Of course, I keep trying to tone Marmaduke down. I thought he was funny at first - but really that kid is no joke. He devastates his parents twenty times a day. I censor him. I bowdlerize him too. There's some stuff you just can't put in books.

Turn your back for ten seconds and he's in the fire or out the window or over in the corner, fucking a light socket (he's the right height for that, with a little bend of the knees). His chaos is strongly sexual, no question. If you enter his nursery you'll usually find him with both hands down the front of his diaper, or behind the reinforced bars of his playpen leering over a swimsuit ad in one of the magazines that some nanny has thrown in to him. He goes at that bottle like a top-dollar Vegas call-girl, like a grand-an-hour sex diva. Yeah, that's it. Marmaduke looks as though he is already contemplating a career in child pornography: he knows it's out there, and he can tell that there's a quick buck in it. Naturally he's hell with the help and any other woman who strays within range. He's always got a hand up the nurse's smock or a seigneurial tongue in the au pair's ear.