I loved those Saturdays, walking hand in hand down new streets, bags full of wild, unfamiliar food on our backs. Stopping for coffee, watching people marching past as we ate lunch and talked about decorating the flat or where we’d spend the summer. Every Saturday was like a holiday, a present.

When I was a boy — when I was Merboy — all schoolchildren had to take the eleven-plus, the exam that separated the stupid from the intelligent, separated the children who’d have a good life from those who wouldn’t. Or, at least, that was how we thought of it. I walked into the classroom one morning and Mr Plunkett, who had a hooked nose and a voice like a foghorn, was laying out papers on the desks.

‘Player, put two of these out for each child,’ he brayed, giving me a box of pencils. ‘And get a haircut soon.’

‘Yes, sir.’ I followed him round the room, doling out the pencils. ‘Sir, is this the exam?’

‘Don’t ask questions, just do what I asked.’

‘Yes, sir.’ I carried on, thinking that he hadn’t asked, he’d told me; thinking that I wanted to be somewhere else; thinking that I knew my mother wanted me to pass this exam.

Other children began to straggle into the classroom, and I saw some of them turn pale as they realised what the papers were because even then we all knew what it meant: grammar school or secondary modern. Success or failure. We all sat at the desks, alphabetically for once, and when Mr Plunkett called for silence the only sound I could hear was Martin Sawyer, two seats behind me, breathing snottily through his snaggle-toothed mouth.

That lunchtime we stood in tight groups, talking about the questions, not running and shouting, playing football or tag or British Bulldog. Martin Sawyer edged up to me.

‘Some of them are tricks, y’know, to catch you out,’ he said nasally. ‘Like the one about the pound of feathers and pound of lead.’ He was scraping at the asphalt of the playground with his shoe. “Sobvious it’s a trick — ‘sgot to be the feathers that’s heavier.’ He looked up and caught me smiling and his face flushed pink under his sallow skin.

Sonja and I went to Paris for our honeymoon — but we might as well have stayed at home since just about all we did was make love all day and night, stopping only to call room service. I lay on the lumpy, unfamiliar mattress the first night, my feet and ankles hanging over the end, unable to sleep. The heat was stifling and even with the long, shuttered windows wide open the air, coloured by the smell of garlic from the restaurant opposite, lay on me as heavily as a blanket. I was thinking of my mother sitting alone on her deck, no doubt thinking of me. I felt I’d cut myself adrift from her, felt that she was receding already in my mind, a well-known island slipping over the horizon. I hated my mother for not loving Sonja and I loved my mother for many reasons. I was twenty years old — too young to forgive her for not loving and old enough to feel fear for her. Because I knew that she’d sit alone for ever on her deck, drinking whisky and looking out over the sea, wishing things could have been different. All that week, as Sonja and I explored each other’s bodies, occasionally dragging ourselves out to walk the streets and eat, I was aware of my mother’s ghost, not walking beside me but sitting beside her. A young, beautiful ghost, a different woman, who — I discovered many years later - didn’t exist.