'Are you there yet?'

'I'm trying to get close enough so I can let him out.'

'You must be right by the gate and you MUST be actually on the kerb!' Monica shouted. 'He is NOT to cross traffic.'

'I know, I know. But I can't get to the kerb, can I?'

'Well, then you'll have to find a parking space. You might as well anyway because Mr Lombard's secretary just called. They want one of us to pop in.'

'Oh God,' said Jimmy.

'I know.'

This was the morning after Jimmy had learned that the Seventh Cavalry in the shape of a fat, unsecured loan from an old friend would not in fact come thundering over the horizon any time soon. If the head wanted to discuss the issue of Toby's outstanding school fees then Jimmy knew he did not have a lot of answers.

Jimmy had no choice but to manoeuvre his way back out of the scrum of unforgiving metal clustered around the little school gate and try to punch his way into the residential streets south of the high street. Living in Notting Hill, he had a Kensington and Chelsea residents' permit and was hoping to find a space. Inevitably there were none. There never were, and Jimmy was forced to swing his car into one of the numerous and much-resented diplomatic bays. He had no choice.

Hoping for the best, Jimmy took his son by the hand and walked back up to the school. It was past nine by the time they arrived and so both man and boy had to bear that horribly uncomfortable feeling of entering a school after classes have begun. Toby was clearly mortified and Jimmy did not feel much better, particularly after he noticed how dirty Toby's shoes were. Abbey Hall set great store by a neat appearance, believing it to be an essential part of school discipline; it was one of the things that attracted parents like Jimmy and Monica. Jimmy knew that all the other boys would have shiny shoes. As shiny as Toby's had been during the days when Jodie had done them for him. Jimmy himself had started to clean his own shoes at the age of seven but children just didn't do that sort of thing for themselves any more. Just like they didn't pick up after themselves either. The culture had changed. Kids had everything done for them and it wasn't Toby's fault that the support structure had suddenly disappeared from under him. The little boy was like the helpless survivor of a shipwreck, cast adrift in a wild new world for which he was equipped with zero survival skills.

Toby joined his class, who were just heading off to assembly. He looked like he wished he was dead. Jimmy took his aching heart in search of the headmaster's office.

He had to wait in the secretary's outer office until assembly was over and then wait again while the great man bustled past him, hymnbook still under his arm, and closed the door behind him. Finally Jimmy was invited in, feeling almost as if it was his own headmaster, not Toby's, to whose office he had been summoned. And like an errant schoolboy, Jimmy tried to get his excuses in first.

'Look, Mr Lombard,' he began quickly, 'I know that Toby's been marked absent a number of times and . . .'

Mr Lombard interrupted him. 'I'm afraid this is not about Toby's absences, nor does it concern his homework. I'm afraid that what I need to discuss with you is non-payment of fees.'

'Ah,' said Jimmy.

He should have seen that coming. What else but unpaid fees would be on the mind of the head of a private school facing an impoverished parent? The establishment was, after all, first and foremost a business.

'I need to enquire, Mr Corby,' Mr Lombard continued, 'whether you see any possibility of settling the balance of your account with Abbey Hall in the immediate future. As you know, you are in arrears by more than a term now and Toby is not a scholarship boy.'

'No. Of course not. I understand that.'

'And yet for some months Abbey Hall has been effectively educating him for nothing.'

'Yes. That's right. I can see that,' Jimmy conceded, adding a rather pathetic 'sorry'.

'Were Toby to leave us now, Abbey Hall would not pursue you for the outstanding debt, but if he is to stay then we will expect your account to be settled in full. Not merely the arrears but also the advance payment which has now come due.'

The significance of this last point was not lost on Jimmy.

'If he is to stay?' Jimmy repeated. 'What do you mean, Mr Lombard? You're not saying . . . you're not going to expel him, are you?'

'Mr Corby, expulsion has nothing to do with it. Toby has done nothing wrong and of course won't be disciplined. Your taking him out of school would be cause for regret on both sides and it is of course your choice, not ours.'

'Choice?'

'Abbey Hall is a fee-paying school, Mr Corby. If you choose not to pay the fees then clearly you do not wish your son to be educated here.'

It was a neat way of putting it but not one that Jimmy felt minded to put up with.

'You mean you're chucking him out?' he asked.

'Mr Corby, are you in a position to settle your account with Abbey Hall and pay for next term?'

'Not if viewed within a specific short-term time frame.'

'Is that a yes or a no?'

'There are cash-flow issues still to be resolved.'

'Mr Corby, I must have a banker's order now.'

'And I have every expectation of being able to satisfy that demand within a structured temporal framework.'

'Does that mean now, Mr Corby?'

'Now as pertains to the upcoming financial year, I very much hope so.'

'But not now as in today?'

Jimmy had run out of vocabulary.

'No.'

'In that case I'm afraid that Toby can no longer keep his place at Abbey Hall.'

For a moment there was silence. It was all so sudden. Could this man really mean it? Toby was being thrown to the wolves.

'But . . . he's done so well here,' Jimmy said quietly.

'I don't like this any more than you do, Mr Corby,' the headmaster replied. 'If it's any comfort at all, I can assure you you're not the only family in this position. It's hard on us all.'

Jimmy looked the headmaster square in the eye.

'Last Christmas I donated five thousand pounds to the new gymnasium wheelchair facility,' he said.

'And we were extremely grateful.'

'Can't you take that and use it for Toby's fees?'

'I'm afraid not.'

'Why not?'

'Because it has already gone towards the gymnasium wheelchair facility.'

'But I don't care about that any more. Toby's not disabled. Let the disabled kid's parents pay for his bloody access to the gym.'

'I'm sorry, Mr Corby, but the two issues are entirely unrelated. Your generous donation was made almost a year ago and was spent soon afterwards. It has no bearing on the current situation. If you are unable to pay his fees, Toby must leave. I take no pleasure in this, in fact I deeply regret it, but although we have charitable status we are not a charity . . .'

'Except when you're asking for donations.'

'We are not a charity and the facts are as I have described them.'

Jimmy was horrified. Toby had been so happy at Abbey Hall, at least until he had started turning up with dirty shoes, untreated nits and a builder's lunch. He was getting a first-class education, a tried and tested route to Oxbridge and lifelong success among the nation's elite. The alternative was almost too horrible to contemplate.

'But what . . . what can we do?' Jimmy enquired.

'You must find a place for him in another school.'

'I can't afford one. That's the point. If I could afford one I'd be paying you, wouldn't I?'

Mr Lombard raised an eyebrow. He narrowed his gaze and he pursed his lips. He had something to say but he didn't want to say it, any more than Jimmy wanted to hear it.

They had arrived at the unthinkable.

'Mr Corby,' Mr Lombard said quietly, 'I did not mean a fee-paying school.'

'You mean . . . ?' Jimmy couldn't say it.

Mr Lombard was a busy man. It was clearly distasteful to him but somebody had to take the plunge.

'I mean that you must place Toby in the . . . state sector, Mr Corby.'

The headmaster said it as if he was pronouncing a death sentence. And of course in Mr Lombard's mind he was. He was the headmaster of a private school and he was casting out a boy that school had nurtured, condemning him to fall among the barbarians of the underclass, to be taken into the realms of the demoralized, terrorized, unionized leftist apparatchiks of the National Union of Teachers. To spend his days attempting to communicate with a peer group whose English was gutter Estuary, or worse, for whom it was a foreign language. To go to a place where knives, drugs and perhaps even guns were more common than books and where vast overweight mothers pushed chips and pies through the school fence into the faces of their pasty, angry children. Wasn't that a sort of death? Death of future. Death of prospects. Death of any remote chance of becoming a well-educated, rounded and cultured individual?

Death of the opportunity for this poor boy to join the elite, to spend his adolescence and young adulthood forming the connections that would cushion him through his professional life.

State education. That absolute impossibility. The one thing that one simply could not do. The thing that Jimmy, Monica and everybody they knew had spent a decade decrying, insulting, despairing of and dismissing. The thing that had been ruined by its makers, deserted by its middle-class constituents and left to rot.

State education. The University of the Damned.

And here was this private school headmaster blithely condemning an Abbey House boy to this terrible fate. What of solidarity? What of no man left behind? What of all the principles of comradeship and loyalty on which Abbey Hall prided itself? What of the honour roll of the glorious dead from two world wars proudly displayed in the school hall? Had those men died for nothing?

Toby was an Abbey Hall boy. That was who he was. His name had gone down at birth. He had gone there immediately on graduating at four from the Jumping Beans Advanced Fun and Learning Module off Ladbroke Grove. Did it really mean nothing at all?

'But surely, Mr Lombard,' Jimmy stammered, 'surely there must be some way round this?'

'Can you suggest one, Mr Corby?'

'Well . . . I sort of hoped that . . . I don't know. I mean Toby belongs here, he's one of you. Doesn't that count for anything?'

'It's extremely distressing for all of us, Mr Corby.'

'Don't you have a system? I mean to help people through when . . .'

'We have waited a term, Mr Corby. We have let you build up considerable arrears.'

'Isn't there anything else?'

'We have scholarships, of course. We think it's important to put something back into the community in which we live.'

'Well then . . .'

'But they are all taken and massively oversubscribed far into the future. Besides which, although Toby is by no means without ability, were he to sit the exam I doubt he could compete with the standard of the non-fee-paying pupils to whom we offer an education. They are all of exceptional ability.'

Of course, Jimmy remembered, the scholars were all brain boxes, that was why they were there. It had nothing to do with putting anything back into the community. These kids were selected in order to push up the ranking of the whole school. Jimmy had appreciated that once. He had appreciated the fact that Abbey Hall outshone even its local rivals in the private sector in the exam league tables that he and Monica used to read with pride when they were published in the Daily Telegraph. Then it had felt good, good to know that through Jimmy's hard work they were able to send their firstborn to a school whose exam ratings were among the best in London. And of course very far above any level that the state could offer. It was stats like that which confirmed absolutely the necessity of never going anywhere near a state primary.

'Would you like to put Toby forward to sit the scholarship exam?' Mr Lombard enquired in a tone that seemed to suggest that Jimmy might as well put him forward to join the SAS because he had about as much chance of getting in there.

'No,' Jimmy said quietly, 'I don't think so.'

'Then I'm afraid, regretfully,' Mr Lombard said, 'that is that.'

Jimmy walked out of Abbey Hall as if in a dream. Mr Lombard had told him that Toby could stay for the last three weeks of the current term, but after that he must not return.

'That should give you time to apply to your local authority for a state place for Toby,' he had said, 'although I should warn you that the public system has different dates and shorter holidays than we do, so you need to get going if you're hoping to secure your first choice.'

Jimmy had resisted the urge to tell Mr Lombard to shove his last three weeks up his arse. His life was in crisis and the last thing he needed was Toby at home to look after while he tried to sort out the mess at Webb Street and find the best state school for him. Instead he thanked Mr Lombard with as much grace as he could muster and walked back, to find his car had been clamped and was being lifted up on to a low loader.

A quiet sleep Jimmy watched his one remaining Range Rover Discovery disappear up the street on its way to the council car pound.

'Fuck!' he shouted. 'Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!'

He could not pursue the car to the pound immediately because he had a full morning scheduled at the Webb Street site, attempting to fob off builders, contractors and suppliers with promises of immediate payment (temporarily deferred).

He would have to let the car go and travel out to Pimlico later in the day to retrieve it. That inconvenience would be made considerably more unpleasant because Jimmy did not know for sure whether he had a credit card that could take the strain of the fine he knew he would have to pay.

In the meantime all he could do was make his way across London by tube to Hackney, a journey for which, thank God, he still had sufficient credit on his Oyster card. His Oyster card! Six months before he had scarcely heard of such a thing. It was something he had read about in the Standard but didn't really understand.

He owned one now though, a reduced-price travel card without which he could no longer visit the street he still technically owned. A street from which at one point he had expected to profit to the tune of many millions of pounds. Millions of pounds which at the time he had assured himself were not just enriching him but making a significant contribution to the economic well-being of the city. Millions which still existed, in a way, except in the topsy-turvy parallel universe of post-crunch Britain they had changed colour from black to red.

He fell asleep on the tube and nearly missed his stop. If it hadn't have been for the man with the accordion and the squirrel in his top pocket who loudly informed the occupants of Jimmy's carriage that he was there to cheer up their day and that any contributions would be gratefully received, Jimmy might have slept all the way to the suburbs.

Jimmy had found that exhaustion was like that; it came and went in oppressive waves. When his mind was engaged in some urgent activity like coming to terms with the fact that his son was about to join a crack-dealing course at the local hoodie hangout or processing the information that his best friend had killed himself, Jimmy was wide awake. Awake in a way that people who were not nearly dead with sleeplessness would never understand, a kind of electrified, other-worldish wakefulness which brought shape, colour and emotion into sharp focus. Jimmy was a big First World War buff and he imagined that this was the kind of wakefulness that the hollow-eyed veterans of the trenches had experienced after three straight nights of constant bombardment.

But when, as on the tube, some never-before-read advert for office air conditioning caught his attention or the legs of the girl sitting opposite drew his eye and momentarily took his mind from the living nightmare in which it struggled to function, Jimmy found that he drifted off instantly. On this occasion it had taken three choruses of 'My Old Man's A Dustman' belted out on the accordion to rouse him to consciousness.

By the time Jimmy got to Webb Street he knew that he simply could not operate any longer without sleep. He had scarcely had a wink the night before, after Lizzie had brought the dreadful news of Robbo's balls-up. He had tossed and turned all night, racked with conflicting emotions. On the one hand he cursed the fact that he was back in the shit, and on the other he cursed himself for worrying about that when Robbo was dead and Lizzie so utterly devastated.

Now, suddenly, he was too far gone to worry about anything. He simply had to sleep. But where?

There were still some increasingly angry men working on his site. Men who had not been paid. Men who were turning up each day only in the hope of being paid. Men who carried hammers, screwdrivers and nail guns. If he was once more to win them over with a dose of his ever more thinly stretched charm then he must have his wits about him. He made a plan. One end of the street was fully occupied. This was the end in which the redevelopment was quite advanced whole houses had been gutted, and new walls and floors put in. Six gleaming new flats were emerging in each house, where previously there had been just a warren of squalid bedsits. But at the other end of the street no work had yet been started and no builder currently trod.

Approaching the street from this still-squalid end, Jimmy slipped into the first doorway unnoticed. He had the keys to all the houses in his case, but he did not need them as a vandal had already pulled the padlocked barrier away. He crept into the house and nearly let himself straight out again, the atmosphere was so horribly oppressive.