McGillivray was a gentle man, but he too began to breathe, he took the clippers, and shore a path through his subject’s hair. He shore, and shore. Till there Clay was. Exposed.

‘That suit?’ McGillivray asked.

‘Thank you,’ she said.

So meek.

Then they went home. They crunched over the asphalt. They were that heavy, both of them.

As they went down the hill towards the turn where the milko’s cart had plunged over, Mrs Skerritt said:

‘There Clay a person is sometimes driven to things in defence of what we know and love I would not of done this otherwise if not to protect you from yourself because love you will suffer in life if you start talking queer remember it doesn’t pay to be different and no one is different without they have something wrong with them.’

Clay touched his prickly hair.

‘Let me remind you,’ she said, ’that your mum loves you that is why.’

But Clay could no longer believe in love, and the kids bashed him up worse than ever, because his no-hair made him a sort of different different.

‘Wot was you in for?’ the kids asked, and did windmills on his stubble. ‘Old Broad Arrer!’ they shouted, and punched.

Actually Clay grew up narrow. He was all knuckle, all wrist. He had those drawn-out arms. He had a greenish skin from living under too many plants. He was long. And his eyes over-flowed at dusk, merged with the street lights, and the oil patches on lapping water.

‘Are you lonely, Clay?’ Mrs Skerritt asked.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Why?’

‘I thought perhaps you was lonely you should get out and meet other young people of your own age you should get to know nice girls otherwise it is not normal.’

Then she drew in her chin, and waited.

But Clay stroked his prickly hair. For he went to Mr McGillivray’s every so often since it was ordained. When his voice broke the others no longer bashed him up, having problems of their own. The blackheads came, the pimples and moustaches.

Sometimes Mrs Skerritt would cry, sitting on the rotten veranda overlooking the little bay in which cats so often drowned.

‘Oh dear Clay,’ she cried, ‘I am your mother and have a responsibility a double one since Dadda went I will ask Mr Stutchbury but cannot rely totally do you know what you want to do?’

Clay said: ‘No.’

‘Oh dear,’ she moaned worse than ever, ‘how did I deserve a silent boy who loves what I would like to know himself perhaps himself.’

In fact Clay did not know what he loved. He would have liked to think it was his mother, though it could have been Dadda. So he would try to remember, but it was only cold yellow skin, and the smell of sick sheets. When he had been forced to approach his father, lying Incurable in the bed, his heart could have tumbled down out of the belfry of his body.