Jeremy Clarke Jeremy Clarke

Low Life | 19 September 2009

Child abuse

issue 19 September 2009

The plan was that in the morning we’d gather our wild foods from the woods and hedgerows, and in the afternoon we’d light a fire and cook and eat a communal meal. But if our survival had really depended on it, the first thing I would have done was to butcher and eat the little boy Zac.

He was about five years old, and he arrived at our base camp in the redwood plantation with his mother, two older sisters and older brother. His mother was a care-worn, ethereal, still beautiful middle-class woman and one saw immediately that she was a woman of new-age beliefs and sensitivities. You heard it first in her high, thin voice, which avoided assertive cadences. Then you recognised that her every utterance, from her ‘Sorry we’re late, everybody!’ to her ‘Wow! One…Two…Three buzzards!’, was a restatement of her helplessness before the unfathomable wisdom of the cosmos, which might have been admirable except that here it seemed tired and habitual rather than truly felt.

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