Going Home. Harriet Evans

like him, but he wasn’t a bad boy. I was rather fond of him,’ said Mum. ‘He had terrible stress headaches, even when he was little. Poor mite.’

      Tom put his elbows on the table, made a pyramid with his fingers and cleared his throat. ‘Oh, honestly, Aunt Suzy, you’re so naïve.’ He then told my mother that all of the prescriptions she’d written for Jimmy Gooch at primary school had been sold in the playground for hard cash by the same Jimmy Gooch: he had claimed, to a circle of goggle-eyed ten-year-olds, that they were ‘hard drugs what made your bits feel funny’.

      My normally cheery mother, who had made a pet of Jimmy Gooch, was devastated. She sat in silence for the rest of the evening, which alarmed all of us, even Tom, then went to bed early, muttering that she needed to get up early and check her records.