One Monday morning his mother started crying before breakfast, and it frightened him. Morning crying was something new, and it was a bad, bad sign. It meant that it could now happen at any hour of the day without warning; there was no safe time. Up until today the mornings had been OK; she seemed to wake up with the hope that whatever was making her unhappy would somehow have vanished overnight, in her sleep, the way colds and upset stomachs sometimes did. And she had sounded OK this morning—not angry, not unhappy, not mad, just kind of normal and mum-like—when she shouted for him to get a move on. But here she was, already at it, slumped over the kitchen table in her dressing-gown, a half-eaten piece of toast on her plate, her face all puffed-up, snot pouring out of her nose.

Marcus never said anything when she cried. He didn’t know what to say. He didn’t understand why she did it, and because he didn’t understand he couldn’t help, and because he couldn’t help, he just ended up standing there and staring at her with his mouth open, and she’d just carry on as if nothing was happening.

‘Do you want some tea?’

He had to guess at what she was saying, because she was so snuffled up.

‘Yeah. Please.’ He took a clean bowl from the draining board and went to the larder to choose his cereal. That cheered him up. He’d forgotten that she’d let him put a variety pack in the supermarket trolley on Saturday morning. He went through all the usual agonies of indecision: he knew he should get through the boring stuff, the cornflakes and the one with fruit in it, first of all, because if he didn’t eat them now he’d never eat them, and they’d just sit on the shelf until they got stale, and Mum would get cross with him, and for the next few months he’d have to stick to an economy-sized packet of something horrible. He understood all that, yet still he went for the Coco Pops, as he always did. His mother didn’t notice—the first advantage of her terrible depression that he’d found so far. It wasn’t a big advantage, though; on the whole he’d rather she was cheerful enough to send him back to the larder. He’d quite happily give up Coco Pops if she’d give up crying all the time.

He ate his cereal, drank his tea, picked up his bag and gave his mother a kiss, just a normal one, not a soppy, understanding one, and went out. Neither of them said a word. What else was he supposed to do?

On the way to school he tried to work out what was wrong with her. What could be wrong with her that he wouldn’t know about? She was in work, so they weren’t poor, although they weren’t rich either—she was a music therapist, which meant that she was a sort of teacher of handicapped children, and she was always saying that the money was pitiful, pathetic, lousy, a crime. But they had enough for the flat, and for food, and for holidays once a year, and even for computer games, once in a while. What else made you cry, apart from money? Death? But he’d know if anybody important had died; she would only cry that much about Grandma, Grandpa, his uncle Tom and Tom’s family, and they’d seen them all the previous weekend, at his cousin Ella’s fourth birthday party. Something to do with men? He knew she wanted a boyfriend; but he knew because she joked about it sometimes, and he couldn’t see that it was possible to go from joking about something now and again to crying about it all the time. Anyway, she was the one who had got rid of Roger, and if she was desperate she would have kept it going. So what else was there? He tried to remember what people cried about in EastEnders, apart from money, death and boyfriends, but it wasn’t very helpful: prison sentences, unwanted pregnancies, Aids, stuff that didn’t seem to apply to his mum.

He’d forgotten about it all by the time he was inside the school gates. It wasn’t like he’d decided to forget about it. It was simply that an instinct for self-preservation took over. When you were having trouble with Lee Hartley and his mates, it hardly mattered whether your mum was going round the bend or not. But it was OK, this morning. He could see them all leaning against the wall of the gym, huddled around some item of treasure, safe in the distance, so he reached the form room without any difficulty.

His friends Nicky and Mark were already there, playing Tetris on Mark’s Gameboy. He went over to them.

‘All right?’

Nicky said hello, but Mark was too absorbed to notice him. He tried to position himself so he could see how Mark was getting on, but Nicky was standing in the only place that offered a glimpse of the Gameboy’s tiny screen, so he sat on a desk waiting for them to finish. They didn’t finish. Or rather, they did, but then they just started again; they didn’t offer him a game or put it away because he had arrived. Marcus felt he was being left out deliberately, and he didn’t know what he was supposed to have done wrong.

‘Are you going to the computer room at lunchtime?’ That was how he knew Nicky and Mark—through the computer club. It was a stupid question, because they always went. If they didn’t go, then like him they would be tiptoeing timidly around the edges of lunchtime, trying not to get noticed by anybody with a big mouth and a sharp haircut.

‘Dunno. Maybe. What do you reckon, Mark?’

‘Dunno. Probably.’

‘Right. See you there, then, maybe.’

He’d see them before then. He was seeing them now, for example—it wasn’t like he was going anywhere. But it was something to say.

Breaktime was the same: Nicky and Mark on the Gameboy, Marcus hovering around on the outside. OK, they weren’t real friends—not like the friends he’d had in Cambridge—but they got on OK, usually, if only because they weren’t like the other kids in their class. Marcus had even been to Nicky’s house once, after school one day. They knew they were nerdy and geeky and all the other things some of the girls called them (all three of them wore specs, none of them was bothered about clothes, Mark had ginger hair and freckles, and Nicky looked a good three years younger than everyone else in year seven), but it didn’t worry them much. The important thing was that they had each other, that they weren’t hugging the corridors trying desperately not to get noticed.

‘Oi! Fuzzy! Give us a song.’ A couple of year eights were standing in the doorway. Marcus didn’t know them, so his fame was obviously spreading. He tried to look more purposeful: he craned his neck to make it look as though he was concentrating on the Gameboy, but he still couldn’t see anything, and anyway Mark and Nicky started to back away, leaving him on his own.

‘Hey, Ginger! Chris Evans! Speccy!’ Mark started to redden.

‘They’re all speccy.’

‘Yeah, I forgot. Oi, Ginger Speccy! Is that a love bite on your neck?’

They thought this was hilarious. They always made jokes about girls and sex; he didn’t know why. Probably because they were sex-mad.

Mark gave up the struggle and turned the Gameboy off. This had been happening a lot recently, and there wasn’t much you could do about it. You just had to stand there and take it until they got bored. It was finding something to do in the meantime, some way to be and to look, that made it difficult. Marcus had recently taken to making lists in his head; his mum had a game where you had cards with categories on them, like, say, ‘Puddings’, and the other team had to guess what twelve examples were on the card, and then you swapped round and had to guess what twelve examples were on the other team’s card, like ‘Football teams’. He couldn’t play it here because he didn’t have the cards and there wasn’t another team, but he played a variation of this: he thought of something that had lots of examples, like, say, ‘Fruit’, and tried to think of as many different fruits as he could before whoever it was who was giving them a hard time went away again.