Low life | 7 February 2019

Just before I left France, Oscar’s mum sent over a photo of Oscar in his classroom at school showing the camera two school awards. One was for ‘pupil of the week’, the other for general sporting excellence. His expression was a comic parody of being proud rather than pride itself. I’d seen him hardly at all since last summer, and perhaps for this reason the change wrought in him between his eighth and ninth years astonished me more than if I had seen him constantly.

Last weekend, I picked him up from his mother’s flat and took him to his first football match: Exeter City vs MK Dons. The change in him that I had noticed in the photo was confirmed when he opened the front door, ready with his coat on. He was lankier and a cultivated fringe curled down to his chin. And while remaining essentially his old cheerful, affectionate, modest and observant self, never complaining, never asking for anything, and thick with catarrh as usual, he has largely abandoned polysyllabic speech in favour of eloquent gestures and monosyllables — a result, reckons his mum, of spending too much time in a virtual reality.

In the car on the way I said: ‘Why did you get the “pupil of the week” award?’ He looked carefully at me. ‘Spelling,’ he said. ‘The weekly test?’ He nodded his head once, exaggeratedly. ‘Out of 60?’ He nodded again. ‘How many did you get?’ ‘Sixty.’ ‘And how many did whoever came second get?’ ‘Thirty.’ Oscar’s mother had told me that he is so far ahead of the rest of the class, the teacher makes him sit next to the dimmest boy to help and encourage him. This dim boy also happens to be the same person with whom Oscar shares a bedroom, a sort of orphaned relation.