Téo Erskine has done everything he can to escape the force field of home: the weighty parental guilt trips, the dangerous enticements of a poker game with the old gang, the possible late-night glimpse of a long-term crush in a crowded pub. He has made it all the way from a tight-knit Jewish community in Enfield, north London, to the urban anonymity of Aldgate, east London. Further! “You might call it as far as Whitechapel, yeah,” he tells a sceptical shopkeeper. He’s a man in his 30s. He has a car. He can visit for a night or two and slope straight back to the liberty of the city.
He can, that is, until tragedy delivers the abrupt responsibility of a surrogate child: a two-year-old boy, “stomach stout and proud as a grandad at the beach”. The presence of Joel – creative in his demands, avid for play, sleepless and shipwrecked by grief – pins Téo in place, trapping him in his own childhood home cheek by jowl with his demanding father. Vic is another lost and fatherless boy, pitched back into the insecurities of infancy by his failing body.
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