Back then, the rigmarole was as regular as taxes; one of us would get a letter from school about an outbreak in their class and, since as many as six of us attended the same primary school at any one time, we would all end up getting treated to stop it spreading elsewhere, whether we’d felt a single itch or not.
Lice are resistant to water, soap, shampoo, bleach, chlorine and stearyl alcohol, but knowing their presence bears no relation to a child’s hygiene did little to assuage my feeling, however foolish, that I am a dirty person who has raised a dirty child.
It smelled more industrial than medicinal, like something that had no business making contact with a child, something that had surely been concocted to melt horses’ hooves, or clean tiger cages.
‘I bet we won’t even find anything now,’ I said confidently to my wife, at the exact moment she tracked the fine-toothed comb through our little cherub’s hair to pull away a veritable menagerie of small, dead critters.
We treated, washed and combed, preening each other like chimps, happily finding nothing at all, as with our son when he came home to find us poised and ready for his own delousing.
