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    We didn’t speak a word. I took Andrew into the bedroom and we lay on the bed beneath the tall Georgian windows with the yellow silk blinds. The blinds were embroidered with pale foliage. Silk birds hid there in a kind of silent apprehension. It was a bright May morning in Kingston-upon-Thames, but the sunlight through the blinds was a dark and florid saffron. It was feverish, almost malarial. The bedroom walls were yellow and ocher. Across the creaking landing, Andrew’s study was white—the color, I suppose, of blank pages. That’s where I retrieved him, after the awful phone call. I read a few words of his column, over his shoulder. He’d been awake all night writing an opinion piece about the Middle East, which was a region he had never visited and had no specialist knowledge of. It was the summer of 2007, and my son was fighting the Penguin and the Puffin, and my country was fighting Iraq and Afghanistan, and my husband was forming public opinion. It was the kind of summer where no one took their costume off.
    I pulled my husband away from the phone. I pulled him into the bedroom by the tasseled cord of his dressing gown, because I had read somewhere that this sort of behavior would excite him. I pulled him down onto our bed.
    I remember the way he moved inside me, like a clock with its mainspring running down. I pulled his face close to mine and I whispered, Oh god Andrew, are you
all right
? My husband didn’t reply. He just closed his eyes against the tears and we began to move faster while small, involuntary moans came from our mouths and fled into the other’s moaning in wordless desperation.
    In on this small tragedy walked my son, who was more at home fighting evil on a larger, more knockabout scale. I opened my eyes and saw him standing in the bedroom doorway, watching us through the small, diamond-shaped eyeholes of his bat mask. From the expression on the part of his face that could be seen, he seemed to be wondering which (if any) of the gadgets on his utility belt might help in this situation.
    When I saw my son, I pushed Andrew off me and scrabbled frantically for the duvet to cover us. I said,
Oh god Charlie, I’m so sorry.
    My son looked behind him, then back at me.
    “Charlie isn’t here. I’m Batman.”
    I nodded, and bit my lip.
    “Good morning, Batman.”
    “What is you and Daddy doing, Mummy?”
    “Er . . .”
    “Is you getting baddies?”
    “
Are we
getting baddies, Charlie. Not
is we.
”
    “Are you?”
    “Yes, Batman. Yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing.”
    I smiled at my son, and waited. I wondered what Batman would say. What he said was,
Someone done a poo in my costume, Mummy.
    “
Did
a poo, Charlie.”
    “Yes. A big big poo.”
    “Oh Batman. Have you really done a poo in your suit?”
    Batman shook his head. His bat ears quivered. Beneath the mask an expression of great cunning settled upon the visible part of his face.
    “It wasn’t me that done the poo. It was the
Puffin.
”
    (The italics were his.)
    “Are you telling me that the Puffin came in the night and did a poo in your bat suit?”
    Batman nodded, solemnly. I noticed he had kept his bat mask on but taken off his bat suit. He stood naked except for the maskand cape. He held up the bat suit for me to inspect. A lump of something fell from it and thumped on the carpet. The smell was indescribable. I sat up in bed and saw a trail of lumps leading across the carpet from the bedroom door. Somewhere inside me the girl who had done science A-levels noted, with empirical fascination, that feces had also found their way into locations which included—but were not limited to—Batman’s hands, the door frame, the bedroom wall, my alarm-clock radio and, of course, the bat suit. My son’s shit was everywhere. There was shit on his hands. Shit on his face. Even on the black-and-yellow bat symbol of his bat suit there was shit. I tried, but I couldn’t make myself believe that these were Puffin droppings.