It was Lee Hartley and a couple of his mates; Marcus hadn’t had much trouble from them so far this term, probably because he hung around with Ellie and Zoe.

‘What?’

‘I bet you don’t even know what those cards are all about, do you?’

Marcus couldn’t see how the first sentence and the second went together: if he was a pervert, then of course he would understand what the cards were all about, but he let it pass, as he let everything pass at times like this. One of Lee Hartley’s mates reached out, removed Marcus’s glasses and put them on.

‘Fucking hell,’ he said. ‘No wonder he doesn’t know what’s going on.’ He reeled around for a moment, his arms stretched out in front of him, making grunting noises meant to show that Marcus was in some way mentally deficient.

‘Can I have those back now, please? I can’t see much without them.’

‘Fuck off,’ said Lee Hartley’s mate.

Ellie and Zoe suddenly emerged from the shop.

‘You pathetic little shitbags,’ said Ellie. ‘Give him those back or you’ll get such a slap.’

Lee Hartley’s mate handed Marcus the glasses, but she hit him anyway, hard, somewhere between his nose and his eye.

‘Tricked you,’ she said, and Zoe laughed. ‘Now run along, all of you, before I get really cross.’

‘Slags,’ said Lee Hartley, but he said it quietly as he was walking away.

‘Now why does hitting someone make me a slag, I wonder?’ said Ellie. ‘Boys are peculiar creatures. Not you, though, Marcus. Well, you’re peculiar, but in a different way.’

But Marcus wasn’t really listening. He was too overcome by Ellie—by her style, and her beauty, and her ability to beat people up—to pay any attention to what she was saying.

Twenty-eight

Twenty-four hours later Marcus was still buzzing, and Will was finding it difficult to adopt the right tone. It would be a mistake, he felt, for the boy to regard Ellie’s assault on Lee Somebody’s mate as evidence of an uncontrollable passion: surely it proved something like the opposite—that while he relied on teenage girls to defend him in the street, he was unlikely to be much of a catch for anybody. But then, maybe Will was being too traditional in his thinking. Maybe that’s how things worked now, and until a girl had smacked someone in the eye for you she wasn’t worth a second look. Either way, Marcus was even more smitten than he had been before, and Will feared for him.

‘You should have seen her,’ Marcus enthused.

‘I feel as though I did.’

‘Wham!’ said Marcus.

‘Yes. Wham. You said.’

‘She’s fantastic.’

‘Yes, but…’ Will knew he would have to outline his theory that Marcus’s current status as victim did nothing for him sexually or romantically, even though it would be a rocky conversational road. ‘What do you think she thinks about having to get you out of trouble?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘It’s just… It’s not what normally happens.’

‘No. That’s why it’s so great.’

‘I’m not so sure. See, I think it’ll be hard for Ellie to think of you as a boyfriend if every time she buys a Mars Bar someone steals your glasses and she has to turn herself into Jean-Claud Van Damme.’

‘Who’s Jean-Claud Van Damme?’

‘Never mind. D’you see what I’m getting at?’

‘What am I supposed to do about it then? Take karate lessons or something?’

‘All I’m saying is, it might not turn out to be the sort of relationship you want it to be. In my experience romances don’t develop in this way. This looks more like pet and owner rather than boyfriend and girlfriend.’

‘That’s OK,’ said Marcus cheerfully.

‘You don’t mind being treated like a… like a gerbil?’

‘No. Course not. That’d do me. I just want to be with her.’ And he said it with such sincerity, and with such a complete absence of self-pity, that for the first time ever Will was tempted to hug him.

Will had no intention of adopting the Ellie/Marcus/gerbil model with Rachel, and though he could recognize the simplicity and decency of Marcus’s desire, his own was neither simple nor, frankly, decent, and it was with this knowledge he intended to proceed. At least Ellie knew who and what Marcus was, though, not that Marcus had any choice in the matter: that weird little speccy guy being tormented outside the newsagent’s, that was Marcus, and nobody was pretending any different. The guy who turned up for lunch with his twelve-year-old son, that wasn’t really Will, and somebody—namely Will himself—was certainly pretending different. One day, he thought, he might learn the lesson that lying about one’s very identity was a purely short-term strategy, useful only in relationships that had a limited life-span. You could tell a bus-conductor or a taxi driver all sorts of rubbish, provided the journey was brief, but if you intended to spend the rest of your life with somebody, then it was kind of inevitable that she would find out a few things sooner or later.

Will decided he would correct any erroneous impressions he might have given slowly and patiently, but halfway through their first time out alone together, he was reminded of the old April Fool’s Day joke about Britain changing over to driving on the right, and making the changeover gradually. Either you lied or you told the truth, it appeared, and that in-between state was pretty tricky to achieve.

‘Oh,’ was all Rachel said at first, when he told her he wasn’t Marcus’s natural father. She was trying and failing to pick up a clump of seaweed with her chopsticks.

‘It’s not really seaweed, you know,’ said Will in a misguided attempt to make out that what he was telling her wasn’t any kind of big deal—not to him, anyway. ‘It’s lettuce or something. They shred it and fry it and put sugar and—’

‘So who is his natural father?’

‘Well,’ said Will. Why hadn’t it occurred to him that if he wasn’t Marcus’s father, then someone else would have to be? Why did these things never occur to him? ‘It’s a guy called Clive who lives in Cambridge.’

‘Right. And you get on OK with him?’

‘Yeah. We spent Christmas together, actually.’

‘So—sorry, I’m being a bit thick here—if you’re not Marcus’s natural father, and you don’t live with him, then, you know, how is he your son?’

‘Yes. Ha ha. I see what you mean. It must look very confusing from the outside.’

‘Tell me how it is on the inside.’

‘It’s just that sort of relationship. I’m old enough to be his father. He’s young enough to be my son. So—’

‘You’re old enough to be the father of just about anyone under twenty. Why this particular boy?’

‘I don’t know. Just one of those things. Would you like to move on to wine now, or do you want to stick with the Chinese beer? Anyway, tell me about your relationship with Ali. Is it as complicated as mine and Marcus’s?’

‘No. I slept with his father and nine months later I gave birth, and that’s about it. Pretty straightforward, but these things usually are.’

‘Yes. I envy you.’

‘I’m sorry to harp on about this, but I still haven’t got it all worked out. You’re Marcus’s stepfather, but you don’t live with him or his mother.’

‘I suppose you could look at it that way, yes.’

‘How else could you look at it?’

‘Ha. I see what you mean,’ he said thoughtfully, as if he had just that second worked out that there was only one way of looking at it.

‘Did you ever live with Marcus’s mother?’

‘Define "live with".’

‘Did you ever have a spare pair of socks at her house? Or a toothbrush?’

Say that Fiona had given him a pair of socks for Christmas. And say that he had left them at her house, and hadn’t got around to picking them up yet. Then he could point out, with a clear conscience, that not only had he once kept a spare pair of socks at Fiona’s house, but they were still there! Unfortunately, however, she hadn’t given him socks, she had given him that stupid book. And he hadn’t even left the book there anyway. So the dream sock scenario was just that—a dream.

‘No.’

‘Just… no?’

‘Yes.’

He picked up the last little spring roll, dunked it in the chilli sauce, put it in his mouth, and behaved as though it were way too big, so he wouldn’t be able to speak for several minutes. Rachel would have to do the talking, and she would probably want to talk about something else eventually. He wanted her to tell him about the book she was currently illustrating, or her ambition to exhibit her work, or how much she had been looking forward to seeing him. Those were the kinds of conversations he had envisaged; he was fed up with talking about imaginary children, and even more fed up with talking about why he had imagined them in the first place.

But Rachel simply sat there and waited for him to finish his mouthful, and however much he chewed and grimaced and swallowed and choked he couldn’t make a mini spring roll last forever. So he told her the truth, as he knew he would, and she was appalled, as she had every right to be.

‘I never actually said he was my son. The words "I have a son called Marcus" never passed my lips. That’s what you chose to believe.’

‘Yeah, right. It’s me who’s the fantasist. I wanted to believe you had a son, so I let my imagination run riot.’

‘You know, that’s a very interesting theory. I read this thing in the paper once about this guy who’d taken all these middle-aged women for a ride, cleaned them out of their life savings because they were convinced he was rich. And, the thing was, he didn’t even have to do anything to prove it. They just believed him.’

‘So he told them he was rich. He lied. That’s different.’

‘Ah. Yes. I see what you mean. That’s sort of where the comparison breaks down, doesn’t it?’

‘Because you didn’t lie. I just made it up. I thought, Cute guy, if only he had a kid, a geeky son, pre-teenage if possible, and then you turned up at my house with Marcus, and bingo! I made this crazy link because of some deep psychological need in me.’