‘I suppose,’ I said, considering, ‘that Mrs Parish didn’t want babies?’

Kitten leaned forward at me, shaking her head.

‘Why then?’ I said.

She scrunched up her mouth and nose. ‘Couldn’t,’ she whispered. ‘Couldn’t have them.’

It was hard to talk to her now without noticing the speck of tomato sauce. It made her look like she was only pretending to be an adult. ‘Oh,’ I said dully. I did some cross-hatching—Rosa had taught me about cross-hatching—on the right side of my pyramid where the shadow would’ve been, according to perspective.

I suspected Kitten was talking to me ‘inappropriately’. More and more I heard that now: ‘That’s not appropriate for Owen’, ‘Don’t say that in front of Owen, it’s not appropriate.’ ‘I’m sorry Owen, that television show is inappropriate.’ And yet I craved the inappropriate. The inappropriate was key to everything. If I had no access to the inappropriate, I lived in a different world to the other people around me. If I was let in on the inappropriate a bit more often, I might understand what the bloody hell was going on with everyone. What the bloody hell! It felt good to say the word bloody.

‘Why can’t she have bloody babies?’ I asked.

Kitten ignored my swear word. She put a crumpled napkin on top of her dinner plate and pushed it away. ‘It’s a difficult situation for Mr Parish too,’ she said primly.

It was half an hour before service, just starting to get dark outside. Rosa hadn’t turned the radio off yet in the kitchen and Tracy hadn’t started on the butters (there was a pattern of triangles you could chop the block up into and I always made sure I watched her do it). There was no one but me and Kitten in the restaurant.

‘It’s hard for a man too, not having children!’ said Kitten. ‘Think of your dad, if he didn’t have you!’

I tried to think of this, but it didn’t seem at all real or worth thinking about. I imagined he would just go on doing what he normally did, but a little more sadly.

‘Really, imagine it, Owen!’ Kitten took another gulp of wine and wiped the tomato off the corner of her mouth. ‘You are the closest thing to a son that the Parishes have. They’re going to leave you all their money, you know. Do you realise that?’ She glared at me as though she wanted to bore a tunnel through my skull with her eyes. ‘Don’t you think it’s strange?’

I didn’t know what was strange and what was not, but I knew now for sure that Kitten was being inappropriate.

‘Some people don’t have children,’ I said. ‘Rosa doesn’t have children.’

‘Rosa!’ said Kitten, and laughed.

‘Are you going to have children?’ I asked her.

Now Kitten looked peeved. ‘Well, a girl has to get married first apparently, Owen.’