‘Do you want to go and get something to eat?’ he said wearily. He was going to have to look a long way down now.

They went to Pizza Express on Upper Street. He hadn’t been there since the last time he had had lunch with Jessica, the ex-girlfriend who was determined to make him as unhappy and sleepless and out of touch and burdened by parenthood as she had become. That was a long, long time ago, before SPAT and Marcus and Suzie and Fiona and Rachel and everything. He’d been an idiot then, but at least he’d been an idiot with an idea, some kind of belief system; now he was hundreds of years older, one or two IQ points wiser, and absolutely all over the place. He’d rather be an idiot again. He’d had his whole life set up so that nobody’s problem was his problem, and now everybody’s problem was his problem, and he had no solutions for any of them. So how, precisely, was he, or anybody else he was involved with, better off?

They looked at the menu in silence.

‘I’m not really hungry,’ said Fiona.

‘Please eat,’ said Will, too quickly and too desperately, and Fiona smiled.

‘You think a pizza will help?’ she said.

‘Yes. Veneziana. ‘Cos then you’ll stop Venice sinking into the sea and you’ll feel better.’

‘OK. If I can have extra mushrooms on it.’

‘Good call.’

The waitress came to take their order; Will asked for a beer, a bottle of house red, and a Four Seasons with extra everything he could think of, including pine nuts. If he was lucky, he would be able to induce a heart attack, or find that he was suddenly fatally allergic to something.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Fiona.

‘What for?’

‘Being like this. And being like this with you.’

‘I’m used to women being like this with me. This is how I spend most evenings.’ Fiona smiled politely, but suddenly Will felt sick of himself. He wanted to find a way in to the conversation that they had to have, but there didn’t seem to be one, and there never would be while he was stuck with his brain and his vocabulary and his personality. He kept feeling as though he were on the verge of saying something proper and serious and useful; but then he ended up thinking, Oh, fuck it, say something stupid instead.

‘I’m the one who should apologize,’ he said. ‘I want to help, but I know I won’t be able to. I haven’t got the answers to anything.’

‘That’s what men think, isn’t it?’

‘What?’

‘That unless you’ve got some answer, unless you can say, "Oh, I know this bloke in Essex Road who can fix that for you", then it’s not worth bothering.’

Will shifted in his seat and didn’t say anything. That was precisely what he thought; in fact, he had spent half the evening trying to think of the name of the bloke in Essex Road, metaphorically speaking.

‘That’s not what I want. I know there’s nothing you can do. I’m depressed. It’s an illness. It just started. Well, that’s not true, there were things happening that helped it along, but…’

And they were away. It was easier than he could possibly have anticipated: all he had to do was listen and nod and ask pertinent questions. He had done it before, loads of times, with Angie and Suzie and Rachel, but that was for a reason. There was no ulterior motive here. He didn’t want to sleep with Fiona, but he did want her to feel better, and he hadn’t realized that in order to make her feel better he had to act in exactly the same way as if he did want to sleep with her. He didn’t want to think about what that meant.

He learnt a lot of things about Fiona. He learnt that she hadn’t really wanted to be a mother, and that sometimes she hated Marcus with a passion that worried her; he learnt that she worried about her inability to hold down a relationship (Will restrained a desire to leap in at this point and tell her that an inability to hold down a relationship was indicative of an undervalued kind of moral courage, that only cool people screwed up); he learnt that her last birthday had scared her to bits, because she hadn’t been anywhere, done anything, all the usual malarkey. None of it amounted to anything enormous, but the sum of her depression was much greater than its parts, and now she had to live with something that tired her and made her see everything through a greeny-brown gauze. And he learnt that if someone were to ask her where this thing lived (Will found it hard to imagine a more unlikely question, but that was just one of the many differences between them), she would say that it was in her throat, because it stopped her from eating, and made her feel as though she were constantly on the verge of tears—when she wasn’t actually crying.

And that was it, more or less. What Will had been most frightened of—apart from Fiona asking him about the point (a subject that never even came close to showing its face, probably because it was clear in his face and even in his life that he didn’t have a clue)—was that there was going to be a cause of all this misery, some dark secret, or some terrible lack, and he was one of the only people in the world who could deal with it, and he wouldn’t want to, even though he would have to anyway. But it wasn’t like that at all; there was nothing—if life, with its attendant disappointments and compromises and bitter little defeats, counted as nothing. Which it probably didn’t.

They got a taxi back to Fiona’s place. The cabbie was listening to GLR, and the disc jockey was talking about Kurt Cobain; it took Will a while to understand the strange, muted tone in the DJ’s voice.

‘What’s happened to him?’ Will asked the cabbie.

‘Who?’

‘Kurt Cobain.’

‘Is he the Nirvana geezer? He shot himself in the head. Boom.’

‘Dead?’

‘No. Just a headache. Yeah, course he’s dead.’

Will wasn’t surprised, particularly, and he was too old to be shocked. He hadn’t been shocked by the death of a pop star since Marvin Gaye died. He had been… how old? He thought back. The first of April 1984… Jesus, ten years ago, nearly to the day. So he had been twenty-six, and still of an age when things like that meant something: he probably sang Marvin Gaye songs with his eyes closed when he was twenty-six. Now he knew that pop stars committing suicide were all grist to the mill, and the only consequence of Kurt Cobain’s death as far as he was concerned was that Nevermind would sound a lot cooler. Ellie and Marcus weren’t old enough to understand that, though. They would think it all meant something, and that worried him.

‘Isn’t he the singer Marcus liked?’ Fiona asked him.

‘Yeah.’

‘Oh, dear.’

Suddenly Will was fearful. He had never had any kind of intuition or empathy or connection in his life before, but he had it now. Typical, he thought, that it should be Marcus, rather than Rachel or someone who looked like Uma Thurman, who brought it on. ‘I’m not being funny, but can I come in with you to listen to Marcus’s answerphone message? I just want to hear that he’s OK.’

But he wasn’t, really. He was calling from a police station in a place called Royston, and he sounded little and frightened and lonely.