When they arrived Fiona had already been carted off somewhere, and Suzie was sitting in the waiting room clutching a styrofoam cup. Marcus dumped the car seat and its apoplectic load down next to her.

‘So what’s happening?’ Will only just managed to restrain himself from rubbing his hands together. He was completely absorbed in all of this—absorbed almost to the point of enjoyment.

‘I don’t know. They’re pumping her stomach or something. She was talking a little in the ambulance. She was asking after you, Marcus.’

‘That’s nice of her.’

‘This isn’t anything to do with you, Marcus. You know that, don’t you? I mean, you’re not the reason she… You’re not the reason she’s here.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I just do.’ She said it with warmth and humour, shaking her head and ruffling Marcus’s hair, but everything about the intonation and her gestures was wrong: they belonged to other, quieter, more domestic circumstances, and though they might have been appropriate for a twelve-year-old, they were not appropriate for the oldest twelve-year-old in the world, which Marcus had suddenly become. Marcus pushed her hand away.

‘Has anyone got any change? I want to get something from the machine.’

Will gave him a handful of silver, and he wandered off.

‘Fucking hell,’ said Will. ‘What are you supposed to tell a kid whose mum has just tried to top herself?’ He was merely curious, but luckily the question came out as if it were rhetorical, and therefore sympathetic. He didn’t want to sound like someone watching a really good disease-of-the-week film.

‘I don’t know,’ said Suzie. She had Megan on her lap, and she was trying to get her to chew on a breadstick. ‘But we’ll have to try and think of something.’

Will didn’t know if he was a part of the ‘we’ or not, but it didn’t matter one way or the other. However absorbing he was finding the evening’s entertainment, he certainly didn’t intend repeating it: this lot were just too weird.

The evening dragged on. Megan cried, then whined, then fell asleep; Marcus made repeated visits to the vending machine and came back with cans of Coke and Kit-Kats and bags of crisps. None of them talked much, although occasionally Marcus grumbled about the people waiting for treatment.

‘I hate this lot. They’re drunk, most of them. Look at them. They’ve all been fighting.’

It was true. More or less everyone in the waiting room was some kind of deadbeat—a vagrant, or a drunk, or a junkie, or just mad. The few people who were there through sheer bad luck (there was a woman who had been bitten by a dog and was waiting for a shot, and a mother with a little girl who looked as though she might have broken her ankle in a fall) looked anxious, pale, drained; tonight was really something out of the ordinary for them. But the rest had simply transferred the chaos of their daily life from one place to another. It made no difference to them if they were roaring at passers-by in the street or abusing nurses in a hospital casualty department—it was all just business.

‘My mum’s not like these people.’

‘No one said she was,’ said Suzie.

‘Supposing they think she is, though?’

‘They won’t.’

‘They might. She took drugs, didn’t she? She came in with sick all over her, didn’t she? How would they know the difference?’

‘Of course they’ll know the difference. And if they don’t, we’ll tell them.’

Marcus nodded, and Will could see that Suzie had said the right thing: who could believe that Fiona was any kind of derelict with friends like these? For once, Will thought, Marcus was asking the wrong question. The right question was: what the hell difference did it make? Because if the only things that separated Fiona from the rest of them were Suzie’s reassuring car keys and Will’s expensive casual clothes, then she was in trouble anyway. You had to live in your own bubble. You couldn’t force your way into someone else’s, because then it wouldn’t be a bubble any more. Will bought his clothes and his CDs and his cars and his Heal’s furniture and his drugs for himself, and himself alone; if Fiona couldn’t afford these things, and didn’t have an equivalent bubble of her own, then that was her lookout.

Right on cue, a woman came over to see them—not a doctor or a nurse, but somebody official.

‘Hello. Did you come in with Fiona Brewer?’

‘Yes. I’m her friend Suzie, and this is Will, and this is Fiona’s son Marcus.’

‘Right. We’re going to be keeping Fiona in overnight, and obviously we don’t want you to have to stay. Is there somewhere Marcus could go? Is there anyone else at home, Marcus?’

Marcus shook his head.

‘He’ll be staying with me tonight,’ said Suzie.

‘OK, but I’ll have to get his mother’s permission for that,’ said the woman.

‘Sure.’

‘That’s where I want to go,’ Marcus said to the woman’s retreating back. She turned round and smiled. ‘Not that anyone cares.’

‘Of course they do,’ said Suzie.

‘You reckon?’

The woman came back a couple of minutes later, smiling and nodding as if Fiona had given birth to a baby, rather than given permission for an overnight stay.

‘That’s fine. She says thank you.’

‘Great. Come on, then, Marcus. You can help me open the sofa bed.’

Suzie put Megan back into the car seat and they made their way out to the car park.

‘I’ll see you,’ said Will. ‘I’ll call you.’

‘I hope you get things sorted out with Ned and Paula.’

Again the momentary blankness: Ned and Paula, Ned and Paula… Ah, yes, his ex-wife and his son.

‘Oh, it’ll be fine. Thanks.’ He kissed Suzie on the cheek, punched Marcus on the arm, waved to Megan and went off to hail a cab. It had all been very interesting, but he wouldn’t want to do it every night.

It was there, on the kitchen table. He was just putting the flowers in the vase, like Suzie had told him to do, when he spotted it. Everyone had been in such a hurry and a mess last night that they hadn’t noticed. He picked it up and sat down.