Chocolate bars. Mars, of course. Snickers. Bounty. Were there any more ice-cream ones? He couldn’t remember. Topic. Picnic.

‘Hey, Marcus, who’s your favourite rapper? Tupac? Warren G?’ Marcus knew these names, but he didn’t know what they meant, or any of their songs, and anyway he knew he wasn’t meant to give an answer. If he gave an answer he’d be sunk.

His mind had gone blank, but then this was part of the point of the game. It would be easy to think of the names of chocolate bars at home, but here, with these kids giving him a hard time, it was almost impossible.

Milky Way.

‘Oi, Midget, do you know what a blow job is?’ Nicky was pretending to stare out of the window, but Marcus could tell he wasn’t seeing anything at all.

Picnic. No, he’d already had that one.

‘Come on, this is boring.’

And they were gone. Only six. Pathetic.

The three of them didn’t say anything for a while. Then Nicky looked at Mark, and Mark looked at Nicky, and finally Mark spoke.

‘Marcus, we don’t want you hanging around with us any more.’

He didn’t know how to react, so he said, ‘Oh,’ and then, ‘Why not?’

‘Because of them.’

‘They’re nothing to do with me.’

‘Yes they are. We never got in any trouble with anyone before we knew you, and now we get this every day.’

Marcus could see that. He could imagine that if they had never met him, Nicky and Mark would have had as much contact with Lee Hartley and the rest of them as koala bears have with piranha fish. But now, because of him, the koala bears had fallen into the sea and the piranhas were taking an interest in them. Nobody had hurt them, not yet, and Marcus knew all the stuff about sticks and stones and names. But insults were hurled in just the same way as missiles, if you thought about it, and if other people happened to be standing in the line of fire they got hit too. That’s what had happened with Nicky and Mark: he had made them visible, he had turned them into targets, and if he was any kind of a friend at all he’d take himself well away from them. It’s just that he had nowhere else to go.

I’m a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. I’m a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. I’m a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. However many times Will told himself this, he could always find some reason that prevented him from believing it; in his own head—not the place that counted the most, but important nevertheless—he didn’t feel like a parent. He was too young, too old, too stupid, too smart, too groovy, too impatient, too selfish, too careless, too careful (whatever the contraceptive circumstances of the woman he was seeing, he always, always used a Durex, even in the days before you had to), he didn’t know enough about kids, he went out too often, he drank too much, he took too many drugs. When he looked in the mirror, he didn’t, couldn’t, see a dad, especially a single dad.

He was trying to see a single dad in the mirror because he had run out of single mums to sleep with; in fact, Angie had so far proved to be both the beginning and the end of his supply. It was all very well deciding that single mums were the future, that there were millions of sad, Julie Christie-like waifs just dying for his call, but the frustrating truth was that he didn’t have any of their phone numbers. Where did they hang out?

It took him longer than it should have done to realize that, by definition, single mothers had children, and children, famously, prevented one from hanging out anywhere. He had made a few gentle, half-hearted enquiries of friends and acquaintances, but had so far failed to make any real headway; the people he knew either didn’t know any single mothers, or were unwilling to effect the necessary introductions due to Will’s legendarily poor romantic track record. But now he had found the ideal solution to this unexpected dearth of prey. He had invented a two-year-old son called Ned and had joined a single parents’ group.

Most people would not have bothered to go to these lengths to indulge a whim, but Will quite often bothered to do things that most people wouldn’t bother to do, simply because he had the time to bother. Doing nothing all day gave him endless opportunities to dream and scheme and pretend to be something he wasn’t. He had, after a fit of remorse following a weekend of extreme self-indulgence, volunteered to work in a soup kitchen, and even though he never actually reported for duty, the phone call had allowed him to pretend, for a couple of days, that he was the kind of guy who might. And he had thought about VSO and filled in the forms, and he had cut out an advert in the local paper about teaching slow learners to read, and he had contacted estate agents about opening a restaurant and then a bookshop…

The point was that if you had a history of pretending, then joining a single parent group when you were not a single parent was neither problematic nor particularly scary. If it didn’t work out, then he’d just have to try something else. It was no big deal.

SPAT (Single Parents—Alone Together) met on the first Thursday of the month in a local adult education centre, and tonight was Will’s first time. He was almost sure that tonight would be his last time, too: he’d get something wrong, like the name of Postman Pat’s cat, or the colour of Noddy’s car (or, more crucially, the name of his own child—for some reason he couldn’t stop thinking of him as Ted, and he had only christened him Ned this morning), and he’d be exposed as a fraud and frogmarched off the premises. If there was a chance of meeting someone like Angie, however, it had to be worth a try.

The car park at the centre contained just one other vehicle, a beaten-up B-reg 2CV which had, according to the stickers in its window, been to Chessington World of Adventure and Alton Towers; Will’s car, a new GTi, hadn’t been anywhere like that at all. Why not? He couldn’t think of any reason why not, apart from the glaringly obvious one, that he was a childless single man aged thirty-six and therefore had never had the desire to drive miles and miles to plunge down a plastic fairy mountain on a tea-tray.

The centre depressed him. He hadn’t set foot inside a place with classrooms and corridors and home-made posters for nearly twenty years, and he had forgotten that British education smelt of disinfectant. It hadn’t occurred to him that he wouldn’t be able to find the SPAT party. He thought he’d be led straight to it by the happy buzz of people forgetting their troubles and getting roaring drunk, but there was no happy buzz, just the distant, mournful clank of a bucket. Finally he spotted a piece of file paper pinned to a classroom door with the word SPAT! scrawled on it in felt-tip pen. The exclamation mark put him off. It was trying too hard.

There was only one woman in the room. She was taking bottles—of white wine, beer, mineral water and supermarket-brand cola—out of a cardboard box and putting them on to a table in the centre of the room. The rest of the tables had been pushed to the back; the chairs were stacked in rows behind them. It was the most desolate party venue Will had ever seen.

‘Have I come to the right place?’ he asked the woman. She had pointy features and red cheeks; she looked like Worzel Gummidge’s friend Aunt Sally.

‘SPAT? Come in. Are you Will? I’m Frances.’

He smiled and shook her hand. He had spoken to Frances on the phone earlier in the day.

‘I’m sorry there’s nobody else here yet. We quite often get off to a slow start. Babysitters.’

‘Of course.’ So he was wrong to be prompt. He had more or less given himself away already. And, of course, he should never have said ‘of course’, which implied that she had clarified something he was finding puzzling. He should have rolled his eyes and said, ‘Tell me about it’, or, ‘Don’t talk to me about babysitters’, something weary and conspiratorial.