‘Oh, Tom,’ says David, wounded. ‘That’s silly. You’ve got so much. That’s why we decided together to lose some of it.’

‘Hold on, hold on.’ I’m missing something here. ‘Tom, are you telling me there’s something else apart from the computer?’

‘Yeah. Loads of stuff.’

‘It wasn’t loads,’ says David, but the impatience in his voice gives him away.

‘When did this happen?’

‘Last week. He made us go through our toys and get rid of half of them.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ I address the question to Tom rather than David, which is indicative of something.

‘He told us not to.’

‘Why do you listen to him? You know he’s a lunatic.’

Jeanie stands up. ‘I think these are things more profitably discussed at home,’ she says gently. ‘But there seems a fair bit to work on, I’d say.’

It turns out that most of what they gave away—to the women’s refuge, again—was junk, or at least stuff they no longer played with. According to David, it was Molly who raised the stakes: she felt that the gifts would be meaningless unless they were really good toys, things they both enjoyed playing with. So there was an agreement (an agreement to which Tom seems to have been a somewhat reluctant signatory) to donate something from the current playlist. He gave away his radio-controlled car, and regretted it almost immediately. Here, then, is the complex psychological explanation for his life of crime: he gave some stuff away, and then wanted some other stuff to replace it.

We have a chat with Tom when we get home, and extract all the necessary guarantees about future conduct; we also agree on a fair and appropriate punishment (no TV of any kind for a week, no Simpsons for a month). But it is not my son I need to talk to.

‘I’m getting lost,’ I say to David when we are on our own. ‘You have to explain things to me. Because I don’t know what any of this is supposed to achieve.’

‘Any of what?’

‘You’re turning our kids into weirdos.’ Please don’t say it’s everyone else who’s weird please don’t say that please please. Because it’s not true, is it? It can’t be true, unless the word ‘weird’ means nothing at all. (But then, is it weird not to want to watch Who Wants to be a Millionaire? when everyone else does? Is it weird to find Big Macs inedible, when millions of people eat almost nothing else? Aha: no it isn’t, because I can draw a circle within a circle—a circle around my particular postal district, as it happens—and place myself in a majority, not a minority. The only circle I can draw encompassing people who want to give their Sunday lunch and their kids’ toys away, however, would be a circle around my house. That’s my definition of weird. It is also fast becoming my definition of lonely, too.)

‘Is it really so weird to worry about what’s happening out there?’

‘I don’t mind you worrying. You can worry yourself sick. It’s trying to do something about it that’s causing all the problems.’

‘Tell me what you think the problems are.’

‘What I think the problems are? You don’t see any?’

‘I can see what might seem like problems to you. But they’re not problems to me.’

‘Your son becoming the Artful Dodger isn’t a problem to you?’

‘He’ll stop taking things. And there are bigger issues at stake.’

‘That’s where I’m lost. I don’t understand what the issues are.’

‘I can’t explain them. I keep trying, and I can’t explain them. It’s just… It’s just about wanting to live a different life. A better life. We were living the wrong one.’

‘We? We? You were the one writing the shitty novel. You were the one writing the newspaper column about how awful everyone was. I was trying to make sick people better.’ I know how this sounds, but he makes me so angry. I’m a good person, I’m a doctor, I know I had an affair but that doesn’t make me bad, that doesn’t mean I have to give away everything I own or watch while my children give away everything they own…

‘I know I’m asking a lot. Maybe too much. Maybe it’s not fair, and maybe you’ll decide that you can’t put up with it. That’s your business. But there’s nothing I can do about it now. I just… The scales have fallen from my eyes, Katie. I was living a wasted life.’

‘But where is this going to get you?’

‘That’s not the point.’

‘What is the point? Please tell me, because I don’t understand.’

‘The point is… The point is how I feel. I don’t care what gets done. I just don’t want to die feeling that I never tried. I don’t believe in Heaven, or anything. But I want to be the kind of person that qualifies for entry anyway. Do you understand?’

Of course I understand. I’m a doctor.

Later, half-asleep, I start to dream about all the people in the world who live bad lives—all the drug-dealers and arms manufacturers and corrupt politicians, all the cynical bastards everywhere—getting touched by GoodNews and changing like David has changed. The dream scares me. Because I need these people—they serve as my compass. Due south there are saints and nurses and teachers in inner-city schools; due north there are managing directors of tobacco companies and angry local newspaper columnists. Please don’t take my due north away, because then I will be adrift, lost in a land where the things I have done and the things I haven’t done really mean something.

The next day is Thursday, when I have an afternoon off, so, when Tom comes back from school, I take him out for a walk. He is deeply resistant to and utterly confused by the idea—‘What are we going to do on this walk? Where are we walking to?’—and if he were in any position to refuse then he would. But he is in trouble, and he knows it, and he is smart enough to realize that if a stroll round the nearest park helps him in any way, then it is a detour worth taking.

It hurts and worries me to say it, but I have become less fond of Tom and Molly. I have been aware of this for a while, and have always presumed that this was perfectly normal—how could I feel the same about this quiet, occasionally surly boy as I did about his smiling, miraculous two-year-old counterpart? But now I’m not so sure. Now I’m beginning to wonder whether he should not, in fact, be more lovable than he is, and whether the shortfall in lovability is due to something unattractive in him, or something unmaternal in me.

‘It’s not my fault, so don’t say it is,’ he says when we’re ten yards from the house. No, there’s no doubt about it: he should be nicer than this.

‘Why isn’t it your fault?’

‘ ’Cos it’s Dad’s fault. And GoodNews’s.’

‘They stole that stuff?’

‘No. But they made me steal it.’

‘They made you. How did they make you?’

‘You know how they made me.’

‘Tell me.’

‘They’ve been depriving me.’

‘And what does “depriving” mean?’

‘Like those kids at school. You said they were deprived.’

He asked me once why a certain group of boys at his school were always in trouble, and I—perhaps, in retrospect, unwisely—introduced the concept of deprivation. I thought I was doing my duty as a right-thinking mother; it turned out that I was merely providing mitigation for my own son’s criminality.

‘That’s different.’

‘Why is it?’

‘Because…’

‘You said they didn’t have very much at home, and that’s why they got in trouble. And now I haven’t got very much at home. And that’s why I’m getting in trouble.’

‘You don’t think you’ve got very much at home.’

‘Not any more I haven’t.’

I’m becoming heartily sick of liberalism. It’s complicated, and tiring, and open to misinterpretation and abuse by… by sneaky, spoiled children. And it breeds doubt, and I’m sick of doubt, too; I want certitude, like David has certitude, or like Margaret Thatcher had certitude. Who wants to be someone like me? People like us? Because we’re almost always sure that we’re wrong; we’re almost always sure that we will go to hell, even though an inordinate amount of our waking thoughts are directed towards achieving the opposite effect. We know what’s right but we don’t do it because it’s too hard, it asks too much, and even trying to cure Mrs Cortenza or Barmy Brian is no guarantee of anything, so I somehow end each day in debit rather than credit. Today I have learned that I don’t really like my children and that I have somehow encouraged one of them to steal from his classmates; David, meanwhile, has been plotting to save the homeless. And yet somehow I still cling to the belief that I’m better than him.