He didn’t mind having a female friend; his realization during his drink with Fiona that he had never had any kind of relationship with someone he hadn’t wanted to sleep with still unsettled him. The problem was that he did want to sleep with Rachel, very much, and he didn’t know whether he could bear to sit there on her sofa with his eyes dilating wildly for the next ten or twenty years, or however long female friends lasted (how would he know?), listening to her being unintentionally sexy on the subject of drawing mice. He didn’t know whether his pupils could bear it, more to the point. Wouldn’t they start hurting after a while? He was almost sure it wouldn’t do them much good, all that expanding and contracting, but he would only mention the pupil-pain to Rachel as a last resort; there was a remote possibility that she might want to sleep with him to save his eyesight, but he’d prefer to find another, more conventionally romantic route to her bed. Or his bed. He wasn’t bothered about which bed they did it in. The point was that it just wasn’t happening.

And then it happened, that evening, for no reason that he could fathom at the time—although later, when he thought about it, he came up with one or two ideas that made sense but the implications of which he found somewhat disturbing. One moment they were talking, the next moment they were kissing, and the moment after that she was leading him upstairs with one hand and unbuttoning her denim shirt with the other. And the weird thing was that sex hadn’t been in the air, as far as he could tell; he’d simply come round to see a friend because he was feeling low. So here was the first of the disturbing implications: if he ended up having sex when he had been unable to detect sex in the air, he was obviously a pretty hopeless sex detective. If, in the immediate aftermath of an apparently sex-free conversation, a beautiful woman started to lead you to the bedroom while unbuttoning her shirt, you were clearly missing something somewhere.

It began with a stroke of luck that passed him by at the time: Ali was away for the night, sleeping over at a school-friend’s house. If Rachel had told him at any other stage of their relationship that she was unencumbered by her psychotically Oedipal son, he would have taken it as a sign from Almighty God that he was about to get laid, but today it didn’t even register. They went into the kitchen, she made them coffee and he found himself launching into the whole thing about Fiona and Marcus and the point even before the kettle had boiled.

‘What’s the point?’ Rachel echoed. ‘Jesus.’

‘And don’t say Ali. I haven’t got an Ali.’

‘You’ve got a Marcus.’

‘It’s hard to think of Marcus as the point of anything. I know that’s a terrible thing to say, but it’s true. You’ve met him.’

‘He’s just a bit messed up. But he adores you.’

It had never occurred to Will that Marcus actually had any real feelings towards him, especially feelings that were visible to a third party. He knew that Marcus liked hanging out at his place, and he knew that Marcus described him as a friend, but all this he had taken merely as evidence of the boy’s eccentricity and loneliness. Rachel’s observation that there were real feelings involved kind of changed things, just as they sometimes did when you found out that a woman you hadn’t noticed was attracted to you, so that you ended up reassessing the situation and finding her much more interesting than you ever had done before.

‘You reckon?’

‘Of course he does.’

‘He’s still not the point, though. If I were about to stick my head in the gas oven, and then you told me Marcus adored me, I wouldn’t necessarily take it out again.’

Rachel laughed.

‘What’s so funny?’

‘I don’t know. Just the idea that I’d be there in that situation. If you ended up sticking your head in a gas oven at the end of an evening, we’d have to come to the conclusion that the evening hadn’t been a raging success.’

‘I…’ Will stopped, and started, and then ploughed on anyway, with as much sincerity as he could muster, and with much more sincerity than the line could bear. ‘I would never stick my head in a gas oven at the end of an evening with you.’

He knew the moment he’d said it that it was a big mistake. He’d meant it, but that was precisely what provoked the hilarity: Rachel laughed and laughed until her eyes filled with tears. ‘That,’ she said in between great gulps of air, ‘is… the… most… romantic… thing… anyone’s ever said to me.’

Will sat there helplessly, feeling like the most stupid man in the world, but when things calmed down again they seemed to be in a different place, somewhere where they were able to be warmer and less nervous with each other. Rachel made the coffee, found some stale custard creams and sat down with him at the kitchen table.

‘You don’t need a point.’

‘Don’t I? That’s not what it feels like.’

‘No. See, I was thinking about you. About how you have to be fairly tough in your head to do what you do.’

‘What?’ For a moment Will was completely bewildered. ‘Tough in your head’, ‘Do what you do’… These were not phrases that anyone used about him too often. What the fuck was it he’d told Rachel he did? Work in a coalmine? Teach young offenders? But then he remembered he’d never actually told Rachel any lies, and his bewilderment took a different shape. ‘What do I do?’

‘Nothing.’

That’s what Will thought he did. ‘So how come I have to be tough to do that?’

‘Because… most of us think that the point is something to do with work, or kids, or family, or whatever. But you don’t have any of that. There’s nothing between you and despair, and you don’t seem a very desperate person.’

‘Too stupid.’

‘You’re not stupid. So why don’t you ever put your head in the oven?’

‘I don’t know. There’s always a new Nirvana album to look forward to, or something happening in NYPD Blue to make you want to watch the next episode.’

‘Exactly.’

‘That’s the point? NYPD Blue? Jesus.’ It was worse than he thought.

‘No, no. The point is you keep going. You want to. So all the things that make you want to are the point. I don’t know if you even realize it, but on the quiet you don’t think life’s too bad. You love things. Telly. Music. Food.’ She looked at him. ‘Women, probably. Which I guess means you like sex too.’

‘Yeah.’ He said it sort of grumpily, as if she had caught him out somehow, and she smiled.

‘I don’t mind. People who like sex are usually pretty good at it. Anyway. I’m the same. I mean, I love things, and they’re mostly different things from you. Poetry. Paintings. My work. Men, and sex. My friends. Ali. I want to see what Ali gets up to tomorrow.’ She started fiddling with the biscuit, breaking off the ends in an attempt to expose the cream, but the biscuit was too soft and it crumbled.

‘See, a few years ago, I was really, really down, and I did think about… you know, what you imagine Fiona’s thinking about. And I really felt guilty about it, because of Ali, and I knew I shouldn’t be that way but I was, and… Anyway, it was always, you know, not today. Maybe tomorrow, but not today. And after a few weeks of that I knew I was never going to do it, and the reason I was never going to do it was because I didn’t want to miss out. I don’t mean that life was great and I didn’t want not to participate. I just mean there were always one or two things that seemed unfinished, things I wanted to follow through. Like you want to see the next episode of NYPD Blue. If I’d just finished stuff for a book, I wanted to see it come out. If I was seeing a guy, I wanted one more date. If Ali had a parents’ evening coming up, I wanted to talk to his form teacher. Little things like that, but there was always something. And in the end I realized there would always be something, and that those somethings would be enough.’ She looked up from the remnants of her biscuit and laughed, embarrassed. ‘That’s what I think, anyway.’