hair stuck down against his pink forehead. He called out, ‘Venus, Venus, my love, my love,’ and ran away towards the girls. At this they scattered, giving little screams, running off in twos and threes, severally. Francis was alone again; he stared at the concrete in furious amazement. He was alone again.
Francis concentrated very hard on walking round the complete edge of the playground. He pretended that the narrow stone edging to the asphalt square was a tightrope, suspended hundreds of feet above the ground, and he balanced on it carefully, placing one foot in front of another. That was a game you could play on your own and, after a few moments, he forgot almost everything. With arms spread out like wings, he really was walking a tightrope, forgetting whether it was a good game or just something to make yourself look occupied. He was three-quarters of the way round the square when he hit a flight of steps, interrupting its clear progress. On it there was a group of boys and girls mixed up together. He dropped his arms.
‘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
