‘But you aren’t living with your dad, are you? How many of us are? At our school, there’s about a million kids whose parents have split. And none of them are living with their dads.’

‘Stephen Wood is.’

‘Yeah, right, Stephen Wood. You win.’

Even though what they were talking about was miserable, Marcus was enjoying the conversation. It seemed big, as though you could walk round it and see different things, and that never happened when you talked to kids normally. ‘Did you see Top of the Pops last night?’ There wasn’t much to think about in that, was there? You said yes or no and it was over. He could see now why his mum chose friends, instead of just putting up with anyone she happened to bump into, or sticking with people who supported the same football team, or wore the same clothes, which was pretty much what happened at school; his mum must have conversations like this with Suzie, conversations which moved, conversations where each thing the other person said seemed to lead you on somewhere.

He wanted to keep it going but he didn’t know how, because Ellie was the one who said the things that got them started. He was OK at coming up with the answers, he reckoned, but he doubted if he’d ever be clever enough to make Ellie think in the way she made him think, and that panicked him a little: he wished they were equally clever, but they weren’t, and they probably never would be, because Ellie would always be older than him. Maybe when he was thirty-two and she was thirty-five it wouldn’t matter so much, but it felt to him that unless he said something really smart in the next few minutes, then she wouldn’t hang around for the rest of the evening, let alone for the next twenty years. Suddenly he remembered the thing boys were supposed to ask girls at parties. He didn’t want to ask, because he knew he was hopeless at it, but the alternative—to let Ellie wander away and talk to somebody else—was just too horrible.

‘Would you like to dance, Ellie?’

Ellie stared at him, her eyes wide with surprise.

‘Marcus!’ She started laughing again, really hard. ‘You’re so funny. Of course I wouldn’t like to dance! I couldn’t think of anything worse!’

He knew then that he should have thought of another proper question, something about Kurt Cobain or politics, because Ellie disappeared off somewhere for a smoke, and he had to go and find his mum. But Ellie came looking for him at midnight and gave him a hug, so he knew that even though he’d been stupid, he hadn’t been unforgivably stupid.

‘Happy New Year, darling,’ she said, and he blushed.

‘Thank you. Happy New Year to you.’

‘And I hope nineteen ninety-four is better for all of us than nineteen ninety-three was. Hey, do you want to see something really disgusting?’

Marcus wasn’t at all sure that he did, but he was given no choice in the matter. Ellie grabbed his arm and took him through the back door to the garden. He tried to ask her where they were going, but she shushed him.

‘Look,’ she whispered. Marcus peered into the darkness. He could just make out two human shapes kissing with frantic energy; the man was pressing the woman against the garden shed and his hands were all over her.

‘Who is it?’ Marcus asked Ellie.

‘My mum. My mum and a guy called Tim Porter. She’s drunk. They do this every year, and I don’t know why they bother. Every New Year’s Day she wakes up and says, "My God, I think I went outside with Tim Porter last night." Pathetic. PATHETIC!’ She shouted out the last word so that she’d be heard, and Marcus saw Ellie’s mum push the man away and look in their direction.

‘Ellie? Is that you?’

‘You said you weren’t going to do that this year.’

‘It’s none of your business what I do. Go back inside.’

‘No.’

‘Do as you’re told.’

‘No. You’re disgusting. Forty-three years old and you’re snogging against a garden shed.’

‘One night of the year I get to behave nearly as badly as you do on the other three hundred and sixty-four, and you stand there giving me a hard time. Go away.’

‘Come on, Marcus. Let’s leave the SAD OLD TART to get on with it.’

Marcus followed Ellie back into the house. He hadn’t seen his mum do anything like that, and he couldn’t imagine that she ever would, but he could see how it might happen to other people’s mums.

‘Doesn’t that bother you?’ he asked Ellie when they were inside.

‘Nah. It doesn’t mean anything, does it? It’s just her having some fun. She doesn’t get much, really.’

Even though it didn’t seem to bother Ellie, it bothered Marcus. It was just too odd for words. It wouldn’t have happened in Cambridge, he didn’t think, but what he couldn’t work out was whether Cambridge was different because it wasn’t London, or because it was where his parents had lived together, and where, therefore, life was simpler—no snogging with strange people in front of your kid, and no yelling rude words at your mum. There were no rules here, and he was old enough to know that when you went to a place, or a time, with no rules then things were bound to be more complicated.

Twenty-six

‘I don’t get it,’ said Marcus. He and Will had walked down to an amusement arcade at the Angel to play on the video machines, and the Angel Funhouse, with its epileptic lights and sirens and explosions and tramps, turned out to be a suitably nightmarish setting for the difficult conversation Will knew they were going to have. It was, in a way, a grotesque version of popping the question. He had chosen the setting, somewhere that would soften Marcus up and make him more likely to say yes, and all he had to do was spit it out.

‘There’s nothing to get,’ said Will blithely. It wasn’t true, of course. There was a lot to get, from Marcus’s point of view, and Will could quite see why he wasn’t getting it.

‘But why did you tell her you were my dad?’

‘I didn’t tell her. She just sort of got the wrong end of the stick.’

‘So why didn’t you just say, you know, "Sorry, you’ve got the wrong end of the stick"? She probably wouldn’t have minded. Why would she care whether you were my dad or not?’

‘Don’t you ever have conversations where someone took a wrong turn at some point, and then it goes on and on and it becomes too late to put things right? Say someone thought your name was Mark, not Marcus, and every time they saw you they said, "Hello, Mark", and you’re going to yourself, Oh, no, I can’t tell him now, ‘cos he’ll be really embarrassed that he’s been calling me Mark for the last six months.’

‘Six months!’

‘Or however long it is.’

‘I’d just tell him the first time he got it wrong.’

‘It’s not always possible to do that.’

‘How can it not be possible to tell someone they’ve got your name wrong?’

‘Because…’ Will knew that sometimes it was not possible through personal experience. One of his neighbours opposite, a nice old guy with a stoop and a horrible little Yorkshire terrier, called him Bill—always had done and presumably always would, right up till the day he died. It actually irritated Will, who was not, he felt, by any stretch of the imagination, a Bill. Bill wouldn’t smoke spliffs and listen to Nirvana. So why had he allowed this misapprehension to continue? Why hadn’t he just said, four years ago, ‘Actually my name’s Will’? Marcus was right, of course, but being right was no use if the rest of the world was wrong.

‘Anyway,’ he continued, in a brisk let’s-cut-the-crap tone. ‘The point is, this woman thinks you’re my son.’

‘So tell her I’m not.’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re going round and round in circles here, Marcus. Why can’t you just accept the facts?’

‘I’ll tell her, if you like. I don’t mind.’

‘That’s very kind of you, Marcus, but that wouldn’t help.’

‘Why not?’