Free Chalcot Crescent by Fay Weldon Page B

back in the days of my wealth, and use there as a base for a while, and Ethan and Mervyn will fuss over him, and do his laundry, and plug in his BlackBerry while the power is on, make a million phone calls, hop over to Muswell Hill to see his mum and be polite to Victor who we must not forget is his stepdad and then move on. For some reason one never quite likes to ask where to.
    When I jokingly said on the phone this morning that I expected a call from the bailiffs any minute, he came round at once. Barely had he arrived than the joke ceased to be a joke and came true. We were lunching on our National Meat Loaf and the last of the tomatoes from my window boxes, when came the banging on the door and the world turned serious.
    I did not of course write the previous section about life in Venetia’s lovely home exactly as you read it above. I admit I have worked on it. I have had the time to do so. I wrote it rather roughly on the stairs, in first draft, while my leg cramped and my neck twinged, so I was happy enough to stop and stretch when Amos finally came loping down the stairs with my blanket, preceded by a waft of skunk.

Amos’ Genetic Inheritance
    Amos’ natural father, donor of the genes, was unknown – other than very briefly to his mother. It had been on my daughter Venetia’s first night at Camberwell Art School, at the Freshers’ ball, and the candlelight too flickery for recognition of who exactly was so pleasuring her, and when the tutors became involved whoever it was never came forward. It is not unusual for virgins to get pregnant on their first sexual encounter. Sheer surprise makes any waiting egg drop from the Fallopian tube, and bingo!
    Amos is Venetia’s eldest son and has over the years offered more problems than her other two boys, Ethan and Mervyn. But then the genes are different. Amos, brilliant at school, a good-looking charmer, a leader of men, worshipped by the two younger boys – and then suddenly a druggie drop-out at sixteen, and a professional drug dealer by twenty-two. ‘That’s what happens if boys don’t have a proper father,’ or so everyone said. I don’t think it made the slightest difference. He had Victor as a stepfather from the age of seven and a perfectly steady, even boring life, until he decided to hot it up via the drug trade. At twenty-three he was in prison – shopped by his associates for having got too big for his boots, muscling in where the big boys – serious boys, the ones who murdered and tortured – thought they had every right to be, shocked back into sense by the company he found himself obliged to keep. By twenty-four he had turned hislife around. It is dreadful having a family member in prison: there is no more innocent enjoyment to be had – it is the family’s sentence as well as the child’s – but inside he at least learned – as Victor put it – to appreciate his family, and give up his ghastly friends.
    Since then Amos has come and gone in our lives, polite – other than for his propensity to swear, which seems ineradicable – self-supporting, affectionate, charming, but always slightly enigmatic: no fixed address that one knew of, but always contactable by email or mobile. An activist, an environmentalist, an aid worker, employed by various NGOs abroad – though one by one, as the Crunch bit and global markets vanished, these dropped off the map and left the failed countries of the world to struggle on their own. Which by all accounts they are doing quite satisfactorily – rather better without us than with us – though the accounts are unreliable as ever. Whether an eyewitness blog emanates from a genuine blogger or a government source who is to say?
    Amos had no fixed address by his own doing, by the way: it was no wish of mine. Indeed, I had bought a rather mean little house at 11 Hunter’s Alley in King’s Cross primarily for Amos, but where Ethan and Mervyn now live, in benign young-man squalor. Amos occasionally turns up and