But then in English things went bad again. They were using one of those books that had a bit of everything in them; the bit they were looking at was taken from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. He knew the story, because he’d seen the film with his mum, and so he could see really clearly, so clearly that he wanted to run from the room, what was going to happen.

When it happened it was even worse than he thought it was going to be. Ms Maguire got one of the girls who she knew was a good reader to read out the passage, and then she tried to get a discussion going.

‘Now, one of the things this book is about is… How do we know who’s mad and who isn’t? Because, you know, in a way we’re all a bit mad, and if someone decides that we’re a bit mad, how do we… how do we show them we’re sane?’

Silence. A couple of the kids sighed and rolled their eyes at each other. One thing Marcus had noticed was that when you came into a school late you could tell straight away how well the teachers got on with a class. Ms Maguire was young and nervous and she was struggling, he reckoned. This class could go either way.

‘OK, let’s put it another way. How can we tell if people are mad?’

Here it comes, he thought. Here it comes. This is it.

‘If they sing for no reason in class, miss.’

Laughter. But then it all got worse than he’d expected. Everyone turned round and looked at him; he looked at Ms Maguire, but she had this big forced grin on and she wouldn’t catch his eye.

‘OK, that’s one way of telling, yes. You’d think that someone who does that would be a little potty. But leaving Marcus out of it for a moment…’

More laughter. He knew what she was doing and why, and he hated her.

Will first saw Angie—or, as it turned out, he didn’t see her—in Championship Vinyl, a little record shop off the Holloway Road. He was browsing, filling up the time, vaguely trying to hunt down an old R & B anthology he used to own when he was younger, one of those he had loved and lost; he heard her tell the surly and depressive assistant that she was looking for a Pinky and Perky record for her niece. He was trawling through the racks while she was being served, so he never caught a glimpse of her face, but he saw a lot of honey-blond hair, and he heard the kind of vaguely husky voice that he and everyone else thought of as sexy, so he listened while she explained that her niece didn’t even know who Pinky and Perky were. ‘Don’t you think that’s terrible? Fancy being five and not knowing who Pinky and Perky are! What are they teaching these kids!’

She was trying to be jolly, but Will had learnt to his cost that jollity was frowned upon in Championship Vinyl. She was, as he knew she would be, met with a withering look of contempt and a mumble which indicated that she was wasting the assistant’s valuable time.

Two days later, he found himself sitting next to the same woman in a café on Upper Street. He recognized her voice (they both ordered a cappuccino and croissant), the blond hair and her denim jacket. They both got up to get one of the café’s newspapers—she took the Guardian, so he was left with the Mail—and he smiled, but she clearly didn’t remember him, and he would have left it at that if she hadn’t been so pretty.

‘I like Pinky and Perky,’ he said in what he hoped was a gentle, friendly and humorously patronizing tone, but he could see immediately that he had made a terrible mistake, that this was not the same woman, that she didn’t have the faintest idea what he was talking about. He wanted to tear out his tongue and grind it into the wooden floor with his foot.

She looked at him, smiled nervously and glanced across at the waiter, probably calculating how long it would take for the waiter to hurl himself across the room and wrestle Will to the floor. Will both understood and sympathized. If a complete stranger were to sit down next to you in a coffee shop and tell you quietly that he liked Pinky and Perky as an opening conversational gambit, you could only presume that you were about to be decapitated and hidden under the floorboards.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’ He blushed, and the blush seemed to relax her: his embarrassment was some kind of indication of sanity, at least. They returned to their newspapers, but the woman kept breaking into a smile and looking across at him.

‘I know this sounds nosy,’ she said eventually, ‘but I’ve got to ask you. Who did you think I was? I’ve been trying to come up with some kind of story, and I can’t.’

So he explained, and she laughed again, and then finally he was given a chance to start over and converse normally. They talked about not working in the morning (he didn’t own up to not working in the afternoon either), and the record shop, and Pinky and Perky, of course, and several other children’s television characters. He had never before attempted to start a relationship cold in this way, but by the time they had finished their second cappuccino he had a phone number and a date for dinner.

When they met again she told him about her kids straight away; he wanted to throw his napkin on the floor, push the table over and run.

‘So?’ he said. It was, of course, the right thing to say.

‘I just thought you ought to know. It makes a difference to some people.’

‘In what way?’

‘Guys, I mean.’

‘Well, yes, I worked that out.’

‘I’m sorry, I’m not making this very easy, am I?’

‘You’re doing fine.’

‘It’s just that… if this is a date date, and it feels like one to me, then I thought I ought to tell you.’

‘Thank you. But really, it’s no problem. I would have been disappointed if you didn’t have children.’

She laughed. ‘Disappointed? Why?’

This was a good question. Why? Obviously he had said it because he thought it sounded smooth and winning, but he couldn’t tell her that.

‘Because I’ve never been out with someone who was a mum before, and I’ve always wanted to. I think I’d be good at it.’

‘Good at what?’

Right. Good at what? What was he good at? This was the million-dollar question, the one he had never been able to answer about anything. Maybe he would be good at children, even though he hated them and everyone responsible for bringing them into the world. Maybe he had written John and Christine and baby Imogen off too hastily. Maybe this was it! Uncle Will!

‘I don’t know. Good at kids’ things. Messing about things.’

He must be, surely. Everyone was, weren’t they? Maybe he should have been working with kids all this time. Maybe this was a turning point in his life!

It had to be said that Angie’s beauty was not irrelevant to his decision to reassess his affinity with children. The long blond hair, he now knew, was accompanied by a calm, open face, big blue eyes and extraordinarily sexy crows’ feet—she was beautiful in a very winning, wholesome, Julie Christie-type way. And that was the point. When had he ever been out with a woman who looked like Julie Christie? People who looked like Julie Christie didn’t go out with people like him. They went out with other film stars, or peers of the realm, or Formula One drivers. What was happening here? He decided that children were what was happening here; that children served as a symbolic blemish, like a birthmark or obesity, which gave him a chance where previously there would have been none. Maybe children democratized beautiful single women.

‘I’ll tell you,’ Angie was saying, although he had missed much of the cogitation that had brought her to this point, ‘when you’re a single mother, you’re far more likely to end up thinking in feminist clichés. You know, all men are bastards, a woman without a man is like a… a… something without a something that doesn’t have any relation to the first something; all that stuff.’