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Use and Abuse

Sitting outside in the evening sun with ice chinking in my gin and tonic, our chatter is interrupted by the mildly irritating, feeble piping of a child’s recorder. Five or so minutes later a little boy, aged about seven, is planted by the entrance door to the theatre, and carries on blowing down the damned thing. A woman folds a towel and places it by his feet. The boy’s little sister is placed alongside her brother; she’s about five. The woman walks up and down the piazza with a mobile phone clamped to her ear, talking incessantly. Sometimes she comes and sits with a man but they do not go near the two children.

The children are pale; they look miserable, and keep going over to the man and woman, but are brought back to the theatre door. It is not obvious the first time he does it, but the man makes a flamboyant gesture of bending forward, dropping coins onto the folded towel, giving a thumbs up sign to the little boy, smiling broadly and then walking away. He seemed to be a man in the street until I noticed he did this each time a crowd of people came towards the door.

People passed the children and smiled indulgently, perhaps thinking they were entrepreneurial youngsters hoping for some pocket money. One or two dropped a coin onto the towel. After only a few minutes, the boy returned to the man and woman, his eyes looking all over the place, his head down; uncertainty and awkwardness emanating from every pore.

When I glanced that way again, the tiny girl was standing alone above the towel. Pale, with white blonde hair, and a fragile body, her lips were puckered up to whistle but very little sound was coming out. She kept trying, but her attempts at whistling were fairly hit and miss; some theatre-goers found this quite charming.

I called the police, snitch that I am. I did not see the police arrive and I did not see the ‘family’ disappear.

On the way home I have a horrible thought; the woman was so swarthy, and the children were so pale; I wonder if people steal small children to use them as mini-beggars like this, keeping moving, away within twenty minutes before the police can get there. Whose children were they?
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