Kids

 Zhenya, who is 11 now, has started a new school and it’s just across the courtyard from me. He gets free every day at around three, the old school kept em chained up till five or later.

I liked that.

So he comes over, about an hour before my working day begins in the late afternoons, and it’s good, we feel all grown up and stuff, almost as though we were normal.

  But now, increasingly,  he brings his mates too, up to four or five of them, and they sit in the kid room and fight and giggle and build mountains out of mattresses and pillows to jump onto each others’ heads and, sometimes, they miss and slam into the wall or the door screaming in agony. Whoever breaks the least bones gets to play KILLZONE on the play station at ear-splitting volumes. At least I’m guessing that’s how it works; I’m too scared to go in there while it’s actually its happening and, so I am forced to see what I can deduce from the wreckage after they have left to pursue their unshakeable quest to destroy God’s creation elsewhere.

 Other times their feral brains might stumble by chance on the notion of food and they will flood outwards in search of prey. Any loaf of bread or pound of cheese left to fend for itself in the kitchen will be taken mercilessly and carried aloft in their shrieking midst back into their lair. A sane man had best not ask what happens to it in there.

  Or again, they swarm into my room demanding that I play the guitar. And when they say guitar they mean Rammstein not Renbourne. So I find myself at 3:17 on a Tuesday afternoon playing an impromptu gig to a gang of ex-soviet 11 year olds. They are only about half them Russian most days, the other half being dark skinned Caucasian lads, Georgian or one of Dagestan’s myriad tribes maybe,  or else central Asian kids, Tajik or Kazaks or even Chinese: they all babble in strange kid Russian.

 It’s very disconcerting at times, and asking what Jesus would do hardly helps anymore.