Before poor Magid knew where he was, two palms had made a ferocious slap on his forehead, and were doing much rubbing for good measure. Magid gave Irie an et tu Brute type of pleading look, in the full knowledge that it was useless. There is no honesty amongst almost-ten-year-olds.
‘Shame! Shame! Know your name!’
‘But Mr J. P. Hamilton,’ moaned Magid from under the heat of shame. ‘We’re here now. His house is just there. It’s a quiet street, you can’t make all this noise. He’s old.’
‘But if he’s old, he’ll be deaf,’ reasoned Millat. ‘And if you’re deaf you can’t hear.’
‘It doesn’t work like that. It’s hard for old people. You don’t understand.’
‘He’s probably too old to take the stuff out of the bags,’ said Irie. ‘We should take them out and carry them in our hands.’
This was agreed upon, and some time was taken arranging all the foodstuffs in the hands and crevices of the body, so that they might ‘surprise’ Mr J. P. Hamilton with the extent of their charity when he answered the door. Mr J. P. Hamilton, confronted on his doorstep by three dark-skinned children clutching a myriad of projectiles, was duly surprised. As old as they had imagined but far taller and cleaner, he opened the door only slightly, keeping his hand, with its mountain range of blue veins, upon the knob, while his head curled around the frame. To Irie he was reminiscent of some genteel elderly eagle: tufts of feather-like hair protruded from ear drums, shirt cuffs and the neck, with one white spray falling over his forehead, his fingers lay in a permanent tight spasm like talons, and he was well dressed, as one might expect of an elderly English bird in Wonderland – a suede waistcoat and a tweed jacket, and a watch on a gold chain.
And twinkling like a magpie, from the blue scattering in his eyes undimmed by the white and red surround, to the gleam of a signet ring, four argent medals perched just above his heart, and the silver rim of a Senior Service packet peeping over the breast pocket.
‘Please,’ came the voice from the bird-man, a voice that even the children sensed was from a different class, a different era. ‘I must ask that you remove yourselves from my doorstep. I have no money whatsoever; so be your intention robbing or selling I’m afraid you will be disappointed.’
Magid stepped forward, trying to place himself in the old man’s eyeline, for the left eye, blue as Rayleigh scattering, had looked beyond them, while the right was so compacted beneath wrinkles it hardly opened. ‘Mr Hamilton, don’t you remember, the school sent us, these are-’
He said, ‘Goodbye, now,’ as if he were bidding farewell to an elderly aunt embarking on a train journey, then once more ‘Goodbye’, and through two panels of cheap stained-glass on the closed door the children watched the lengthy figure of Mr Hamilton, blurred as if by heat, walking slowly away from them down a corridor until the brown flecks of him merged with the brown flecks of the household furnishings and the former all but disappeared.
Millat pulled his Tomytronic down around his neck, frowned, and purposefully slammed his little fist into the doorbell, holding it down.
‘Maybe,’ suggested Irie, ‘he doesn’t want the stuff.’
Millat released the doorbell briefly. ‘He’s got to want it. He asked for it,’ he growled, pushing the bell back down with his full force. ‘ ’SGod’s harvest, innit? Mr Hamilton! Mr J. P. Hamilton!’
And then that slow process of disappearance began to rewind as he reconstituted himself via the atoms of a staircase and a dresser until he was large as life once more, curled around the door.
Millat, lacking patience, thrust his school information sheet into his hand. ‘ ’SGod’s harvest.’
But the old man shook his head like a bird in a bird-bath. ‘No, no, I really won’t be intimidated into purchases on my own doorstep. I don’t know what you are selling – please God let it not be encyclopedias – at my age it is not more information one requires but less.’
‘But it’s free!’
‘Oh… yes, I see… why?’
‘ ’SGod’s harvest,’ repeated Magid.
‘Helping the local community. Mr Hamilton, you must have spoken to our teacher, because she sent us here. Maybe it slipped your mind,’ added Irie in her grown-up voice.
Mr Hamilton touched his temple sadly as if to retrieve the memory and then ever so slowly opened his front door to full tilt and made a pigeon-step forward into the autumn sunlight. ‘Well… you’d better come in.’
They followed Mr Hamilton into the town house gloom of his hall. Filled to the brim with battered and chipped Victoriana punctuated by signs of more recent life – children’s broken bikes, a discarded Speak-and-Spell, four pairs of muddy wellies in a family’s variant sizes.
‘Now,’ he said cheerily, as they reached the living room with its beautiful bay windows through which a sweeping garden could be seen, ‘what have we got here?’
The children released their load on to a moth-eaten chaise longue, Magid reeling off the contents like items from a shopping list, while Mr Hamilton lit a cigarette and inspected the urban picnic with doddering fingers.
‘Apples… oh, dear me, no… chickpeas… no, no, no, potato-chips…’
It went on like this, each article being picked up in its turn and chastised, until the old man looked up at them with faint tears in his eyes. ‘I can’t eat any of this, you see… too hard, too bloody hard. The most I could manage is probably the milk in that coconut. Still… we will have tea, won’t we? You’ll stay for tea?’
The children looked at him blankly.
‘Go on, my dears, do sit down.’
Irie, Magid and Millat shuffled up nervously on the chaise longue. Then there was a click-clack sound and when they looked up Mr Hamilton’s teeth were on his tongue, as if a second mouth had come out of the first. And then in a flash they were back in.
‘I simply cannot eat anything unless it has been pulverized beforehand, you see. My own fault. Years and years of neglect. Clean teeth – never a priority in the army.’ He signalled himself clumsily, an awkward jab at his own chest with a shaking hand. ‘I was an army man, you see. Now: how many times do you young people brush your teeth?’
‘Three times a day,’ said Irie, lying.
‘LIAR!’ chorused Millat and Magid. ‘PANTS ON FIRE!’
‘Two and a half times.’
‘Well, dear me, which is it?’ said Mr Hamilton, smoothing down his trousers with one hand and lifting his tea with the other.
‘Once a day,’ said Irie sheepishly, the concern in his voice compelling her to tell the truth. ‘Most days.’
‘I fear you will come to regret that. And you two?’
Magid was midway through formulating some elaborate fantasy of a toothbrush machine that did it while you slept, but Millat came clean. ‘Same. Once a day. More or less.’
Mr Hamilton leant back contemplatively in his chair. ‘One sometimes forgets the significance of one’s teeth. We’re not like the lower animals – teeth replaced regularly and all that – we’re of the mammals, you see. And mammals only get two chances, with teeth. More sugar?’
The children, mindful of their two chances, declined.
‘But like all things, the business has two sides. Clean white teeth are not always wise, now are they? Par exemplum: when I was in the Congo, the only way I could identify the nigger was by the whiteness of his teeth, if you see what I mean. Horrid business. Dark as buggery, it was. And they died because of it, you see? Poor bastards. Or rather I survived, to look at it in another way, do you see?’
The children sat silently. And then Irie began to cry, ever so quietly.
Mr Hamilton continued, ‘Those are the split decisions you make in war. See a flash of white and bang! as it were… Dark as buggery. Terrible times. All these beautiful boys lying dead there, right in front of me, right at my feet. Stomachs open, you know, with their guts on my shoes. Like the end of the bloody world. Beautiful men, enlisted by the Krauts, black as the ace of spades; poor fools didn’t even know why they were there, what people they were fighting for, who they were shooting at. The decision of the gun. So quick, children. So brutal. Biscuit?’