‘Were you talking to that Timothy?’ a boy said, addressing Francis.
‘He just came up to me,’ Francis said. ‘He said he was in love with a girl called Venus and then he ran off again.’
‘He calls me that,’ a girl said. Francis wouldn’t have recognized her: she seemed ordinary, not an object of devotion. ‘I wish he’d stop, it’s stupid, I hate him, he’s mental.’
‘Where do you come from?’ one of the girls said. ‘You’re in our class.’
She rhymed it with ‘lass’, but it wasn’t unfriendly, her tone. ‘I come from London,’ Francis said.
‘She’s thick, that Barker,’ another girl said. ‘You’ve got put in the worst class you could be put in. They put people there for punishment, she’s that boring.’
‘“When I was in Africa,”’ a boy said. ‘She should talk to that Timothy, he’s always on about snakes when he’s not calling you Venus.’
‘I’m called Andrea, really,’ the girl said. ‘I don’t know where he got Venus from. I’m going to tell my mum if he carries on.’
‘She’s always saying that,’ the boy said. He raised his voice into a dull shriek. ‘“When I was in Africa.”’
‘Aye,’ they chorused appreciatively. It was a party trick of this boy’s, you could see, the shrieking imitation of, who?, Miss Barker’s voice and her usual sentence. ‘“When I was in Africa.” What’s London like?’
‘It’s all right,’ Francis said. ‘We lived outside London, really.’
‘I’ve been to London,’ a girl said.
‘You never,’ one of the boys said. ‘You’re a right liar, you.’
The consensus of the group was that it was obviously a lie, to claim to have been to London. But Francis was surprised: he thought everyone, always, had been to London. It wasn’t anything to lie about.
‘You don’t want to sit with that Michael,’ a boy said.
‘He smells a bit,’ Francis said.
They all laughed; one of the boys clutched his sides, and pretended to roll about on the ground. ‘You’re a right one,’ a girl said. ‘But it’s true, he’s got a right pong. Miss Barker, she always puts people next to him who can’t refuse, it’s like a punishment, and you have to sit next to him for an hour. She doesn’t mind people who pong. It comes of living in Africa. “When I was in Africa—”’
‘Well, you’ve only had the miserable torment of sitting next to Smelly Michael for an hour,’ a sensible-looking boy, in neatly pressed trousers and a short-sleeved grey shirt with a sleeveless home-knitted sweater, said. ‘You can come and sit next to me, if you like. I’ve not got anyone sitting next to me because Neil Thwaite’s in hospital. He’s got something wrong with his blood.’
‘I heard he’s going to die,’ a girl said.
‘No, he’s not,’ the boy said. ‘I saw him in the hospital, he’s bored. But he’s in hospital a while, so you can sit next to me.’
‘She told me to sit next to that smelly boy,’ Francis said. ‘At my school in London, you had to sit where you were told and then you stayed there all year. I didn’t mind. I was next to Robert who was my friend. But won’t I get in trouble if I move?’
‘No, no,’ they shouted.
‘Anyway,’ the boy said, ‘if she asks, you say, “I can’t sit next to that Michael because I’m allergic to the smell he puts out, it makes me sick and I can’t answer questions and my hand wobbles when I write.” That Michael, his family, they live in a maisonette, they’re right poor. You can sit where you like, so come and sit next to me.’
‘He didn’t know who the prime minister was,’ a girl said. ‘I’m Sally, and that’s Paul, and that’s the other Paul, and—’
‘He was going to be kept back a year because he doesn’t know anything,’ Paul – Francis’s new neighbour – said. ‘But his mum came down and she shouted and they let him go up anyway, but he knows nowt.’
‘He knows—’
‘He knows nowt,’ the other Paul, the impressionist, the playground raconteur said. ‘Don’t you know what “nowt” means?’
Soon, that vocabulary, like the shared and tender vocabulary of friendship, was clarified, and Francis was tenderly aware that if he had walked out of that classroom with near-tears of fright and isolation, he had walked back in surrounded by six immediate friends, and his near-tears were from a different source. They were the last back in, and Francis felt that a wave of shy surprise and interest went through the rest of the class, admiring and envying the bold step that that mixed and sophisticated group had taken in befriending the boy from London without waiting to see what the general view was. Francis felt full of pride at the step he had taken here.
The game began every day at half twelve, once they’d finished their doled-out lunch, bolted it down. Sometimes, too, at half ten and quickly at the quarter-past-two playtime as well, till the luxurious expanse of the game they could play at dinnertime to the point of stitches in their sides seemed almost improbable next to the swift trailer of its morning, its afternoon versions. Francis was absorbed here, both anonymous and accepted, whether a blank member of a playtime cadre, or a person with conspicuous friends, but in either case protected.
At break – that was what they called playtime, whether a more serious or just a more Sheffield word – the game began again, returning to the beginning and each time, somehow, getting a little bit further. It was as if with each attempt they had got a little closer to its essential heart, to some prize it concealed, like a team of adventurers taking turns to whittle at some initially unpromising and rude block. Inside there was some prize.
That was it, the allure of the game. Though there was not and could not be any real prize, it seemed far more like a formal, famous game, the sort you played under gracious adult supervision at a celebration, a birthday party, and yet infinitely more violent and exciting. It did not seem like a playground enterprise of shamefaced silliness, of rhymes and stomping that no adult could be allowed to hear, but like a brilliant expansive entertainment with printed rules, played in your best clothes, but with the dazzling promise of unconstrained fury, too. It was a game that should have been put away for best occasions, and was played, irresistibly, every day.
But outside the game and its allotted hours, his social standing was obscure. He felt himself good at the game through something barely commented on by others or previously noticed by him: his height and swiftness. He had grown up into this scale and, in London, the moment to observe any change or the disproportion had never presented itself. But to arrive here in such a state, taller than anyone else in the class and faster too, as the game proved, made him obvious to them and to himself. In the playground, and to his immediately acquired circle, that was something fine, dangerous, admired; outside it, it seemed to make him only conspicuous.
One day, during PE, Miss Barker set them a race in the playground, a relay race between four teams. Each runner was to touch a marked-out point at the middle of each straight border; Miss Barker marked them, and those were the rules. The first runners from each team set off, and ran along the border of the whole playground. It seemed that they had not understood, and when it came to Francis’s turn, third in his team, he set off directly, running only between points, carving a small diamond like the points in a