Материал: nick_hornby_about_a_boy
the impression that he was merely stopping off on this planet on his way to somewhere else, somewhere
he might fit in better. Periods of blankness, when he seemed to disappear into his own head completely,
were followed by periods when he seemed to be trying to compensate for these absences, and would ask
question after question.
Once or twice Will decided he couldn’t face it and went shopping or to the cinema; but most of the
time he was in at four-fifteen, waiting for the buzzer—sometimes because he couldn’t be bothered to go
out, sometimes because he felt he owed Marcus something. What and why he owed him he didn’t know,
but he could see he was serving some purpose in the kid’s life at the moment, and as he served no
purpose in anybody else’s he was hardly going to die of compassion fatigue. It was still a bit of a drag,
though, having some kid inflict himself on you every afternoon. Will would be relieved when Marcus
found a purpose to life somewhere else.
On the third or fourth visit he asked Marcus about Fiona, and ended up wishing he hadn’t, because it
was quite clear that the boy was messed up about it. Will couldn’t blame him, but couldn’t think of
anything to say that would be of even the smallest consolation or value, so he ended up simply swearing
sympathetically and, given Marcus’s age, inappropriately. Will wouldn’t make that mistake again. If
Marcus wanted to talk about his suicidal mother, he could do it with Suzie, or a counsellor, or someone
like that, someone capable of something more than an obscenity.
The thing was, Will had spent his whole life avoiding real stuff. He was, after all, the son and heir of
the man who wrote ‘Santa’s Super Sleigh’. Santa Claus, whose existence most adults had real cause to
doubt, bought him everything he wore and ate and drank and sat on and lived in; it could reasonably be
argued that reality was not in his genes. He liked watching real stuff on
EastEnders
and
The Bill
, and he
liked listening to Joe Strummer and Curtis Mayfield and Kurt Cobain singing about real stuff, but he’d
never had real stuff sitting on his sofa before. No wonder, then, that once he’d made it a cup of tea and
offered it a biscuit he didn’t really know what to do with it.
Sometimes they managed conversations about Marcus’s life that skirted round the twin disasters of
school and home.
‘My dad’s stopped drinking coffee,’ Marcus suddenly said one evening after Will had complained of
caffeine poisoning (an occupational hazard, he supposed, of those with no occupation).
Will had never really thought about Marcus’s father. Marcus seemed so much a product of his mother
that the idea of a father seemed almost incongruous.
‘What does he do, your dad?’
‘He works for Cambridge Social Services.’
That figured, Will thought. All of these people came from another country, a country full of things that
Will knew nothing about and had no use for, like music therapists and housing officers and health-food
shops with noticeboards and aromatherapy oils and brightly coloured sweaters and difficult European
novels and feelings. Marcus was the fruit of their loins.
‘What does he do for them?’
‘I dunno. He doesn’t get much money, though.’
‘Do you see him often?’
‘Quite often. Some weekends. Half-terms. He’s got a girlfriend called Lindsey. She’s nice.’
‘Oh.’
‘Do you want me to say more about him?’ Marcus asked helpfully. ‘I will if you want.’
‘Do you want to say more about him?’
‘Yeah. We don’t talk about him at home much.’
‘What do you want to say?’
‘I dunno. I could tell you what car he’s got, and whether he smokes.’
‘OK, does he smoke?’ Will was no longer thrown by Marcus’s somewhat eccentric conversational
patterns.
‘No. Given up,’ Marcus said triumphantly, as if he had lured Will into a trap.
‘Ah.’
‘It was hard, though.’
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‘I’ll bet. Do you miss your dad?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Well, you know. Do you… I don’t know… do you miss him? You understand what that means.’
‘I see him. How can I miss him?’
‘Do you wish you saw him more than you do?’
‘No.’
‘Oh. That’s all right, then.’
‘Can I have another Coke?’
Will didn’t understand at first why Marcus had introduced the subject of his father, but clearly there
was a value in talking about something that didn’t remind Marcus of the awful messes that surrounded
him. The triumph over nicotine addiction wasn’t Marcus’s triumph, exactly, but in a life that was at the
moment decidedly triumph-free it was the closest he had come for a while.
Will could see how sad this was, but he could also see that it wasn’t his problem. No problem was his
problem. Very few people were in a position to say they had no problems, but then, that wasn’t his
problem either. Will didn’t see this as a source of shame, but as a cause for wild and raucous
celebration; to reach the age he had without encountering any serious difficulties seemed to him a record
worth preserving, and though he didn’t mind giving Marcus the odd can of Coke, he wasn’t about to
embroil himself in the sorry dog’s dinner that was Marcus’s life. Why would he want to do that?
The following week Will’s date with
Countdown
was interrupted by a hail of what sounded like gravel
against his sitting-room window, followed quickly by a continuous, urgent-sounding and annoying ring
on the doorbell. Will knew it was trouble—you didn’t get gravel smashing into your windows and
frantic doorbell-ringing without trouble, he imagined—and his first instinct was to turn the volume on
the TV up and ignore it all. But in the end some sense of self-respect drove the cowardice away, and he
propelled himself off the sofa towards the front door.
Marcus was standing on the step being bombarded with some kind of confectionery, rock-shaped and
rock-hard lumps that could easily do as much damage as rocks. Will knew this because he took several
direct hits himself. He ushered Marcus in and managed to locate the bombardiers, two mean-looking
french-cropped teenage boys.
‘What do you think you’re doing?’
‘Who are you?’
‘Never mind who I am. Who the fuck are you?’ Will couldn’t remember the last time he felt like
thumping someone, but he felt like thumping these two. ‘Fuck off.’
‘Ooo-er,’ said one of them obscurely. Will presumed it was intended to indicate their lack of fear, but
their bravado was somewhat undercut by their immediate and rapid disappearance. This was a surprise
and a relief. Will would never have run away from Will in a million years (or rather, in the admittedly
unlikely event that Will should meet himself down a dark alley, both Wills would have run away at
equal and very fast speeds in opposite directions). But he was an adult now, and though it was of course
true that teenagers had lost all respect, bring back National Service and so on and so forth, only the very
bad or very armed were likely to risk a confrontation with someone bigger and older than them. Will
went back into the flat feeling bigger and older, and not altogether displeased with himself.
Marcus had helped himself to a biscuit, and was sat on the sofa watching TV. He looked just as he
normally looked, absorbed in the programme, the biscuit poised halfway to the mouth; there was no
visible sign of distress at all. If this boy, the one on the sofa watching
Countdown
, had ever been bullied,
it was ages ago, and he had long since forgotten all about it.
‘Who were they, then?’
‘Who?’
‘Who? Those kids who were just trying to embed sweets into your skull.’
‘Oh, them,’ said Marcus, his eyes still on the screen. ‘I don’t know their names. They’re in year nine.’
‘And you don’t know their names?’
‘No. They just started following me home after school. So I thought I’d better not go home, so they
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wouldn’t find out where I lived. I thought I’d come round here.’
‘Thanks a lot.’
‘They won’t chuck sweets at you. They were after me.’
‘And does this happen often?’
‘They’ve never chucked sweets before. They thought of that today. Just now.’
‘I’m not talking about the sweets. I’m talking about… older kids trying to kill you.’
Marcus looked at him.
‘Yeah. I told you before.’
‘You didn’t make it sound so dramatic before.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You said a couple of kids gave you a hard time. You didn’t say that people you don’t even know
follow you around and chuck things at you.’
‘They hadn’t done it then,’ said Marcus patiently. ‘They’ve only just invented it.’
Will was beginning to lose his temper; if he’d had any sweets to hand he would have started flinging
them at Marcus himself. ‘Marcus, for Christ’s sake, I’m not talking about the bloody sweets. Are you
always this bloody literal-minded? I understand that they’ve never done that before. But they’ve been
giving you a hard time for ages.’
‘Oh yeah. Not those two…’
‘No, OK, OK, not those two. But others like them.’
‘Yeah. Loads.’
‘Right. That’s all I’ve been trying to find out.’
‘You could have just asked.’
Will walked into the kitchen and put the kettle on, if only to give himself something to do which
wouldn’t result in a prison sentence, but he couldn’t let it drop.
‘So what are you going to do about it?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Are you going to let it go on like this for the next however many years?’
‘You’re like the teachers at school.’
‘What do they say?’
‘Oh, you know. "Keep out of their way." I mean, I don’t try to get in their way.’
‘But it must make you unhappy.’
‘I s’pose so. I just don’t think about it. Like when I broke my wrist falling off that climbing-frame
thing.’
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘I tried not to think about that. It happened and I wished it hadn’t, but it’s just life, isn’t it?’
Sometimes Marcus sounded as though he were a hundred years old, and it broke Will’s heart.
‘It doesn’t have to be life, though, does it?’
‘I dunno. You tell me. I haven’t done anything. I just started at a new school and then I got all this. I
don’t know why.’
‘What about your old school?’
‘It was different there. Not every kid was the same. There were clever ones and thick ones and trendy
ones and weird ones. I didn’t feel different there. Here I feel different.’
‘They can’t be different sorts of kids here. Kids are kids.’
‘So where are all the weird ones, then?’
‘Maybe they start off weird, and then they get their act together. They’re still weird but you just can’t
see them. The trouble is, these kids can see you. You make yourself obvious.’
‘So I’ve got to make myself invisible?’ Marcus snorted at the magnitude of the task. ‘How do I do
that? Is one of the machines in your kitchen an invisible machine?’
‘You don’t have to make yourself invisible. You just have to go in disguise.’
‘What, with a moustache and stuff?’
‘Yeah, right, with a moustache. Nobody would notice a twelve-year-old boy with a moustache, would
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they?’
Marcus looked at him. ‘You’re joking. Everyone would notice. I’d be the only one in the whole
school.’
Will had forgotten about the sarcasm thing. ‘OK, no moustache, then. Bad idea. But how about if you
wore the same clothes and haircut and glasses as everyone else? You can be as weird as you want on the
inside. Just do something about the outside.’
They started with his feet. Marcus wore the kind of shoes that Will didn’t think they made any more,
plain black slip-ons whose only discernible ambition was to get their owner up and down school
corridors without attracting the attention of the deputy head.
‘Do you like those shoes?’ Will asked him. They were walking up Holloway Road to look at trainers.
Marcus peered down at his feet through the early-evening gloom and promptly collided with a large
woman carrying several overstuffed Lo-Cost bags.
‘How do you mean?’
‘I mean, do you like them?’
‘They’re my school shoes. I’m not supposed to like them.’
‘You can like everything you wear, if you can be bothered.’
‘Do you like everything you wear?’
‘I don’t wear anything I hate.’
‘What do you do with the stuff you hate, then?’
‘I don’t buy it, do I?’
‘Yeah, because you haven’t got a mum. Sorry to say it like that, but you haven’t.’
‘It’s OK. I’ve got used to the idea.’
The trainer shop was huge and crowded, and the lighting made all the customers look ill; everyone had
a green tinge, regardless of their original colour. Will caught sight of the pair of them in a mirror, and
was shocked to see that they could easily pass for father and son; he had somehow imagined himself as
Marcus’s elder brother, but the reflection threw age and youth into sharp relief—Will’s stubble and
crow’s feet versus Marcus’s smooth cheeks and gleaming white teeth. And the hair… Will prided
himself on having avoided even the tiniest of bald patches, but he still had less on top than Marcus,
almost as if life had worn some of it away.
‘What do you fancy?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘It’s got to be Adidas, I think.’
‘Why?’
‘Because that’s what everyone wears.’
The shoes were displayed according to manufacturer, and the Adidas section of the shop was attracting
more than its fair share of shoppers.
‘Sheep,’ said Marcus as they were approaching. ‘Baaaa.’
‘Where did you get that from?’
‘That’s what my mum says when she thinks people haven’t got a mind of their own.’
Will suddenly remembered that a boy at his old school had had a mum like Fiona—not exactly like
her, because it seemed to Will that Fiona was a peculiarly contemporary creation, with her seventies
albums, her eighties politics and her nineties foot lotion, but certainly a sixties equivalent of Fiona.
Stephen Fullick’s mother had a thing about TV, that it turned people into androids, so they didn’t have a
set in the house. ‘Did you see
Thund
…’ Will would say every Monday morning and then remember and
blush, as if the TV were a parent who had just died. And what good had that done Stephen Fullick? He
was not, as far as Will was aware, a visionary poet, or a primitive painter; he was probably stuck in
some provincial solicitor’s office, like everyone else from school. He had endured years of pity for no
discernible purpose.
‘The whole idea of this expedition, Marcus, is that you learn to become a sheep.’
‘Is it?’
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‘Of course. You don’t want anyone to notice you. You don’t want to look different. Baaaa.’
Will picked out a pair of Adidas basketball boots that looked cool but relatively unshowy.
‘What do you think of them?’
‘They’re sixty pounds.’
‘Never mind how much they cost. What do you think of them?’
‘Yeah, good.’
Will grabbed an assistant and asked him to bring the right size, and Marcus stomped up and down for
a while. He looked at himself in the mirror and tried to repress a smile.
‘You think you look cool, don’t you?’ said Will.
‘Yeah. Except… except now the rest of me looks all wrong.’
‘So next time we’ll make the rest of you look OK.’
Marcus went straight home afterwards, his boots stuffed into his school bag; Will walked back
beaming at his own munificence. So this was what people meant by a natural high! He couldn’t recall
having felt like this before, so at peace with himself, so convinced of his own self-worth. And,
unbelievably, it had only cost him sixty quid! How much would he have had to pay for an equivalent
unnatural high? (Probably about twenty-five quid, thinking about it, but unnatural highs were
indisputably inferior.) He had made an unhappy boy temporarily happy, and there hadn’t been anything
in it for him at all. He didn’t even want to sleep with the boy’s mother.
The following day Marcus turned up at Will’s door, tearful, a pair of soggy black socks where his
Adidas basketball boots should have been; they’d stolen them, of course.
Seventeen
Marcus would have told his mum where the trainers had come from, if she’d asked, but she didn’t
because she didn’t even notice he was wearing them. OK, his mum wasn’t the most observant person in
the world, but the trainers seemed so big and white and peculiar and attention-seeking that Marcus felt
as though he wasn’t wearing shoes at all, but something alive—a pair of rabbits, maybe.
But she noticed they had gone. Typical. She didn’t notice the rabbits, which you never see on feet, but
she spotted the socks, which were only where they should be.
‘Where are your shoes?’ she shrieked when he came home. (Will had given him a lift, but it was
November, and wet, and during the short walk across the pavement and up the stairs to the front door of
the flats he had soaked his socks through again.) He looked at his feet, and for a moment he didn’t say
anything: he toyed with the idea of acting all surprised and telling her he didn’t know, but he quickly
realized she wouldn’t believe him.
‘Stolen,’ he said eventually.
‘Stolen? Why would anyone steal your shoes?’
‘Because…’ He was going to have to tell the truth, but the problem was that the truth would lead to a
whole lot more questions. ‘Because they were nice ones.’
‘They were just ordinary black slip-on shoes.’
‘No, they weren’t. They were new Adidas trainers.’
‘Where did you get new Adidas trainers from?’
‘Will bought them for me.’
‘Will who? Will the guy who took us out to lunch?’
‘Yeah, Will. The bloke from SPAT. He’s sort of become my friend.’
‘He’s sort of become your friend?’
Marcus was right. She had loads more questions, except the way she asked them was a bit boring: she
just repeated the last thing he said, stuck a question mark on the end of it and shouted.
‘I go round his flat after school.’
‘YOU GO ROUND HIS FLAT AFTER SCHOOL?’
Or:
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