When the onlookers realized what had actually happened they had two minutes’ silence, and Fat Charlie’s father was carried out and put into an ambulance while the blonde tourist had hysterics in the ladies’ room.

It was the breasts that Fat Charlie couldn’t get out of his head. In his mind’s eye they followed him accusatively around the room, like the eyes in a painting. He kept wanting to apologize to a roomful of people he had never met. And the knowledge that his father would have found it hugely amusing simply added to Fat Charlie’s mortification. It’s worse when you’re embarrassed about something you were not even there to see: your mind keeps embroidering the events and going back to it and turning it over and over, and examining it from every side. Well, yours might not, but Fat Charlie’s certainly did.

As a rule, Fat Charlie felt embarrassment in his teeth, and in the upper pit of his stomach. If something that even looked like it might be embarrassing was about to happen on his television screen Fat Charlie would leap up and turn it off. If that was not possible, say if other people were present, he would leave the room on some pretext and wait until the moment of embarrassment was sure to be over.

Fat Charlie lived in South London. He had arrived, at the age of ten, with an American accent, which he had been relentlessly teased about, and had worked very hard to lose, finally extirpating the last of the soft consonants and rich Rs while learning the correct use and placement of the word innit. He had finally succeeded in losing his American accent for good as he had turned sixteen, just as his schoolfriends discovered that they needed very badly to sound like they came from the ‘hood. Soon all of them except Fat Charlie sounded like people who wanted to sound like Fat Charlie had talked when he’d come to England in the first place, except that he could never have used language like that in public without his mum giving him a swift clout round the ear.