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ordeal than normal, made worse by the fact that he increasingly couldn’t see much point. After all, you only got dirty again.
    He had pointed this out, and the fact that Lenny only washed about once a month ,and she had told him to be quiet, as she had used a scrubbing brush on his back, which had set his teeth on edge, and said that now his skin tingled as if it were alive. Lil laughed and squeezed his hand gently.
    His face had turned crimson when Lenny, Dick and Nigel saw him, an effect heightened by the white of his shirt. They had started taunting, calling him a drip, a pansy, a flower, and every other insult they could lay their tongues to, with a lady present, until Lil told them to shut up, and him , to ignore them.
    They had run off laughing, sticking two fingers up at Mrs O’Brien, who was cleaning her windows.
    Lil and Robert came back at two to find Bob still asleep, with dried vomit down his shirt and trousers. She’d done again a lot of thinking whilst in church, and was determined her only son would not end up like him.
     
    ***
     
    Robert was therefore soon sitting at the table, looking down at an open Bible, trying hard to ignore his father’s disgusting excesses.
    “David and Goliath,” his mother told him, “from the Book of Samuel in the Old Testament. I want you to read it and tell me what you learn, for it will have a bearing on your future life.”
    Robert sighed as he regarded the page, and yawned. His idea of fun was not sitting here reading this boring drivel, but being out there with his mates, teasing Big Molly, or stealing sweets from the grocer’s, MacPherson’s on Cross Street, not because they wanted sweets, but because Mr MacPherson himself would chase them.
    He smirked as saw in his mind’s eye that great red face in that mass of white beard, yelling threats as he chased them, unclipping his thick belt as he ran. He always seemed to get one.
    Then there was school.
    What greater fun was there than pushing the goody-goodies over in the puddle of piss that never seemed to drain away in the toilets, or stuffing Mr Myer’s cane up the stove pipe, as Dick had done, and watching him go berserk when…?
    “So, what can you tell me?”
    His mother was suddenly at his side, wiping her hands down an apron, and he jumped, taking a moment to gather his thoughts.
    “Well, he killed ’im with a stone from a sling.”
    He couldn’t believe that he’d actually waded through the words.
    Perhaps the vivid colour illustration in the upper left hand corner had helped, of a little pansy in what looked like a frock, standing before a giant. The pansy looked like one of the goody-goodies.
    “Yes,” Lil replied, as a series of grunts came from the corner of the room, “But what is the point of the tale?”
    “Er… dunno.”
    “Everything in the Bible has a point, even if it is not immediately obvious. I’ll tell you how I interpret it. Ithink it demonstrates that however small and insignificant you may feel, you can still overcome obstacles that seem like mountains. Look around you.”
    Robert complied wondering what was the point of looking around the same old room.
    “Horrible, isn’t it?” Lil asked him. “But with monumental effort and endeavour, you can do much better.”
    “What’s endeavour?”
    “Doing your best, trying to rise above, conquering. There are many other passages in the Bible, from which you can learn, even if you are not religious. That’s why I always call it the book of common sense.”
    Lil gave him another passage to read, this time about Samson and Delilah, saying that this would demonstrate that even out of something as rotten as their own existence, good could still come.
    She picked her newspaper and finally left him to it when there came a knock at the door. Lil nodded at Robert to open it.
    Certain it would be Sergeant Sharp, the only person left, after his mother, who Robert had any respect for, he hesitated.
    “Well, open it then!” she told