People say that in the weeks before ‘what happened in Doncaster’ the octogenarian Curtis Thumb and his impressionable grandson Andrew (age 13) often took to the dank cellar of the terraced house in which they lived alone, without support from the Social Services. In those weeks Grandad Curtis would clutch his many cans of Heineken down to the bottom of the stairs (the big cans with the ‘25% Extra’ written boldly in red) and Andrew would be left alone in the kitchen to incompetently spool out the long orange extension cord from the socket by the cooker, over the cracking blue and grey lino that covered the floor and right down the stone steps to the junk-filled cellar (dank, as previously mentioned) so they could have some privacy, light, the music and the camcorder, just as they needed and desired. Whatever happened to the biological parents in this narrative no one has so far succeeded (or really even bothered) to find out, but this type of family comprising child plus random grandparent is common in Endland (sic) and frankly no one cares. (I.E. Just so long as you’re not actually selling smack or secrets or systematically murdering kids in your cellar, people will let you get on with it and roll on institutional live and let die).

If you looked around their house with its broken toilet, uncleaned bath, piles of unwashed crockery, sink of growing mildew and floors all patterned with their covering of rank disgusting clothes, more lager cans and olden magazines, it was easy to see why the Social gave up on them, they had targets to meet after all. The neighbours said that Curtis and his grandson were strange. They said that ‘lately’ (whatever that meant) they had got stranger. There were noises all hours of the night. There were unpredictable smells and evidence of what 1 case worker called ‘a sideways not normal thought process.’ There was a pile of rubbish in the front garden, a pile that grew high and then higher with the passing of the weeks and if it spilled and spewed and obstructed the path or the pavement, then it didn’t seem like the aging Curtis or his grandson Andrew could give a flying fuck. DOWN WITH YOU said Andrew’s Wall-Mart/DECATHALON t-shirt and it was sure to those reading it he was probably talking to them.

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