My mum was a primary school teacher in a seriously rough inner city school that was absolutely chock-full of kids with social problems, but she absolutely loved almost every single one of them. But she reckons that once or twice in every career, you teach a kid who genuinely makes you feel that you're in the presence of evil: no empathy; no softness; just self-serving cold malice. She's been retired for years but she says she still wonders about a boy she taught in the early 90s and what awful things he may have done.
That's exactly how I feel about Jack: she's like a changeling. An evil presence in a purportedly left-wing crib.
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