Jack frowned. “Didn’t you submit that book to the competition last year?”

Huxtable looked hurt. “No.”

“Oh. It just sounded familiar, that’s all.”

Madeleine hid a smile.

“I know what you’re saying,” said Huxtable in an aggrieved tone, “but I tell you, more copies of my book have been stolen from bookshops than all the other Armitage Shanks finalists’ put together.”

“Do stolen books count on the bestseller lists?”

“I should certainly hope so,” replied Huxtable, thinking that it had been a colossal risk and a waste of his time if they didn’t, “but in any event it’s a modern benchmark of success, you know.”

Jack couldn’t avoid a smile, and Huxtable gave up on him, striking up a conversation along similar lines with his other neighbor.

In the end neither Huxtable nor Sphincter won. The first prize went to Jennifer Darkke’s Share My Rotten Childhood. Lord Spooncurdle gave a pleasant after-dinner talk. He made several obscure puns about cheese making and wondered why no one laughed.

That night Jack lay awake in bed, staring at the patterns on the ceiling. He was thinking about Goldilocks and the Gingerbreadman, the NCD, his career and the psychiatric assessment—and just how noisy Mr. and Mrs. Punch’s lovemaking was next door.

“How long have they been at it now?” asked Madeleine sleepily, pillow over her head to block out the thumping, groans and occasional shrieks that penetrated through the shared wall.

“Two and a half hours,” replied Jack. “Go to sleep.”

10. Porridge Problems

The day broke clear and fine. A light breeze in the night had cleared away the haze, and the morning felt crisp and clean and sunny—the sort of morning that is generally reserved only for breakfast cereal commercials, where members of a nauseatingly bouncy nuclear family leap around like happy gazelles while something resembling wood shavings and latex paint falls in slow motion into a bowl.

No one was bouncy in the Spratt household that morning, but Jack dragged himself up and was out of the house at eight, telling Madeleine he was off to see the counselor first thing. She’d replied, “You’re a lying hound. Good luck on the Goldilocks hunt, and invite Mary and Ashley around for dinner one evening.”