six

I'm a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. I'm a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. I'm a single father. I have a two-year-old boy. However many times Will told himself this, he could always find some reason that prevented him from believing it; in his own head — not the place that counted the most, but important nevertheless — he didn't feel like a parent. He was too young, too old, too stupid, too smart, too groovy, too impatient, too selfish, too careless, too careful (whatever the contraceptive circumstances of the woman he was seeing, he always, always used a Durex, even in the days before you had to), he didn't know enough about kids, he went out too often, he drank too much, he took too many drugs. When he looked in the mirror, he didn't, couldn't, see a dad, especially a single dad.

    He was trying to see a single dad in the mirror because he had run out of single mums to sleep with; in fact, Angie had so far proved to be both the beginning and the end of his supply. It was all very well deciding that single mums were the future, that there were millions of sad, Julie Christie-like waifs just dying for his call, but the frustrating truth was that he didn't have any of their phone numbers. Where did they hang out?

    It took him longer than it should have done to realize that, by definition, single mothers had children, and children, famously, prevented one from hanging out anywhere. He had made a few gentle, half-hearted enquiries of friends and acquaintances, but had so far failed to make any real headway; the people he knew either didn't know any single mothers, or were unwilling to effect the necessary introductions due to Will's legendarily poor romantic track record. But now he had found the ideal solution to this unexpected dearth of prey. He had invented a two-year-old son called Ned and had joined a single parents' group.

    Most people would not have bothered to go to these lengths to indulge a whim, but Will quite often bothered to do things that most people wouldn't bother to do, simply because he had the time to bother. Doing nothing all day gave him endless opportunities to dream and scheme and pretend to be something he wasn't. He had, after a fit of remorse following a weekend of extreme self-indulgence, volunteered to work in a soup kitchen, and even though he never actually reported for duty, the phone call had allowed him to pretend, for a couple of days, that he was the kind of guy who might. And he had thought about VSO and filled in the forms, and he had cut out an advert in the local paper about teaching slow learners to read, and he had contacted estate agents about opening a restaurant and then a bookshop . . .

    The point was that if you had a history of pretending, then joining a single parent group when you were not a single parent was neither problematic nor particularly scary. If it didn't work out, then he'd just have to try something else. It was no big deal.

SPAT (Single Parents — Alone Together) met on the first Thursday of the month in a local adult education centre, and tonight was Will's first time. He was almost sure that tonight would be his last time, too: he'd get something wrong, like the name of Postman Pat's cat, or the colour of Noddy's car (or, more crucially, the name of his own child — for some reason he couldn't stop thinking of him as Ted, and he had only christened him Ned this morning), and he'd be exposed as a fraud and frogmarched off the premises. If there was a chance of meeting someone like Angie, however, it had to be worth a try.

    The car park at the centre contained just one other vehicle, a beaten-up B-reg 2CV which had, according to the stickers in its window, been to Chessington World of Adventure and Alton Towers; Will's car, a new GTi, hadn't been anywhere like that at all. Why not? He couldn't think of any reason why not, apart from the glaringly obvious one, that he was a childless single man aged thirty-six and therefore had never had the desire to drive miles and miles to plunge down a plastic fairy mountain on a tea-tray.

    The centre depressed him. He hadn't set foot inside a place with classrooms and corridors and home-made posters for nearly twenty years, and he had forgotten that British education smelt of disinfectant. It hadn't occurred to him that he wouldn't be able to find the SPAT party. He thought he'd be led straight to it by the happy buzz of people forgetting their troubles and getting roaring drunk, but there was no happy buzz, just the distant, mournful clank of a bucket. Finally he spotted a piece of file paper pinned to a classroom door with the word SPAT! scrawled on it in felt-tip pen. The exclamation mark put him off. It was trying too hard.

    There was only one woman in the room. She was taking bottles — of white wine, beer, mineral water and supermarket-brand cola — out of a cardboard box and putting them on to a table in the centre of the room. The rest of the tables had been pushed to the back; the chairs were stacked in rows behind them. It was the most desolate party venue Will had ever seen.

    'Have I come to the right place?' he asked the woman. She had pointy features and red cheeks; she looked like Worzel Gummidge's friend Aunt Sally.

    'SPAT? Come in. Are you Will? I'm Frances.'

    He smiled and shook her hand. He had spoken to Frances on the phone earlier in the day.

    'I'm sorry there's nobody else here yet. We quite often get off to a slow start. Babysitters.'

    'Of course.' So he was wrong to be prompt. He had more or less given himself away already. And, of course, he should never have said 'of course', which implied that she had clarified something he was finding puzzling. He should have rolled his eyes and said, 'Tell me about it', or, 'Don't talk to me about babysitters', something weary and conspiratorial.

    Maybe it wasn't too late. He rolled his eyes. 'Don't talk to me about babysitters,' he said. He laughed bitterly and shook his head, just for good measure. Frances ignored the eccentric conversational timing and took the cue.

    'Did you have trouble tonight, then?'

    'No. My mother's looking after him.' He was proud of the use of the pronoun. It implied familiarity. On the debit side, though, there had been an awful lot of head-shaking, eye-rolling and bitter laughter for a man with no apparent baby-sitting difficulties.

    'I've had trouble before, though,' he added hastily. The conversation was less than two minutes old and already he was a nervous wreck.

    'Haven't we all?' said Frances.

    Will laughed heartily. 'Yes,' he said. 'I know I have.'

    It was now perfectly clear, he felt, that he was either a liar or a lunatic, but before he could dig himself any deeper into a hole which was already shipping water other SPAT members — all of them women, all but one of them in their thirties — started to arrive. Frances introduced him to each of them: Sally and Moira, who looked tough, ignored him completely, helped themselves to a paper cupful of white wine and disappeared off to the further corner of the room (Moira, Will noted with interest, was wearing a Lorena Bobbitt T-shirt); Lizzie, who was small, sweet and scatty; Helen and Susannah, who obviously regarded SPAT as beneath their dignity, and made rude comments about the wine and the location; Saskia, who was ten years younger than anybody else in the room, and looked more like somebody's daughter than somebody's mother; and Suzie, who was tall, blond, pale, nervy-looking and beautiful. She would do, he thought, and stopped looking at anyone else who came in. Blond and beautiful were two of the qualities he was looking for; pale and nervy-looking were two of the qualities that gave him the right to do so.

    'Hello,' he said. 'I'm Will, I'm new, and I don't know anybody.'

    'Hello, Will. I'm Suzie, I'm old, and I know everybody.' He laughed. She laughed. He spent as much of the evening as courtesy allowed in her company.

    His conversation with Frances had sharpened him up, so he did better on the Ned front. In any case Suzie wanted to talk, and in these circumstances he was extremely happy to listen. There was a lot to listen to. Suzie had been married to a man called Dan, who had started an affair when she was six months pregnant and had left her the day before she went into labour. Dan had only seen his daughter Megan once, accidentally, in the Body Shop in Islington. He hadn't seemed to want to see her again. Suzie was now poor (she was trying to retrain as a nutritionist) and bitter, and Will could understand why.

    Suzie looked around the room.

    'One of the reasons I like coming here is that you can be angry and no one thinks any the less of you,' she said. 'Just about everyone's got something they're angry about.'

    'Really?' They didn't look that angry to Will.

    'Let's see who's here . . . The woman in the denim shirt over there? Her husband went because he thought their little boy wasn't his. Ummm . . . Helen . . . boring . . . he went off with someone from work . . . Moira . . . he came out . . . Susannah Curtis . . . I think he was running two families . . .'

    There were endless ingenious variations on the same theme. Men who took one look at their new child and went, men who took one look at their new colleague and went, men who went for the hell of it. Immediately Will understood Moira's sanctification of Lorena Bobbitt completely; by the time Suzie had finished her litany of treachery and deceit, he wanted to cut off his own penis with a kitchen knife.

    'Aren't there any other men who come to SPAT?' he asked Suzie.

    'Just one. Jeremy. He's on holiday.'

    'So women do leave sometimes?'

    'Jeremy's wife was killed in a car crash.'

    'Oh. Oh well.'

    Will was becoming so depressed about his sex that he decided to redress the balance.

    'So. I'm on my own,' he said, in what he hoped was a mysteriously wistful tone.

    'I'm sorry,' said Suzie. 'I haven't asked you anything about yourself.'

    'Oh . . . It doesn't matter.'

    'Did you get dumped then?'

    'Well, I suppose I did, yes.' He gave her a sad, stoical smile.

    'And does your ex see Ned?'

    'Sometimes. She's not really that bothered.' He was beginning to feel better; it was good to be the bearer of bad news about women. True, this bad news was entirely fictitious, but there was, he thought, an emotional truth here somewhere, and he could see now that his role-playing had a previously unsuspected artistic element to it. He was acting, yes, but in the noblest, most profound sense of the word. He wasn't a fraud. He was Robert De Niro.

    'How does he cope with that?'

    'Oh . . . he's a good little boy. Very brave.'

    'They have amazing resources, kids, don't they?'

    To his astonishment he found himself blinking back a tear, and Suzie put a reassuring hand on his arm. He was in here, no doubt about it.