Will and I studied the board. It had ornate and slightly scary Edwardian etchings of a smiling sun, a frowning moon and some ghostly silhouettes. The letters of the alphabet were spelled out, and there were also the words ‘yes’, ‘no’ and ‘goodbye’, for the spirits to use when in a hurry.
I looked at this group of teenagers. Four girls, at a guess aged around seventeen, in pixie boots and legwarmers. They set up the board and argued about which one of them Jim Morrison’s ghost had been talking about when he said she was ‘well hot’. Will Lee and I hovered around them, poked our heads over their shoulders, and generally tried to get their attention.
‘Leave us alone,’ said one of the girls, after they turned the lights off and put a single candle in the middle of the kitchen table. ‘We need to concentrate for our séance to work.’
As we left them to it, they put all of their hands together on the plastic heart-shaped object designed to move around the board.
‘Voices from the Other Side, talk to us.’
‘It’s moving,’ one of them shrieked.
On the other side of the door, meanwhile, we did our best to listen in. They could hear us sniggering.
‘Go away.’
We stuck our heads round the door. ‘What’s happening? Found any dead people?’
‘We’ve contacted a Victorian man called Bartholomew,’ our babysitter replied. ‘He had two wives and six children, although three of them died in childbirth and one grew up to become a whore in Islington.’
‘What’s a whore?’ asked Will.
The girls refused to tell us, and for that reason we decided to play a trick on them. Nobody had got round to fixing the milk hatch that had broken off its hinges, so its little wooden door was simply jammed into position on the outside wall of the kitchen but not actually held on by anything. This would allow us our revenge. We went round to the side of the house and tried to listen to the girls’ conversation with Bartholomew. It was impossible; only when they giggled could we hear them. So we waited until they weren’t giggling. That would mean they were absorbed in a tense moment of Ouija board mysticism.
‘OK,’ I whispered to Will, ‘one, two, three.’
We pushed the door of the milk hatch as hard as we could. We heard chilling, terrified screams. We ran round to see what had happened. The milk hatch had landed right in the centre of the Ouija board, smashing the plastic heart. The girls were standing up, away from the table, with widened eyes and their hands over their mouths. Pasty-faced suburban girls, they were even paler than usual.
‘I’m never doing it again.’
‘We’re dealing with forces we don’t understand.’
‘We just asked Bartholomew a question,’ said Judy, ‘and that thing flew onto the table.’
‘What was the question?’ said Will.
The girls shuddered in unison. ‘“How did you die?”’
Without Nev to help me with homework, school became one form of torture after another. If it wasn’t games – freezing on the brittle mud of a football field as a defender after being picked last, apart from Bobby Sultanpur who had one leg shorter than the other – it was science, with Mr Mott threatening to whack us with his paddle stick if we did so much as set fire to the annoying kid’s blazer with a Bunsen burner. Music lessons were a waste of time altogether. Our teacher, Mr Stuckey, had a vague connection with Andrew Lloyd Webber, which meant that our school provided the boys for the choir in the West End production of Evita. About half of my class was in the choir. They got five pounds a night, they went up to Soho on a coach once or twice a week, and they had Mr Stuckey’s full attention. He sat around a piano and trained the chosen ones while the Evita rejects had to sit in a cold, grey back room and amuse themselves in whatever ways unsupervised twelve-year-old boys could.
Art was appalling, but not because of the art teacher. He was a man with red hair and a beard in a fisherman’s jumper who told us that Mrs Oates, our English teacher, who put on white lacy gloves before handling a piece of chalk and got emotional as she told us the word gay had been ruined forever, slept in the same bed as a cannon. It was years before we discovered her husband was Canon Oates, a high-ranking member of the clergy. Art was appalling because I couldn’t draw or paint. The concept of perspective eluded me. You had to have something in school to be good at, even if you were diabolical at everything else. I might have scraped through English with a bit of dignity if it hadn’t been for Mrs Oates and her horrific taste in literature. She considered A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K. Le Guin a masterpiece and dismissed The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, which I had read over an afternoon of uncontrollable laughter, as vulgar. And sooner or later it always came back to the Bible, surely the most boring book ever written. The only lesson that was vaguely bearable was French, and that was because Mr Gaff had a fascination with combustion engines which meant that once you got him on the subject he would spend the entire lesson talking about them rather than the clauses and declensions he was meant to be concentrating on. It felt like a minor victory.
Worst of all was the comment I got when another ink-blot-stained exam paper came back scrawled in angry red marker pen. ‘After your brother, you’re a bit of a disappointment. Aren’t you, Hodgkinson?’
If only those teachers could see the torments Tom put the rest of the family through. While Nev was still a silent and bedridden presence, Tom refused to wear the anorak Mum had bought him, even though the very air was soaked through. Fog and rain had turned the suburbs of London into a dark grey, mud-splattered pit of dirty concrete and squelching grass.
‘For a start it’s too big,’ said Tom, throwing the anorak to the ground. ‘Secondly, the zip doesn’t work. And thirdly, everyone will laugh at me. You haven’t been to school in thirty years. You don’t know what it’s like.’
‘It’s an anorak. Everyone else’s mums will have insisted they wear one,’ shouted Mum, picking it up off the floor and thrusting it back at Tom. ‘You don’t get picked on because of what you wear. You get picked on for not standing up for yourself.’
‘And I’m not going to stand here listening to you. You’re not sophisticated enough to know what it’s like to be a scholarship boy.’
A week after the birthday party, I came home from school with the intention of going straight out on my BMX and heading over to the woods, where there was a stream in dire need of being jumped over. Then I saw Nev, sitting by our kitchen table, nursing a cup of tea. Mum was next to him. He looked peaceful, serene and frail. It was the first time in two months I had seen him out of his pyjamas.
‘Hello, Sturchos,’ he said, his old familiar grin back in place. ‘How have you been?’
He looked older. Nev had always been a young dad, and young for his age – he was thirty-eight and he could pass for a decade less – but now he looked weathered, reduced. He was extremely thin, like a skeleton rattling about in jeans and a jumper, and the skin was stretched over his knuckles. His curly blonde hair was thin and neat; he must have had a haircut that afternoon. I told him I was fine except that on the day of my birthday the kids at school gave me the bumps – throwing you up in the air for as many times as match your age – and then, when the bell for the end of break went, they all ran off as the bumps hit twelve, leaving me to land on the ground with a thud.
‘I’m afraid the same thing happened to me,’ he said. ‘Boys can be terribly stupid. The most important thing is not to let it affect you too much. You can’t control the way other people behave, but you can control the way you respond to their behaviour.’
We chatted about how Nev had been feeling during his two months of serious sickness, as Mum looked at him in a way I hadn’t seen before. She wasn’t teasing and playful, as she had been with Nev when Tom and I were younger,