Something I hadn’t thought about for years. I must have been six or seven. My mum was dropping me round to his house for a play date.
I liked playing at Kurt’s — his mum always had a big tin with those Club biscuits with the golf ball on, which we never had. We always had banana milkshake too, whizzed up in a special machine, something my mum never made. Better still, the flower beds of his garden were studded with little plastic soldiers everywhere, as if massing for a vast infantry battle. In among the gladioli and the lavender, Nazi stormtroopers happily rubbed shoulders with Action Men and Roman centurions.
If his dad was there, we’d talk about types of engine or the behaviour of viruses or the origins of various words, stuff like that. His dad always prompted him to answer questions in these chats, as if they’d been rehearsing his general knowledge, but there was an edge to his reaction if Kurt got one wrong. (Once in class our teacher asked if anyone knew what “famine” was. I’ll never forget Kurt’s answer. He said: “An abject lack of adequate nutrition”. He must have been eight. The teacher said, “Have you swallowed a dictionary, young man?” And Kurt laughed and said, in a way that couldn’t help sounding smug: “I think you’d find that would be pretty indigestible.”)
We went up the path. I ran on ahead. His mum was at the door. I made as if to go in, but she blocked me, not physically or anything, just with her forcefield. Her expression was a dark cloud. She looked all puffy and out of breath.
I would say now that she looked like someone who’d been up crying all night.
Behind her, sitting on the bottom stair, was her “little man”, as she always called him, knobby knees, shorts and a Ninja Turtle T-shirt. (He was always Donatello, in our games.) His face was in shadow, but I knew something was wrong. On any other morning, he’d have been out the front door and excitedly bombarding me with facts and figures before I’d even got my coat off.
My mum quickly got into a huddle with his mum, the way mums did, murmuring among themselves of unknowable things. She put her hand on his mum’s arm, and left it there for some time. Then suddenly she swung her basket and said to me: “Come on, darling. Let’s get home. Today’s not a great day for visiting Kurt. His dad’s had to go away for work again, and everyone’s a bit sad.”
I looked past Mrs Seaton to Kurt. He didn’t move, didn’t respond when my mum said we were going. I don’t think I had ever seen him silent before. Slowly and sadly, I let my mum turn me around and drag me by the hand back up the garden path. The door closed, inscrutably, almost at once. It was orange, with a strip of frosted glass down the middle, through which I dimly saw shapes and shadows moving.
At the end of the path I turned round. A movement caught my eye, and I looked up. For a second, I saw the face of Kurt’s dad, peeping furtively through the milky gauze of the bathroom net curtains.
