The following week Will’s date with Countdown was interrupted by a hail of what sounded like gravel against his sitting-room window, followed quickly by a continuous, urgent-sounding and annoying ring on the doorbell. Will knew it was trouble—you didn’t get gravel smashing into your windows and frantic doorbell-ringing without trouble, he imagined—and his first instinct was to turn the volume on the TV up and ignore it all. But in the end some sense of self-respect drove the cowardice away, and he propelled himself off the sofa towards the front door.

Marcus was standing on the step being bombarded with some kind of confectionery, rock-shaped and rock-hard lumps that could easily do as much damage as rocks. Will knew this because he took several direct hits himself. He ushered Marcus in and managed to locate the bombardiers, two mean-looking french-cropped teenage boys.

‘What do you think you’re doing?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Never mind who I am. Who the fuck are you?’ Will couldn’t remember the last time he felt like thumping someone, but he felt like thumping these two. ‘Fuck off.’

‘Ooo-er,’ said one of them obscurely. Will presumed it was intended to indicate their lack of fear, but their bravado was somewhat undercut by their immediate and rapid disappearance. This was a surprise and a relief. Will would never have run away from Will in a million years (or rather, in the admittedly unlikely event that Will should meet himself down a dark alley, both Wills would have run away at equal and very fast speeds in opposite directions). But he was an adult now, and though it was of course true that teenagers had lost all respect, bring back National Service and so on and so forth, only the very bad or very armed were likely to risk a confrontation with someone bigger and older than them. Will went back into the flat feeling bigger and older, and not altogether displeased with himself.

Marcus had helped himself to a biscuit, and was sat on the sofa watching TV. He looked just as he normally looked, absorbed in the programme, the biscuit poised halfway to the mouth; there was no visible sign of distress at all. If this boy, the one on the sofa watching Countdown, had ever been bullied, it was ages ago, and he had long since forgotten all about it.

‘Who were they, then?’

‘Who?’

‘Who? Those kids who were just trying to embed sweets into your skull.’

‘Oh, them,’ said Marcus, his eyes still on the screen. ‘I don’t know their names. They’re in year nine.’

‘And you don’t know their names?’

‘No. They just started following me home after school. So I thought I’d better not go home, so they wouldn’t find out where I lived. I thought I’d come round here.’

‘Thanks a lot.’

‘They won’t chuck sweets at you. They were after me.’

‘And does this happen often?’

‘They’ve never chucked sweets before. They thought of that today. Just now.’

‘I’m not talking about the sweets. I’m talking about… older kids trying to kill you.’

Marcus looked at him.

‘Yeah. I told you before.’

‘You didn’t make it sound so dramatic before.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You said a couple of kids gave you a hard time. You didn’t say that people you don’t even know follow you around and chuck things at you.’

‘They hadn’t done it then,’ said Marcus patiently. ‘They’ve only just invented it.’

Will was beginning to lose his temper; if he’d had any sweets to hand he would have started flinging them at Marcus himself. ‘Marcus, for Christ’s sake, I’m not talking about the bloody sweets. Are you always this bloody literal-minded? I understand that they’ve never done that before. But they’ve been giving you a hard time for ages.’

‘Oh yeah. Not those two…’

‘No, OK, OK, not those two. But others like them.’

‘Yeah. Loads.’

‘Right. That’s all I’ve been trying to find out.’

‘You could have just asked.’

Will walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on, if only to give himself something to do which wouldn’t result in a prison sentence, but he couldn’t let it drop.

‘So what are you going to do about it?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Are you going to let it go on like this for the next however many years?’

‘You’re like the teachers at school.’

‘What do they say?’

‘Oh, you know. "Keep out of their way." I mean, I don’t try to get in their way.’

‘But it must make you unhappy.’

‘I s’pose so. I just don’t think about it. Like when I broke my wrist falling off that climbing-frame thing.’

‘You’ve lost me.’

‘I tried not to think about that. It happened and I wished it hadn’t, but it’s just life, isn’t it?’

Sometimes Marcus sounded as though he were a hundred years old, and it broke Will’s heart.

‘It doesn’t have to be life, though, does it?’

‘I dunno. You tell me. I haven’t done anything. I just started at a new school and then I got all this. I don’t know why.’

‘What about your old school?’

‘It was different there. Not every kid was the same. There were clever ones and thick ones and trendy ones and weird ones. I didn’t feel different there. Here I feel different.’

‘They can’t be different sorts of kids here. Kids are kids.’

‘So where are all the weird ones, then?’

‘Maybe they start off weird, and then they get their act together. They’re still weird but you just can’t see them. The trouble is, these kids can see you. You make yourself obvious.’

‘So I’ve got to make myself invisible?’ Marcus snorted at the magnitude of the task. ‘How do I do that? Is one of the machines in your kitchen an invisible machine?’

‘You don’t have to make yourself invisible. You just have to go in disguise.’

‘What, with a moustache and stuff?’

‘Yeah, right, with a moustache. Nobody would notice a twelve-year-old boy with a moustache, would they?’

Marcus looked at him. ‘You’re joking. Everyone would notice. I’d be the only one in the whole school.’

Will had forgotten about the sarcasm thing. ‘OK, no moustache, then. Bad idea. But how about if you wore the same clothes and haircut and glasses as everyone else? You can be as weird as you want on the inside. Just do something about the outside.’

They started with his feet. Marcus wore the kind of shoes that Will didn’t think they made any more, plain black slip-ons whose only discernible ambition was to get their owner up and down school corridors without attracting the attention of the deputy head.

‘Do you like those shoes?’ Will asked him. They were walking up Holloway Road to look at trainers. Marcus peered down at his feet through the early-evening gloom and promptly collided with a large woman carrying several overstuffed Lo-Cost bags.

‘How do you mean?’

‘I mean, do you like them?’

‘They’re my school shoes. I’m not supposed to like them.’

‘You can like everything you wear, if you can be bothered.’

‘Do you like everything you wear?’

‘I don’t wear anything I hate.’

‘What do you do with the stuff you hate, then?’

‘I don’t buy it, do I?’

‘Yeah, because you haven’t got a mum. Sorry to say it like that, but you haven’t.’

‘It’s OK. I’ve got used to the idea.’

The trainer shop was huge and crowded, and the lighting made all the customers look ill; everyone had a green tinge, regardless of their original colour. Will caught sight of the pair of them in a mirror, and was shocked to see that they could easily pass for father and son; he had somehow imagined himself as Marcus’s elder brother, but the reflection threw age and youth into sharp relief—Will’s stubble and crow’s feet versus Marcus’s smooth cheeks and gleaming white teeth. And the hair… Will prided himself on having avoided even the tiniest of bald patches, but he still had less on top than Marcus, almost as if life had worn some of it away.