Megan wriggled out of her mother’s lap and went over to the Christmas tree.

‘There might be a present for you under there, Megan,’ said Fiona.

‘Oooh, Megan, presents,’ said Suzie. Fiona went over to the tree, picked up one of the last two or three parcels and gave it to her. Megan stood there clutching it and looked around the room.

‘She’s wondering who to give it to,’ said Suzie. ‘She’s had as much fun giving them out as opening them today.’

‘How sweet,’ said Lindsey’s mum. Everyone watched and waited while Megan made her decision; it was almost as if the little girl had understood the snubbing business and wanted to make mischief, because she toddled over to Will and thrust the present at him.

Will didn’t move. ‘Well, take it from her then, you fool,’ said Suzie.

‘It’s not my bloody present,’ said Will. Good for you, Marcus thought. Do some snubbing of your own. The only trouble was that as things stood Will was snubbing Megan, not Suzie, and Marcus didn’t think you should snub anyone under the age of three. What was the point? Megan didn’t seem to mind, though, because she continued to hold the present out to him until he reached for it.

‘Now what?’ said Will crossly.

‘Open it with her,’ said Suzie. She was more patient this time; Will’s anger seemed to have calmed her down a little. If she wanted a row with Will, she clearly didn’t want it here, in front of all these people.

Will and Megan tore off the paper to reveal some sort of plastic toy that played tunes. Megan looked at it and waved it at Will.

‘What now?’ said Will.

‘Play with her,’ said Suzie. ‘God, spot the childless person here.’

‘Tell you what,’ said Will. ‘You play with her.’ He tossed Suzie the toy. ‘As I’m so bloody clueless.’

‘Maybe you could learn to be less clueless,’ said Suzie.

‘What for?’

‘I would have thought that in your line of work it might be handy to know how to play with kids.’

‘What’s your line of work?’ Lindsey asked politely, as if this were a normal conversation amongst a normal group of people.

‘He doesn’t do anything,’ Marcus said. ‘His dad wrote "Santa’s Super Sleigh" and he earns a million pounds a minute.’

‘He pretends he has a child so he can join single parent groups and chat up single mothers,’ said Suzie.

‘Yeah, but he doesn’t get paid for that,’ said Marcus.

Will stood up again, but this time he didn’t sit down.

‘Thanks for the lunch and everything,’ he said. ‘I’m off.’

‘Suzie has a right to express her anger, Will,’ said Fiona.

‘Yes, and she’s expressed it, and now I have a right to go home.’ He started to weave his way through the presents and glasses and people towards the door.

‘He’s my friend,’ Marcus said suddenly. ‘I invited him. I should be able to tell him when he goes home.’

‘I’m not sure that’s how the whole hospitality thing works,’ said Will.

‘But I don’t want him to go yet,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s not fair. How come Lindsey’s mum’s still here, and no one invited her, and the one person I invited is leaving because everyone’s being horrible to him?’

‘First of all,’ said Fiona, ‘I invited Lindsey’s mum, and it’s my house too. And we haven’t been horrible to Will. Suzie’s angry with Will, as she has every right to be, and she’s telling him so.’

Marcus felt as though he were in a play. He was standing up, and Will was standing up, and then Fiona stood up; but Lindsey and her mum and Clive were sat on the sofa watching, in a line, with their mouths open.

‘All he did was make up a kid for a couple of weeks. God. That’s nothing. So what? Who cares? Kids at school do worse than that every day.’

‘The point is, Marcus, that Will left school a long time ago. He should have grown out of making people up by now.’

‘Yeah, but he’s behaved better since, hasn’t he?’

‘Can I go yet?’ said Will, but nobody took any notice.

‘Why? What’s he done?’ asked Suzie.

‘He never wanted me round his flat every day. I just went. And he bought me those shoes, and at least he listens when I say I’m having a hard time at school. You just tell me to get used to it. And he knew who Kirk O’Bane was.’

‘Kurt Cobain,’ said Will.

‘And it’s not like you lot never do anything wrong ever, is it?’ said Marcus. ‘I mean…’ He had to be careful here. He knew he couldn’t say too much, or even anything at all, about the hospital stuff. ‘I mean, how come I got to know Will in the first place?’

‘Because you threw a bloody great baguette at a duck’s head and killed it, basically,’ said Will.

Marcus couldn’t believe Will was bringing that up now. It was supposed to be all about how everyone else did things wrong, not about how he had killed the duck. But then Suzie and Fiona started laughing, and Marcus could see that Will knew what he was doing.

‘Is that true, Marcus?’ said his father.

‘There was something wrong with it,’ said Marcus. ‘I think it was going to die anyway.’

Suzie and Fiona laughed even harder. The audience on the sofa looked appalled. Will sat down again.

Will fell in love on New Year’s Eve, and the experience took him completely by surprise. She was called Rachel, she illustrated children’s books, and she looked a little bit like Laura Nyro on the cover of Gonna Take A Miracle—nervy, glamorous, Bohemian, clever, lots of long, unruly dark hair.

Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends it had always struck him as a peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the unhappiness when it was unreciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out. These were people who could not control themselves, or protect themselves, people who, if only temporarily, were no longer content to occupy their own space, people who could no longer rely on a new jacket, a bag of grass and an afternoon rerun of The Rockford Files to make them complete.

Lots of people, of course, would be thrilled to take their seats next to their computer-generated ideal life-partner, but Will was a realist, and he could see immediately that there was only cause for panic. He was almost sure that Rachel was about to make him very miserable indeed, mostly because he couldn’t see anything he might have which could possibly interest her.

If there was a disadvantage to the life he had chosen for himself, a life without work and care and difficulty and detail, a life without context and texture, then he had finally found it: when he met an intelligent, cultured, ambitious, beautiful, witty and single woman at a New Year’s Eve party, he felt like a blank twit, a cypher, someone who had done nothing with his whole life apart from watch Countdown and drive around listening to Nirvana records. That had to be a bad thing, he reckoned. If you were falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and all the rest of it, then feeling like a blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.

One of his problems, he reflected as he was trying to dredge his memory for a single tiny scrap of experience that this woman might regard as worth her momentary contemplation, was that he was reasonably good-looking and reasonably articulate. It gave people the wrong impression. It gave him admission to a party from which he should be barred by ferocious bouncers with thick necks and tattoos. He may have been good-looking and articulate, but that was just a quirk of genetics, environment and education; at his core he was ugly and monosyllabic. Maybe he should undergo some sort of reverse plastic surgery—something that would rearrange his features so that they were less even, and push his eyes closer together or further apart. Or maybe he should put on an enormous amount of weight, sprout a few extra chins, grow so fat that he sweated profusely all the time. And, of course, he should start grunting like an ape.