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his head once in frowning denial, not opening his eyes, his mouth clamped shut, keeping her out.
    In the doctor’s surgery, her puffy pale face without makeup and her velvet skirt stained and crumpled, she insisted on knowing which tests could be done to find out what was the matter. The doctor even joked that she should try some herbal remedies or Red Indian charms. In the end the tests showed that Toby had a form of viral encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain, and he was off school for two years, with almost constant pain in his head and all over his body. He spent months in hospital, because the encephalitis weakened his immune system and made him prone to other illnesses; he had pneumonia twice. Naomi lost interest in the Graham conversation. She cut down her drinking; whenever Toby was in hospital she slept every night there too; she was silent, fixated, dull company except when she was talking to other mothers with ill children. The girls moved back to live full time with Marian.
    At one point when Toby was very ill, his name was mentioned in Assembly at school and his class collected money for flowers. Two or three years later when he was better, he once bumped into Haggis (Haggis’s real name was James, and that was how Toby hailed him from across the street). Toby and Naomi had moved to a flat in a different part of the city, and Toby had started back at a different school. Haggis looked surprised to see him and told him they had all assumed that he had died.
    *   *   *
    WHEN T OBY was twenty he went away to University, where he studied for a Visual Arts degree specializing in film and video. When he came home at the end of his final year he planned to spend some of the summer with his mother and some with Clare and her husband and children, before he went off traveling with his camera. Naomi had moved again since he’d last seen her and had got out of an abusive relationship with a man with a mental health problem (before that there had been a married businessman who imported shoes). She was now living with another woman, Angie. Tamsin couldn’t deal with it and wouldn’t visit them, but Clare said it was a good thing. She said Naomi had fallen into a pattern of being treated badly by the men she got involved with, and this relationship with Angie was a sign of her wanting to break that pattern. She said women were kinder to women than men ever were, more appreciative and gentle and sensitive; and Naomi’s choice of Angie was a sign that at least she wasn’t willing her own destruction anymore.
    Naomi picked Toby up from the bus station in her old Citroen. The car was as scruffy as ever and she had to move paper tissues, empty crisps packets, a Tampax box, secateurs, and rolling tobacco efore he could get into the front seat, but she looked pretty. She was wearing an embroidered silky top and jeans; she had had her hair cut shoulder length, and, as Clare said, it made her look younger because she didn’t look as if she was trying to. The lines at the corners of her eyes and mouth were still there, but crinkled with smiling. She was buoyant and childish and seemed rather overexcited, unlike his usual idea of her: small, dark, concentrated with suffering. Her silver earrings had some sort of symbol that might be a lesbian thing; Toby didn’t mind, as long as she didn’t try to corner him with it and make him say something.
    â€”We’re nearly there. Look, Toby!
    They were driving around a mini-roundabout at the end of a suburban street; an improvised banner was tied between two young trees. In red paint on a white torn sheet was written, WELCOME HOME, TOBY MENGES, BA!
    There were tears in her eyes.
    â€”Did you see, sweetheart? Realize how proud of you we are? Let’s go round again, what the hell!
    This time she sounded the horn, blaring out one of the rhythms he used to clap at football matches with his friends. A car following them onto the