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Russell! What do you want for your tea?”
    Russell gathered himself. Then, still laughing: “Egg and chips!”
    â€œCan I have that too, nana?”
    Cook followed Esther and hovered as she struggled with the sticky front door.
    â€œNo. You’re going out.”
    The door opened on the third tug, revealing Lily, frozen in a rehearsed smile.
    â€œHello, Dorian, darling!”
    As ever, Cook recoiled from the hug, keeping one foot in the house and the other on the front step, torn between his egg and chips and his mother.
    *
    Cook and Lily walked slowly and silently through the Saturday dusk, up past the oil-works and down a deserted side-road lined with houses whose windows were either boarded or cautiously ajar, leaking statutory odours of over-boiled vegetables. Cook tolerated the holding of his hand but didn’t squeeze back. As they traced the high perimeter fence of honeycomb-patterned wire that bordered the Bethesda School infants’ playground, he saw that Lily had lost her smile, but regained it briefly whenever she caught him glancing up at her. After a careful crossing of the busy road that climbed up to the football stadium (City), Lily released Cook’s hand and pulled a single door-key from the fur-lined pocket of her coat. For a second, Cook thought she was about to let herself into the
King’s Head
– a buckled old pub on the corner, long since marked for demolition but somehow still upright. Instead, she cut into a narrow side-passage and Cook followed as she lifted the latch on the poorly hung gate at the end of a smelly back yard. The key admitted them into a narrow kitchen where they crab-stepped past toppled columns of saucepans and dinner plates which seeped over the rim of a china sink barnacled with mould and matter.
    The living room was certainly lived in. Cook cleared away a heap of damp clothes and settled into a squashy armchair which, despite its smooth PVC upholstery, had managed to retain an impressive crust of dust. A large-to-overlarge man in T-shirt and pyjama bottoms emerged from a storage room under the staircase, bumping his head on the door frame. Lily leapt to his aid, rubbing at the bump, her pink nail varnish contrasting with his inky-black hair. She turned to her boy as she soothed her man.
    â€œDor, this is Tom. Remember – I told you about him a few weeks ago.”
    â€œHiya!” said Cook, mock-cheerfully.
    â€œY’alright, Dorian?” enquired Tom. He pulled away from Lily’s fussing and dumped a mound of comic-books on the floor next to Cook’s chair.
    â€œEe’yar… Have a look at them, then.
Spider-Man
,
Hulk
. Think there’s a few
Superman
ones in there, too.”
    â€œWhat d’ya say, Dor?” said Lily.
    â€œThank you!” sing-songed Cook, ruffling through the pile. He took out an issue of
The Amazing Spider-Man
. On the cover, the Green Goblin was in mid-fight with the costumed hero, while the pair’s alter-egos taunted each other in flashback. Tom gave Cook a small bottle of orangeade and a packet of cheese-and-onion crisps. Cook guzzled and munched and rustled, hardly noticing that Tom and Lily had disappeared upstairs. When it grew too gloomy to read, he just sat there in the dark, tracing spider-web patterns in the armchair dust, re-imagining the comic stories, projecting them onto the blackness where they played out as animations – vivid and looming and leering.
    On the way back to Esther’s, Cook happily threaded his fingers through Lily’s.
    â€œI like my dad!” he declared.
    Lily snatched in a breath. “That’s really good, Dor.”

11. The Uninvited

    THERE WERE FEW REQUESTS more humbling than being summoned for a second sitting in make-up because of a producer’s concern over ‘shine’. Cook was in position, installed on a minimalist sofa, side-on to camera, when a perky young runner interrupted their chat about the new wave of