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By Root 838 0

now in the breaks, just so that I might watch him in the playground. There was so little that was distinguishable about him, except the fact that he wore glasses, which somehow seemed to make him even more hidden, as if his spectacles were a mask. One day we became a little braver, and we managed to be out in the playground before him and positioned ourselves in his particular corner. He came walking towards it, quietly, inconspicuously as always, changing his course now and then to get out of the way of the more noisy and conspicuous boys, who didn’t seem to notice him at all, and then as he was almost at the corner he finally saw us. What horror in his little face, what panic. He stood still, stunned for a moment, and then turned around quickly and went back inside the school. I saw him closer that time than I had ever seen him before and I noticed then that one of the lenses of his glasses was gummed up. And then I realised there was something conspicuous about him after all, the boy had a severe squint. One of his eyes saw only Irva, the other only me. In comparison to us, of course, his squint was an amateur in the great circus of conspicuousness, it was a shy and modest and retiring thing. We approached him the next day in the playground, I even spoke to him: ‘My sister and I live in Veber Street. We weren’t born there, we were born in Saint Mirgarita of Antioch Street, in the hospital that’s there. Our father’s dead. He died on Napoleon Street. Where do you live?’

When he still refused to speak to us even after our generous words, we followed him all the way to his home which was on Verres Square (way out of our usual route, and I have to admit that twice we became utterly lost as we retraced our way towards home and when I asked people the way they said that they didn’t know and that they’d never heard of Veber Street or even of Pilias Street, so in the end, and with Irva frightened and in tears, fearing we’d never find home again, we had to walk all the way to Napoleon Street, which was of course a street that people had heard of, and from there we were able to find home, but always, always it was I, and not Irva, who asked the questions). We followed him for about a week. And I’m sure he noticed us following him, because he’d break into a run just as we were reaching Verres Square and when we turned the corner into the square he wasn’t there at all. We knew he lived somewhere on the square but we couldn’t be sure which house, we didn’t know his exact address. Ah, but we knew someone who would. So the next Saturday morning we went on a trip to Napoleon Street to find that extraordinary man who knew where everybody lived, who was known to us simply as Grandfather. We gave Grandfather Girin’s surname and told him that he lived in Verres Square and from that Grandfather was able to work out the precise location of where the elusive fellow was hiding from us: no. 12. And then I said to Grandfather, ‘We wish to send him a present.’ ‘A Valentine?,’ he asked with a smile. ‘No Grandfather,’ Irva said in a panic, ‘It’s April, as you well know.’ We showed Grandfather the present. It was a plasticine model just the same as the one we had, of the Littsen Street school though without any scratches on it. Grandfather looked offended. ‘You’ve been modelling,’ he said, ‘and you didn’t tell me.’ (Grandfather always wanted us to ask his advice, he felt that it was impossible for us to model without it.) ‘I don’t recognise the model,’ he said, ‘What’s it of?’ But we knew he recognised it. Of course he did. I put it in a cardboard box and put scrunched-up newspaper around it for protection. As I was sealing it up Irva taped a needle on the inside of the box’s lid so that that would be the first thing the addressee (a word we learnt from Grandfather) would see and underneath the needle I wrote ‘© ALVA AND IRVA DAPPS’. ‘Why the needle?,’ Grandfather asked us. When I told him it was to make pock marks on the school, he only went, ‘Hem,’ and looked disapproving. And so it was sent. And on Tuesday morning it had arrived, but not in time