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had found her abandoned under a bush, wrapped up in someone’s bloody nightdress. They never found out whose nightdress it was.
    â€”I’m the original babe in the woods, she said. Now, wouldn’t that make a great film? Haven’t I given you a fantastic subject? Complete with a happy ending too.
    Naomi poured herself a second brandy. She watched Angie with a private smiling concentration, nursing her glass in her warm palms and breathing the fumes, slightly drunk and exalted. Then she turned to Toby expectantly as if he was their audience and might applaud what she loved and had had displayed for him.
    When he settled down to sleep, Toby pulled the duvet tightly up over his ears. Their bedroom opened directly off the sitting room where he lay. He dreaded overhearing Angie making love with his mother (although no more than he had dreaded it with the men).
    *   *   *
    A NGIE WORKED with children in a play group run by the local council. Naomi had been doing office work for the Royal Automobile Club for a couple of years now; it was dull but it was safe, it brought the money in, she didn’t hate it. So they were both out all day; they stepped around Toby in his bed in the mornings while they were getting ready and made their arrangements in hurried undertones. When they pulled the door shut behind them at half past eight he sank back down into a sleep that ballooned with relief and lightness into the empty space.
    They left him notes in the kitchen: Supper at six-thirty if you’d like some (mushroom risotto) ; there were boxes to tick for YES or NO . He worried while he ate his cereals over what to put, and how often he could say no without offending them; it was always possible that they felt as grateful as he did on the nights he ate at Clare’s or bought himself chips. When he said yes, he had to spend all day trying to remember to get back in time. There was only one bus from town that came anywhere near the house and it only ran once every hour; if he got out of bed around midday, that didn’t leave him much time for getting things done. If he was late for supper, Angie would be silent and smiling and Naomi overemphatic in her reassurances that it didn’t matter as she hurried to warm things up.
    He did have things to do. Each day he set himself one task to accomplish: the travel agent’s to visit, or the doctor’s to organize his inoculations, or some item of clothing to buy, or insurance to arrange. He didn’t always accomplish it. Toby’s “task for the day” became a sort of jokey catchphrase with Angie, and it was true that he wasn’t very good at focusing single-mindedly on his purpose. However much he determined not to be distracted or to allow himself to be waylaid, there must be something in his face that gave away an openness to suggestion like a weakness. Anyone eccentric or garrulous always sat next to him on the bus. People selling political newspapers or giving out religious tracts or tickets for a club homed in on him from across a crowd, also refugees with an album of photographs of torture injuries and a petition to sign that turned out to involve contributing money. He never managed to avoid the eye of the homeless who were selling their Big Issue magazine, so that he always had to stop and explain to them that he didn’t have anything to spare. Then he’d find himself in a long conversation while the crowd flowed past as if he’d never been a part of it, on his way somewhere.
    The day he went to see his father he happened to have a book in his pocket that he had just bought from a man selling Socialist Worker; when he had tried to explain that he didn’t want to buy their paper because it seemed to him that their approach to politics was superficial and sloganizing, the man had produced from somewhere inside his coat a book of essays in tiny print on shiny paper, assuring Toby that he would find inside the