day he’ll be too weak and shrunken to fight anyone.  He’ll always be looking over his shoulder WORRYING about if and when you kids’ll take revenge, because he’s bound to expect it.  One thing’s for sure in life, what goes around comes around and evil bastards like him do get their comeuppance at some point along life’s road.”

The police duly informed her that they’d pass her complaint on to their Domestic Violence section whereupon a D/V counsellor would contact her in due course.

The next month or so passed without undue alarm.  The family still had to put up with the now familiar nightly spasmodic irritations such as: stones splattering the windows, slow knocking on the front room window and front door, shuffling noises on the drive, the dull ring of the flue being walloped, the gate rattling and nasty notes threatening death, shoved through the letterbox.  In the mornings they’d routinely find evidence of the aforenight’s trespassers such as: blobs of paint on the wall, rubbish in the yard, the disappearance of the bins, patches on the wall where the pebble-cash had been scraped off and messages of, “You are dead,” sellotaped to the windows and scrawled on the walls.  The kids kept a semi-regular night watch from their lookout positions upstairs but could detect no life below.  Greg had become quite the expert on camouflage and concealment. Sarah was convinced their tormentor had been lurking in next-door’s shadows.

Despite the minor disturbances, Sarah was beginning to feel more relaxed and fairly secure in the knowledge that nothing major was going to happen to any of them.  Greg was just trying to ruffle a few feathers - nothing too serious.  She had started to sleep more soundly again, except for one particular night when Jessie simply refused to settle down and decided she wanted to ‘party’ all night.  After a tiring few hours of appeasement: nursing, winding, rocking…. Sarah surrendered and duly obeyed her baby daughter’s demands to be allowed to snuggle up to her in the big bed and suckle on a nipple until she dozed.  But after a couple of hours, Sarah awoke suddenly in a blind panic, not because Greg was stood at the foot of her bed aiming a gun at her head, but because she’d committed the cardinal sin of allowing herself to drop off with her baby at her side.  Jess was only meant to spend a few minutes in her bed.  Sarah was mortified.  What if the bedclothes had smothered Jessica?  What if she’d accidentally rolled on top of her tiny child?  What if?  What if?  Oh God.  Sarah made up her mind that baby Jessica could bawl her head off all night in her cot in future if she so insisted but she was not, from now on; repeat NOT…. EVER, going to be allowed to climb into Sarah’s bed.  It was far too risky.

Another week rolled on in relative peace with only a handful of negligible incidences of annoyance until late one night when David and Anna could not believe the opportunity handed to them - practically gift-wrapped.  There in full view, below their very noses, stood Greg sticking obscene notes to the kitchen window.  With tiger-like prowess and piercing concentration, the kids quickly and stealthily eased open the window and positioned themselves for the kill.  Then, with impeccable timing and impressive precision, they fired simultaneously; Anna catapulting a large stone that caught the abhorrent intruder square on the side of his balding head and David launching a razor sharp arrow from his home-made bow that landed perfectly on the prey, penetrating his large fleshy hand so deep that the victim released an unholy cascade of unrelenting filth.  Swearing profusely, Greg made a slow getaway, struggling with the obscene arrow sticking out of his skin and nursing a sore spot on the side of his egomaniacal head.  The kids whooped and clapped with joyous abandonment.  Their mother scurried upstairs to witness the tail end of an interloper sent packing and the three of them scrambled outside, the kids armed with their sports gat guns and Sarah clutching a torch, to inspect the evidence.  And there it was.  With smug satisfaction they found a trail of Greg’s bright red, copious BLOOD.  It was a macabre sight, but one to be proud of.  This was bittersweet revenge.  It was an indescribably fantastic feeling - of Christmases all rolled into one.

            “Is the bad feeling in your tummies still bothering you?”  Sarah asked.  Both children whooped an ecstatic “NO” in joyous abandonment.  Then noticing, “You fucking bitch bag – you’re dead,” and, “You are all in for it,” scrawled on to the window, the three vigilantes grinned at each other, slapped each other on the back and asked, “Who is?”