‘Oh.’

‘Now ask Mum.’

‘Fiona, have you ever been married?’

‘No.’

For a moment, Marcus was confused; when he was a real kid, a little kid, he used to think that you had to be married to be a father or mother, in the same way that you had to have a driving licence to drive. He knew now that this wasn’t true, and he knew too that his parents had never been married, but somehow the ideas you grew up with were hard to shake off.

‘Did you want to get married, Mum?’

‘Not really. It didn’t seem important.’

‘So why do other people bother?’

‘Oh, all sorts of reasons. Security. Pressure from family. Misguided notions of romance.’

Will laughed at this. ‘Cynic,’ he said.

Marcus didn’t understand this, but that was good: his mum and Will now had something that he hadn’t started.

‘Do you still see Marcus’s dad?’

‘Sometimes. Not very often. Marcus sees him quite a lot. How about you? Do you still see your ex?’

‘Ummm… Well, yes. All the time. She picked Ned up this morning.’ He said this in a funny way, Marcus thought. Almost like he’d forgotten and then remembered.

‘And is that all right?’

‘Oh, it’s OK. We have our moments.’

‘How come you ended up looking after Ned? I mean, I’m sure you’re a brilliant dad and everything, but that’s not usually how it works, is it?’

‘No. She was going through a Kramer vs Kramer kind of thing at the time. You know, a sort of I-want-to-find-out-who-I-am malarkey.’

‘And did she find out who she was?’

‘Not really. I don’t know if anyone really does, do they?’

The food arrived, but the two adults hardly noticed; Marcus dug happily into his omelette and fries. Would they move into Will’s place, he wondered, or buy somewhere new?

Will knew that Fiona was not his type. For a start, she didn’t look the way he wanted women to look—in fact, he doubted whether looks were important to her at all. He couldn’t be doing with that. People, women and men, had a duty to care, he felt, even if they didn’t have the requisite raw material—unless they weren’t interested in the sexual side of life at all, in which case, fair enough. You could do what you wanted then. Einstein, for example… Will didn’t know the first thing about Einstein’s private life, but in his photos he looked like a guy with other things on his mind. But Fiona wasn’t Einstein. She might have been as brainy as Einstein, for all he knew, but she was clearly interested in relationships, judging from the conversation they had had over lunch, so why didn’t she make more of an effort? Why didn’t she have a decent hair cut, instead of all that frizz, and why didn’t she wear clothes which looked like they mattered to her? He didn’t get that at all.

And she was just too hippy. He could see now why Marcus was so weird. She believed in alternative things, like aromatherapy and vegetarianism and the environment, stuff he didn’t give much of a shit about, really. If they went out they’d fight terribly, he knew, and that would upset her, and the last thing he wanted to do at the moment was upset her.

He had to say that the thing he found most attractive about her was that she had tried to kill herself. Now that was interesting—sexy, almost, in a morbid kind of way. But how can you contemplate dating a woman who might top herself at any moment? Before, he thought that going out with a mother was a heavy number; how much heavier would it be going out with a suicidal mother? But he didn’t want to let it drop. He still had this sense that Fiona and Marcus could replace soup kitchens and Media Guardian jobs, possibly forever. He wouldn’t have to do that much, after all—the occasional swordfish steak, the odd visit to a crappy film that he might have gone to anyway. How hard could that be? It was a damn sight easier than trying to force-feed vagrants. Good works! Helping people! That was the way forward for him now. The way he saw it, he’d helped Angie by sleeping with her (although admittedly there had been a little speck of self-interest there) and now he was going to find out whether it was possible to help someone without sleeping with them. It had to be, surely? Other people had managed, Mother Teresa and Florence Nightingale and so on, although he suspected that when he entered the good-works fray his style would be somewhat different.

They had made no further arrangement after the lunch. They left the restaurant, wandered around Covent Garden, caught the tube back to north London, and he was back home in time for Sports Report. But he knew they’d all started something that wasn’t finished.

Within a few days he’d changed his mind completely. He had no interest in good works. He had no interest in Marcus and Fiona. He would, he felt sure, break out into a cold sweat of embarrassment every time he thought of them. He would never see them again; he doubted, in fact, whether he would ever be able to go to Holloway again, just in case he bumped into them. He knew he was overreacting, but not by much. Singing! How could you have anything to do with someone who makes you sing! He knew they were both a little flaky, but. . .

It began ordinarily enough, with an invitation to supper, and though he didn’t like what they had to eat—something vegetarian with chickpeas and rice and tinned tomatoes—he quite enjoyed the conversation. Fiona told him about her job as a music therapist, and Marcus told Fiona that Will earned millions of pounds a minute because his dad had written a song. Will helped with the washing up, and Fiona made them a cup of tea, and then she sat down at the piano and started to play.

She wasn’t bad. The piano playing was better than her voice, but her voice wasn’t awful, simply adequate, if a little thin, and she could certainly carry a tune. No, it wasn’t the quality that embarrassed him, it was the sincerity. He’d been with people who had picked up guitars and sat down at pianos before (although not for a very long time), but they had always sent themselves up in some way: they had chosen stupid songs to play, or sung them in a stupid way, or camped them up or done anything to show they didn’t mean it.

Fiona meant it. She meant ‘Knocking On Heaven’s Door’, and then she meant ‘Fire And Rain’, and then she meant ‘Both Sides Now’. There was nothing between her and the songs; she was inside them. She even closed her eyes when she was singing.

‘Do you want to come over here so you can see the words?’ she asked him after ‘Both Sides Now’. He’d been sitting at the dining table staring hard at Marcus, until Marcus started singing too, at which point he turned his attention to the wall.

‘Ummm… What’s next?’

‘Any requests?’

He wanted her to play something that she couldn’t close her eyes to, ‘Roll Out The Barrel,’ say, or ‘Knees Up, Mother Brown’, but the mood had already been set.

‘Anything.’

She chose ‘Killing Me Softly With His Song’. There was nothing he could do but stand next to her and let the odd half-syllable of lyric crawl choking out of his mouth. ‘Smile… While… Boy… Ling…’ He knew, of course he knew, that the song couldn’t last forever, that the evening couldn’t last forever, that he would soon be home tucked up in bed, that singing round the piano with a depressive hippy and her weirdo son wouldn’t kill him. He knew all that, but he didn’t feel it. He couldn’t do anything with these people after all, he could see that now. He’d been stupid to think there was anything here for him.

When he got home he put a Pet Shop Boys CD on, and watched Prisoner: Cell Block H with the sound down. He wanted to hear people who didn’t mean it, and he wanted to watch people he could laugh at. He got drunk, too; he filled a glass with ice and poured himself scotch after scotch. And as the drink began to take hold, he realized that people who meant it were much more likely to kill themselves than people who didn’t: he couldn’t recall having even the faintest urge to take his own life, and he found it hard to imagine that he ever would. When it came down to it, he just wasn’t that engaged. You had to be engaged to be a vegetarian; you had to be engaged to sing ‘Both Sides Now’ with your eyes closed; when it came down to it, you had to be engaged to be a mother. He wasn’t much bothered either way about anything, and that, he knew, would guarantee him a long and depression-free life. He’d made a big mistake thinking that good works were a way forward for him. They weren’t. They drove you mad. Fiona did good works and they had driven her mad: she was vulnerable, messed-up, inadequate. Will had a system going here that was going to whizz him effortlessly to the grave. He didn’t want to fuck it up now.