‘Hello. I’m Hope.’ Hope. My God. The almost supernatural inappropriateness of Hope’s name is an awful warning to all parents everywhere. ‘I’ve come to play with Molly. We’re playing cards. It’s my turn.’ She places a card carefully on a pile.

‘The three of diamonds. It’s your turn now, Molly.’ Molly places a card on the pile. ‘The five of clubs.’ Hope is as loquacious as Christopher is silent. She describes everything that she does. And everything she sees. And she has an apparent fear of compound sentences. So she sounds like Janet, from ‘Janet and John’.

‘What are you playing?’

‘Snap. This is our third game. Nobody’s won yet.’

‘No. Well, you see…’ I begin to explain the fatal flaw in their approach and equipment, and then think better of it.

‘Can I come round tomorrow?’ Hope asks.

I look at Molly for signs of reluctance or active distaste, but her face is a mask of diplomacy.

‘We’ll see,’ I say.

‘I don’t mind,’ Molly says quickly. ‘Really.’

It’s a strange thing for a little girl to say about the prospect of a playdate with her new best friend, but I let it pass.

‘Are you staying for tea, Hope?’

‘I don’t mind that, either,’ Molly says. ‘She can if she wants. Honestly. It would be good for me.’

This last phrase, cheerily and sincerely delivered, tells me everything I need to know about our guests.

As chance would have it, it is my turn to cook; David and GoodNews stay up in the bedroom, plotting. Christopher and Hope stay for tea, which is eaten in almost complete silence, apart from the occasional snatch of main-clause commentary from Hope—‘I love pizza!’ ‘My mum drinks tea!’ ‘I like this plate!’ As Christopher seems only to be able to breathe through his mouth, his eating is a somewhat alarming cacophony of splutters, grunts and squelches which Tom regards with utter disdain. People talk about a face that only a mother could love, but Christopher’s entire being would surely stretch maternal ties beyond the point of elasticity: I have never met a less lovable child, although admittedly Hope, whose peculiar personal aroma has not been dissipated by her proximity to food or other people, runs him close.

Christopher pushes his plate away from him. ‘Finished.’

‘Would you like some more? There’s another slice.’

‘No. Didn’t like it.’

‘I did,’ says Tom, who has never once expressed approval for anything I have ever cooked, presumably because he has never hitherto been presented with an opportunity to make such approval sound aggressive. Christopher turns his head to look for the source of the remark, but once he has located it, cannot think of anything to say in reply.

‘I like pizza,’ says Hope, for the second time. Tom could normally be relied upon to leap upon that kind of repetition and rip the repeater to shreds, but he seems to have given up: he merely rolls his eyes.

‘Your telly’s too small,’ says Christopher. ‘And it dunt go very loud. When that thing blew up it sounded rubbish.’

‘Why didn’t you just ask for it to be turned up?’ Tom says. Again, Christopher turns his head creakily, like some prototype robot, to study his friend; again, no response is forthcoming. In forty-five minutes Christopher has made me question my commitment to comprehensive education; suddenly I suspect that stupidity is contagious, and this boy should be thrown out of the house immediately.

‘Where do you live, Christopher?’ I ask him, in an attempt to find a conversational topic to which he might be able to make a contribution.

‘Suffolk Rise,’ he says, in exactly the same pugnaciously defensive rising tone—which other children use for the phrase ‘No I never’.

‘And do you like it there?’ Molly asks. Another child might be suspected of satirizing the social situation, but Molly, I fear, is simply Trying Her Best.

‘All right. Better than here. Here’s a dump.’

It’s Tom’s timing that is so revealing. He counts to ten, maybe even twenty or thirty, and while he is counting he examines Christopher as if he were a chess problem, or a particularly complicated patient history. Then he stands up and punches Christopher squarely and calmly on the boil, which, on closer examination, turns out to have burst and spilled its dayglo yellow contents all over its former owner’s cheek.

‘I’m sorry, Mum,’ he says sadly as he walks out, anticipating the first stage of his punishment before it has even been delivered. ‘But you must understand a bit.’

‘We’re doing guilt,’ David says after Christopher and Hope have gone home. (Christopher’s mother, a large, pleasant and perhaps understandably disappointed woman, does not seem particularly surprised to learn that her son has been punched, and perhaps as a consequence does not seem particularly interested in my long and detailed outline of the sanctions we intend to take.)

‘What does that mean?’

‘We’re all guilty, right?’ GoodNews chips in enthusiastically.

‘So you’ve always led me to understand.’

‘Oh, no, I’m not talking about how we’re all guilty because we’re members of an unfeeling society. Even though we are, of course.’

‘Of course. I wouldn’t for a moment suggest otherwise.’

‘No, I’m talking about individual guilt. We’ve all done something we feel guilty about. The lies we’ve told. The, you know, the affairs we’ve had. The hurts we’ve caused. So, David and I have been talking to the kids about it, trying to get a feel of where their own particular guilt lies, and then kind of encouraging them to reverse it.’

‘Reverse it.’

‘Yeah. Right. Reversal. That’s what we’re calling it. You take something you’ve done wrong, or some bad you’ve done to someone, and you reverse it. Do the opposite. If you stole something you give it back. If you were horrible, you have to be nice.’

‘Because we’re introducing the personal alongside the political.’

‘Thanks, David. I forgot to say that bit. Right. The personal and the political. We’ve done the political thing, right? With the homeless kids and all that?’

‘Oh, so that’s finished now, is it? Homelessness cured? World a better place?’

‘Please don’t be facetious, Katie. When GoodNews says we’ve “done” it, he doesn’t mean we’ve solved anything…’

‘God, no way. There’s still a lot to do out there. Phew.’ And GoodNews fans himself with his hand, apparently to indicate the amount of sweat yet to be expended on the plight of the world’s poor. ‘But there’s just as much to do in here, you know?’ And he points at his own skull. ‘Or in here, maybe.’ His finger shifts towards his heart. ‘So that’s the work we’re doing at the moment.’

‘And that’s why we had Christopher and Hope round for tea?’

‘Exactly,’ says David. ‘We talked to Molly and Tom, asked them what they wanted to reverse, and we kind of pinpointed these two poor kids as particular sources of… regret. Molly always felt bad that she didn’t ask Hope to her last birthday party, and… Well, you’ll laugh, but Tom felt bad that he’d thumped Christopher at school.’

‘Which is sort of ironic, isn’t it? Seeing as he’s just thumped him again.’

‘I can see why you’d say that, yes.’

‘And maybe what happened today was predictable?’

‘Do you think?’ David clearly hadn’t anticipated the possibility of history repeating itself. ‘Why?’

‘Think about it.’

‘I don’t want my son bullying kids, Katie. And I don’t want him disliking kids, either. I want him to find the good and the… the lovable in everybody.’

‘And you think I don’t?’

‘I’m not sure. Do you want him to find what’s lovable in Christopher?’

‘Yes, well. Christopher may well prove to be a special case. A loophole in the law of universal love.’

‘So you don’t want him to love everybody.’

‘Well, in an ideal world of course I do. But…’

‘Don’t you see?’ GoodNews says excitedly. ‘That’s what we’re doing! Building an ideal world in our own home!’