The day after my father vanished we had a dance. They told us to take off our clothes and put them in a pile and then we never saw them again. They played folk music over the speakers and told us to dance to it. The singer's voice was strangled and crackly. Soon they had us dancing in a circle.

Faster and faster we were goaded, until we outran the rhythm of the music and were no longer dancing. Several of us linked hands. This was fun. When they tapped you on the shoulder, however, you had to leave the dancefloor. Nobody I knew was tapped on the shoulder. That was mostly older people.

They stopped the dance in the middle of the next song, when even I was feeling searing pains in my legs. Then we packed up and went back to our barracks and found our new clothes waiting for us. When I put them on, I too began to smell of someone else. My brother and I fought over who had to wear the single pair of damp socks they had provided for the two of us. I won. He wore them.

I thought I saw my father again the following morning whilst at work. I was on my knees scrubbing the latrine when he came in and sat down above me. I could not see his face, but the trousers that gathered around his ankles were definitely my father's. By the time I had climbed out, however, they and their wearer had vanished again.

I was determined to see him again, if only to determine why he no longer saw us. I next saw him late the following night. The last of the work crews were coming in and they always woke me up. I had the bottom bunk. We had fought about that too and I had lost. This meant I only ever saw legs. This meant I only saw his trousers.

I knew I ought not to, but I crept out of bed and followed him. I didn't know where he was going. I had never been where he took me. The people in their beds were awake but they said nothing. Their faces were fearful. I couldn't tell whether some were shaking their heads at me or just trembling, but I felt safe because I was getting closer and closer to my father. They shut the lights down in stages, so that I knew darkness was coming before it reached me. The last thing I did before the blackness swallowed me whole was fix into my mind the bunk my father was climbing into. It was the bottom bunk, seven stalls from me, on the left. I began to feel my way along the bedposts.

When I reached the seventh, I had no qualms about shaking the occupant awake because I knew it was my father. Except it wasn't. I could not see his face but it was not his voice. It was a rough, older voice. And my father would never have pushed me or grabbed my arm like that. I cried out.

The barracks were never silent. Even in the middle of the night I could wake up and hear people rustling or shuffling in their beds, or maybe someone softly crying. I heard the rapid trickling of their heavy, approaching boots before I saw the dancing beams of their flashlights.

In the darkness I just froze. A whisper rose up and passed through the barracks, but I did not hear what was said. And then the flashlights were upon me and I was blinded. They grabbed me and pushed me and pulled me. They also grabbed the man who had used to be my father. When I could see once more, and the flashlights settled upon his face, I could see that he didn't even look remotely like my father. Before they took him away, they let him pull up his trousers. They were matte grey and had a single corduroy ridge down the front of each leg.

I told them where my bunk was and one of them took me back to it. My brother pretended to be asleep. When all was dark and silent again, I felt soft wool against my cheek. I reached up and grabbed it. I squeezed it in my hands and felt along its length. It was a scarf.

"It's papa's," my brother whispered. "Keep it to yourself."

I didn't wear the scarf for some time. I just hid it where no-one else could find it instead. When winter came, however, I was cold, so I wore it everyday. I never saw that man wearing my father's trousers again, but I did see them on someone else. Only after I had been wearing the scarf a few days did I realise it was mine now, just as the trousers were those stranger's.

NOTES:
This was written over two dates, several months apart. The first draft was about twice as long, written in late 2001 and included a sexually perverted SS dentist as a character. The second draft - in which that superfluous middle was completely excised, leaving only the beginning and ending pretty much intact - was written for an optional creative writing class at UEA in early 2002 held by prose-poet extroadinaire, Bernadine Evaristo. She made me read it out loud in the second class.