Low life | 1 June 2017

My latest bed partner is a seven-year-old lad. That first night we slept together in my double bed, I hardly got a wink. Vivid dreams made him lash out at me in his sleep with kicks and flailing arms. In the morning I opened my eyes and his clear blue eyes, three inches from mine, were studying me.

‘Did you have nightmares, Oscar?’ I said. The eyes considered. ‘Not nightmares,’ he said judiciously. ‘Dreams.’ ‘What about? You were kicking and punching me all night,’ I said. ‘I dreamt Dominic came to my school, and we didn’t do any work, we just played football all day.’ Dominic was Oscar’s best friend at his old school. Dominic is a gigantic boy and a Newcastle United supporter. Oscar is little and has plumped for Manchester United — a tragic choice. He has recently begun at a new school and his new best friend is called Kye, who I think is a boy. Apart from missing Dominic, Oscar likes his new school. It is a progressive school. His last reading and comprehension homework passage, which he and I completed together, was a multiculturalist anti-hunting tract. My duty as his grandfather, I felt, was to point this out to him.

Oscar now lives with his mummy instead of his daddy because his daddy got married and moved 50 miles away to be near his new prison, at which he is a prison officer. He passed out in March from his three-month training course in the Midlands, and on my desk I have a photograph of him, taken a few minutes later, standing proudly in his uniform. For the past three years he has stayed at home looking after Oscar and his younger brother while his fiancée went out to work.