‘I’m not sure what I’m doing yet.’

‘Where might you be going instead?’

‘Nowhere, but…’

Any conversational holes that needed filling were usually filled by Marcus. His concentration was such that any ums and ers and buts he looked on as cues to change the subject entirely. For some reason, though, he suddenly abandoned his usual technique and stared at Will intently.

‘What are you staring at?’ Will said eventually.

‘I wasn’t staring. I was waiting for you to answer the question.’

‘I answered it. "Nowhere," I said.’

‘You said "Nowhere, but…". I was waiting for what came after the but.’

‘Well, nothing. I’m not going anywhere for Christmas.’

‘So you can come to us.’

‘Yes, but—’

‘But what?’

‘Stop asking me "But what?" all the time.’

‘Why?’

‘Because… it’s not polite.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because… I clearly have reservations, Marcus. That’s why I keep saying "But". I’m obviously not one hundred per cent convinced that I want to come to your house for Christmas.’

‘Why not?’

‘Are you being funny?’

‘No.’

It was true, of course: Marcus was never deliberately funny. One look at Marcus’s face was enough to convince Will that the boy was merely curious, and that his curiosity showed no signs of abating. The conversation had already been extended way beyond Will’s comfort point, and now he was beginning to worry that he would eventually be forced to articulate the cruellest of truths: that Marcus’s mother was, like her son, a lunatic; that even disregarding the sanity aspect of things they were both a pair of losers anyway; that he couldn’t imagine a gloomier Christmas; that he would much, much rather revert to his original plan for oblivion and the entire output of the Marx Brothers than pull wishbones with either of them; that any sane person would feel the same way. If the kid couldn’t take a hint, what option did he have? Unless…

‘I’m sorry, Marcus, I was being rude. I’d love to spend Christmas with you.’

That was the other option. It wasn’t his chosen option, but it was the other option.

As it turned out it wasn’t just the three of them, which helped him no end when he showed up. He was expecting one of Fiona’s logic-free lectures, but all he got was a look; she clearly didn’t want to resume hostilities in front of her other guests. There was Marcus’s dad Clive, and his girlfriend Lindsey, and his girlfriend’s mum, six of them altogether, all squashed round the fold-out dining table in the flat. Will didn’t know that the world was like this. As the product of a 1960s’ second marriage, he was labouring under the misapprehension that when families broke up some of the constituent parts stopped speaking to each other, but the set-up here was different: Fiona and her ex seemed to look back on their relationship as the thing that had brought them together in the first place, rather than something that had gone horribly wrong and driven them apart. It was as if sharing a home and a bed and having a child together was like staying in adjacent rooms in the same hotel, or being in the same class at school—a happy coincidence that had given them the opportunity for an occasional friendship.

This couldn’t happen all the time, Will thought, otherwise SPAT would have been full of happy but estranged couples, all introducing their exes and their nexts and their kids from here, there and everywhere; but it hadn’t been like that at all—it had been full of justified and righteous anger, and a very great deal of unhappiness. From what he had seen that evening he didn’t think too many SPAT families would be reconvening for a game of Twister and a sing-song round the tree today.

But even if it didn’t happen very often, it was happening here, today, which at first Will found rather sickening: if people couldn’t live together, he reckoned, they should at least have the decency to loathe each other. But actually, as the day wore on and he had a little more to drink, Will could dimly see that to strive for pleasantness and harmony once a year wasn’t an entirely contemptible ambition. A room full of people trying to get on made Marcus happy, for a start, and even Will was not cynical enough to wish Marcus anything but happiness on Christmas Day. On New Year’s Eve he would make a resolution to recover some of his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as the Romans do, and smile at people even if he disapproved of them. Smiling at people didn’t mean that you had to be friends with them forever, surely? Much later in the day, when common sense prevailed and everyone started squabbling, he learnt that smiling at people didn’t even mean that you had to be friends for a day, but for a few hours he was happy to believe in an inverted universe.

He had bought presents for Fiona and Marcus. He gave Marcus a vinyl copy of Nevermind, because they didn’t own a CD player, and a Kurt Cobain T-shirt, so he could keep in with Ellie; he gave Fiona a pretty groovy and pretty expensive plain glass vase, because she’d complained after the hospital business that she didn’t know what to do with the flowers. Marcus gave him a crossword-solver’s book to help him with Countdown, and Fiona gave him The Single Parent’s Handbook as a joke.

‘What’s the joke?’ Lindsey asked him.

‘Nothing,’ said Will quickly and, he could see as soon as he’d said it, feebly.

‘Will pretended to have a kid so’s he could join this single parents’ group,’ said Marcus.

‘Oh,’ said Lindsey. The strangers in the room, Lindsey and her mum and Clive, looked at him with some interest, but he declined to elucidate. He just smiled at them, as if it were something anyone would do in the circumstances. He wouldn’t like to have to explain what those circumstances were, however.

The present-giving part of the day didn’t take that long, and for the most part it was the usual stuff—alarmingly so, given the complicated web of relationships in the room. Penis-shaped chocolate was all very well, Will thought (actually he didn’t think that at all, but never mind—he was trying to live and let live) but was penis-shaped chocolate an appropriate gift for your boyfriend’s currently boyfriendless and celibate ex-lover? He really didn’t know, but it seemed a little tasteless, somehow—surely the whole subject of penises was best left alone on occasions like this?—and anyway Fiona had never struck Will as a penis-shaped-chocolate kind of woman, but she laughed anyway.

As the pile of discarded wrapping paper grew bigger, it struck Will that just about any present given in these circumstances could be deemed inappropriate or darkly meaningful. Fiona gave Lindsey some silk underwear, as if to say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter to me what you two get up to at nights,’ and she gave Clive a new book called The Secret History, as if to say something rather different. Clive gave Fiona a Nick Drake cassette, and though Clive did not know about the hospital business, as far as Will was aware, there still seemed to be something weird about him forcing a possibly suicidal depressive’s music on a possibly suicidal depressive.

Clive’s presents for Marcus were in themselves uncontroversial, computer games and sweatshirts and a baseball cap and the Mr Blobby record and so on, but what made them seem pointed was their contrast with the joyless little pile that Fiona had given Marcus earlier in the day: a jumper that wouldn’t do him any favours at school (it was baggy and hairy and arty), a couple of books and some piano music—a gentle and very dull maternal reminder, it transpired, that Marcus had given up on his lessons some time ago. Marcus showed him this miserable haul with a pride and enthusiasm that almost broke Will’s heart… ‘And a really nice jumper, and these books look really interesting, and this music because one day when I… when I get a bit more time I’m going to really give it a go…’ Will had never properly given Marcus credit for being a good kid—up until now he’d only noticed his eccentric, troublesome side, probably because there hadn’t been much else to notice. But he was good, Will could see that now. Not good as in obedient and uncomplaining; it was more of a mindset kind of good, where you looked at something like a pile of crap presents and recognized that they were given with love and chosen with care, and that was enough. It wasn’t even that he was choosing to see the glass as half-full, either—Marcus’s glass was full to overflowing, and he would have been amazed and mystified if anyone had attempted to tell him there were kids who would have hurled the hairy jumper and the sheet music back in the parental face and demanded a Nintendo.