WE'RE LOOKING at a book about dinosaurs. Ed's struggling with the names. I say them out loud and he tries to copy, his tongue stumbling over an obstacle course of polysyllables and Greco-Latinate collisions. We get to Diplodocus. He says Dildocus. I start laughing and he starts laughing too. He turns through the last few pages quickly, closes the book and presses his head back against my chest. He's tired now. He drinks his milk from the beaker with the snapped handle and inspects a blemish on his sole. On the armchair by the window Marvin, the mute mongrel (voice box - bark box? - excised with the cancer six months ago), yawns until his black gums are showing and then slides his chin along his legs and goes back to sleep.

Things are good between me and Ed now. The gap's closing. When his mother moved out, she left a hole, a crater, that Ed and me stood looking into from opposite sides for a while, dazed and distant, as though a bomb had gone off. From time to time he'd look at me from his side and I'd look at him from mine. There was a time when I couldn't look at Ed at all. I think I even disliked him because he reminded me about the hole and why it was there. But things are good again. He laughs now. The hole is slowly knitting together.

Elspeth comes in and sits with us, stitching up the lip of hem that's come loose on her best dress - one she's had for years and keeps solely for attending other people's weddings, her sister's this time.

She notices me watching her. 'I won't have time in the morning,' she says. 'It must be four hundred miles to Devon.'

She's calmed down now after the phonecall. It sounded like a bad one. She was heavy handed with the kitchen cupboards for a while afterwards. I know the sound of the kitchen cupboards - like all the sounds of this house they are as familiar as voices - and I know when they're being slammed in anger. The cutlery went into the drawers more noisily too. Things have a habit of flying from her hands when she's annoyed. There's a patch on the wall that has a slightly different shade of white where I painted over a streak of rubber left by one of her shoes.

She bites the thread and looks at her work. Ed watches her. She kisses Ed on the ear and he touches her hair. She squeezes a nugget of fat around his knee and he giggles into his cup. I worry he's overweight. Elspeth says I'm just paranoid. Ed is a bad eater. He simply isn't interested. He prefers to let the food sit in his mouth and let the enzymes do the work. He's fickle. He'll eat cheese sandwiches but not pizza, sausages but not bacon. I was the same, apparently. Forever presenting me as a precocious, idiosyncratic child, my mother likes to tell everyone that I only ever ate alphabetti spaghetti, and used to write her messages like FULL, or PLAY, or OUTSIDE when I'd had enough. I don't believe a word of it.

Elspeth offers to take Ed up. This is the first time she's done this. It feels important. Of course I let her. She hoists him onto her back and he presses his cheek into her spine, content, sleepy. 'Night, night,' he says and Elspeth jogs him upstairs.

The phonecall had interrupted what I was saying about my mother.

I'd only got as far as telling Elspeth that we moved around a lot when I was growing up. My mother was flighty like that. Too free-spirited for my father who got left behind at some point. Perhaps even by accident, like an old toy. My mother was a bit forgetful.

But people liked her. She always made friends quickly. She was one of those engagingly eccentric, unfettered individuals that people like instantly because they seem to belong to a different, simpler world. They breeze in and out, they light up rooms, they leave people undulating on their wake.

She got involved in something as soon as we moved to a new place, insinuating herself into some committee or club, talking about people as though she'd known them for years. She liked everyone, but especially mothers who had boys the same age. Perhaps it made her feel less guilty about going out if she could come back with something for me.

We moved again when I was twelve years old, out of the endless brown sprawl of Birmingham where my mother had been working with battered housewives to a place near Southport. We rented what was really a shack in the middle of nowhere. Crumbling red brick and flimsy clapboard lean-tos. We only stayed there for a short time, only a school term, but I liked it enormously. The land was very flat, with lots of long greenhouses and roadside fruit stalls that we would stop at periodically and buy dusty, lead-infused strawberries, or jars of damsons, grown straight into the pots off the tree, that looked like bruised testicles.

Elspeth comes back down with a new book to read. A serious book. Which means she trying to forget about the phonecall and think about September instead. She's reading her way out of the Summer of Trash, as she called her break from academia. She's been working her way through those Lost Voices books - Lost Voices of The First World War, Lost Voices of the Second World War, Lost Voices of the Holocaust and so on. She got most of the way through Lost Voices of the Munitions Girls before she conceded they were probably at the bottom of the barrel. 'Who cares, they made bombs and went yellow,' she said. And in what sense were these voices 'lost' I wanted to know. Shouldn't they be called Found Voices? 'Probably,' she said.

Then there was the obsession with those 'I had an awful childhood, well, no childhood at all actually', books - Where's Daddy? I Want My Real Mummy, No, Daddy, Don't Do That, etcetera, etcetera. Always white covers, handwriting font, monochromatic image of doe-eyed child either staring vacantly out of the cover or cowering on steps. There was a whole section given over to them in Smiths last time we went - True Life Childhood Misery, or something like that. Between Gardening and Cookery.

'Trowels, Trauma, Trifles,' Elspeth said.

Now she's reading something about Modernism. I think I recognise two out of the dozen faces on the front cover. I'm right with Hemingway (who looks like a sheared Santa Claus) but DH Lawrence turns out to be George Bernard Shaw. Elspeth tells me the rest. So that's what Garcia Lorca looks like. Gertrude Stein is a pre-op transsexual. EM Forster a slightly pervy-looking headmaster. Andre Gide looks remarkably like a wigless Frankie Howerd.

Elspeth reads a chapter on Russian Constructivism and shows me a colour illustration. Agitprop about collective labour. A red finger pointing at a black skeleton - Do you want to conquer hunger? A red finger pointing at a crudely drawn white ghost - Do you want to conquer cold? Then two happy people beneath eating bread and drinking wine - Hurry to join the strike team of exemplary labour.

'I love this kind of art,' she says. 'It's so simple. I'd have it on the wall.'

'I'll get Ed on the job,' I say and she pokes me in the ribs. Elspeth likes simplicity. She gets excited by IKEA catalogues - the clean lines and spaces of the rooms in the photographs as stark and indulgently improbable as a kind of pornography.

Her phone goes again. Just a message this time. She flips it open.

'He can't live without me,' Elspeth says and shows me: cnt liv wivout u.

It's been two months now, but Alna won't let up. He's persistent, I'll give him that.

Elspeth works with deaf people. One of the first things she ever told me was the story about the time she went to watch someone giving a talk to a group of deaf children and at the end they didn't clap but waved instead.

She was seeing a deaf man called Alna (Alan, actually, but she entered his name wrongly on her mobile and never got round to changing it, so I've always called him Alna. It makes her laugh). He cheated on her with a girl who signed for the BBC. Elspeth found out and there followed weeks of arguing by text message, or, like tonight, he would ring up and rant at her down the phone and Elspeth could only listen of course. She argued with him face-to-face as well and I can only imagine it must have looked like they were practising some kind of martial art. He said some pretty nasty things to Elspeth. She had a fat back. She didn't understand him. She was shit at signing.

Elspeth reads the message again. 'I spoke to my mum about him,' she says. 'She was genuinely shocked that he could be so mean.'

Elspeth puts the phone in the pocket of her cardigan.

'It's odd, isn't it?' she says, 'that people have this perception that deaf people are always nice.'

Her pocket bleeps. Another message. Pls cum back miss u. Elspeth deletes it and switches off her phone.

She says she needs distraction. We play that game they play on Jaws. Richard Dreyfuss and Robert Shaw comparing scars. Marvin can be Roy Schneider. He doesn't say anything.

Elspeth has rollerskate scars and I have football scars. We both have chicken pox scars. Mine: above my left eyebrow. Hers: on the angle of her jaw. She touches mine and I touch hers. She flicks her head to move her long hair out of the way and kisses me with a serious look on her face, like she means it.

We're at that stage. The serious stage. The peeling stage. The sex and talking stage. Sometimes together. Sometimes one and not the other. Both pleasurable and purposeful, unlike the strange bargaining tools they become later on.

Her body is new. Her moods are unfamiliar roads. I still like saying her name when people ask me about her. I like that it's old-fashioned. It's sepia-toned, made of lace, it makes me think of gloomy, silent drawing rooms, the opposite of modern. It's a name that's very aware of itself.

I tell her about the time I was between jobs, living on my own in Sunderland. I grew a beard and ran everywhere. I weighed eight and a half stone. Organic veg and fruit juice. Herbal roll-ups. Dreadful poetry.

She tells me about her teenage obsession with Brief Encounter and how she'd got a summer job working in the café at Carnforth station where they had the film playing on a loop.

I know things about her parents. Her mum works in Morrisons and writes letters to women's magazines and secretly goes to matins and psychic shows. She worries constantly about her health but doesn't like doctors so she rings up the helplines in her magazines. Once she was concerned about her insomnia and called the number for sleep disorders, but she was so tired she got a digit wrong and was put through to erectile dysfunction. They were sympathetic but not all that helpful and she was convinced the young man at the other end of the phone was trying not to laugh. For years she worked in a typing pool for a newspaper, but then she got arthritis and gave it all up once typing pools became as old fashioned as slide rulers and darning and Dennis Wheatley.

Her dad makes home brew in a shed and listens to the Chubby Brown tapes his wife won't allow in the house. He spent his life in asbestos and has lungs like pincushions. Like his wife he is drawn to the backs of magazines and buys things like plates with Lancaster bombers on them, or zip-up slippers or hand-painted models of Napoleonic soldiers. He's also into Artex. He's Artexed every surface in their house. When they go on holiday, he takes photos of the Artex patterns on the ceilings of their hotel rooms. There are rumours of a slide show. Elspeth threatens me with it when we argue.

She knows things about my parents. Mum working on a female-only kibbutz in Beersheba. Dad working on pickling his liver in Battersea. The way my Mum made her own clothes and would quiz me about what she'd have on the record player.

'Even now I could tell you the track listings for Catch Bull At Four or The Hissing of Summer Lawns,' I say to Elspeth.

'Go on then,' she says.

But it's late. Marvin is snoring. I watch his furry belly inflating and deflating. Elspeth puts her head on my shoulder and watches too. Ed's book is still open on the settee and she picks it up to look at the pictures. In a desert scene, with a volcano oddly spouting in the background, a tyrannosaurus towers over a gored corpse, its teeth dripping.

'How do they know what colour their skin was?' Elspeth says and closes the book.

'They match their skin with their temperament,' I say. 'It makes it easier. Green for nice herbivores; black for the ones with sharp teeth.'

A car goes past on the street outside. We listen to it breaking the puddles. It'll be September in a week's time.

'Let's go to bed,' Elspeth says. 'Early start and all that.'