A Little Stranger by Candia McWilliam Page B

either, I could hear from the pigeon-sounds from his room. He was singing and talking. He had not yet become, as he did later in the day, some sort of vehicle.
    ‘Good morning,’ he said, without looking up. ‘Tell me again about the scissor-man. Like last night.’
    ‘It’s me, John.’ I particularly disliked the scissor-man, the bladed creature who jetés across a page in Struwwelpeter , and whose vocation it is to chop off the thumbs of children who suck them. I read it in German first, so perhaps I’m not being fair; maybe I inherited something of my father’s antipathy. But even in the unGothic English script, I didn’t like it.
    The most unpleasant thing, to me, are the severed stumps where the thumbs have been, which spout blood like the roses of watering cans. But we didn’t have a copy of the book in the house.
    ‘Hello, Mummy. Did you suck your thumb when you were young?’
    ‘Yes, and I’ve still got two thumbs. The scissor-man isn’t true, you know.’
    ‘It is so.’
    ‘He is not.’
    ‘So.’
    ‘Not.’
    We began one of those padded tickling matches which end up on the floor. I was wrapped in my shrinking dressing-gown like a Sumo after a bout.
    We were lying on the floor, out of breath. John said, ‘Pick on someone your own size. That’s what Margaret said.’
    ‘Isn’t Margaret bigger than you?’ I asked with sleepy pedantry.
    ‘She said it to the man.’
    ‘What man?’ I was a bit confused. John knew the names of most of the people he saw.
    But he heard my interest and didn’t like the draught it let in from the grown-up world. Like his father, he had a way of cutting out when a subject had stopped being convenient. I resisted it sometimes, but that morning I thought he had as much right to be lazy, to have a time off thinking, as I had. When I had thoughts, I did not much like them.
     
    Later, when I was dressed, I went up to the nursery to fetch John to say goodbye to his father.
    ‘Margaret, are you very against the sucking of thumbs?’ I was unnecessarily nervous, may even have spoonerised my question.
    She looked up with surprise from John’s nape, at which she was doing up some Fair Isle buttons that were cleft like toffee-coloured beetles, and replied, ‘It’s nothing a spot of aloes can’t cure.’ She enunciated very clearly and patiently.
    ‘Aren’t they awfully bitter?’
    ‘They are known as bitter aloes.’
    ‘That’s undeniable.’
    John raised his eyebrows at me. This adult gesture on his unlined face was funny, and he saw that I was doting on him. I felt quite warm with it. How could I ask questions about strange men, scissor-limbed or not, in front of him?

Chapter 14
    He wore his cars well, my husband. In the country they were green or nicely combat-muddied milk-white, of a square and accommodating cut. For town they were sharp and slim, though long enough for evening glamour. A car once bought loses its value; among the many ways we notionally lost money, this was one of the swiftest. One of the town cars was black and the other the hardly different blue which is darker than black. It is the blue of a king’s greatcoat when he inspects his maritime forces, themselves a sea of merely navy blue.
    Today he was driving himself, in the blue car. Having shut his papers in the boot, he allowed John in on his knee to say goodbye. It seemed strange, within that tank of pearly leather, tortoiseshell-walnut veneer and needled numbers, to see so much naked flesh, four unshelled limbs sticking out of shorts and a shirt, and a face without reserve, smiling beneath his father’s face.
    My husband lowered the window to allow me to look through air, not glass, at his son and himself. I stood away from the car so that I might bend, seeing as I did so my wide and layered reflection, like a pile of tyres, in the sleek side of the car. Thin as the line of red alcohol in an Arctic thermometer, the stripe down the side of the car sliced my inflated reflection at the