Life: An Exploded Diagram by Mal Peet

as immutable as a Sicilian grudge. George lived with it in a state of blank denial, like a murderer whose victim is buried under the cellar floor. Later, and to Win’s immense irritation, he and Ruth developed a passion for redecorating. Every three years or so, they would hang new wallpaper in the living room or hall, paint the picture rails an adventurous shade of muted pink, the door panels duck-egg blue or primrose yellow. I remember them being almost in love at such times. Once I came home from school to find Ruth tiptoe on a chair, lining up a roll of pasted wallpaper on the living-room wall, the furniture herded onto the rug. George was pretending to support her, both his hands on her broad backside. They hadn’t heard me come in.
    “Stop that, George,” she said. “I can’t concentrate. I’ll get this all wonky.”
    Yet there was happiness, naughtiness, in her voice.
    No, there I go again. Sentimentality. Maybe it wasn’t like that at all. Maybe she was just annoyed.
    They never redecorated the best room. It stayed just as Win had re-created it, for almost thirty years. After she died, George and Ruth waited three weeks, then phoned a man called Cooper, who did house clearance. Cooper came and looked around the room. He pushed his cap onto the back of his head and made a sad noise through his plump lips.
    “How much?” George asked.
    Cooper shook his head. “I dunno. Say twenny quid?”
    “Fair enough,” George said, and took his wallet out of his pocket.
    Cooper raised his eyebrows but took the money. He’d meant that he’d pay George twenty pounds, but you don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, especially one from an uppity northerner. He came back the following Thursday and loaded it all onto his lorry and drove Win’s family’s history to an auction room in Norwich.
    Within a month, the best room had been papered in Regency-stripe wallpaper and recarpeted. Its windows were rehung with curtains (patterned side to the street, of course) that matched the wallpaper. Chintz-covered “cottage-style” furniture was installed. The woodwork was painted a shade called dawn. Ruth and George admired their work, feeling, I imagine, a spring tide of relief and liberation. It’s just possible they stood in the doorway holding hands, or almost.
    All the same, they never had nor found a use for the room.
    One night — in 1980 or thereabouts — after my parents had gone to bed, I smoked a joint in there. Just for the lonely naughty hell of it, and with the paint-stiffened window opened as wide as it would go.

T HE HEADMASTER OF Millfields Primary School was an overweight, kindly, bespectacled man with a face that was always a bright pink. His name, by happy coincidence, was Mr. Pinkerton. He was a romantic socialist whose ambition was to instill in his charges a love of those rich things — poetry, art, Russian achievements, music, the beauties of the natural world — that might console them during lives that would almost certainly be poor, coarse, and disappointing.
    Early in the summer term of 1956, he eased himself smilingly into Mrs. Pullen’s classroom with a large, fat envelope under his left arm. The children stood up. He bade them, pinkly, to be seated.
    “Boys and girls,” he said, “as you know, you will — I am sorry to say — be leaving us at the end of term. We — I — shall miss you. You were among the first children to come to this brand-new school, and you will be among the first to leave it. You will be going to secondary schools, where you will learn new skills and how to be grown-ups.”
    Clem, seated in the third row, paid only intermittent attention to this speech. His eyes were fixed, sidelong, on Hazel Cork, who could be relied upon to have a fit when anything out of the ordinary happened. Hazel’s fits threw her from her seat onto the floor, where she would writhe and swear and try to eat her ponytail and display her knickers. Clem was unsure whether he wanted this to happen