Sickness benefit? Wangle it somehow? Through Rick or Gayle maybe?

Loan from Jude $15 (pay back out of dole cheque)

Sell leather jacket to Recycle Shop? How much?

In handbag $7.57 (!!!!!!!!!!!)

HARD TIMES!!!!!!!!!!!!

Chapter 4

‘I’ll be able to tell your mum when she comes on Friday you’ve been a good obedient boy and given no trouble,’ Thelma said. ‘Or hardly any.’

He knew that meant the small scorch mark on the kitchen table where he’d absent-mindedly put down the hot saucepan last night. Thelma had been referring to it obliquely ever since.

‘With all this extra time you’ve got for study, you might even be ahead of the others in your class when you go back to school,’ she said. ‘If you look at it like that, it makes up for not being able to roam about on your own for a week or so. Not that that’s important. We all have our crosses to bear in this world, every one of us. You can’t start too early in life to learn what’s in store and people make a big mistake thinking everything should be fun. Now, Seymour, today you can make do with a couple of boiled eggs for lunch. Put bicarb soda in that little aluminium saucepan to soak afterwards, so it doesn’t discolour, and I’ll be home by six.’

At last she was gone, clomping away down the street in her sensible shoes, and Seymour put the chain back on the door. He waited alone in the quiet house, listening to the mantel clock ticking imperiously from the front room and the heat crackling on the roof. At ten-thirty precisely he crossed the alley and went in through Angie’s gate.

No one answered his knock on the door. He’d thought himself immune to disappointment, and wasn’t prepared for the sense of loss that assailed him now, of something promised and denied. He knocked several times more, quiet, tentative, despairing little knocks, and finally tried the handle, to discover that Angie must have gone out and left the door unlocked. It swung lightly inwards, catching against her striped handbag lying on the floor. There was one pink satin shoe tossed carelessly on a chair with plastic bangles on top.

‘Angie? Angela, you still here?’ he called in a voice as insubstantial as the movement of a leaf. He hesitated on the step. Women never went out anywhere without their handbags, he thought, hopes rising. Angela might have just gone into the main house for a minute, to see her landlady about something. Surely she couldn’t have forgotten that invitation of yesterday!