requiem for a boy

My friend and I used to babysit a neighbour's boy.

Age three, full of beans, he would wait for his mum, then would suddenly sleep wherever he happened to be
sometimes hanging upside down from the settee.
Slumped in sleep, warm and heavy, he would slide from your arms if you tried to lift him into bed
so we would curl up around him and wait for his mother to return drunk or drugged
a blessing that you could not wake him then from the dead
of sleep

His father died of alcohol, froze to death on the street they say. To this day his mother's still boozing, pilling, shouting, ranting. Sometimes, he would be found sobbing in the close, forgotten that here was no longer home, and they had all long moved away. He never had many words.

Twenty-five last week, he fell asleep and would not wake, died of drugs and drink.

My friend phoned. Poor bugger, she said, he never had a hope in hell.

All I could think of was the warmth and dead-weight of his sleeping three-year-old body.