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By Root 2718 0

and she said: “I’ll put your breakfast in the oven then, son. I’ve got to be off myself now.” Which was true, there being this law for everybody not a child nor with child nor ill to go out rabbiting. My mum worked at one of the Statemarts, as they called them, filling up the shelves with tinned soup and beans and all that cal. So I slooshied her clank a plate in the gas-oven like and then she was putting her shoes on and then getting her coat from behind the door and then sighing again, then she said: “I’m off now, son.” But I let on to be back in sleepland and then I did doze off real horrorshow, and I had a queer and very real like sneety, dreaming for some reason of my droog Georgie. In this sneety he’d got like very much older and very sharp and hard and was govoreeting about discipline and obedience and how all the malchicks under his control had to jump hard at it and throw up the old salute like being in the army, and there was me in line like the rest saying yes sir and no sir, and the I viddied clear that Georgie had these stars on his pletchoes and he was like a general. And then he brought in old Dim with a whip, and Dim was a lot more starry and grey and had a few zoobies missing as you could see when he let out a smeck, viddying me, and then my droog Georgie said, pointing like at me: “That man has filth and cal all over his platties,” and it was true. Then I creeched: “Don’t hit, please don’t, brothers,” and started to run. And I was running in like circles and Dim was after me, smecking his gulliver off, cracking with the old whip, and each time I got a real horrorshow tolchock with this whip there was like a very loud electric bell ringringring, and this bell was like a sort of a pain too.

Then I woke up real skorry, my heart going bap bap bap, and of course there was really a bell going brrrrr, and it was our front-door bell. I let on that nobody was at home, but this brrrrr still ittied on, and then I heard a goloss shouting through the door: “Come on then, get out of it, I know you’re in bed.” I recognized the goloss right away. It was the goloss of P. R. Deltoid (a real gloopy nazz, that one) what they called my Post-Corrective Adviser, an overworked veck with hundreds on his books. I shouted right right right, in a goloss of like pain, and I got out of bed and attired myself, O my brothers, in a very lovely over-gown of like silk, with designs of like great cities all over this over-gown. Then I put my nogas into very comfy wooly toofles, combed my luscious glory, and was ready for P. R. Deltoid. When I opened up he came shambling in looking shagged, a battered old shlapa on his gulliver, his raincoat filthy. “Ah, Alex boy,” he said to me. “I met your mother, yes. She said something about a pain somewhere. Hence not at schol, yes.”

“A rather intolerable pain in the head, brother, sir,” I said in my gentleman’s goloss. “I think it should clear by this afternoon.”

“Or certainly by this evening, yes,” said P. R. Deltoid. “The evening is the great time, isn’t it, Alex boy? Sit,” he said, “sit, sit,” as though this was his domy and me his guest. And he sat in this starry rocking-chair of my dad’s and began rocking, as if that was all he had come for. I said: “A cup of the old chai, sir? Tea, I mean.”

“No time,” he said. And he rocked, giving me the old glint under frowning brows, as if with all the time in the world. “No time, yes,” he said, gloopy. So I put the kettle on. Then I said: “To what do I owe the extreme pleasure? Is anything

wrong, sir?”

“Wrong?” he said, very skorry and sly, sort of hunched looking at me but still rocking away. Then he caught sight of an advert in the gazetta, which was on the table - a lovely smecking young ptitsa with her groodies hanging out to advertise, my brothers, the Glories of the Jugoslav Beaches. Then, after sort of eating her up in two swallows, he said: “Why should you think in terms of there being anything wrong? Have you been doing something you shouldn’t, yes?”

“Just a manner of speech,” I said, “sir.”

“Well,” said P. R. Deltoid, “it’s just a manner of