Family planning

Beginning starts at the end. A Crouch End party has just finished and the sitting room is a waste tip of punctured beer cans, tortured napkins and crushed nibbles. Wine bottles lie scattered across the carpet like fallen ninepins. Hostess Laura invites her last guest, Danny, for a final glass of Chardonnay. Twitchy conversation ensues. Then she tells him point-blank that she’s fallen in love with him, even though they’ve only just met. He rejects her weird come-ons (‘Kiss me, you lemon’) with evasive hyperactivity. He dashes about the room filling a bin-liner with defunct wine bottles and pulverised cheesy Wotsits. She forces him to sit next to her on the sofa, where he squirms and flips like a beached haddock.

What’s wrong with him? Why doesn’t he leap into the arms of his midnight seductress? It turns out that both characters harbour a secret. Laura is a broody sperm-burglar seeking impregnation. Danny is a divorced dad, cut off from his child, who fears fathering any more kids. This makes more sense, but the pair just don’t look like a couple. Laura is a successful corporate executive with the poise of Jackie Onassis and the intellect of Katharine Hepburn. If she were really a nipper-hungry singleton (which seems improbable for starters), she’d recruit the help of a gay designer with a high IQ and a sense of style. Instead she lights on Danny, a thick, fat Tory boy from Essex who lives with his mum. Though he claims to be a graduate of Bristol University, he has the gormless air of a teenage arsonist trying to get matey with his probation officer. His conversational sallies include the following: ‘I’m friends on Facebook with my nan’; ‘Some cunt stubbed a fag out on your carpet’; and ‘My mum likes a bit of kiwi fruit on her porridge.’