The child came to the clinic each week to see Anna Oblotsky, the social worker. His world was a kaleidoscope of conflicting images of his mother: times when she lay in the wide bed and he would burrow into her warm flesh, intoxicated by the rich smell of lust and perfume, other times when she changed, due to a particular badness in him, he fancied, or perhaps it was that she told him it was his wickedness which transformed her. Then she became all bone and sharp angles, flashing eyes and scolding voice, and he would shrivel to nothing. Light as a drift of ash from some conflagration, he would tumble to school on those days, existing suspended in a twilight place where vague images of power and glory jostled at his mind. Snatches of visions from fairy-tales or bible stories clamoured at him as he stood awkwardly on the fringes of the group of laughing teasing fighting children. A solitary child, he did not know how to join their games.

Anna Oblotsky was small and fair, with strange light blue eyes which looked as if the colour had been washed from them by too many years of seeing the misery of children. Her parents had escaped from Russia during the revolution and she was the child of their middle age born after the years of deprivation when they found peace at last, in a country at the far ends of the earth. The two children of their passionate youth, clutched in shaking arms as they fled across borders, or hid in some deserted shelter, had died, tragically drowned when the leaking boat in which they crossed the Yangtze Kiang sank under them. Stephan and Katya Oblotsky had been fortunate to escape with their own lives, dragged unconscious from the flood by bandits who coveted the gold chain around Katya’s neck. Anna Oblotsky devoted her life to the search for the lost souls of children, a task for which she had a rare gift.