The man with no neck is standing at the corner of the road again. He watches Jamie step off the bus and scuffle a coke can along the grass verge. “Hi son,” he calls out.

Jamie tries to ignore him but he’s aware of his shoulders twitching, the way they do when he’s nervous or afraid he’s going to get found out.

The man falls into step beside him. He’s wearing a white shirt and a tie and his head sits on his collar like Humpty Dumpty’s. “Pass it over,” he says, indicating the coke can, reaching out with a surprisingly adept foot and kicking it up the pavement.

Jamie refuses to play. He takes urgent strides homewards, clutches at the security of his gatepost. “I have to go now,” he says.

The man raises his index finger, pink, blunt-ended, with bulging knuckles. “Your parents in?” One of his favourite questions.

“I don’t know,” says Jamie. And bolts.

Once inside he peers cautiously through an upstairs window. Usually the man hangs around for a bit, looks at his watch a few times and then leaves. Once he rang the doorbell; it shrilled several times and Japmie waited paralysed, his hands shielding his ears, for the ringing to stop.

Only when he is quite certain he has given up and gone does he feel he can safely go into the kitchen and quieten the panic in his stomach with food. The fridge is always well-stocked with tubs of snacks and salads his mother buys from the supermarket. If he just takes a little from each one, she will not suspect he has been so long at home.

Jamie is not supposed to be by himself in the house. He is supposed to be supervised at the out-of-hours kids' club in the school gym. In fact he has only been there once and would rather be menaced by snarling Rottweilers than go again.

“You’re a new boy, aren’t you?” the teacher on duty had said. “But I’m afraid I don’t have your name down. Are you sure your parents filled in the form?”

Jamie shrugged and stared at the floor. A group of girls milled curiously and importantly around the desk.

“Perhaps they forgot to include the cheque? Make sure you bring it tomorrow.”

Jamie has not been back. It’s easy enough to pretend he has only just arrived home when his mother gets in. She’s often late in any case, frequently flustered, and hung about with colourful parcels and packages. Simon, his father, never seems very interested in what she has bought; though he likes to joke that there should be a factory somewhere printing carrier bags with Rachel’s name on them.

“I can’t afford cheap things,” is her favourite response. “It’s false economy.”

“Any economy at all would have its merits,” says Simon.

Rachel loves beautiful things. She loves luxurious fabrics and delicate china. She loves fine food and well-made clothes and most of all she loves shoes. She chooses spiky heels to give her height, soft supple leather to cosset her feet, and rich vivid colours to make people notice her: deep crimson, emerald green, bitter chocolate. The first thing she does when she gets home in the evening is to scatter her purchases and slip off her shoes. They join Jamie’s trainers in the hall; no-one is allowed to tread outside dirt onto her fitted velvet pile carpets.

“D’you have a good day darling?”

Jamie nods quickly. It’s best to keep quiet; otherwise he might not remember which lies he had told her. “How about you, mum?”

Rachel rarely has a good day. She is either buried in paperwork or visiting families who can’t cope with their run-down lives in sad squalid flats. It’s not much fun investigating tales of abuse, looking out for bruises on a child’s skinny arm or raised weals caused by the buckle of a belt. The only bruises Jamie gets are from being hugged too tightly, or falling over running for the bus.

The journey to his new school involves two bus rides. There is plenty of scope for error. If he misses one of the buses, he misses registration, might easily miss assembly and the beginning of the first lesson. Sometimes it’s simpler to miss the second one too, miss the whole day in fact. Go home again.

He enjoys nesting in the huge squashy sofa, munching crisps, flicking through endless TV channels with the remote control. When one of the teachers asks for an absence note he tells her he has handed it to someone else. As she seems to believe him, he starts to skip school more often. Classes are large and with his quiet shy ways he knows he is easy to overlook. And if, while he is playing a computer game or leafing through a comic, someone comes to the door or the phone rings, he’ll hold his breath and freeze until the disturbance is over.

The most scary thing is when he gets back early and finds a strange pair of shoes, next to his father’s, in the hall. They are definitely not the type Rachel would wear: they are navy suede moccasins with a flat wide sole. And upstairs there’s a voice he doesn’t recognise either, pattering like raindrops above his father’s low growl.

Jamie inches himself out through the front door and flees from discovery; flees straight into the paunch of the man with no neck.

“Hey steady on,” says the man.

“Sorry,” stammers Jamie.

The man is gripping his arm. “You look as though you’d seen a ghost.” With his free hand he fumbles in his trouser pocket. “Fancy a mars bar?” he says.

“I’m late for my music lesson.”

"Take it with you. Go on.”

Jamie shakes himself free and unwraps the warm, slightly sticky chocolate.

The fat man with no neck runs his tongue along his fleshy lips. “Good, huh?” He nods towards the house. “Anyone home?”

“No,” mutters Jamie through layers of toffee.

“Work long hours do they? Your parents?”

“I really have to go.” He crams the rest of the chocolate into his mouth and makes off in no particular direction. He hears the man laugh in a leery sort of way and wonders how long he must stay out on the street before it is safe to return, before the navy blue moccasins walk out of the door.

Actually, it is very unusual to find his father at home. He always seems to be stuck in the office, sometimes even at weekends. Rachel and Jamie are used to having to entertain themselves. They go to the cinema or the bowling alley; they shop for games and gadgets and treats. Once they brought back a pizza so enormous it wouldn’t fit in the oven.

“Well that’s it,” declared Rachel. “Must be time for a new cooker. Maybe I could have a whole new kitchen.” They’d both giggled because it was a well-known fact that Rachel never cooked. She’d rather pad about the terracotta tiles in her bare feet, peeling back the lids of their take-away dinners with her sharp red fingernails.

The kitchen itself is immaculate, sparkling with empty surfaces. “If you could just see some of the places I have to go to,” she sighs, a shadow crossing her face. And Jamie builds up images of grimy bathrooms and soiled mattresses, the sickly sweet smell of mould and rat droppings. He sees half-clothed children beaten with electric flexes, weeping behind barred doors.

The second scariest thing is when the deputy head calls him into her study.

“Is anything the matter at home?” she asks.

Jamie can feel his bones shrinking; soon there will be nothing left of him inside the shape of his school uniform.

“Sit down James,” she says patiently. “Now what have you got to tell me?”

“Nothing miss.”

“Nothing? You were absent one day last week, two the week before that.”

“I brought in notes miss.”

“Well we don’t have a record of them. I’ve tried to ring your parents.”

“They’re at work,” says Jamie quickly.

“Then I’ll have to write to them. Ask them to come and see me.”

“Please don’t.” It comes out as a pathetic whimper.

The deputy head rests her chin on her hands and tries to look compassionate.

“They’re separating,” He pauses. “They might be getting a divorce.”

“Oh dear, I’m sorry to hear that.”

“It makes mum forgetful – that’s why I don’t always bring an absence note. She cries a lot...if you write to her she might get even more upset.”

“James,” says the deputy head with grave authority. “We are talking about your education. Your attendance record has some bearing on that. We cannot afford to ignore it.”

Jamie is not listening; he is elaborating the details of his parents' separation. He replays their frequent arguments: about money, about his schooling, about the lack of time they spend together. He sees Simon noisily starting the car, churning up the gravel drive so that the stones fly about like bullets. He pictures himself comforting Rachel, sharing a carton of Haagen-Dazs cookie dough ice-cream. He draws the curtains on intruders, takes the phone off the hook. He doesn’t want to think about what will happen next.

Two days later the letter arrives, the school crest emblazoned on the envelope.

Jamie doesn’t open it; he doesn’t really want to know its contents. He slips it into his pocket along with a box of matches. As he waits for the bus he drops it burning into the litter bin, scorching the sleeve of his blazer in the process. It is a good quality wool blazer - not for Rachel the cheap and tacky polyester version - and he finds it hot and heavy. He rubs anxiously at the smouldering brown smudge until it becomes a small dark hole.

With the second letter he is more careful, holding its flame at arm’s length and stuffing it through the bars of a drain so that it can end its journey in the sewer.

Over the next few weeks he keeps careful account of the post and destroys any brown envelopes which seem particularly threatening or which have DO NOT IGNORE written on them. He wishes however, that he did not feel so uncomfortable, that his neck did not constantly prickle or his cuffs chafe so irritatingly against his wrists.

Rachel is forever clearing out clutter, throwing away things that have hardly been used, and he begins to feel a sense of impermanence. Sometimes when she replaces something that has scarcely had a life of its own, Simon complains at her extravagance.

“You deal with those poor sods all day,” he says. “Can’t you keep a sense of proportion?”

“It’s because of those poor sods that I need to do this,” says Rachel, discarding an armful of fragile-petaled lilies and returning a newly filled vase to the cherry wood dining table.

His father makes a gesture of despair. “All these flowers!”

Her face flushes scarlet and she blazes at him: “I like flowers and it’s not as if you buy me any.”

As their voices rise Jamie slinks sadly from the room.

He is not surprised, the following week, to see a letter stamped with the imprint of the County Court. So they are getting divorced after all, his suspicions have been correct. They’ve been trying to keep it from him just as he has been keeping his truancy from them. Still, he’s an old hand now with unwanted mail and soon the ashes are fluttering gutter wards.

Jamie is making an effort to get to school early, to stay in school all day and to be a model pupil. He responds promptly to questions and even raises his hand in class from time to time. He doesn’t run in the corridors or fail to tie his laces. He produces his homework on cue and presents himself for games. The only thing he will not do - and nobody expects him in any case - is turn up at the kids' club.

Meanwhile his parents are performing a kind of mystifying dance routine. One day they will glide across the thick pale carpets into an avid embrace; the next they will be chastising each other at full volume. They don’t seem to know, reflects Jamie, what they really want. Like Rachel trying on an assortment of different outfits, they are still trying to work out what suits them.

When Rachel comes home weeping, blotting her eyes with soggy tissues, he assumes the worst. Assumes the divorce has happened and he will never see his father again. But it is only a work problem. A child has died.

Rachel squeezes him so tightly he’s struggling for breath; her nails claw into his back. He tries to act like a grown-up, to say Never mind, it wasn’t your fault.

“It wasn’t my fault,” says Rachel defiantly. “It wasn’t even my case. I just visited a couple of times on cover. Poor little mite. She was half the size she should have been.”

“Was she murdered?” The news on the television screen is showing atrocities in some far-off country; bodies with machetes buried in their skulls.

“She was extremely malnourished. She choked on her own vomit.”

Rachel sighs and goes into the kitchen where she opens a packet of spaghetti and a jar of sauce. “Just you and me tonight,” she says. “Dad’s out late.” She pours herself a drink and re-applies her mascara. “I’m so lucky to have you, darling!”

Jamie doesn’t feel very hungry - he has been nibbling since he came in - but he struggles down the sloppy pasta in its bloody coating to please her. Every once in a while she reaches across the table to touch him, as if to make sure he is still there.

The hand lands on his shoulder; Jamie spins around in shock. Usually he can spot the man with no neck a mile off; today he has crept up from nowhere.

“Right young fellow,” he says. “We’ll have no shilly-shallying, eh?”

Jamie wriggles. “What do you want?”

“Let’s go inside, shall we? Bit more private.”

“You can’t come into our house.”

“I think I can.”

He can’t run away. The man is still gripping his shoulder with his broad pudgy fingers; the other arm is hugging his chest as if he’s hiding something under his jacket. A woman is pushing a double buggy on the other side of the road, two dogs are sniffing at each other, cars flit past, but Jamie is too scared to call out. The front gardens of all the aspiring semis in this desirable street dip away from the pavement; once beyond the gates they will be screened. The sky is heavy with rain clouds which may burst at any moment.

“Get a move on,” says the man, abandoning all his earlier attempts to be friendly. His voice has a distinctly impatient note and his feet are shifting irritably up and down.

Jamie fumbles with the key. All at once they are in the hall and the burglar alarm is ringing its thirty second warning.

“Turn that thing off. We don’t want the police here.”

As he taps in the number, the man strides towards the sitting room.

“Stop! You’re supposed to take off your shoes. Everyone has to.”

The man just laughs. Now that he has got indoors he seems more relaxed. He has a good look around him, whips out a folder and makes some notes. He pats the space on the sofa beside him. “Come and sit here, sonny.”

“No thank you.”

“You’re a bit young to be left on your own so much aren’t you? When do your parents get back?”

“Soon. Very soon.”

It seems an age. They sit mostly in silence, watching the rain streak down. Sometimes the visitor tries to make conversation, with little success. They are both relieved to hear the tap tap of high heels on the stone path, the swish of nylon as Rachel sets her umbrella to dry.

She freezes in the doorway at the sight of the two of them. “Who the hell are you?”

He’s going to tell her everything, thinks Jamie in a panic. All the times he’s seen me bunk off school, all about the out-of-hours club I haven’t been to...

Rachel is trembling. “If you’ve laid a finger on him,” she says. “If you’ve so much as...”

The man produces a piece of paper. “I’ve a warrant here,” he says. “For distraint of goods. Judgement has been entered against you in the county court.”

“In the county court! What are you talking about? Why wasn’t I told?”

“You have received several warnings madam,” says the man with no neck. “And I have tried to call on a number of occasions. Unfortunately you’ve not been at home, which is why I had to persuade your young man to let me in today.”

“I can’t believe you’ve a right to do this.”

“I can’t believe, madam, that you could ignore so many warning signals.”

“Jamie,” says Rachel sharply. “Go to your room.”

When Jamie comes downstairs later, much later, knowing miserably that this entire mess is his fault, the wide-screen television has gone. And the CD player. And the new Italian coffee machine that filled the kitchen with the hiss of warm steam. Rachel is dramatically slicing through her credit cards with a pair of nail scissors. She glances over to him and her voice is yearning. “Oh my poor boy....but we’ll manage somehow, won’t we?”

Jamie is not prepared for the ring on the doorbell. A spasm of terror crosses his face.

“Answer it will you darling.”

“But suppose ....it might be... him?”

“It’s all right. It’s only Karen.”

“Who’s Karen?”

“Your Dad’s new PA. He can’t get back just yet so he’s sending her round with some cash. God, I so need a drink.”

The woman at the door hands him an envelope. He hears her say she can’t stop, she’s in a rush, but he doesn’t see her lips move. He isn’t looking at her face; his eyes are fixed on her sensible navy blue moccasins.

Treading slowly, as if balancing on the finest of wires, he returns to the sitting room with his hands full of smooth new notes.

Rachel struggles to smile. “Let’s go out and treat ourselves,” she says.