[...] Well – perhaps she
had a point, but our heroine didn’t think so at that moment in time.
And even though she had to hear it pretty much every day, it never quite
sounded like that, only at very lucid times, but they were probably actually
always the wrong times.
“I have an idea,” Tira had said very early on, when the girl first moved in and was still only just beginning to let herself slip into her – very obvious to everyone else – chaos of the soul. “I’ll be your life coach! But you must promise to do everything I say.”
The offer was declined. And when Tira left the girl’s room and the dog jumped up to the bed in wistful anticipation of a moment’s communing, she must have felt rather desolate in that Brixton council house housing half of Europe, two children and this down and out lonely dog. All being – sigh – expressive together; teenagers beyond teenagehood, escaping their homes and home countries to develop the arguments, in their many varied ways, of the place of childhood in adulthood.
But the stories were great! And the methods of weaving them into a – somehow – justified sense of reality, even better. They all a key at the end of some string for an hour or so, to unlock some mysterious sense of what it was all about and how we all fit into it. [...]