Free Kindergarten by Peter Rushforth Page A

broad black lettering beneath the manufacturer’s name. “Humiliating, isn’t it?”
    “It’s no fun being a dwarf.”
    “I found a poem about you the other day. ‘A Considerable Speck,’ it was called.”
    “Oh yes. Robert Frost and I often went swinging on birches together, until he fell off and killed his parrot.”
    There was a long silence.
    Jo sat up in bed arranging the sheets about him, like a child ill in bed in the middle of the day.
    Corrie sat in the cane rocking-chair, pushing himself backwards and forwards. Jo’s clothes were neatly folded on the trunk at the bottom of his bed. The front of the thin sand-coloured jacket he had changed into when they got back from the churchyard was covered in metal badges: “I Am 2.” “Head Girl.” “Netball Captain.” The badge with Shakespeare’s head and “Will Power” on it was from when they had gone to see the Royal Shakespeare Company in London, during a short holiday the previous year.
    The painting Lilli had given to Jo, one of her illustrations for “The Six Swans,” hung above his bed. The wall around the painting was covered by large blown-up black-and-white photographs of family and friends which Jo had taken and developed. His own face, and the faces of Dad, Mum, Matthias, Lilli, Sal, his cousins Michael and Lincoln, Judith, Cato, and many others regarded Corrie from across the bed. He thought of Lilli’s dining-room, and the intense close-up examination of the faces of the many people in all the paintings. The baby’s face in the painting Lilli had given Jo was at the very front of the picture as it lay in its cradle beside its sleeping mother, and the evil Queen, her face hidden by a looped curtain at the other side of the room, was walking towards the baby, her hands just beginning to lift up from her side. There was a full-length photograph Jo had taken of him directly opposite. He was wearing the high-heeled boots he wore to make him look taller, and jeans, and his hands were thrust into the slanting pockets of the hooded zip-front sweat-shirt he was wearing. He was pulling a funny face.
    He walked across the room.
    “I pray you sit by us, and tell’s a tale,” he said, sitting on the bed beside Jo.
    “Merry or sad shall’t be?”
    “As merry as you will.”
    “A sad tale’s best for winter.”
    He looked at Jo’s T-shirt.
    There was a fashionable shop in London selling T-shirts with the symbol of the Red Phoenix terrorists—the flame and the fist—on them. In the music magazine that Cato bought, next to an advertisement for teenage spots, Corrie had seen a special offer placed by a mail-order company for T-shirts with a line of bullet-holes printed across the front, to make it look as if the wearer had been machine-gunned. The shirts could also be ordered with bullet-holes printed on the back as well as the front, to look as if the bullets had gone right through the wearer’s body. This cost fifty pence extra.
    Jo looked ill, strained. There were dark lines under his eyes.
    “O.K.?” Corrie asked.
    Jo nodded.
    “I thought your asthma had started when I heard you moving about.”
    He told Jo about Matthias standing like Rupert the Bear, and they sat in silence for a while.
    “Any more news about that school?”
    Corrie shook his head. “No. They just said again that they wanted the other terrorists released from prison before they’ll set anyone free.”
    “And the government won’t let anyone be released?”
    Corrie nodded.
    “Just the same.”
    “Just the same.”
    “They can’t do as the terrorists want, can they?” Jo asked. “Release the prisoners? Because if they do, it’ll happen again.”
    “It will anyway.”
    “How do you stop it happening in the first place?”
    “You can’t, can you?”
    “The German government isn’t going to negotiate, whatever happens.”
    “Do you think they’ll storm the building?”
    “It’s the only thing they can do.”
    “The terrorists say they’ve got the