"No, Marcus, I haven't got another boyfriend. That's not how it works. Not when you're a thirty-eight-year-old working mother. There's a time problem. Ha! There's an everything problem. Why? Does it bother you?"
"I dunno."
And he didn't know. His mum was sad, he knew that—she cried a lot now, more than she did before they moved to London—but he had no idea whether that was anything to do with boyfriends. He kind of hoped it was, because then it would all get sorted out. She would meet someone, and he would make her happy. Why not? His mum was pretty, he thought, and nice, and funny sometimes, and he reckoned there must be loads of blokes like Roger around. If it wasn't boyfriends, though, he didn't know what it could be, apart from something bad.
“Do you mind me having boyfriends?”
“No. Only Andrew.”
“Well, yes, I know you didn’t like Andrew. But generally? You don’t mind the idea of it?”
“No. Course not.”
“You’ve been really good about everything. Considering you’ve had two different sorts of life.”
He understood what she meant. The first sort of life had ended four years ago, when he was eight and his mum and dad had split up; that was the normal, boring kind, with school and holidays and homework and weekend visits to grandparents. The second sort was messier, and there were more people and places in it: his mother’s boyfriends and his dad’s girlfriends; flats and houses; Cambridge and London. You wouldn’t believe that so much could change just because a relationship ended, but he wasn’t bothered. Sometimes he even thought he preferred the second sort of life to the first sort. More happened, and that had to be a good thing.
Apart from Roger, not much had happened in London yet. They’d only been here for a few weeks—they’d moved on the first day of the summer holidays—and so far it had been pretty boring. He had been to see two films with his mum, Home Alone 2, which wasn’t as good as Home Alone 1, and Honey, I Blew Up the Kids, which wasn’t as good as Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, and his mum had said that modern films were too commercial, and that when she was his age . . . something, he couldn’t remember what. And they’d been to have a look at his school, which was big and horrible, and wandered around their new neighbourhood, which was called Holloway, and had nice bits and ugly bits, and they’d had lots of talks about London, and the changes that were happening to them, and how they were all for the best, probably. But really they were sitting around waiting for their London lives to begin.
The pizzas arrived and they ate them straight out of the boxes.
“They’re better than the ones we had in Cambridge, aren’t they?” Marcus said cheerfully. It wasn’t true: it was the same pizza company, but in Cambridge the pizzas hadn’t had to travel so far, so they weren’t quite as soggy. It was just that he thought he ought to say something optimistic. “Shall we watch TV?”
“If you want.”
He found the remote control down the back of the sofa and zapped through the channels.