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season’s come to darkest Worcestershire!’ I agreed it was chucking it down, and left with her quick. In case the other patients worked out why I was there. Down the corridor we went, past the signpost full of words like PAEDIATRICS and ULTRASCANS . (No ultranscan’d read my brain. I’d beat it by remembering every satellite in the solar system.) ‘February’s so gloomy in this part of the world,’ said Mrs de Roo, ‘don’t you think? It’s not so much a month as a twenty-eight-day-long Monday morning. You leave home in the dark and go home in the dark. On wet days like these, it’s like living in a cave, behind a waterfall.’
    I told Mrs de Roo how I’d heard Eskimo kids spend time under artificial sun-lamps to stop them getting scurvy, ’cause at the North Pole winter lasts for most of the year. I suggested Mrs de Roo should think about getting a sunbed.
    Mrs de Roo answered, ‘I shall think on.’
    We passed a room where a howling baby’d just had an injection. In the next room a freckly girl Julia’s age sat in a wheelchair. One of her legs wasn’t there. She’d probably love to have my stammer if she could have her leg back, and I wondered if being happy’s about other people’s misery. That cuts both ways, mind. People’ll look at me after tomorrow morning and think, Well, my life may be a swamp of shit but at least I’m not in Jason Taylor’s shoes. At least I can talk.
     
    February’s Hangman’s favourite month. Come summer he gets dozy and hibernates through to autumn, and I can speak a bit better. In fact after my first run of visits to Mrs de Roo five years ago, by the time my hayfever began everyone thought my stammer was cured. But come November Hangman wakes up again, sort of like John Barleycorn in reverse. By January he’s his old self again, so back I come to Mrs de Roo. This year Hangman’s worse than ever. Aunt Alice stayed with us two weeks ago and one night I was crossing the landing and I heard her say to Mum, ‘ Honestly , Helena, when are you going to do something about his stutter ? It’s social suicide! I never know whether to finish the sentence for him or just leave the poor boy dangling on the end of his rope.’ (Eavesdropping’s sort of thrilling ’cause you learn what people really think, but eavesdropping makes you miserable for exactly the same reason.) After Aunt Alice’d gone back to Richmond, Mum sat me down and said it mightn’t do any harm to visit Mrs de Roo again. I said okay, ’cause actually I’d wanted to but I hadn’t asked ’cause I was ashamed, and ’cause mentioning my stammer makes it realer.
     
    Mrs de Roo’s office smells of Nescafé. She drinks Nescafé Gold Blend non-stop. There’re two ratty sofas, one yolky rug, a dragon’s-egg paperweight, a Fisher-Price toy multi-storey car park and a giant Zulu mask from South Africa. Mrs de Roo was born in South Africa but one day she was told by the government to leave the country in twenty-four hours or she’d be thrown into prison. Not ’cause she’d done anything wrong, but because they do that in South Africa if you don’t agree coloured people should be kept herded off in mud-and-straw huts in big reservations with no schools, no hospitals and no jobs. Julia says the police in South Africa don’t always bother with prisons, and that often they throw you off a tall building and say you tried to escape. Mrs de Roo and her husband (who’s an Indian brain surgeon) escaped to Rhodesia in a jeep but had to leave everything they owned behind. The government took the lot. (The Malvern Gazetteer interviewed her, that’s how I know most of this.) South Africa’s summer is our winter so their February is lovely and hot. Mrs de Roo’s still got a slightly funny accent. Her ‘yes’ is a ‘yis’ and her ‘get’ is a ‘git’.
    ‘So, Jason,’ she began today. ‘How are things?’
    Most people only want a ‘Fine, thanks’ when they ask a kid that, but Mrs de Roo actually means it.