‘I was watching them, Marcus. It’s OK.’

He walked over to the counter and piled the stuff on top of the newspapers.

‘Are they at your school?’

Marcus nodded.

‘You’d better keep out of their way.’

Yeah, right. Bloody hell. Keep out of their way.

When he got home his mother was lying on the floor with a coat draped over her, watching children’s cartoons. She didn’t look up.

‘Didn’t you go to work today?’

‘This morning. I took the afternoon off sick.’

‘What kind of sick?’

No answer.

This wasn’t right. He was only a kid. He’d been thinking that more and more recently, as he got older and older. He didn’t know why. Maybe it was because, when he really was only a kid, he wasn’t capable of recognizing it—you had to be a certain age before you realized that you were actually quite young. Or maybe when he was little there was nothing to worry about—five or six years ago his mum never spent half the day shivering under a coat watching stupid cartoons, and even if she had he might not have thought it was anything out of the ordinary.

But something was going to have to give. He was having a shit time at school and a shit time at home, and as home and school was all there was to it, just about, that meant he was having a shit time all the time, apart from when he was asleep. Someone was going to have to do something about it, because he couldn’t do anything about it himself, and he couldn’t see who else there was, apart from the woman under the coat.

She was funny, his mum. She was all for talking. She was always on at him to talk and tell her things, but he was sure she didn’t really mean it. She was fine on the little things, but he knew that if he went for the big stuff then there’d be trouble, especially now, when she cried and cried about nothing. But at the moment he couldn’t see any way of avoiding it. He was only a kid, and she was his mum, and if he felt bad it was her job to stop him feeling bad, simple as that. Even if she didn’t want to, even if it meant that she’d end up feeling worse. Tough. Too bad. He was angry enough to talk to her now.

‘What are you watching this for? It’s rubbish. You’re always telling me.’

‘I thought you liked cartoons.’

‘I do. I just don’t like this one. It’s terrible.’

They both stared at the screen without speaking. This weird dog-type thing was trying to get at a boy who could turn himself into a kind of flying saucer.

‘What sort of sick?’ He asked the question roughly, the way a teacher would ask someone like Paul Cox whether he’d done his homework.

No answer again.

‘Mum, what sort of sick?’

‘Oh, Marcus, it’s not the sort of sick that—’

‘Don’t treat me like an idiot, Mum.’

She started crying again, long, low sobs that terrified him.

‘You’ve got to stop this.’

‘I can’t.’

‘You’ve got to. If you can’t look after me properly then you’ll have to find someone who can.’

She rolled over on to her stomach and looked at him.

‘How can you say I don’t look after you?’

‘Because you don’t. All you do is make my meals and I could do that. The rest of the time you just cry. That’s… that’s no good. That’s no good to me.’

She cried even harder then, and he let her. He went upstairs to his room and played NBA Basketball with the earphones on, even though he wasn’t supposed to on school nights. But when he came downstairs she was up and the duvet had been put away. She was spooning pasta and sauce on to plates, and she seemed OK. He knew she wasn’t OK—he may have been just a kid, but he was old enough to know that people didn’t stop being nuts (and that, he was beginning to realize, was what sort of sick it was) just because you told them to stop—but he didn’t care, as long as she was OK in front of him.

‘You’re going to a picnic on Saturday,’ she said out of the blue.

‘A picnic?’

‘Yes. In Regent’s Park.’

‘Who with?’

‘Suzie.’

‘Not that SPAT lot.’

‘Yes, that SPAT lot.’

‘I hate them.’ Fiona had taken Marcus to a SPAT summer party in someone’s garden when they first moved to London, but she hadn’t been back since; Marcus had been to more meetings than she had, because Suzie had taken him on one of their outings.

‘Tant pis.’

What did she have to say things like that for? He knew it was French for ‘tough shit’, but why couldn’t she just say ‘tough shit’? No wonder he was a weirdo. If you had a mum who spoke French for no reason, you were more or less bound to end up singing out loud in newsagents’ without meaning to. He put loads and loads of cheese on his pasta and stirred it around.

‘Are you going?’

‘No.’

‘So why do I have to?’

‘Because I’m having a rest.’

‘I can keep out of your way.’

‘I’m doing what you said. I’m getting someone else to look after you. Suzie’s much more capable than I am.’

Suzie was her best friend; they’d known each other since school-days. She was nice; Marcus liked her a lot. But he still didn’t want to go on a picnic with her and all those horrible little kids from SPAT. He was ten years older than most of them, and every time he’d done anything with them before, he’d hated it. The last time, when they all went to the zoo, he’d come home and told his mum he wanted a vasectomy. That made her laugh a lot, but he’d meant it. He knew for a fact that he was never going to have children, so why not get it over and done with now?

‘I could do anything. I could sit in my room all day playing games. You wouldn’t even know I was in the house.’

‘I want you to get out. Do something normal. It’s too intense here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I mean… Oh, I don’t know what I mean. I just know that we’re not doing each other any good.’

Hold on a moment. They didn’t do each other any good? For the first time since his mother had started crying, he wanted to cry too. He knew she wasn’t doing him any good, but he had no idea that it worked both ways. What had he done to her? He couldn’t think of a single thing. One day he’d ask her what she was on about, but not today, not now. He wasn’t sure he’d like the answer.

‘What a bitch.’

Will looked at his feet and made noises intended to convey to Suzie that his ex-wife wasn’t that bad, not really.

‘Will, it’s just not on. You can’t ring up five minutes in advance and change plans like that. You should’ve told her to…’—she looked around to see whether Marcus, the strange kid they were apparently stuck with for the day, was still listening—‘. . . eff off.’

His ex (who, according to Suzie, was called Paula, a name he must have mentioned the other night) was always going to get the blame for Ned’s non-appearance at the picnic, but he felt obscurely loyal to her in the face of Suzie’s empathetic anger. Had he pushed it too far?

‘Oh, well,’ he kept saying, while Suzie raged on, ‘you know.’

‘You can’t afford to be soft. You’ll just get messed around all the time.’

‘She’s never done it before.’

‘No, but she’ll do it again. You watch. You’re too nice. This is a nasty business. You’ll have to toughen up.’

‘I suppose so.’ Being told that he was too nice, that he needed to be meaner, was an unusual experience for Will, but he was feeling so weedy that it was easy to see how Paula had walked all over him.

‘And the car! I can’t believe she took the car.’

He had forgotten about the car. Paula had also taken that, first thing this morning, for reasons too complicated to explain, thus obliging Will to phone up Suzie and ask for a lift to Regent’s Park.

‘I know, I know. She’s…’ Words failed him. If you looked at the whole picture, the Ned thing and the car thing, Paula had behaved outrageously, he could see that, but it was still hard for him to summon up the requisite anger. He was going to have to, though, if only to show Suzie that he wasn’t a hopeless, spineless wimp. ‘She’s a cow.’