In the passenger seat on the way back home after a Swedish film - After The Wedding. In the dark, Bob Dylan playing. My father sits beside me, turns up the bass. We get to that point, on top of that hill, and I can see for miles. Those pinpricks of yellow light make me think every time. What's down there, who are those people in those houses, what is happening to them? We don't talk. We sit, he drives, I think, forehead pressed against the cold, hard glass. However uncomfortable, this is a position I don't move from until we have pulled up outside our red front door. (Frog sticker in the window.) I don't move because I like how it feels to be like this. I like how, if someone were watching, they would think - that's someone who is wrapped up in her own world, and wouldn't it be something to know more about that world?

My father drives, and there is no need to say anything. A few years ago, I remember this lack of words upsetting me, but now it is a good thing. I would snap at him if he said anything. I wonder what he is thinking. Perhaps how good it feels to be driving this fast in the dark on a long, straight road. Cruising, he sometimes calls it. In the car there is more of an affinity.

Back at home, it changes. It is impossible to carry that car mood back inside. Especially when my mother's friend is there, the one with the many earrings and the hippy clothes, the one I find beautiful but my father hates. He closes the kitchen door as he cooks, so he doesn't have to look at her.

I don't like this, he mutters when my sister phones asking to be picked up from somewhere outside (in the rain and with a boy!) at eleven. Wine? he asks her pointedly once she's back and we're all around the table. Vodka, perhaps? It is snide and mean and no-one is happy anymore. My mother's friend has left. My brother shouts 'shut the hell up' when no-one listens to how he will live in California when he is older, because he wants to be a pro-skater and California has a lot of marble. Apparently. My father interrupts once, twice, again and again and then everyone is speaking over each other and shouting.

It is always give and take a little bit. Sometimes the 'take' makes me dream of being a hermit, living in some remote place with music and books and darjeeling tea and nobody else, but if I didn't take the 'take' with a pinch of salt, I wouldn't be given the 'give', the car moments with Bob Dylan and darkness and pinpricks of light from the top of a hill.