Maybe it wasn’t too late. He rolled his eyes. ‘Don’t talk to me about babysitters,’ he said. He laughed bitterly and shook his head, just for good measure. Frances ignored the eccentric conversational timing and took the cue.

‘Did you have trouble tonight, then?’

‘No. My mother’s looking after him.’ He was proud of the use of the pronoun. It implied familiarity. On the debit side, though, there had been an awful lot of head-shaking, eye-rolling and bitter laughter for a man with no apparent baby-sitting difficulties.

‘I’ve had trouble before, though,’ he added hastily. The conversation was less than two minutes old and already he was a nervous wreck.

‘Haven’t we all?’ said Frances.

Will laughed heartily. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I know I have.’

It was now perfectly clear, he felt, that he was either a liar or a lunatic, but before he could dig himself any deeper into a hole which was already shipping water other SPAT members—all of them women, all but one of them in their thirties—started to arrive. Frances introduced him to each of them: Sally and Moira, who looked tough, ignored him completely, helped themselves to a paper cupful of white wine and disappeared off to the further corner of the room (Moira, Will noted with interest, was wearing a Lorena Bobbitt T-shirt); Lizzie, who was small, sweet and scatty; Helen and Susannah, who obviously regarded SPAT as beneath their dignity, and made rude comments about the wine and the location; Saskia, who was ten years younger than anybody else in the room, and looked more like somebody’s daughter than somebody’s mother; and Suzie, who was tall, blond, pale, nervy-looking and beautiful. She would do, he thought, and stopped looking at anyone else who came in. Blond and beautiful were two of the qualities he was looking for; pale and nervy-looking were two of the qualities that gave him the right to do so.

‘Hello,’ he said. ‘I’m Will, I’m new, and I don’t know anybody.’

‘Hello, Will. I’m Suzie, I’m old, and I know everybody.’ He laughed. She laughed. He spent as much of the evening as courtesy allowed in her company.

His conversation with Frances had sharpened him up, so he did better on the Ned front. In any case Suzie wanted to talk, and in these circumstances he was extremely happy to listen. There was a lot to listen to. Suzie had been married to a man called Dan, who had started an affair when she was six months pregnant and had left her the day before she went into labour. Dan had only seen his daughter Megan once, accidentally, in the Body Shop in Islington. He hadn’t seemed to want to see her again. Suzie was now poor (she was trying to retrain as a nutritionist) and bitter, and Will could understand why.

Suzie looked around the room.

‘One of the reasons I like coming here is that you can be angry and no one thinks any the less of you,’ she said. ‘Just about everyone’s got something they’re angry about.’

‘Really?’ They didn’t look that angry to Will.

‘Let’s see who’s here… The woman in the denim shirt over there? Her husband went because he thought their little boy wasn’t his. Ummm… Helen… boring… he went off with someone from work… Moira… he came out… Susannah Curtis… I think he was running two families…’

There were endless ingenious variations on the same theme. Men who took one look at their new child and went, men who took one look at their new colleague and went, men who went for the hell of it. Immediately Will understood Moira’s sanctification of Lorena Bobbitt completely; by the time Suzie had finished her litany of treachery and deceit, he wanted to cut off his own penis with a kitchen knife.

‘Aren’t there any other men who come to SPAT?’ he asked Suzie.

‘Just one. Jeremy. He’s on holiday.’

‘So women do leave sometimes?’

‘Jeremy’s wife was killed in a car crash.’

‘Oh. Oh well.’

Will was becoming so depressed about his sex that he decided to redress the balance.

‘So. I’m on my own,’ he said, in what he hoped was a mysteriously wistful tone.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Suzie. ‘I haven’t asked you anything about yourself.’

‘Oh… It doesn’t matter.’

‘Did you get dumped then?’

‘Well, I suppose I did, yes.’ He gave her a sad, stoical smile.

‘And does your ex see Ned?’

‘Sometimes. She’s not really that bothered.’ He was beginning to feel better; it was good to be the bearer of bad news about women. True, this bad news was entirely fictitious, but there was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word. He wasn’t a fraud. He was Robert De Niro.

‘How does he cope with that?’

‘Oh… he’s a good little boy. Very brave.’

‘They have amazing resources, kids, don’t they?’

To his astonishment he found himself blinking back a tear, and Suzie put a reassuring hand on his arm. He was in here, no doubt about it.

Some things carried on as normal. He went to his dad’s in Cambridge for the weekend and watched a load of telly. On the Sunday he and his dad and Lindsey, his dad’s girlfriend, went to Lindsey’s mum’s house in Norfolk, and they went for a walk on the beach and Lindsey’s mum gave him a fiver for no reason. He liked Lindsey’s mum. He liked Lindsey, too. Even his mum liked Lindsey, although she said nasty things about her every now and again. (He never stuck up for her. In fact, he stored up stupid things that Lindsey said or did and told his mum about them when he got home; it was easier that way.) Everyone was OK, really. It was just that there were so many of them now. But he got on with them all OK, and they didn’t think he was weird, or at least they didn’t seem to. He went back to school wondering whether he’d been making a fuss about nothing.

On the way home, though, it all started again, in the newsagent’s round the corner. They were nice in there, and they didn’t mind him looking at the computer magazines. He could stand browsing for ten minutes or so before they said anything, and even then they were gentle and jokey about it, not mean and anti-kid, like in so many of the shops. ‘Only three children allowed in at the same time.’ He hated all that. You were a thief just because of how old you were… He wouldn’t go in shops that had that sign in the window. He wouldn’t give them his money.

‘How’s your lovely mum, Marcus?’ the man behind the counter asked when he walked in. They liked his mother here, because she talked to them about the place where they came from; she had been there once, a long time ago, when she was a real hippy.

‘She’s OK.’ He wasn’t going to tell them anything.

He found the magazine he’d got halfway through last week, and forgot about everything else. The next thing he knew they were all in there, crowded in really close, and they were laughing at him again. He was sick of that sound. If no one laughed again in the whole world for the rest of his life, he wouldn’t care.

‘What you singing, Fuzzy?’

He’d done it again. He’d been thinking of one of his mum’s songs, a Joni Mitchell one about a taxi, but it had obviously slipped out again. They all started humming tunelessly, throwing in nonsense words every now and again, prodding him to get him to turn round. He ignored them, and tried to concentrate on what he was reading. He didn’t need to think of stuff like chocolate bars when he had a computer article to lose himself in. He started off just pretending, but within seconds he was properly lost, and he forgot all about them, and the next thing he knew they were on their way out of the shop.

‘Oi, Mohammed,’ one of them shouted. That wasn’t Mr Patel’s name. ‘You ought to check his pockets. He’s been thieving.’ And then they were gone. He checked his own pockets. They were full of chocolate bars and packets of chewing gum. He hadn’t even noticed. He felt sick. He started trying to explain, but Mr Patel interrupted him.