2
As we sat the boy down on the settee he seemed confused, pressing the flowery fabric with his palms.
'This isn't M', he said plaintively. My mother and I shook out heads in agreement.
After a while his lower lip started to tremble. I hugged him and my mother brought him some hot tea. He took the cup gingerly and stared at it.
'You have to drink it', I explained.
Watching me with his strange purple eyes he took a sip, started at the heat and dropped the cup. He watched the tea soak into the beige carpet.
'This isn't M', he said, as if he had somehow expected to find what he was looking for in my mother's chintzy china.
For the rest of the evening, as we talked to him, fed him and tried to ask him questions, this phrase was all we could get out of him.
When it grew dark my mother went upstairs and made up the spare room. Then we led him upstairs, showed him to the bathroom and gave him some of my father's old pyjamas to put on. When he came out of the bathroom wearing the ill fitting clothes with his unhappy face he looked like some sort of victorian child convict.
'M wasn't in there,' he said sadly.
In the spare room we tucked him up in bed and wished him a good night. Looking wide awake he asked us whether M was coming.
'Maybe tomorrow,' said my mother, turning out the light and closing the door. She turned to me and whispered, 'what are we going to do?'
Suddenly there was a series of shouts from the purple eyed boy's room.
'M? M! It's you. It's really you.'
My mother flung the door open....