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haven’t got the faintest idea what you’re talking about. Vernon Savoy’s only famous in my book for sponging off my mother and wearing awful waistcoats.
    He doesn’t! cries Brendan, And has he still got that ludicrous moustache?
    Ludicrous, nods Anna.
    It sounds a riot, he says, Anna Calder, confidante to the stars! I bet it’s just like The Good Old Days.
    They’re a complete embarrassment, the way they carry on, says Anna,
You
go and stay with them if you don’t believe me. See how long it is before you’re sectioned.
    Is it really that bad? asks Brendan.
    It’s worse. But I’ve been left with no alternative.
    They both stare at the car for a minute. A fine drizzle starts to fall, sprinkling them with tiny beads of rain. Brendan puts his arm around her as they turn back towards the house.
    Oh, look on the bright side, he says, At least we didn’t bother wasting time on that scrap of dirt you call a garden. And give me bedlam over boredom any day.

FIVE
    The idea Lewis had—of returning to Cardiff, of finding his mother again—seems pointless now, in the middle of the day in the middle of a busy London street. He stands on the corner and tries to regulate his breathing. He’d run non-stop from the common until he realized he was drawing attention to himself: a man fleeing down the high street in broad daylight. It wouldn’t do. It would look weird. He sees himself as a stranger might; chaotic, dishevelled, wild-eyed: like an escapee from a mental ward. Trying to behave as a normal person would, Lewis tags on the end of a queue of people waiting for a bus, half-sits on the low wall, just like the man next to him, like those two girls further along. His legs are trembling, he has to fight the urge to cry. He rests his back against the railing and puts his kitbag on his lap to stop his knees from jumping. He wants to be no one again, the invisible man, but the confusion—and then the realization—washes over him like sweat: he’s run away from one bad situation, and straight into another. For a second, he sees himself as if he’s been tied on a long piece of invisible elastic, getting catapulted from one place to the next, only to return twice as quickly. He fights the thought. More like a wrecking ball, he says, under his breath. But if he isn’t on elastic, what is he doing in Clapham, directly opposite the Café Salsa, the very place where the rot set in?

    Lewis had been living in a basement flat off the high street, doing jobs for cash, some house clearance, odd bits of decorating, which was how he first met Vivienne. He’d been employed to paint the interior of the café; there was two week’s work in it if he took his time. Vivienne was a fixture, beautiful to look at, always in the middle of a crowd of admirers: would-be poets and bit-part actors and young men in suits, who would twirl their car keys and offer to buy her drinks. She had breakfast in the café every morning, and she’d still be there at lunch-time, chatting on her mobile, scanning the small ads in the paper. During the afternoon, Viv would disappear for a few hours and come back in different clothes: always some black outfit, and heavy pieces of glass jewellery hanging from her ears and her throat. She’d sit at
her
table in the window, in the candlelight, glinting like a scarab.
    Viv made the first move. He’d been painting a trompe-l’oeil effect on the back wall: a menagerie of yellow parrots and green monkeys copied from a print the owner had given him. He hated the work; it was vulgar, he thought, but he made no comment because he got paid daily, in cash. She turned to him one morning from her seat in the window, and asked him if he was gay or straight. That was how it started.
    Later, she would say she was attracted to his profile; that he reminded her of an actor she vaguely knew. He wasn’t pleased with the idea of looking like