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head of a Phillips screw and gouged a chicken-skin wound in Sam’s thumb. He ran the cut under the cold tap in the bathroom while Jamie went hunting for the Elastoplast. After lunch, Sam watched with a mug of tea and a plate of Jammie Dodgers as Jamie erected blinds at the bay window. Although they hung slightly and variously askew, they at least stayed attached, and Jamie was proud of the job done.
    Soon Jamie’s room was ready. There remained a great deal of summer to kill. Jamie spent most of it at Mel’s.
    Jamie and Mel had begun to grow truly close when Jamie’s lack of siblings began to impair Sam and Justine’s cheerful attempts at family holidays. Jamie was never able to make new friends quickly, and too much exclusive parental company bored and embarrassed him. So Mel looked after him while Sam and Justine were in Tuscany or North Africa or Rome. And because Mel didn’t mortify Jamie the way his parents did, it was she who took him away. Together, they’d been to Cornwall, to Brighton, to Spain, Disneyland Paris, and three times to CenterParcs.
    Usually, Mel cooked the kind of food Jamie wasn’t allowed at home. But she made him wash the dishes, too, and sometimes do the vacuuming. Mysteriously, Jamie didn’t mind taking out the rubbish, or cleaning the upstairs windows, or running to the shops to get milk and cigarettes, as long as it was Mel who asked him to do it.
    Mel always phoned if Jamie was staying over and—although Sam knew she’d feed him on frozen potato waffles and Findus crispy pancakes, and that she wouldn’t make him bathe if he didn’t feel like it, or go to bed until he was staggering with fatigue, or make him clean his teeth, or put on clean underwear—he always said yes. But when he suggested that Jamie should keep some clothes—just a few T-shirts, some socks and underwear, perhaps a toothbrush—at Mel’s, his sister and his son took lofty offence and he was forced to apologize, as if for barging in on a private game.
    One afternoon, Mel and Jamie walked to the Dolphin Centre to return a rental video ( The Evil Dead II ).Propped against the NSS newsagent’s window, Jamie noticed a mountain bike that he recognized as belonging to Stuart Ballard, a ratty little kid he’d known since they were both three or four years old. Sam had always thought that Stuart belonged to another age: he should have been dressed in grey shorts and tank tops, clambering, scabby-kneed, over postwar bombsites or collecting tadpoles in a jam jar with string for a handle. Once, Stuart’s parents had been Mel’s neighbours. Three years ago, they’d moved to a slightly smaller house on the Merrydown Estate.
    Stuart was inside the NSS, buying a PlayStation magazine and ten Silk Cut for his mum. Mel and Jamie surprised him on the way out. Stuart went back to Mel’s with them, pushing his bike. They pulled the curtains on the afternoon and watched Halloween H2O on fizzy, jumpy VHS. Stuart warned them it was crap, but they enjoyed it anyway. That afternoon, Jamie ate his tea at the Ballards’; grilled lamb chops, chips, peas and HP fruity sauce.
    Sometimes, two or three days might pass without Sam catching sight of Jamie, and when he did come home, he’d be worn out and crabby, still wearing the clothes he’d left in. The trousers would be grass-stained, the collars grease-blackened, the socks mossy-damp and odorous. Sam took care to welcome him jauntily, repressing the powerful urge to order him immediately upstairs and into the bath.
    Sam wasn’t due to start work at Agartha Barrow, the local mental hospital, until October. He had never spent so much time alone. But it wasn’t so bad. At first, he kept busy by unpacking the stuff he hadn’t crammed into the smallest spare room. When that was done, and when he’d found a place to put everything, the house felt emptier. It swallowed those belongings by which he was content to be surrounded. The rearing expanse of living-room wall miniaturized the