Emily looked up. Tiny coloured lights hung in the blackness, like Midget Gems suspended mid-rinse in a toddler’s open mouth. She was on her way to the bonfire party, at the big house at the end of the street in Brixton where she lived, at the invitation of the new owner whom she had never met. Emily should have been used to the fireworks at her age because there had always been fireworks on bonfire night, for as long as she could remember - the fireworks now as much a celebration of Diwali, the Hindu festival of light, and Halloween, the American festival of gore and dressing up, as Guy Fawkes night, when people in England remembered the day back in 1605 when a plot had been foiled which, had it been successful, would have blown up the Houses of Parliament, with King James I inside it. But tonight each explosion startled Emily slightly, as if it was the sound of a gunshot, danger. And the sizzling sausage smell of blackening flesh that hung in the autumn air made her think of her dog Jessie who had died the week before.
