Материал: nick_hornby_about_a_boy
‘Ummm… Oh, yes.’
‘So who is it?’
‘Ummm… Forgotten.’
‘You never knew it.’
‘No.’
‘That’s incredible. That’s like not knowing the name of the prime minister or something.’
‘Yeah.’ Marcus gave a little laugh, to show her that at least he knew how stupid he was, even if he
didn’t know anything else. ‘Who is it, then?’
‘Kirk O’Bane.’
‘Oh, yes.’
He’d never heard of Kirk O’Bane, but he’d never heard of anybody.
‘What does he do?’
‘He plays for Manchester United.’
Marcus looked at the picture on the sweatshirt again, even though that meant sort of looking at Ellie’s
tits. He hoped she understood that he wasn’t interested in her tits, only in the picture.
‘Does he?’ He looked much more like a singer than a footballer. Footballers weren’t sad, usually, and
this man looked sad. He wouldn’t have thought that Ellie would be the sort of person who liked football,
anyway.
‘Yeah. He scored five goals for them last Saturday.’
‘Wow,’ said Marcus.
Mrs Morrison’s door opened and two white-faced year sevens came out. ‘Come in, Marcus,’ said Mrs
Morrison.
‘Bye, Ellie,’ said Marcus. Ellie went through her head-shaking routine again, still apparently bitter that
her reputation had gone before her. Marcus wasn’t looking forward to seeing Mrs Morrison, but if the
alternative was sitting out in the corridor with Ellie, then he’d take the head’s office any day of the
week.
He lost his temper with Mrs Morrison. Bad idea, he could see afterwards, losing your temper with the
headmistress of your new school, but he couldn’t help it. She was being so thick that in the end he just
had to shout. They started off OK: no, he’d never had any trouble from the shoe-stealers before, no, he
didn’t know who they were and no, he wasn’t very happy at school (only one lie there). But then she
started talking about what she called ‘survival strategies’, and that was when he got cross.
‘I mean, I’m sure you’ve thought of this, but couldn’t you just try keeping out of their way?’
Did they all think he was thick? Did they reckon that he woke up every morning thinking, I must find
the people who call me names and give me shit and want to steal my trainers, so that they can do more
things to me?
‘I have tried.’ That was all he could say for the moment. He was too frustrated to say any more.
‘Maybe you haven’t tried hard enough.’
That did it. She had said this not because she wanted to be helpful, but because she didn’t like him.
Nobody at this school liked him and he didn’t understand why. He’d had enough, and he stood up to go.
‘Sit down, Marcus. I haven’t finished with you yet.’
‘I’ve finished with you.’
He didn’t know he was going to say that, and he was amazed when he had. He had never been cheeky
to a teacher before, mostly because there hadn’t been a need for it. Now he could see that he hadn’t
started in a great place. If you were going to get yourself into trouble, maybe it was best to work up to it
slowly, get some practice in first. He had started right at the top, which was probably a mistake.
‘SIT down.’
But he didn’t. He just walked out the way he had come in, and kept on walking.
As soon as he left Mrs Morrison’s office he felt different, better, as if he’d let go and he was now
falling through space. It was an exciting feeling, really, and it was much better than the feeling of
hanging on that he’d had before. He wouldn’t have been able to describe it as ‘hanging on’ until just
now, but that was definitely what it was. He’d been pretending that everything was normal—difficult,
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yes, but normal—but now he’d let go he could see it had been everything but normal. You don’t get
your shoes stolen
normally.
Your English teacher doesn’t make out you’re a nutter
normally
. You don’t
get boiled sweets thrown at your head
normally.
And that was just the school stuff.
And now he was a truant. He was walking down Holloway Road while everyone else at school was…
actually, they were eating their lunch, but he wasn’t going back. Soon he’d be walking down Holloway
Road (well, not Holloway Road, probably, because he was almost at the end of it already, and lunch
would go on for another thirty minutes yet) during history, and then he’d be a proper truant. He
wondered whether all truants started like that, whether there was always a Mrs Morrison moment which
made them blow their top and leave. He supposed there had to be. He’d always presumed that truants
were different sort of people entirely, not like him at all, that they’d been born truants, sort of thing, but
he was obviously wrong. In May, before they moved to London, when he was in his last term at his old
school, he wasn’t a truant kind of person in any way whatsoever. He turned up at school, listened to
what people said, did his homework, took part. But six months later that had all changed, bit by bit.
It was probably like that for tramps, too, he realized. They walked out of their house one evening and
thought, I’ll sleep in this shop doorway tonight, and when you’d done it once, something changed in
you, and you became a tramp, rather than someone who didn’t have anywhere to sleep for one night.
And the same with criminals! And drug addicts! And… He decided to stop thinking about it all then. If
he carried on, walking out of Mrs Morrison’s office might begin to look like the moment his whole life
changed, and he wasn’t sure he was ready for that. He wasn’t someone who wanted to become a truant
or a tramp or a murderer or a drug addict. He was just someone who was fed up with Mrs Morrison.
There had to be a difference.
Twenty
Will loved driving around London. He loved the traffic, which allowed him to believe he was a man in
a hurry and offered him rare opportunities for frustration and anger (other people did things to let off
steam, but Will had to do things to build it up); he loved knowing his way around; he loved being
swallowed up in the flow of the city’s life. You didn’t need a job or a family to drive around London;
you only needed a car, and Will had a car. Sometimes he just drove for the hell of it, and sometimes he
drove because he liked to hear music played at a volume that would not be possible in the flat without a
furious knock on the door or the wall or the ceiling.
Today he had convinced himself that he had to drive to Waitrose, but if he was honest the real reason
for the trip was that he wanted to sing along to ‘Nevermind’ at the top of his voice, and he couldn’t do
that at home. He loved Nirvana, but at his age they were kind of a guilty pleasure. All that rage and pain
and self-hatred! Will got a bit…
fed up
sometimes, but he couldn’t pretend it was anything stronger than
that. So now he used loud angry rock music as a replacement for real feelings, rather than as an
expression of them, and he didn’t even mind very much. What good were real feelings anyway?
The cassette had just turned itself over when he saw Marcus ambling down Upper Street. He hadn’t
seen him since the day of the trainers, nor had he wanted to see him particularly, but he suddenly felt a
little surge of affection for him. Marcus was so locked into himself, so oblivious to everyone and
everything, that affection seemed to be the only possible response: the boy somehow seemed to be
asking for absolutely nothing and absolutely everything all at the same time.
The affection that Will felt was not acute enough to make him want to stop the car, or even toot: he
had discovered that it was much easier to sustain one’s fondness for Marcus if one just kept one’s foot
down, literally and metaphorically. But it was funny, seeing him out in the street in broad daylight,
wandering aimlessly… Something nagged at him. Why was it funny? Because Will had never really
seen Marcus in broad daylight before. He had only previously seen him in the gloom of a winter
afternoon. And why had he only seen him in the gloom of a winter afternoon? Because Marcus only
came round after school. But it was just after two o’clock. Marcus should be in school now. Bollocks.
Will wrestled with his conscience, grappled it to the ground and sat on it until he couldn’t hear a
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squeak out of it. Why should he care if Marcus went to school or not? OK, wrong question. He knew
very well why he should care whether Marcus went to school. Try a different question:
how much
did he
care whether Marcus went to school or not? Answer: not a lot. That was better. He drove home.
At exactly 4.15, right in the middle of
Countdown
, the buzzer went. If Will hadn’t seen Marcus
bunking off this afternoon, the precision of the timing would have escaped his notice, but now it just
seemed transparently obvious: Marcus had clearly decided that arriving at the flat before 4.15 would
arouse suspicion, so he’d timed it to the second. It didn’t matter, however; he wasn’t going to answer the
door.
Marcus buzzed again; Will ignored him again. On the third buzz he turned
Countdown
off and put
In
Utero
on, in the hope that Nirvana might block out the sound more effectively than Carol Vorderman.
By the time he got to ‘Pennyroyal Tea’, the eighth or ninth track, he’d had enough of listening to Kurt
Cobain and Marcus: Marcus could obviously hear the music through the door, and was providing his
own accompaniment by buzzing in time. Will gave up.
‘You’re not supposed to be here.’
‘I came to ask you a favour.’ Nothing in Marcus’s face or voice suggested that he had been the least
bit inconvenienced or bored during his thirty-odd minutes of buzzing.
They had a brief bout of leg-wrestling: Will was standing in Marcus’s way, but Marcus managed to
force his way into the flat regardless.
‘Oh no,
Countdown
’s finished. Did that fat bloke get knocked out?’
‘What favour do you want to ask me?’
‘I want you to take me and a friend to football.’
‘Your mum can take you.’
‘She doesn’t like football.’
‘Neither do you.’
‘I do now. I like Manchester United.’
‘Why?’
‘I like O’Bane.’
‘Who the hell’s O’Bane?’
‘He scored five goals for them last Saturday.’
‘They drew nil—nil at Leeds.’
‘It was probably the Saturday before, then.’
‘Marcus, there isn’t a player called O’Bane.’
‘I might have got it wrong. Something that sounds like that. He’s got bleached hair and a beard and he
looks like Jesus. Can I have a Coke?’
‘No. There’s nobody who plays for Man United with bleached hair and a beard who looks like Jesus.’
‘Tell me some of their names.’
‘Hughes? Cantona? Giggs? Sharpe? Robson?’
‘No. O’Bane.’
‘O’Kane?’
Marcus’s face lit up. ‘That must be it!’
‘Used to play for Nottingham Forest about twenty-five years ago. Didn’t look like Jesus. Didn’t bleach
his hair. Never scored five goals. How was school today?’
‘OK.’
‘How was the afternoon?’
Marcus looked at him, trying to work out why he might have asked the question.
‘OK.’
‘What did you have?’
‘History, and then… ummm…’
Will had intended to store the skiving up, just as Marcus had stored the Ned thing up, but now he had
him wriggling on the hook he couldn’t resist taking him off and making him swim round and round in
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the bucket.
‘It’s Wednesday today, isn’t it?’
‘Er… Yes.’
‘Don’t you have double walking up and down Upper Street on Wednesday afternoons?’
He could see Marcus beginning the slow descent towards panic.
‘What do you mean?’
‘I saw you this afternoon.’
‘What, in school?’
‘Well, I couldn’t have seen you in school, Marcus, could I? Because you weren’t there.’
‘This afternoon?’
‘Yes, this afternoon.’
‘Oh, right. I had to nip out and get something.’
‘You had to nip out? And they’re all right about nipping out, are they?’
‘Where did you see me?’
‘I drove past you on Upper Street. I have to say, it didn’t look as though you were nipping. It looked
like you were skiving.’
‘It was Mrs Morrison’s fault.’
‘Her fault that you had to nip out? Or her fault that you had to skive?’
‘She told me to keep out of their way again.’
‘You’re losing me, Marcus. Who is Mrs Morrison?’
‘The head. You know they always say when I get in trouble that I should keep out of their way? She
said that about the training shoe kids.’ His voice rose an octave, and he started to speak more quickly.
‘They followed me! How can I keep out of their way if they follow me?’
‘OK, OK, keep your hair on. Did you tell her that?’
‘Course I did. She just didn’t take any notice.’
‘Right. So you go home and tell your mum this. It’s no good telling me. And you’ve got to tell her that
you bunked off as well.’
‘I’m not telling her that. She’s got enough problems without me.’
‘Marcus, you’re already a problem.’
‘Why can’t you go and see her? Mrs Morrison?’
‘You’re joking. Why should she take any notice of me?’
‘She would. She—’
‘Marcus, listen. I’m not your father, or your uncle, or your stepfather, or anybody at all. I’m nothing to
do with you. No headmistress is going to take any notice of what I say, and nor should she, either.
You’ve got to stop thinking I know the answer to anything, because I don’t.’
‘You know about things. You knew about the trainers.’
‘Yeah, and what a triumph they were. I mean, they were a source of endless happiness, weren’t they?
You’d have been in school this afternoon if I hadn’t bought you the trainers.’
‘And you knew about Kirk O’Bane.’
‘Who?’
‘Kirk O’Bane.’
‘The footballer?’
‘Except I don’t think he can be a footballer. Ellie was making one of those jokes that you make.’
‘But his first name’s Kirk?’
‘I think so.’
‘Kurt Cobain, you jerk.’
‘Who’s Kurt Cobain?’
‘The singer with Nirvana.’
‘I thought he must be a singer. Bleached hair? Looks a bit like Jesus?’
‘I suppose so.’
‘There you are, then,’ said Marcus triumphantly. ‘You knew about him, too.’
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‘Everyone knows about him.’
‘I didn’t.’
‘No, you didn’t. But you’re different, Marcus.’
‘And my mum wouldn’t.’
‘No, she wouldn’t either.’
‘You see, you know things. You can help.’
It was then, for the first time, that Will saw the kind of help Marcus needed. Fiona had given him the
idea that Marcus was after a father figure, someone to guide him gently towards male adulthood, but that
wasn’t it at all: Marcus needed help to be a kid, not an adult. And, unhappily for Will, that was exactly
the kind of assistance he was qualified to provide. He wasn’t able to tell Marcus how to grow up, or how
to cope with a suicidal mother, or anything like that, but he could certainly tell him that Kurt Cobain
didn’t play for Manchester United, and for a twelve-year-old boy attending a comprehensive school at
the end of 1993, that was maybe the most important information of all.
Twenty-One
Marcus went back to school the following morning. Nobody seemed to have noticed that he hadn’t
been around the previous afternoon: his form teacher knew he’d had to go to see Mrs Morrison during
afternoon registration, and Mr Sandford the history teacher never noticed him even when he was there.
The other kids in the class might have worked out that he was bunking off, but as they never spoke to
him anyway, how would he ever know?
He bumped into Ellie at breaktime at the vending machine. She was wearing her Kurt Cobain
sweatshirt and standing with a friend from her class.
‘Kurt Cobain doesn’t play for Manchester United,’ he told her. The girl from her class burst into
hysterical laughter.
‘Oh, no!’ said Ellie, mock-horrified. ‘Have they got rid of him?’
Marcus was confused for a moment—maybe Ellie really did think he was a footballer? But then he
realized she was making one of those jokes he never got.
‘Ha, ha,’ he said, without laughing at all. That was what you were supposed to do, and he felt the thrill
of having done something right for a change. ‘No, he plays… he
sings
for Nirvana.’
‘Thanks for telling me.’
‘That’s OK. A friend of mine has got one of their records.
Nevermind
.’
‘Everybody’s got that one. I’ll bet he hasn’t got the new one.’
‘He might have. He’s got lots of stuff.’
‘What year’s he in? I didn’t think anyone in this school liked Nirvana.’
‘He’s left school. He’s quite old. It’s grunge, isn’t it, Nirvana? I don’t know what I think of grunge.’
He didn’t, either. Will had played him some Nirvana the previous evening, and he’d never heard
anything quite like it. At first he hadn’t been able to hear anything apart from noise and shouting, but
there were some quiet bits, too, and in the end he had been able to make out a tune. He didn’t think he’d
ever like it as much as he liked Joni or Bob or Mozart, but he could sort of see why someone like Ellie
might like it.
The two girls looked at each other and laughed louder than they had done the first time.
‘And what do you think you might think of it?’ asked Ellie’s friend.
‘Well,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s a bit of a racket, but it’s got a good beat, and the picture on the cover is very
interesting.’ It was a picture of a baby underwater, swimming after a dollar bill. Will had said something
about the picture, but he couldn’t remember what it was. ‘I think the cover has a meaning. Something
about society.’
The girls looked at him, looked at each other and laughed.
‘You’re very funny,’ said Ellie’s friend. ‘Who are you?’
‘Marcus.’
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