‘Shall I put the film back on?’ he asked her. This was like a test. The old mum would know he didn’t mean that.

‘Do you mind?’ she said. ‘I’d like to see how it turns out.’

Filling days had never really been a problem for Will. He might not have been proud of his lifelong lack of achievement, but he was proud of his ability to stay afloat in the enormous ocean of time he had at his disposal; a less resourceful man, he felt, might have gone under and drowned.

The evenings were fine; he knew people. He didn’t know how he knew them, because he’d never had colleagues, and he never spoke to girlfriends when they became ex-girlfriends. But he had managed to pick people up along the way—guys who once worked in record shops that he frequented, guys he played football or squash with, guys from a pub quiz team he once belonged to, that kind of thing—and they sort of did the job. They wouldn’t be much use in the unlikely event of some kind of suicidal depression, or the even more unlikely event of a broken heart, but they were pretty good for a game of pool, or a drink and a curry.

No, the evenings were OK; it was the days that tested his patience and ingenuity, because all of these people were at work—unless they were on paternity leave, like John, father of Barney and Imogen, and Will didn’t want to see them anyway. His way of coping with the days was to think of activities as units of time, each unit consisting of about thirty minutes. Whole hours, he found, were more intimidating, and most things one could do in a day took half an hour. Reading the paper, having a bath, tidying the flat, watching Home and Away and Countdown, doing a quick crossword on the toilet, eating breakfast and lunch, going to the local shops… That was nine units of a twenty-unit day (the evenings didn’t count) filled by just the basic necessities. In fact, he had reached a stage where he wondered how his friends could juggle life and a job. Life took up so much time, so how could one work and, say, take a bath on the same day? He suspected that one or two people he knew were making some pretty unsavoury short cuts.

Occasionally, when the mood took him, he applied for jobs advertised in the media pages of the Guardian. He liked the media pages, because he felt he was qualified to fill most of the vacancies on offer. How hard could it be to edit the building industry’s in-house journal, or run a small arts workshop, or write copy for holiday brochures? Not very hard at all, he imagined, so he doggedly wrote letters explaining to potential employers why he was the man they were looking for. He even enclosed a CV, although it only just ran on to a second page. Rather brilliantly, he thought, he had numbered these two pages ‘one’ and ‘three’, thus implying that page two, the page containing the details of his brilliant career, had got lost somewhere. The idea was that people would be so impressed by the letter, so dazzled by his extensive range of interests, that they would invite him in for an interview, where sheer force of personality would carry him through. Actually, he had never heard from anybody, although occasionally he received a standard rejection letter.

The truth was he didn’t mind. He applied for these jobs in the same spirit that he had volunteered to work in the soup kitchen, and in the same spirit that he had become the father of Ned: it was all a dreamy alternative reality that didn’t touch his real life, whatever that was, at all. He didn’t need a job. He was OK as he was. He read quite a lot; he saw films in the afternoon; he went jogging; he cooked nice meals for himself and his friends; he went to Rome and New York and Barcelona every now and again, when boredom became particularly acute… He couldn’t say that the need for change burned within him terribly fiercely.

In any case, this morning he was somewhat distracted by the curious events of the weekend. For some reason—possibly because he encountered real drama very rarely in the course of an average twenty-time-unit quick-crossword-on-the-toilet day—he kept being drawn back to thinking about Marcus and Fiona, and wondering how they were. He had also, in the absence of a Media Guardian advertisement that had really grabbed him, begun to entertain strange and probably unhealthy notions of entering their lives in some way. Maybe Fiona and Marcus needed him more than Suzie did. Maybe he could really… do something with those two. He could take an avuncular interest in them, give their lives a bit of shape and gaiety. He would bond with Marcus, take him somewhere every now and again—to Arsenal, possibly. And perhaps Fiona would like a nice dinner somewhere, or a night out at the theatre.

Mid-morning he phoned Suzie. Megan was having a nap, and she was just sitting down to a cup of coffee.

‘I was wondering how things are up the road,’ he said.

‘Not too bad, I think. She hasn’t gone back to work, but Marcus went to school today. How about you?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘You sound pretty cheerful. Did things get sorted out?’

If he sounded cheerful, then obviously they must have done. ‘Oh, yes. It’s all blown over now.’

‘And Ned’s OK?’

‘Yes, he’s fine. Aren’t you, Ned?’ Why had he done that? It was a completely unnecessary embellishment. Why couldn’t he just leave well alone?

‘Good.’

‘Listen, do you think there’s any way I could help with Marcus and Fiona? Take Marcus out or something?’

‘Would you like to?’

‘Of course. He seemed…’ What? What did Marcus seem, other than slightly batty and vaguely malevolent? ‘He seemed nice. We got on OK. Maybe I could, you know, build on the other day.’

‘Why don’t I ask Fiona?’

‘Thanks. And it’d be nice to see you and Megan again soon.’

‘I’m still dying to meet Ned.’

‘We’ll fix something up.’

So, there it was then: an enormous, happy, extended family. True, this happy family included an invisible two-year-old, a barmy twelve-year-old and his suicidal mother; but sod’s law dictated that this was just the sort of family you were bound to end up with when you didn’t like families in the first place.

Will bought a Time Out and read it from cover to cover in an attempt to find something that a twelve-year-old boy might want to do on a Saturday afternoon—or rather, something that might make it clear to Marcus that he was not dealing with your average, desperately unhip thirty-six-year-old here. He started with the children’s section, but soon realized that Marcus was not a brass-rubbing sort of a child, or a puppet theatre sort of a child, or even a child at all; at twelve, his childhood was over. Will tried to remember what he liked doing at that age, but could come up with nothing, although he could remember what he hated doing. What he hated doing were things that adults made him do, however well-intentioned those adults were. Maybe the coolest thing he could do for Marcus was let him run wild on Saturday—give him some money, take him to Soho and leave him there. He had to admit, though, that while this might score points on the coolometer, it didn’t do quite so well on the responsible in loco parentis scale: if Marcus were to embark on a career as a rent-boy and his mother never saw him again, Will would end up feeling responsible and possibly even regretful.

Films? Video arcades? Ice-skating? Museums? Art galleries? Brent Cross? McDonald’s? Jesus, how did anyone get through childhood without falling into a slumber lasting several years? If he were forced to relive his childhood, he would go to bed when Blue Peter had ceased to exert its allure and ask to be woken up when it was time to sign on. It was no wonder young people were turning to crime and drugs and prostitution. They were turning to crime and drugs and prostitution simply because they were on the menu now, an exciting, colourful and tasty new range of options that he had been denied. The real question was why his generation had been quite so apathetically, unenterprisingly law-abiding—especially given the lack of even the token sops to teens, the Australian soaps and the chicken dippers, that passed for youthful entertainment in contemporary society.