‘I think maybe your tummy’s gone funny because of eating things like raw potatoes,’ I say eventually. ‘But it’s OK. There are all sorts of things we can do.’

And I do some of them. I prescribe him some liquid paraffin, and I recommend a bowel-loosening takeaway curry, and I promise that I will cook him dinner myself one evening. And when he has gone I call Social Services.

When I get home, David and GoodNews announce that after several weeks’ deliberation, they have finally isolated their candidates for ‘reversal’—their equivalents of Hope and Christopher, the people they feel most guilty about in their whole lives. I’m tired, and hungry, and not terribly interested, but they stand in front of me anyway and insist that they tell me.

‘Go on, then,’ I say, with as much weariness as I feel, plus a little extra for effect.

‘Mine’s called Nigel Richards,’ David says proudly.

‘Who’s Nigel Richards?’

‘He’s a kid I used to beat up at school. Except he’s not a kid now. He used to be. In the early seventies.’

‘You’ve never mentioned him before.’

‘Too ashamed,’ says David, almost triumphantly.

I cannot help feeling that there must be someone else, someone more recent—a former colleague, a family member, me me me—but even on a day like today, when I am depressed and tired, I know better than to provide David with a long, thorny list with which he will flagellate himself for months to come. If he feels bad about Nigel Richards, then Nigel Richards it is.

GoodNews, meanwhile, has chosen his sister.

‘What’, I ask, ‘did you do to your sister?’

‘Nothing, really. I just… I can’t stand her, that’s all. So I never see her. And she’s my sister. I feel bad about it, you know?’

‘Do I still have to play with Hope, Mummy?’

‘You’ve done your bit.’

‘Well, we’ve never really done our bit, have we?’ says David. ‘It’s a lifelong commitment.’

‘So Nigel Richards is going to be your new best friend? We’ll be spending all our time with Mr and Mrs Richards in the future?’

‘I’m sure Nigel Richards won’t need me as a best friend. I’m sure he’s gone on to have millions of successful and fulfilling relationships. But if he hasn’t, then I’ll be there for him, yes.’

‘You’ll be there for someone you don’t know because you thumped him twenty-five years ago?’

‘Yes. Exactly. I shouldn’t have done it.’

‘And that’s really the only thing you can think of that you shouldn’t have done?’

‘Not the only. The first.’

It looks like being a very long life.

It is, I confess, my idea to join forces—to combine Brian and Nigel and GoodNews’s sister Cantata (for that is her name—self-chosen at the age of twenty-three, apparently, after a particularly intense experience under the influence of acid in the Royal Festival Hall) at the dinner table in the hope of expunging all our sins at one fell swoop—or at least, that is how I present it to David, who cannot see the prospect of anything but a very jolly evening, even if Nigel is now the chairman of a multinational bank and is seated next to Brian and his malfunctioning bowels for the entire evening.

The truth is that I have given up expecting anything approaching a pleasant or even tolerable social life, and so my motives for the suggestion are born from cynicism and a kind of despairing perversity: why not sit them all down together? The more the merrier! The worse the better! If nothing else, the evening will become an anecdote that may amaze and delight my friends for years to come; and maybe the desire for nice evenings with people I know and love is essentially bourgeois, reprehensible—depraved, almost.

GoodNews goes first. He phones the last number he had for Cantata, and then he is given another one, and then another one, and finally he tracks her down to a squat in Brighton.

‘Cantata? It’s GoodNews.’

But apparently not—she hangs up.

GoodNews phones the number again.

‘Beforeyouputthephonedownagainlistento me… Thank you. I’ve been thinking a lot about you, and how badly I’ve treated you. And I wanted to…’

‘—‘

‘I know.’

‘—‘

‘I know.’

‘—‘

‘Ah, now that wasn’t my fault. I never called the police. That was Mum.’

‘—‘

‘Well, I didn’t run him over, did I? And I didn’t leave the door open, either.’

‘—‘

‘Oh, come on, Cantata. That cost seventy pence. And I’m pretty sure it was torn anyway.’

‘—‘

GoodNews jumps to his feet and then keeps jumping, up and down, like someone on a trampoline. Or rather, like someone who is trying to resolve a blood feud—the kind of problem that cannot be reached by healing hands, or answered on a piece of paper, or written about in a book, but only by jumping up and down, up and down, because that is the only response left to him. I wish I had thought of jumping up and down months ago. It would have been as useful as anything else.

‘No!’ GoodNews shouts. ‘No, no, no! YOU fuck off! YOU fuck off!’

And then he slams the phone down and walks out.

‘Aren’t you going to talk to him?’ I ask David.

‘What am I going to say?’

‘I don’t know. Try to make him feel better.’

‘He shouldn’t have said that. I’m very disappointed in him. We’re supposed to be above all that.’

‘But we’re not, are we?’

‘I’m not talking about you. I’m talking about me and him.’

‘That’s the trouble, isn’t it? You were human all the time. You just forgot.’

I go to talk to him. He’s lying on his bed, chewing furiously, staring at the ceiling.

‘I’m sorry I swore in front of the kids.’

‘That’s OK. They’ve heard that word a lot from their father.’

‘In the old days?’

‘Yeah, that’s right. In the old days.’ It had never occurred to me that David no longer swears in front of the children. That’s a good thing, surely? OK, some would argue that this has been a Pyrrhic victory, achieved only by having a man with turtles for eyebrows coming to live with us for what seems like years, and at a cost to all semblance of a normal family life, but I choose to accentuate the positive.

‘You shouldn’t beat yourself up about it,’ I tell him. ‘I mean, I only heard your side of the argument, but she seems pretty unreasonable. What was all that stuff about seventy pence?’

‘Her bloody Simon LeBon poster. She’s never forgotten it.’

‘I gathered that.’

‘Katie, I can’t stand her. She’s awful. Always has been, always will be. Cantata! What a bloody idiot.’

With enormous self-control I pass up the opportunity for first-name-calling.

‘It’s OK.’

‘No it’s not. She’s my sister.’

‘But she’s doing OK without you.’

‘I don’t know that.’

‘If she needed you, you would have heard from her. Despite the unfortunate Simon LeBon poster incident.’

‘Do you think?’

‘Of course.’

‘I still feel I’m a failure though. You know, it’s love this, and love that, and I fucking hate her. Excuse my language.’

And in my opinion, he’s right. He is a failure, and self-interest requires that I let him know. Who are these people, that they want to save the world and yet they are incapable of forming proper relationships with anybody? As GoodNews so eloquently puts it, it’s love this and love that, but of course it’s so easy to love someone you don’t know, whether it’s George Clooney or Monkey. Staying civil to someone with whom you’ve ever shared Christmas turkey—now there’s a miracle. If GoodNews could pull that one off with his warm hands, he could live with us for ever.

‘But think of all the people you help who do need you,’ I tell him. ‘Isn’t that worth more?’

‘D’you think?’

‘Of course.’

And thus GoodNews is encouraged to wreak yet more havoc, by someone who should know better. But—irony upon irony—I know I’m doing the right thing.