‘Come on,’ my mum said, walking on ahead with the extra meat the butcher gave because he liked her. He always did and she moved off because she didn’t want me to see her counting up the money. She waited for me two shops up and put the meat in the wicker trolley. ‘Mum,’ I said, ‘can I have my treat?’ There were only two shops I wanted to go in, Micklejohn’s, the blue toy shop on the other side of the road, and Sainsbury’s because there was sawdust all over the floor and big mirrors up on the walls, you could see everyone from different angles. But she said we were only buying vegetables from the stalls and to look at what was being dropped on the floor because all those greens got eaten up by the rats, which was what made their coats so glossy and black and I should eat up my greens. She stopped to look at onions and carrots, but moved on while I was crouched down trying to look underneath the stall to see what was going on. The man standing in the road behind came round through the gap between the stalls and jingled his money, saying, ‘She’s a looker!’ I stood up and saw he was wearing a leather pouch on a belt in front and talking to the old man with white hair on the pavement looking after the fruit stall. The old man pulled him round by the elbow to look at me, ‘That’s hers.’ It took me a moment to realise he was connecting me to my mum, and the man with the pouch let his mouth fall open and looked down the stalls at her, ‘Fuckin’ black man’s mattress ...’ I looked at both their faces, it was me standing there but they were ignoring me, one with his hands in his pouch looking at my mum and the other one turned back to his fruit stall. It was like I was a wooden post. They were treating me like I wasn’t real. They were treating me the way I treated the blind boy, as though I wasn’t a proper person. I didn’t know what else to do, ‘I’m a real boy,’ I said. They both turned to look at me, but it didn’t make any difference, they looked at each other and shook their heads and turned away.