Mike doesn’t stand a chance—he isn’t even allowed to speak. Max points out that they have been burgled three times in the last two years, and it doesn’t really matter if thieves are living next door to you or a couple of streets away. Martina tells Mike that she has lived alone for fifteen years, and enjoys Tiz’s company so much that she would be devastated if she disappeared now. ‘I would haf to go and find another Tiz,’ she says.

Sas speaks last. She’s not a good speaker—she’s shy, and she looks at her shoes, and she stops and starts, and no one can really hear her anyway. But what is clear is that she is desperate for this chance—desperate to stay with Simon and Richard, desperate to go to college so that she can pass some exams, desperate not to return to how things were for her before. She wanted to kill Robbie, she said, because she knew what it meant, and what people would think of the rest of them, and she said if anything else got stolen while they were in the street she would personally pay the victims back out of her own pocket, even if it took her the rest of her life. When she has finished Richard comes up and hugs her, while everyone else claps. Mike goes home, looking as if he might burgle his own house and disappear.

Richard comes up to me afterwards to thank me for the evening—as if I have done anything apart from complain about yet more intrusion.

‘I know Sas thinks we’ve done a lot for her,’ he says. ‘But I can’t describe what she’s done for us. I mean, look at me. A bad actor who’s thrilled to bits if I survive more than one week in a hospital bed in Casualty. I’ve done nothing with my life. And now I’m on this permanent high. If Sas ever qualifies as a nurse I’ll die a happy man. And I’d cry for a month. You must be very proud of David.’

‘I am a doctor, you know,’ I say. ‘I’ve saved the odd life myself.’ Richard stares at me until I run off and lock myself in the toilet.

This is not their story; it is mine, and David’s. So I want to bring their story to an end, and tell you what has happened to them all. Craig and Monkey disappeared, after a few days in Monkey’s case, and a few weeks in Craig’s. Monkey took some money when he went, but it was money that David and I had put to one side to be stolen: when we began to suspect that Monkey was unhappy, and uncomfortable, and itching to move on to something else, I showed him the kitchen jar where we keep our emergency money, and then we put five twenty pound notes in it. We knew it would go, and it did. Craig was talking about going to find his mother, apparently, and we hope that’s where he has gone. The girls are still here, in the street, and it is as if they never had a previous life at all. So. David wanted to rescue ten kids. He had to settle for six. Three of those six were beyond his reach. If the other three stay, and get jobs, and find homes of their own, and partners, maybe, then… Oh, you can do the maths yourself. I don’t mean the three-out-of-ten maths, of course. I mean the rest of it. Because I don’t know the value of anything any more.

The only scenes I can stand in any of the Star Wars films are the quiet scenes in the second one, The Empire Strikes Back. Or rather, it used to be the second one, before the fourth one became the first one, thus making the second one the fifth one. A couple of years ago Tom used to watch his Star Wars videos over and over again, in sequence, and at first I preferred The Empire Strikes Back simply because it offered some respite from all the roaring and banging and whizzing. But later I came to appreciate its… I don’t know what you’d call it. Message? Moral? Do Star Wars films have messages? Anyway, something in it began to chime somewhere in me, and I wanted to be Luke Skywalker, off somewhere on my own, learning to be a Jedi. I wanted a break from the war. I wanted someone wise to teach me how to do the things I needed to know to survive the rest of my life. And I know it’s pathetic that it should have been a children’s science-fiction film telling me this—it should have been George Eliot, or Wordsworth, or Virginia Woolf. But then, that’s precisely the point, isn’t it? There is no time or energy for Virginia Woolf, which means that I am forced to look for meaning and comfort in my son’s Star Wars videos. I have to be Luke Skywalker because I don’t know who else to be.

When Monkey and his pals moved into the street, I became acutely aware of the need to think; it seemed as though life were unsustainable without thought, in fact. I couldn’t work out who was right and who was wrong, my house was full of people I didn’t know… I was going mad, really. So I had to do this, didn’t I? And of course it’s selfish and indulgent and bad, but it seemed at the time as though I couldn’t work out how to be good without being bad. Anyone would understand. God, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Miriam Stoppard, anyone. Wouldn’t they? And it doesn’t mean I love my children less, and it doesn’t even mean I love my husband less (I don’t think, although that’s one of the things I need to think about)…

I’ve moved out. Sort of, anyway. Except that nobody knows. Well, David and GoodNews know, and a colleague called Janet, for reasons that will become clear, but Molly and Tom don’t, not yet. I now live, or at least sleep, in a bedsit just around the corner, and I put the kids to bed at night, and I set the alarm for six-fifteen in the morning, get dressed, and walk straight out of the flat, no tea, no muesli, nightdress and dressing gown in a carrier bag, so that I am back in the familial house at six-thirty. The children usually need to be woken an hour later, but I’m there on the off-chance that either of them should get up earlier. (They rarely wake in the night now, and when they do, David has always been the one to deal with them, simply because I am the one with the proper job.) I then change back into my nightdress and dressing gown in order to remove any last doubts the children might have—although they would have to be very suspicious indeed to suspect that the mother who puts them to bed at night and is there at breakfast the next morning has moved out—and spend my extra hour reading the paper that I have brought with me. In theory, I get an hour’s less sleep, but this is no hardship, because in practice it feels like I have slept for an hour longer, such is the revivifying effect of being on my own for the night.

I’m not paying for the room; it belongs to Janet Walder, the third person who knows about my new domestic arrangements. Janet works at the surgery and has gone back to New Zealand for a month to see her new niece. If it hadn’t been for Janet’s new niece, in fact, I would never have taken the decision to move out. Like those thieves who would never have dreamed of stealing a wallet if they hadn’t seen it sticking out of somebody’s pocket, the opportunity was all: she just happened to mention that she was leaving her room empty, and within seconds I had made my mind up. It was as if I were powerless to resist the temptation; my senses were overcome. I could hear the emptiness, and taste the silence, and smell the solitude, and I wanted it more than I have ever wanted anything before. (And what does that say about me? What kind of sensualist craves nothingness?) And then I invented my post-bedtime, pre-breakfast plan, on the spot, in seconds, because necessity is the mother of invention. And then I went home and told David what I was doing, and then I did it.

‘Why?’ David asked—not unreasonably, I suppose.

Because of everything, I told him. Because of GoodNews, and because of Monkey, and because I’m frightened of what you might do next. And because I’m disappearing, I wanted to tell him. Every day I wake up and there’s a little bit less of me. But I couldn’t say that, because I didn’t know whether I was entitled to, and nor would I ever know, unless I got my Jedi training.