Old age takes the veneer off people. The nice get nicer and the mean get meaner. That’s one of Flick’s sayings and she mutters it when I’m in one of my moods. She has the right to say it, given she’s been too bloody nice by half for the past eighty years. I’m not so comfortable with it. I don’t think I’ve ever been nice. I have kindness in me and then sometimes I have an impulse to do something absurdly generous. But I’d be the first to admit that there’s a mean streak in me. I know how to catch a person off guard. I can see somebody’s frail supports and weak joists and I always seem to know just where to insert the lever. I was only in my twenties back in ’67 and still hadn’t worked out how to use that particular skill in a way that turned the world in my favour. I just knew that more than a handful of people had referred to me as a nasty piece of work, and the nuns at school felt they had cause to bless themselves more often in my company than in anybody else’s. Wicked. That was the word I heard most. Wicked.

I was musing on wickedness as I tramped up the Featherstone road. Wondering whether or not I was bad all the way through. At school, when I suggested that the Good Book was so full of punishment and violence that it could as easily have been written by Satan, I was thrashed so hard that the scars are still visible on the backs of my legs whenever I flush pink.

I was their troubled case; their difficult charge. Me, with my big brain and my endless questions and my refusal to be fed their regurgitated scraps of wisdom like I was some sort of feeble baby bird. They were pleased to see me depart for the grammar school and they, in turn, rejoiced at my leaving for university. I had never had friends. No champions or trusted confidantes. So I never asked the questions aloud. I still chewed on them like gum. Still mashed them into a tasteless blob with the molars in the back of my head. What was I for? What did I matter? Why had I been made? Christ, but I was a tedious specimen back then.