‘Why not?’

‘David, I’m not going to waste an awful lot of time on this.’

‘Why not?’

‘Why aren’t I going to waste time explaining why you’re not Julia Roberts?’

‘Yes. This is important. Tell me the difference between what I’m doing and what she was doing.’

‘What are you doing? Explain it to me.’

‘You explain to me what she was doing first. And then we’ll see what the differences are.’

‘You’re going to drive me mad.’

‘OK, I’m sorry. The point is that she and I want to do something about things. A water company is poisoning people. Bad. She wants justice for the people affected. Kids are sleeping out on the street. Bad. I want to help them.’

‘Why you?’

‘Why her?’

‘It was a film, David.’

‘Based on a true story.’

‘Let me ask you something: is this worth wrecking your family for?’

‘I don’t intend to wreck my family.’

‘I know you don’t intend to wreck your family. But two of us are very unhappy. And I don’t know how much more I can take.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘That’s all you can say?’

‘What else is there to say? You’re threatening to leave me because I’m trying to do something for people who can’t do much for themselves. And I…’

‘That’s not true, David. I’m threatening to leave you because you’re becoming unbearable.’

‘What can’t you bear?’

‘Any of it. The… the sanctimony. The smugness. The…’

‘People are dying out there, Katie. I’m sorry if you think that I’m being smug.’

I cannot bring myself to say any more.

What with one thing and another—a broken leg one summer, post-college poverty the next—David and I did not go away on holiday together until the third year of our relationship. We were a proper couple by then, by which I mean that we had rows, that some days I didn’t like him very much, that if he or I went away for a few days I didn’t miss him, although I found myself jotting down inconsequential things to tell him, but that I never ever thought about whether I wanted to be with him or not, because I knew, somewhere in me, that I was in for the long haul. What I am saying, I suppose, is that this first holiday was not a honeymoon, and there was not very much chance of us spending the entire fortnight in bed, emerging only to feed each other spoonfuls of exotic fruits. It was more likely, in fact, that David would lapse into a two-week long sulk over a dispute about his loose interpretation of the rules of Scrabble, during the course of which I would call him a pathetic cheating baby. That was the stage we were at.

We found cheap flights to Egypt, with the intention of travelling around a bit, but on our second day in Cairo David became ill—sicker than he’s ever been since, in fact. He became delirious, and he vomited every couple of hours, and at the height of it he lost control of his bowels, and we were in a cheap hotel and we didn’t have our own toilet or shower, and I had to clean him up.

And there was a part of me that was pleased, because I’d set myself a test years before (probably when I first conceived of being a doctor, and realized that sometimes my private life would resemble my professional life): would I be able to see a man in that state and still respect him in the morning? I passed the test with flying colours. I had no qualms about cleaning David up, I could still bring myself to have sex with him afterwards (after the holiday, and after his restoration to health, I mean, rather than after his accident)… I was capable of a mature relationship after all. This was love, surely?

But now I can see I was wrong. That wasn’t a test. What kind of woman would leave her boyfriend to rot in his soiled bedsheets in a strange hotel in a foreign country? This is a test. And Lord, am I failing it.

Wendy and Ed, the enormous couple who live at number 19, come to see us first thing the next morning. They took in a kid called Robbie, who they said they liked. Last night the three of them stayed in together and talked about Robbie’s life, and how it had turned out in the way that it had, and Wendy and Ed went to bed feeling positive about the choice they had made to have him stay. But when they got up Robbie had vanished. Also vanished: a video camera, seventy pounds in cash, a bracelet that Wendy had left by the sink when she was doing the washing-up. GoodNews listens to the story with increasing agitation, which surprises me: I was presuming that he would be happy to write off the loss to experience, that he would argue—and as he is the owner of nothing very much, it is an easy argument to make—that these sorts of risks were worth running, that it was all for the greater good, and so on. It turns out, however, that it is not the theft that has agitated him, but our bourgeois logic.

‘Oh, no, no, no, people,’ he says. ‘We’re jumping to conclusions. We shouldn’t be jumping. We should be sitting and thinking, not jumping.’

‘How do you mean?’ Ed is genuinely baffled. He, like me, is trying to see how any other interpretation of events is possible.

‘Don’t you see? We’re putting two and two together and making the proverbial. I mean… OK, Robbie has gone. And OK, some stuff has gone. But it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’ve gone to the same place.’

‘I’m sure they haven’t,’ I say. ‘I’m sure they’ve gone to different places. I’m sure the video camera has gone to the second-hand shop in Holloway Road and Robbie’s gone to the off-licence.’

David gives me a look that lets me know I am being unhelpful, but I don’t think that’s true. Wendy and Ed are actually being pretty good about this. They could have come round here and thrown David from an upstairs window, or sat on him until he burst, but they just seem bewildered and hurt. And now they are being told that their powers of deduction are faulty.

‘GoodNews is right,’ says David, with a wearying predictability. ‘We mustn’t stereotype these kids. That’s kind of how they got into this mess in the first place.’

Monkey comes into the kitchen, dressed in some of David’s cast-offs and yawning.

‘Do you know Robbie?’ I ask him. ‘The guy who was living with Ed and Wendy here?’

‘Yeah,’ says Monkey. ‘He’s a thieving little cunt. Pardon my language.’

‘How do you know?’ David asks.

‘How do I know he’s a thieving little cunt? ‘Cos he steals everything.’ Misjudging the mood somewhat, he laughs heartily at his own witticism.

‘He’s stolen some stuff from us and disappeared,’ says Ed.

‘Yeah, well, I could have told you that would happen. What’s he taken?’

Ed tells him what is missing.

‘Little fucker. Right.’ And Monkey disappears too.

We make Ed and Wendy a cup of tea. David puts his head in his hands and stares mournfully at the floor. ‘It was a high-risk strategy, I suppose. Thinking about it now.’ That last phrase I would have found particularly difficult to swallow, if I were Ed and Wendy. They might have hoped that the thought had been done beforehand.

‘You shouldn’t worry too much about it,’ GoodNews tells them cheerfully. ‘You did the right thing. No matter how much you’ve lost. He could have taken everything you own, every last penny you’ve got, and you could go to sleep tonight knowing that your conscience is clear. More than clear. It’s…’ GoodNews struggles for a moment to find a word that means ‘more than clear’, and then gives up and settles for a beaming smile that doesn’t seem to offer Ed and Wendy as much consolation as he might have anticipated.

Forty-five minutes later Monkey is back, with the camera, the bracelet, fifty of the seventy pounds, and Robbie, who is bleeding profusely from a cut above his right eye. David is angry, GoodNews anguished.

‘How did he get that?’ David asks.

Monkey laughs. ‘He walked into a door.’

‘Oh, man,’ says GoodNews. ‘This isn’t what we’re about.’