At the beginning of my third week in Janet’s flat, I come home to find Tom watching TV with a new friend. The new friend is a little fat child with a boil near his nose and a boy-band fringe that only serves to accentuate, or perhaps even poke fun at, his almost startling unattractiveness. ‘You know the kind of faces I’m usually found on?’ the fringe seems to be saying. ‘Well, have a look at this one!’ Tom’s friends don’t look like this. They look handsome and cool. Cool is very important to Tom; fat and boils (and fluffy brown-and-white sweaters) are usually of even less interest to him than they are to anyone else.
‘Hello,’ I say brightly. ‘Who’s this?’
The new friend looks at me, and then looks around the room, head wobbling, to try to locate the stranger in our midst. Heartbreakingly, given his other disadvantages, he doesn’t appear to be very bright; even after having ascertained that there is no one else with us, he declines to answer my question, presumably on the assumption that he would get it wrong.
‘Christopher,’ mumbles Tom.
‘Hello, Christopher.’
‘Hello.’
‘Are you staying for tea?’
He stares at me again. Nope. He’s not going to risk getting caught out on that one.
‘She’s asking you if you’re staying for tea,’ shouts Tom.
I am suddenly stricken with remorse and embarrassment. ‘Is Christopher deaf?’
‘No,’ says Tom contemptuously. ‘Just thick.’
Christopher turns his head to look at Tom, and then pushes him in the chest, feebly. Tom looks at me and shakes his head in what I can only interpret as disbelief.
‘Where’s your father?’
‘In GoodNews’s room.’
‘Molly?’
‘Upstairs. She’s got a friend round, too.’
Molly is in her room with what appears to be the eight-year-old female equivalent of Christopher. Molly’s new friend is tiny, grey-skinned, bespectacled and unambiguously malodorous—Molly’s bedroom has never smelt like this before. The air in the room is a witch’s brew of farts, body odour and socks.
‘Hello. I’m Hope.’ Hope. My God. The almost supernatural inappropriateness of Hope’s name is an awful warning to all parents everywhere. ‘I’ve come to play with Molly. We’re playing cards. It’s my turn.’ She places a card carefully on a pile.
‘The three of diamonds. It’s your turn now, Molly.’ Molly places a card on the pile. ‘The five of clubs.’ Hope is as loquacious as Christopher is silent. She describes everything that she does. And everything she sees. And she has an apparent fear of compound sentences. So she sounds like Janet, from ‘Janet and John’.
‘What are you playing?’
‘Snap. This is our third game. Nobody’s won yet.’
‘No. Well, you see…’ I begin to explain the fatal flaw in their approach and equipment, and then think better of it.
‘Can I come round tomorrow?’ Hope asks.
I look at Molly for signs of reluctance or active distaste, but her face is a mask of diplomacy.
‘We’ll see,’ I say.
‘I don’t mind,’ Molly says quickly. ‘Really.’
It’s a strange thing for a little girl to say about the prospect of a playdate with her new best friend, but I let it pass.
‘Are you staying for tea, Hope?’
‘I don’t mind that, either,’ Molly says. ‘She can if she wants. Honestly. It would be good for me.’
This last phrase, cheerily and sincerely delivered, tells me everything I need to know about our guests.
As chance would have it, it is my turn to cook; David and GoodNews stay up in the bedroom, plotting. Christopher and Hope stay for tea, which is eaten in almost complete silence, apart from the occasional snatch of main-clause commentary from Hope—‘I love pizza!’ ‘My mum drinks tea!’ ‘I like this plate!’ As Christopher seems only to be able to breathe through his mouth, his eating is a somewhat alarming cacophony of splutters, grunts and squelches which Tom regards with utter disdain. People talk about a face that only a mother could love, but Christopher’s entire being would surely stretch maternal ties beyond the point of elasticity: I have never met a less lovable child, although admittedly Hope, whose peculiar personal aroma has not been dissipated by her proximity to food or other people, runs him close.
Christopher pushes his plate away from him. ‘Finished.’
‘Would you like some more? There’s another slice.’
‘No. Didn’t like it.’
‘I did,’ says Tom, who has never once expressed approval for anything I have ever cooked, presumably because he has never hitherto been presented with an opportunity to make such approval sound aggressive. Christopher turns his head to look for the source of the remark, but once he has located it, cannot think of anything to say in reply.
‘I like pizza,’ says Hope, for the second time. Tom could normally be relied upon to leap upon that kind of repetition and rip the repeater to shreds, but he seems to have given up: he merely rolls his eyes.
‘Your telly’s too small,’ says Christopher. ‘And it dunt go very loud. When that thing blew up it sounded rubbish.’
‘Why didn’t you just ask for it to be turned up?’ Tom says. Again, Christopher turns his head creakily, like some prototype robot, to study his friend; again, no response is forthcoming. In forty-five minutes Christopher has made me question my commitment to comprehensive education; suddenly I suspect that stupidity is contagious, and this boy should be thrown out of the house immediately.
‘Where do you live, Christopher?’ I ask him, in an attempt to find a conversational topic to which he might be able to make a contribution.
‘Suffolk Rise,’ he says, in exactly the same pugnaciously defensive rising tone—which other children use for the phrase ‘No I never’.
‘And do you like it there?’ Molly asks. Another child might be suspected of satirizing the social situation, but Molly, I fear, is simply Trying Her Best.
‘All right. Better than here. Here’s a dump.’
It’s Tom’s timing that is so revealing. He counts to ten, maybe even twenty or thirty, and while he is counting he examines Christopher as if he were a chess problem, or a particularly complicated patient history. Then he stands up and punches Christopher squarely and calmly on the boil, which, on closer examination, turns out to have burst and spilled its dayglo yellow contents all over its former owner’s cheek.
‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he says sadly as he walks out, anticipating the first stage of his punishment before it has even been delivered. ‘But you must understand a bit.’
‘We’re doing guilt,’ David says after Christopher and Hope have gone home. (Christopher’s mother, a large, pleasant and perhaps understandably disappointed woman, does not seem particularly surprised to learn that her son has been punched, and perhaps as a consequence does not seem particularly interested in my long and detailed outline of the sanctions we intend to take.)
‘What does that mean?’
‘We’re all guilty, right?’ GoodNews chips in enthusiastically.
‘So you’ve always led me to understand.’
‘Oh, no, I’m not talking about how we’re all guilty because we’re members of an unfeeling society. Even though we are, of course.’
‘Of course. I wouldn’t for a moment suggest otherwise.’
‘No, I’m talking about individual guilt. We’ve all done something we feel guilty about. The lies we’ve told. The, you know, the affairs we’ve had. The hurts we’ve caused. So, David and I have been talking to the kids about it, trying to get a feel of where their own particular guilt lies, and then kind of encouraging them to reverse it.’