‘Are you OK?’ he said over his shoulder.

‘Yes. You’ll tell me if we have to go upstairs or anything?’

‘Course.’

Marcus was almost enjoying it all now. They were going through a narrow passageway, and you had to concentrate, because you couldn’t just stop dead or sidestep, and you had to remember that you’d sort of doubled in size, so you had to think about what sort of spaces you could fit into. This must be what it was like if you started driving a coach when you were used to a Fiat Uno or something. The best thing about it was that he really did have to look after Ellie, and he liked the feeling that brought with it. He’d never looked after anything or anybody in his whole life—he’d never had a pet, because he wasn’t bothered about animals, even though he and his mum had agreed not to eat them (why hadn’t he just told her he wasn’t bothered about animals, instead of getting into an argument about factory farming and so on?)—and as he loved Ellie more than he would ever have loved a goldfish or a hamster, it felt real.

‘Are we nearly there?’

‘Yeah.’

‘The light’s different.’

‘We’re out of the big station and now we’re going into the little one. The train’s there waiting for us.’

‘I know why you’re doing this, Marcus,’ she suddenly said in a small, quiet voice that didn’t sound like her. He stopped, but she didn’t let go of him. ‘You think I haven’t seen the paper, but I have.’

He turned round to look at her, but she wouldn’t open her eyes.

‘Are you OK?’

‘Yeah. Well. Not really.’ She rummaged around in her bag and produced a bottle of vodka. ‘I’m going to get drunk.’

Suddenly Marcus could see a problem with his guided missile plan: the problem was that Ellie wasn’t actually a guided missile. You couldn’t guide her. That didn’t matter so much in school, because school was full of walls and rules and she could just bounce off them; but out in the world, where there were no walls and rules, she was scary. She could just blow up in his face any time.

Thirty-two

There was absolutely nothing wrong with the idea—it wasn’t even particularly risky. On the contrary, it was just a mundane social arrangement, the sort that people make all the time, all over the place. If these people were ever to realize the possible consequences, Will reflected later, all the tears and embarrassment and panic that could ensue in the event of these arrangements going just slightly wrong, they would never arrange to meet for a drink again.

The plan was for Rachel, Will and Fiona to go to a pub in Islington while Marcus was up in Cambridge visiting his father. They would have a drink and a chat, then Will would absent himself and Rachel and Fiona would have a drink and a chat, as a result of which Fiona would cheer up, feel better about things and lose the urge to top herself. What could possibly go wrong?

Will arrived at the pub first, got himself a drink, sat down, lit a cigarette. Fiona arrived shortly afterwards; she was distracted and slightly manic. She asked for a large gin and ice, no mixer, and sipped at it nervously and quickly. Will started to feel a little uncomfortable.

‘Have you heard from the boy?’

‘Which boy?’

‘Marcus?’

‘Oh, him!’ She laughed. ‘I’d forgotten all about him. No. He’ll leave a message while I’m out, I should think. Who’s your friend?’

Will looked round, just to check that the seat beside him was as empty as he remembered it to be, and then back at Fiona. Maybe she was imagining people; maybe that’s why she got down and cried a lot. Maybe the people she imagined were horrible, or as depressed as she was.

‘Which friend?’

‘Rachel?’

‘Who’s my friend Rachel?’ Now he didn’t understand the question. If she knew his friend Rachel was Rachel, what exactly was the information she required?

‘Who is she? Where does she come from? How does she fit in? Why do you want me to meet her?’

‘Oh. I see. I just thought, you know.’

‘No.’

‘I just thought you might find her interesting.’

‘Will this happen every time you meet somebody? I have to see them for a drink, even though I don’t really know you, let alone them?’

‘Oh, no. Not every time, anyway. I’ll weed out the rubbish.’

‘Thank you.’

And still no Rachel. She was now fifteen minutes late. After a peculiar and pointless conversation about John Major’s shirts (Fiona’s choice of conversational topic, not his), and several lengthy silences, Rachel was thirty minutes late.

‘She does exist?’

‘Oh, she definitely exists.’

‘Right.’

‘I’ll go and phone her.’ He went to the payphone, got the answerphone, waited for a human interruption that never came, and went back to his seat without leaving a message. The only excuse he would accept, he decided, would involve Ali and a large articulated vehicle… Unless she had never intended to come. He suddenly realized with terrible clarity that he’d been set up, that when Rachel had said that he would get the hang of it if she showed him how, this is what she had meant. He wanted to hate her, but he couldn’t: instead he felt a rising panic.

Another silence, and then Fiona started crying. Her eyes filled up and started to leak down her face and on to her pullover, and she just sat there quietly, like a kid oblivious to a runny nose. For a while Will thought he could just ignore it, and it would go away, but he knew deep down that ignoring her was simply not an option, not if he were worth anything at all.

‘What’s the matter?’ He tried to say it as if he knew it were a big question, but it came out all wrong: the gravity sounded, to him at least, like tetchiness, as if there were a ‘now’ missing from the end.

‘Nothing.’

‘That’s not true, is it?’ It still wouldn’t be too late. If Rachel arrived breathless and apologetic at this second, he could stand up, make the introductions, tell Rachel that Fiona was just about to explain the root cause of her misery, and then shove off. He looked towards the door hopefully and, as if by magic, it opened: two guys in Man United away shirts walked in.

‘It is true. Nothing’s the matter. No thing. I’m just like this.’

‘Existential despair, right?’

‘Yeah. Right.’

Again, he hadn’t got the tone of it. He’d used the phrase to prove that he knew it (he wondered whether Fiona thought he was dim), but quickly realized that if you knew it, these were precisely the circumstances in which you would give it an enormous body-swerve; it sounded flip and pseud and shallow. He wasn’t cut out for chats about existential despair. It just wasn’t him. And what was wrong with that? There was no shame in it, surely? Leather trousers weren’t him. (He’d tried some on once, just for a laugh, in a shop called LeatherTime in Covent Garden, and he’d looked like a… Anyway). The colour green wasn’t him. Antique furniture wasn’t him. And depressive hippy-liberal women weren’t him. Big deal. It didn’t make him a bad person.

‘I don’t know if there’s a lot of point in talking about this with you,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said, more cheerfully than was appropriate. ‘I know what you mean. Shall we finish this and go, then? I don’t think Rachel’s going to show up.’

Fiona smiled sadly and shook her head. ‘You could try persuading me that I’m wrong.’

‘Could I?’

‘I think I probably need to talk to somebody, and you’re the only one here.’

‘I’m the only one here that you know. But I’d be useless. You could throw that slice of lemon across the pub and hit somebody who was better than me. As long as you aimed away from that guy who’s singing on his own over there.’

She laughed. Maybe his lemon joke had done the trick. Maybe she’d look back on those few seconds as a turning point in her life. But then she shook her head, and said, ‘Oh, shit,’ and began to cry again, and he could see that he had overrated the power of the throwaway one-liner.