‘Zoe, Marcus, I want to talk to Ellie in private. And Marcus, you and I have some unfinished business to attend to, don’t we?’

‘Yes, Mrs Morrison.’ Ellie caught his eye and smiled, and for a moment he really felt as if the three of them were a trio. Or maybe a triangle, with Ellie at the top and him and Zoe at the bottom.

‘Off you go.’

And off they went.

Ellie and Zoe came looking for him at lunchtime. He was sitting at his desk eating his sandwiches, listening to Frankie Ball and Juliet Lawrence talk about some bloke in year nine, when they just turned up.

‘Here he is, look!’

‘Oooeee! Marcus!’

Just about every kid in the room stopped what they were doing and turned round. You could see what they were thinking: Ellie and Marcus???????? Even Nicky and Mark, who hadn’t spoken to him for weeks and liked to pretend that they had never known him, looked up from their Gameboy; Marcus hoped that one of them had lost a life. He felt great. If Kurt Cobain himself had walked through the form-room door looking for him, the mouths of his classmates couldn’t have opened any wider.

‘What are you lot staring at? Marcus is our friend, aren’t you, Marcus?’

‘Yes,’ said Marcus. Whatever his relationship with Ellie and Zoe was, ‘yes’ was definitely the right answer here.

‘Come on, then, let’s go. You don’t want to hang around here all lunchtime, do you? Come to our form room. It’s a waste of time hanging out with this lot. Boring fuckers.’

Marcus could see some of them start to blush but nobody said anything. They couldn’t, unless they were prepared to argue with Ellie, which clearly none of them were. What would be the point? Even Mrs Morrison couldn’t argue with Ellie, so what chance did Frankie Ball and the rest of them have?

‘OK,’ said Marcus. ‘Hang on a minute.’ He wanted them to wait simply because he wanted the moment to last longer: he didn’t know whether Ellie and Zoe would come looking for him ever again and, even if they did, he doubted whether they’d announce to the world, or the part of the world eating sandwiches in his classroom, that he was their friend and that everyone else was a boring fucker. That would be too much to ask. But now he’d asked them to hang on, he had no idea what they might be hanging on for.

‘Shall I… Do you want me to bring anything?’

‘Like what?’ said Zoe. ‘A bottle?’

‘No, but, like…’

‘Or condoms?’ said Ellie. ‘Is that what you mean? We can’t have sex in our room, Marcus, even though I’d like to, of course. There are too many people in there.’ Zoe was laughing so hard that Marcus thought she might be sick. Her eyes were closed and she was sort of choking.

‘No, I know, I…’ Maybe asking them to hang on had been a mistake. He was turning his moment of triumph into what seemed like a year of horrible awfulness.

‘Just bring your sweet self, Marcus. But get a move on, eh?’

He knew he was red in the face, and the condom bit had been bad. But he still got to walk from his desk to where Ellie and Zoe were standing while everyone else watched, and when he got there Ellie gave him a kiss. OK, she was making fun of him, but it didn’t matter, there weren’t many people in his class that Ellie would bother to spit on, let alone kiss. ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ his dad had said once, ages ago, when Marcus had asked him why some actor was letting Noel Edmonds pour stuff over his head, and now he could see what he meant. Ellie had kind of poured stuff over his head, but it was really, really worth it.

Ellie’s form room was upstairs and the walk made the good bit, the fucking-hell-Marcus-and-Ellie bit, last longer. One of the teachers even stopped him to ask if he was OK, as if anyone hanging around with Ellie must have been kidnapped or brainwashed.

‘We’re adopting him, sir,’ said Ellie.

‘I wasn’t asking you, Ellie. I was asking him.’

‘They’re adopting me, sir,’ said Marcus. He didn’t mean it as a joke—he just thought that saying what Ellie said was sensible—but they all laughed anyway.

‘And you couldn’t hope for more responsible parents,’ said the teacher.

‘Ha, ha,’ said Marcus, although he wasn’t sure he should have done this time.

‘We’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Ellie. ‘Thank you. We’ll look after him. Have him home by midnight and all that.’

‘Make sure you do,’ said the teacher. ‘In one piece.’

Ellie made him wait outside her form room while she announced him. He could hear her shouting.

‘OK, listen everybody, I want you to meet Marcus. The only other Kurt Cobain fan in the whole fucking school. Come in, Marcus.’

He walked into the room. There weren’t many people in there, but those that were all laughed when they saw him.

‘I didn’t say I was a fan as such,’ he said. ‘I just think they have a good beat and their cover means something.’

Everyone laughed again. Ellie and Zoe stood beside him proudly, as if he had just done a magic trick that they had told everyone he could do even though nobody believed them. They were right; he did feel he’d been adopted.

Will had been trying not to think about Christmas, but as it got nearer he was beginning to go off the idea of watching a few hundred videos and smoking a few thousand joints. It didn’t seem very festive, somehow, and even though festivities invariably entailed The Song somewhere along the line, he didn’t want to ignore them completely. It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world about where you were at in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for yourself, and therefore spending three days bombed out of your head on your own said things about you that you might not want saying.

So he would spend Christmas in the bosom of a family—not his family, because he didn’t have one, but a family. There was one family he wanted to avoid at all costs: no way did he want to spend Christmas eating nut fucking roast, not watching TV, and singing carols with his eyes closed. He had to be careful, though, because if he just let himself drift along he’d be carried right over the weir; he had to start swimming in the opposite direction fast.

Having decided with such unshakeable firmness that he would absolutely definitely not be celebrating 25 December with Fiona and Marcus, it came as something of a surprise to him to find himself accepting an invitation from Marcus the following afternoon to do exactly that.

‘Do you want to spend Christmas round ours?’ Marcus asked, even before he had stepped into the flat.

‘Ummm,’ said Will. ‘That’s, ah, very kind of you.’

‘Good,’ said Marcus.

‘I only said that’s very kind of you,’ said Will.

‘But you’re coming.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because—’

‘Don’t you want to come?’

‘Yes, of course I do, but… What about your mum?’

‘She’ll be there too.’

‘Yes, I’d sort of presumed that. But she wouldn’t want me there.’

‘I’ve already spoken to her about it. I said I wanted to invite a friend, and she said OK.’

‘So you didn’t tell her it was me?’

‘No, but I think she guessed.’

‘How?’

‘I haven’t got any other friends, have I?’

‘Does she know you still come round here?’

‘Sort of. She’s stopped asking me, so I think she’s given up worrying about it.’

‘And there really isn’t anyone else you’d rather ask?’

‘No, course not. And if there was, they wouldn’t be allowed to come to my house for Christmas lunch. They’d be going to their own houses. Except they live in their own houses, so they wouldn’t be going anywhere, would they?’

Will was finding the conversation depressing. What Marcus was saying, in his artful, skewed way, was that he didn’t want Will to be alone on Christmas day.