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shoulder-jerks; foot-twitching. Go out and beat up a queer? Bruckner 4/Philh./Columbia/Klemperer), or when we were too tired to go out for a mild épat, we’d often come back to the same theme.
    ‘One thing about parents. They fug you up.’
    ‘Do you think they mean to?’
    ‘They may not. But they do, don’t they?’
    ‘Yeah, but it’s not really their fault, is it?’
    ‘You mean like in Zola – because they were fugged up in their turn by their parents.’
    ‘Good point. But you’ve got to blame them a bit, haven’t you? I mean, for not realising they were being fugged up, and going on and doing it to us as well?’
    ‘Oh, sure, I’m not suggesting we shouldn’t go on punishing them.’
    ‘You had me worried for a bit.’
    Every morning, at breakfast, I would gaze disbelievingly at my family. They were all still there, for a start – that was the first surprise. Why hadn’t some of them run off in the night, wounded beyond endurance by the emptiness I divined in their lives? Why were they all still sitting where they’d sat the morning before, and looking as if they’d be perfectly content to be back there again in another twenty-four hours?
    Across the table, my elder brother Nigel gazed over the topof his Weetabix at a science fiction mag. (Maybe this was how he controlled his existential discontent: by escaping into New Galaxies and New Worlds and Astounding Realities . Not that I’d ever asked him if he suffered from existential discontent; if anything, I rather hoped he didn’t – these things can get too popular.) Next to him, my sister Mary was also staring over the top of her breakfast, reading the pepper and salt. It wasn’t because she hadn’t yet woken up properly: at dinner she read the knives and forks. One day she might graduate to the backs of cornflake packets. She was thirteen and didn’t talk much. I thought she looked more like Nigel than me: they both had bland, soft-featured, unresentful faces.
    On my right, my father had The Times folded back at the stock-exchange prices and was murmuring his way down them. He didn’t look like me either. For a start, he was bald. I suppose the cast of his jaw was a bit like mine, but he certainly didn’t have my profound, questing eyes. From time to time he would toss my mother a dutiful question about the garden. She sat on my left, brought the food, answered any questions, and chivvied us gently through the largely silent meal. I didn’t look like her either. Some people said I had her eyes; but even if I did, I didn’t have anything else.
    Could it be that I was really related to all of them? And how could I bear not to point out the obvious differences?
    ‘Mum, am I illegitimate?’ (Normal conversational pitch)
    I heard a slight rustle to my left. Both my siblings carried on with their reading.
    ‘No, dear. Got your sandwiches?’
    ‘Yeah. You sure there isn’t a chance I’m illegitimate?’ I waved an explicatory hand towards Nigel and Mary. My father cleared his throat quietly.
    ‘School, Christopher.’
    Well, they could be lying.
    Parenthood, for Toni and me, was a crime of strict liability. There didn’t need to be any mens rea , just the actus reus of birth. The sentence we doled out, after giving due consideration to all the circumstances of the case and the social background ofthe offenders, was one of perpetual probation. And as for ourselves, the victims, the mal-aimés , we realised that independent existence could only be achieved by strict deconditioning. Camus had left everyone else on the grid with his ‘Aujourd’hui Maman est morte. Ou peut-être hier.’ Deconning, as we called it, savouring the pun, was the duty of every self-respecting adolescent.
    But it was harder than we reckoned. There were, we worked out, two distinct stages. First came Scorched Earth – systematic rejection, wilful contradiction, a wide-ranging, anarchic slate-wipe. After all, we were part of the Anger generation.
    ‘Do you