Dawn looks at me despairingly. ‘What have you been doing?’ she asks.

‘Nothing,’ I say, quickly enough for Dawn to deduce the opposite. ‘Well, I got this guy in yesterday. A masseur. For Mrs Cortenza’s back. Is that what they’re on about?’

‘Is he very tasty or something?’

‘Oh, I don’t think it’s that. I think he uses—’ and as I’m saying it I get a flash of déjà vu—‘I think he uses some cream or another, and… I think it might have some kind of effect on old ladies.’

‘So what shall I tell them?’

‘Oh, just… I don’t know. Tell them to buy some liniment. It’ll have the same effect. Write it down on a bit of paper and send them packing.’ And I wander off down the corridor, in the vain hope that by walking away from the scene I might be able to put the whole unhappy episode behind me, but within an hour Becca has been in to see me.

‘There’s a rumour sweeping through the waiting room that somebody cured one of our patients,’ she says accusingly. ‘Somebody who’s got something to do with you.’

‘I’m sorry. It won’t happen again.’

‘I should hope not. Hey, all these old ladies are coming in to see me gabbling about somebody with hot hands who’s a friend of yours. Is that the guy?’

‘Which guy?’

‘Affair guy?’

‘No. It’s… someone else.’

‘Really someone else? Or pretend someone else, but actually, between you and me, and I promise I won’t tell anyone, the same man?’

‘Really someone else. Affair Guy has gone. This is Spiritual Healer Guy. The one who gave David the brain tumour. He’s moved in with us.’

‘And you’re not sleeping with him?’

‘No, I’m not sleeping with him. Jesus. I thought you might be more interested in his apparent ability to heal the sick by touching them than who he’s sleeping with.’

‘Not really. I only came in to ask what it’s like to have sex with someone who has hot hands. But you say you don’t know.’

‘No, I don’t know.’

‘Will you tell me if you find out?’

‘Becca, you seem to be labouring under the misapprehension that because of… recent events I will now always have a lover of some description. Infidelity’s not a career, you know. I’m embarrassed about what happened before. Can you please stop joking about it?’

‘Sorry.’

‘What should I do about this guy?’

‘Which guy? There seem to be so many.’

‘Shut up.’

‘Sorry, sorry.’

‘Should I use him again?’

‘God, no.’

‘Why not?’

‘We’re GPs, Katie. We trained for seven years. I’m sure the world’s full of people who can do a better job than we do, but we can’t let the patients know that, or it’s finished.’

She’s right, of course. I don’t want GoodNews here every day, even if he has the power to make my patients well. Especially if he has the power to make my patients well. That’s my job, not his, and he’s already taken too much as it is.

8

Tom doesn’t own a Gameboy. I knew this, and so did David, and we watched him playing with it all through breakfast, and the impossibility of what we were seeing didn’t register with either of us. And nor did I get to work and become suddenly distracted by a puzzling image, something slightly odd that I couldn’t quite put my finger on. I would like to claim that a mother’s intuition made me pick up the phone in order to put my mind at rest, but that is not the case: I only pick up the phone because it is ringing, and I only realize Tom doesn’t own a Gameboy when David calls to tell me that we have been invited to the school, to talk to his head-teacher about our son’s recent spate of thieving.

‘What’s he stolen?’ I ask David. ‘That Gameboy, for starters,’ he says.

Only then does my maternal-detective instinct kick in.

When we get to the school at four, there is an array of stolen goods displayed on the headteacher’s desk, like one of those memory games: there’s the Gameboy, but also a couple of videotapes, an S Club 7 CD, a Tamagotchi, a whole load of Pokémon stuff, a Manchester United shirt, some half-eaten bags of sweets and, somewhat bizarrely, a paper wallet containing a classmate’s holiday snaps.

‘What did you want those for?’ I ask Tom, but he doesn’t know, predictably, and he just shrugs. He knows he has done wrong, and he’s hunched up in the chair, hugging himself; but there is some part of him that is angry, too. One of the things that has always broken my heart about Tom is that when he is in trouble he stares very intently at you, and one day I realized that what he was looking for was softness, evidence that, despite your disapproval of his misdemeanour, you still loved him. Today, however, he’s not interested. He won’t make eye contact with anyone in the room.

‘He’s basically been pinching anything that wasn’t nailed down,’ says the head. ‘He’s not very popular with his schoolmates at the moment, as you can imagine.’ She’s a nice, intelligent, gentle woman, Jeanie Field, and she’s always been very complimentary about our kids, partly, I suspect, because they demand so little of her. They come to school. They enjoy their lessons. They don’t hit anyone. They go home. Now Tom has become just another drain on her time and her energy, and it is that as much as anything that is making me feel wretched.

‘Have his home circumstances changed in any way?’

Where would one begin? With the Damascene conversion of his father? The discussion about which parent he would live with in the event of a divorce? The appearance of GoodNews? I look at David, to let him know that it is his unhappy task to explain the events of the last few months in a way that will embarrass nobody in the room, and he shifts uncomfortably in his seat.

‘We have had some difficulties, yes.’ I realize with horror that since he met GoodNews, David regards the avoidance of embarrassment as a bourgeois hang-up with which he will have no truck.

‘Tom, will you wait outside, please?’ I say quickly. Tom doesn’t move, so I grab him by the hand, pull him to his feet, and march him outside. David starts to protest, but I just shake my head, and he shuts up.

‘I’m sure Katie won’t mind me saying that she had an affair,’ David is saying as I come back into the room.

‘I do mind you saying that, actually.’ I want him to know, just for the record.

‘Oh,’ says David, baffled. ‘It was my fault, though. I was an inattentive and ill-tempered husband. I didn’t love her enough, or appreciate her properly.’

‘That… Well, that sort of thing can happen,’ says Jeanie, who clearly wishes that she were having a meeting with the knife-wielding, drug-dealing parents of an illiterate sexual deviant.

‘But I… well, I… My shortcomings were revealed to me when I met a spiritual healer, and I think I’ve changed. Wouldn’t you say, Katie?’

‘Oh, you’ve changed,’ I say wearily.

‘And the spiritual healer is currently staying with us, and we’re… we’re re-examining a lot of our lifestyle choices, and… Maybe, thinking about it, some of this has unsettled Tom.’

‘I’d say that was a possibility, yes,’ says Jeanie. I look at her, but there’s no trace in her face of the dryness in her words. She knows how to do the white wine thing.

There is a knock on the door, and Tom comes back in.

‘Have you finished?’ he says. ‘I mean, have you finished the stuff that I can’t hear? About Mum’s boyfriend and everything?’

We all stare at our feet.

‘Sit down, Tom,’ says Jeanie. He sits down in the corner of the room, in a chair that faces none of us, so we all have to turn to look at him. ‘We’ve been talking about what might have made you do this. Whether there’s anything you’re not happy with at school or at home, or…’

‘I haven’t got anything,’ says Tom suddenly and angrily.

‘What do you mean?’ Jeanie asks him.

‘I haven’t got anything. At home. He keeps giving it away.’ He nods at his father.