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ask people to sponsor him, would have raised a lot of money. For some years afterwards, he’d taken quite an interest in Chad, devouring everything the newspapers had to offer about that benighted land. Then gradually a feeling of
déjà vu
crept into his reading, as drought and famine and hardship wheeled past his eyes again and again. He took, first to scanning, then skipping. And somehow, before he even realized what was happening, he’d given up on Chad. Africa in general followed. Then the Middle East. Already the lights were going out all over Europe. And, were it not for the fact that news from America so often doubled as Entertainment, he would have given up on there as well.
    And in this, he admitted, he was his mother’s son. How often had he heard her, over the years, declaring, ‘I can’t be bothered with the ozone layer any more.’ (Or recycling. Or the teachers.) Secretly he’d sympathize, knowing that he, too, was halfway to hell in the handbasket of indifference, and, like her, soon the only things that he’d bestopping at as he flicked through the pages would be gossip and murders, scandals and divorces. In fact, she’d have wider interests than his own, because she kept up with interest rates and enjoyed the obituaries.
    And this, he thought, digging a lump of chewed slipper out from the small of his back to settle more comfortably with the Arts section she’d discarded, was why she still liked him to come, and why, when he was there, he only toyed with the idea of running her through with one of his father’s old chisels. There was a balance between them. His visits to her passed in a fine mix of mutual condescension and respect. She had a fathomless contempt for his naïvety and weakness. And he could only despise her lifelong failure to put her talents to good use. But he respected her untiring courage and impregnable cynicism, and she was continually impressed by his flashes of mutiny. As a child, Colin had never dared even to try to stick up for himself. But one day, as she was working herself into a froth about one of his adolescent shortcomings, he’d somehow come out with a crosspatch remark and brought her up short. It was a revelation. From that day on, at least with her, he was a different person. Unlike with the spells, where regular failure had tended to augment rather than diminish his sense of her supremacy, his caustic moments were good for both his spirits and hers, as now when, handing back the slipper, he said, ‘I see you’re still favouring Flossie as your personal designer.’
    â€˜They might be old, these slippers, but they’re comfortable.’
    â€˜Perhaps it’ll catch on, this natty notion of keeping them on your feet with elastic bands.’
    â€˜Perhaps you should mind your own business.’ But it was in a companionable silence that she read on, making it clear from a few tart utterances about ‘the disadvantaged’ that, by her, the expression was taken to be entirely synonymous with ‘wastrels’, and, just as he was thinking of making quietly for the door to put the kettle on at last, raising her head to make a series of observations about child prostitution in Salford that left him in no doubt that, in her book, the war on this evil could most usefully begin with the speedy and permanent dispatch of its victims. Cunningly without giving him a moment in which he might get the suggestion in ahead, she rounded off this peroration with a plaintive, ‘And I don’t know
when
I’m going to be offered a cup of tea . . .’
    He put down his unread paper. ‘Biscuits or teacakes? I bought both.’
    â€˜I’m sorry. I’ve simply no appetite.’
    Notwithstanding his pasta ballast, he took the downstairs run at speed, determined not to have to hear how long it was since she’d forced nourishment between her lips. As he rushed by the letter rack, he had the