‘Well there you are then,’ he said flatly.

‘Where am I?’

‘That’s why he said it. Because he knew it would do the job.’

‘What job?’

‘Whatever job he wanted it to do at the time. I expect he’s been saving it. That was his nuclear option. What were you arguing about?’

‘I’d just reiterated my opposition to his relationship with you.’

‘Oh.’ That was very bad news. If Marcus was willing to go nuclear on his account, then he was in even deeper than he’d feared.

‘Are you saying what I think you’re saying? That he was attacking me in my most vulnerable spot just so he could win an argument?’

‘Yeah. Course he was.’

‘Marcus isn’t capable of that.’

Will snorted. ‘Whatever.’

‘Do you really think so?’

‘He’s not daft.’

‘It’s not his intelligence I’m worried about. It’s his… emotional honesty.’

Will snorted again. He had intended to keep his thoughts to himself throughout this conversation, but they kept escaping through his nose. What planet did this woman live on? She was so unworldly that she seemed to him to be an unlikely suicidal depressive, even though she sang with her eyes closed: surely anyone who floated that high above everything was protected in some way? But of course that was part of the problem. They were sitting here because a twelve-year-old’s craftiness had brought her crashing down to earth, and if Marcus could do it, any boyfriend or boss or landlord—any adult who didn’t love her—could do it. There was no protection in that. Why did these people want to make things so hard for themselves? It was easy, life, easy-peasy, a matter of simple arithmetic: loving people, and allowing yourself to be loved, was only worth the risk if the odds were in your favour, but they quite clearly weren’t. There were about seventy-nine squillion people in the world, and if you were very lucky, you would end up being loved by fifteen or twenty of them. So how smart did you have to be to work out that it just wasn’t worth the risk? OK, Fiona had made the mistake of having a child, but it wasn’t the end of the world. In her position, Will wouldn’t let the little sod drag him under.

Fiona was looking at him. ‘Why does everything I say make you do that?’

‘What?’

‘Make that snorting noise?’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just that… I don’t know anything about, you know, stages of development and what kids should do when and all that. But I do know that it’s around now you shouldn’t trust anything a human male says about what he feels.’

Fiona looked bleakly at her Guinness.

‘And when does that stop, in your expert opinion?’ The last two words had a rusty serrated edge on them, but Will ignored it.

‘When he’s around seventy or eighty, and then he can use the truth at highly inappropriate moments to shock people.’

‘I’ll be dead then.’

‘Yup.’

She went to the bar to get him a drink, and then sat back down heavily in her seat. ‘But why you?’

‘I just told you. He doesn’t really need a male influence. He just said it to get his own way.’

‘I know, I know. I understand that. But why does he want to see you so much he’d do that to me?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Do you really not know?’

‘Really.’

‘Maybe it is best if he doesn’t see you.’

Will said nothing. He had learnt something from the previous day’s conversation, anyway.

‘What do you think?’

‘I don’t.’

‘What?’

‘I don’t think. I don’t think anything. You’re his mother. You make the decisions.’

‘But you’re involved now. He keeps coming round to your house. You take him out to buy shoes. He’s living this whole life I can’t control, which means you have to.’

‘I’m not going to control anything.’

‘In which case, it’s best that he doesn’t see you.’

‘We’ve been here before. What do you want me to do if he rings on the bell?’

‘Don’t let him in.’

‘Fine.’

‘I mean, if you’re not prepared to think about how to help me, then keep out.’

‘Right.’

‘God, you’re a selfish bastard.’

‘But I’m on my own. There’s just me. I’m not putting myself first, because there isn’t anybody else.’

‘Well, he’s there too now. You can’t just shut life out, you know.’

She was wrong, he was almost positive. You could shut life out. If you didn’t answer the door to it, how was it going to get in?

Marcus didn’t like the idea of his mum talking to Will. A while ago he would have got excited about it, but he no longer thought that he and his mum and Will and Ned and another baby perhaps were going to live together in Will’s flat. For a start, Ned didn’t exist, and for another start, if you could have two starts, Fiona and Will didn’t like each other very much, and anyway Will’s flat was nowhere near big enough for them all, even though there weren’t as many of them as he had originally thought.

But now everyone knew too much, and there were too many things that he didn’t want the two of them to talk about without him. He didn’t want Will to talk to his mum about the hospital, in case it made her go funny again; and he didn’t want Will to tell her about how he’d tried to blackmail Will into going out with her; and he didn’t want his mum to talk about how much telly he was allowed to watch, in case Will started turning it off when he went round… As far as he could tell, every possible topic of conversation meant trouble of some sort.

She was only gone for a couple of hours after tea time, so they didn’t have to find a baby-sitter; he put the chain on the door, did his homework, watched a bit of TV, played on the computer and waited. At five past nine she buzzed the special buzz on the doorbell. He let her in, and stared at her face to try to work out just how angry or depressed she was, but she seemed OK.

‘Did you have a good time?’

‘It was OK.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘He’s not a very nice man, is he?’

‘I think he is. He bought me those trainers.’

‘Well, you’re not to go round any more.’

‘You can’t stop me.’

‘No, but he’s not going to answer the door, so it’s a waste of time.’

‘How do you know he’s not going to answer the door?’

‘Because he told me he wouldn’t.’

Marcus could just hear Will saying that, but it didn’t worry him. He knew how loud the buzzer was inside the flat, and he had the time to ring it and ring it and ring it.

Marcus had to go and see the headmistress about his trainers. His mum had made a complaint to the school, even though Marcus had told her, begged her, not to. They’d spent so long arguing about it that he ended up having to go days after the event. So now he had a choice: he could lie to the headmistress, tell her that he had no idea who had stolen his shoes, and make himself look stupid; or he could tell her and lose his shoes, jacket, shirt, trousers, underpants and probably an eye or a piece of ear on the way home. He couldn’t see that he’d lose much sleep worrying about what to do.

He went at the beginning of lunch break, the time his form teacher had told him to go, but Mrs Morrison wasn’t ready for him; he could hear her through the door, shouting at someone. He was on his own at first, but then Ellie McCrae, this sulky, scruffy girl from year ten who hacked off her own hair and wore black lipstick, sat down on the far end of the row of chairs outside the office. Ellie was famous. She was always in trouble for something or other, usually something quite bad.

They sat in silence for a bit, and then Marcus thought he’d try to talk to her; his mum was always on at him to talk to people at school.

‘Hello, Ellie,’ he said. She looked at him and laughed once under her breath, shook her head bitterly and then turned her face away. Marcus didn’t mind. In fact, he almost laughed. He wished he had a video camera. He’d love to show his mum what happened when you tried to talk to another kid at school, especially an older kid, especially a girl. He wouldn’t bother trying again.