Half the World Away - [8]

‘They’ll keep some people on,’ I say, ‘surely, even if the merger goes ahead. The project will still need finishing.’

‘I don’t know. Andy’s not giving anyone straight answers.’ Andy is his boss, the project manager. ‘He probably doesn’t know himself,’ he adds, still anxious to be fair, even though he might be getting shafted. ‘It’s an awful time to be looking for jobs.’

‘It might not come to that. We’ll manage,’ I say.

‘How? On what you earn? On bloody benefits?’

‘We’ll have to,’ I say. ‘People do.’ I’m being optimistic. I’ve seen families at school go through the mill, plunged into free school dinners, shocked at the reality of life on the welfare system. And others who, despite all their efforts, have never been able to escape from it, now shamed and hounded by the rhetoric of blaming the poor for poverty. But I’m determined to remain positive, ignore the way my stomach dropped when he announced the risk of redundancy.

‘Besides,’ I say, ‘you’ll get some money.’

‘Yes,’ Nick says, ‘twenty grand.’

‘Breathing space. Then you could look for-’

He holds up his hands, he doesn’t need any more blithe reassurances.

A week later I get a call from Sunita, Isaac’s teacher. Can I come to the classroom?

She sounds strained, or am I imagining it?

The rest of the class are playing out. Isaac is there and his best friend Sebastian. Sebastian is in tears.

‘What’s the matter?’ I say.

‘I’m afraid Isaac bit Sebastian,’ Sunita says.

‘I didn’t,’ Isaac says.

Crouching down so I’m level with the two boys, I say to Isaac, ‘What happened?’

His face is tight, a scowl scored deep on his brow. ‘He’s stupid,’ Isaac says.

‘Calling people names is naughty. What happened, Sebastian?’ I say.

Sebastian’s lower lip is quivering and his eyes well up again. He talks in hiccups. ‘He bit me.’ He shows me the evidence, tooth-marks on his forearm.

‘You need to say sorry,’ I tell Isaac, ‘and you’ll have to go to time-out.’

Isaac looks murderous. If he could bite me too, he would.

‘He said Benji was a pig,’ Isaac says.

‘I did not,’ Sebastian retorts. ‘I said he was big. You didn’t listen.’

‘It doesn’t matter what he said,’ Sunita tells Isaac. ‘You do not hurt other people. If someone is mean to you, you tell a teacher.’

Thank God it was Sebastian, I think. His mum, Freya, won’t make a big deal of it. I hope the boys’ friendship will last. Isaac needs all the friends he can get.

‘Say sorry,’ I say.

Isaacs spits out a ‘sorry’.

‘Isaac,’ Sunita says, ‘that doesn’t sound like you mean it.’

It takes two more attempts but we get a halfway decent apology and Isaac spends the rest of the morning in time-out.

There’s a darkness in Isaac I don’t understand. It’s not just the biting – that’s one of the ways he expresses it. While the world is Lori’s oyster and Finn’s happy home, for Isaac it often seems to be a place of treachery and shadows. Glass half empty and witches under the bed. Where does it come from?

Lori in the Ori-ent

Food: the good, the bad and the… What is that?

Posted on 12 February 2014 by Lori

Sichuan province, and Chengdu in particular, is known for its spicy food. If you are lucky enough to stumble upon a waiter who has any English you might be able to negotiate a mild version of the day’s dish. For mild read fiery.

The cuisine comes in three levels of spiciness. Spiciness is a bit of a euphemism. We’re talking chilli at industrial concentrations. But also Sichuan peppers – little round peppercorns that are like culinary grenades, zapping the nerve endings and destroying all sensation in the mouth. Raised in Manchester, I am quite familiar with the delights of the curry house, and can scarf down a vindaloo with the best of them. I had no idea.

Here the meals are

1) hot

2) blazing hot

3) scorching.

It would be handy to have some sort of rating system on the menus, sticks of dynamite, maybe, or little bonfires. Until that is introduced (don’t hold your breath) the dining-out experience can best be described as a minefield. One advantage of this custom of drenching everything in fiery, sweat-inducing chilli sauce is that while I am trying to tell if my tongue has melted or there’s any enamel left on my teeth I am less anxious about what lurks within the sauce. Whether it is lamb or pork or chicken or, to be more precise, a bit of the animal I have ever allowed past my lips before. Armpits, eyeballs, testicles, toes? Or any of those inside bits I prefer not to think about? Nothing is wasted.

There is no bread. There are no chips, no mash or jacket potatoes. There is always rice or noodles – as long as you ask for it. I have never been so hungry in my life. You’d think three honey buns would fill up a girl with an appetite but the effect lasts for about ten minutes.

On Saturday I was out with friends (you can see us in the last picture). Bradley, Dawn and Shona. Bradley has better Mandarin than me (hah! everyone has better Mandarin than me), and by the end of our meal, with a little help from an app on his phone, he’d worked out that among our dishes of baby lamb and big pig we had also enjoyed sea slug.