Teenage Babysitter

Godwin's Tower is the unintentional consequence of a government initiative to provide more homes for single mothers. A Soviet-style concrete block comprising twelve floors, with four flats on each floor after the ground floor and two-thirds of them occupied by young, single women with small children. Jason's mother had been one of the first to move in when Jason was six years old. Now, six years later, she is married (but not to Jason's father).

Marion, Jason's mother, had met Arthur when he got the job of caretaker at Godwin's. He is quite a lot older than her and recently retired from the Merchant Navy. They all get on pretty well together and Jason is doing well at school. At twelve years old, he's the oldest kid in the building and he's well used to seeing the young mothers nervously carrying their new babies into their new flats, the toddlers running around getting in everyone's way, and the elderly people that the council in their wisdom, put on the top two floors, presumably so that they can get some exercise when the lifts stop working.

Jason is short for his age at 140 cm but stocky with it. He has dark curly hair and dark brown eyes. When he helps Arthur out, fixing stuff in some of the flats, Arthur teases him that the young tenants fancy him. So far, Jason has been more interested in cricket and football than girls, and the magazines he keeps hidden under his bed mostly feature older women with big tits.

The ground floor has the caretaker's flat, where Arthur, Marion, and Jason live, the boiler room, which is Arthur's domain and strictly out of bounds to everyone else apart from Jason, and a communal/meeting room part of which has been converted into a nursery for the pre-schoolers.

In the evenings, some of the young mothers operate a kind of rota system, where two or three of them will go out together and one stays behind to look after the children, but there is always a demand for babysitters and now that Jason is twelve, he is considered responsible enough to take on that task.

One day he goes into the meeting room and looks at the noticeboard. There are several people looking for babysitters:

Emily Thatcher Flat 14

• Babysitter wanted on Thursday evenings for Veronica, age 3