See ya, don’t go away if I’m not there. Be back as soon as I can and I’ll bring us both a yummy pizza and all the trimmings for afternoon tea!

Love from Angie

P.S. Have you got rid of that DAGGY shirt yet?!!! Don’t go putting it in the charity bin, either, you’ll have all the derros chasing you round town trying to hit you over the head with wine bottles.

P.P.S. Hey, we could go up the market one day and buy you some fantastic tee shirts, saw one there with the Phantom on it and his eyes light up behind his mask.

P.P.P.S. Hope this letter doesn’t land on Thelma’s head by mistake if she’s hanging up the washing! Couldn’t find a stone to weigh it down with, so I want this elephant earring back!

Chapter 7

His mother came for her promised visit and stayed the weekend. There were many secretive, murmured conferences between her and Thelma in the front room, with Seymour banished to the kitchen to make endless pots of tea. In between the conferences in which he had no part, his mother kept insisting how wonderful it would be when they were back together at the end of the month, how the new situation at Carrucan would make up for these four trying, solitary weeks. Seymour made agreeable responses, but kept his mind perfectly blank, not allowing any expectations to take seed. He knew just how stark the gap between imagination and reality could be.

She took him out on Saturday, but it wasn’t an enjoyable excursion. Even the start of it was charged with drama. First she opened the front door a crack and peered through, then went dramatically to the gate to check that his father wasn’t lurking about in Victoria Road. And when they travelled into the city, most of the time was spent in buying new school clothes. The only emotion Seymour felt when he tried on the new uniform was a detached curiosity about how much wear he’d actually get out of it before they moved on to some other place.

Uniforms, he thought dully, were really only suitable for kids who lived predictable ordinary lives. In nice predictable ordinary suburbs where nothing ever altered except someone building a new garage, someone else having an extra room added to their house. That’s what his mother wanted, to live in a place like that. She’d keep such a house so trim, too, as neat as a little cuckoo clock. Suddenly he noticed how she glanced at certain things on display in the store—curtain material, cushions—and in those glances he thought he detected the same degree of yearning he’d experienced himself over objects. It was…sad.