Jane Gordon - My Fair Man

Jimmy himself appeared in one of the pictures. It must have been taken when he was about twelve years old and he looked, surrounded by his rough and rowdy siblings, as if he were a changeling. Which of course she supposed he was. The family group was standing in the front garden of a run-down, grey, pebble-dashed house surrounded by inner-city litter – car tyres, bits of old metal, abandoned toys and disintegrating black rubbish bags. To the right of the picture it was possible to see the next-door house, which was blackened by fire and boarded up. It was the kind of place that Hattie had seen in newsreels and documentaries on urban decay but had never glimpsed at first-hand. One or two of her friends lived in small ‘worker’s’ cottages – two-up, two-down, in places like Wandsworth, where the outside privies had been turned into conservatories – but with her own privileged background she had no experience of the kind of deprivation Jimmy was showing her.

‘Do you miss them?’

‘The littleun. He’s nine now. I miss him a lot,’ he said.

‘Fourteen years younger than you?’

He thought for a moment, screwing up his eyes as if making a difficult calculation. ‘I suppose …’

‘How did you get to that doorway that night? Why did you leave your home and your family?’

He sighed and looked at her as if to say that the reasons were too plentiful and the story too long and painful to tell.

‘Me mam got a new man and there was no room. Wha aboot you, like? What aboot ye family?’ he said, clearly trying to deflect her from any further discussion of his own origins.

‘I have a family, a sister. You might have heard of my sister, Arabella.’

‘Is she famous, like?’ he said in tones of awe, offering her another cigarette which she quickly took.

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