Материал: nick_hornby_about_a_boy
‘Marcus. Cool name.’
‘Do you think so?’ Marcus hadn’t thought about his name that much, but he’d never thought it was
cool.
‘No,’ said Ellie’s friend, and they laughed again. ‘See you around, Marcus.’
‘See you.’
It was the longest conversation he’d had with anyone at school for weeks.
‘So we’ve scored,’ said Will when Marcus told him about Ellie and her friend. ‘I don’t fancy yours
much, though.’
Sometimes he didn’t understand one word Will said, and when that happened Marcus just ignored him
completely.
‘They said I was funny.’
‘You are funny. You’re hilarious. But I don’t know if it’s much to build a whole relationship on.’
‘Can I invite Ellie round?’
‘I’m not sure she’d come, Marcus.’
‘Why not?’
‘Well… I’m not sure that… How old is she?’
‘I dunno. Fifteen?’
‘I’m not sure that fifteen-year-olds hang out with twelve-year-olds. I’ll bet you her boyfriend is
twenty-five, drives a Harley Davidson and works as a roadie for some band. He’d beat you up. He’d
squash you like a bug, man.’
Marcus hadn’t thought of that.
‘I don’t want to go out with her. I know she’d never go for someone like me. But we can come round
here and listen to your Nirvana records, can’t we?’
‘She’s probably heard them already.’
Marcus was getting frustrated with Will. Why didn’t he want him to make friends?
‘OK, forget it, then.’
‘I’m sorry, Marcus. I’m glad you spoke to Ellie today, I really am. But a two-minute conversation with
someone who’s taking the piss out of you… I can’t see that working out long-term, you know?’
Marcus wasn’t really listening. Ellie and her friend had said he was funny, and if he could be funny
once, he could be funny again.
He saw them by the vending machine the next day. They were leaning against it and saying things
about anyone who had the nerve to come up and put money in. Marcus watched them for a little while
before he went up to them.
‘Hello, Ellie.’
‘Marcus! My man!’
Marcus didn’t want to think about what that might mean, so he didn’t take any notice.
‘Ellie, how old is your boyfriend?’
He’d only asked one question, and already he had made the girls laugh. He knew he could do it.
‘A hundred and two.’
‘Ha, ha.’ He’d done it right again.
‘Nine.’
‘Ha, ha.’
‘Why do you want to know? How do you even know I’ve got a boyfriend?’
‘My friend Will said he was probably about twenty-five and drove a Harley Davidson and he’d squash
me like a bug.’
‘Aaaah, Marcus.’ Ellie grabbed him round the neck and ruffled his hair. ‘I wouldn’t let him.’
‘Good. Thank you. I have to admit I was a bit worried when he said that.’
More laughter. Ellie’s friend was staring at him as if he was the most interesting person she’d ever
met.
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‘How old is your girlfriend, anyway? She probably wants to kill me, doesn’t she?’ They were laughing
all the time now. You couldn’t tell where one laugh ended and the next one began.
‘No, because I haven’t got one.’
‘I don’t believe that. A good-looking boy like you? We’ll have to fix you up.’
‘It’s OK, thanks. I don’t really want one at the moment. I don’t feel ready yet.’
‘Very sensible.’
Mrs Morrison suddenly appeared beside them.
‘In my office now, Ellie.’
‘I’m not changing the sweatshirt.’
‘We’ll talk about it in my office.’
‘There’s nothing to talk about.’
‘Do you want to argue in front of everyone?’
Ellie shrugged. ‘I don’t mind if you don’t.’
Ellie genuinely didn’t care, Marcus could see that. Loads of kids acted as if they weren’t scared, but
dropped the act the moment a teacher said anything to them. Ellie could keep going forever, though, and
there was nothing Mrs Morrison could do. There was a load of stuff she could do to him, though, and
Ellie’s friend didn’t look like she wanted to pick a fight with Mrs Morrison either. Ellie had something
that they didn’t have—or they had something Ellie didn’t have, he didn’t know which.
‘Zoe, Marcus, I want to talk to Ellie in private. And Marcus, you and I have some unfinished business
to attend to, don’t we?’
‘Yes, Mrs Morrison.’ Ellie caught his eye and smiled, and for a moment he really felt as if the three of
them were a trio. Or maybe a triangle, with Ellie at the top and him and Zoe at the bottom.
‘Off you go.’
And off they went.
Ellie and Zoe came looking for him at lunchtime. He was sitting at his desk eating his sandwiches,
listening to Frankie Ball and Juliet Lawrence talk about some bloke in year nine, when they just turned
up.
‘Here he is, look!’
‘Oooeee! Marcus!’
Just about every kid in the room stopped what they were doing and turned round. You could see what
they were thinking: Ellie and
Marcus????????
Even Nicky and Mark, who hadn’t spoken to him for
weeks and liked to pretend that they had never known him, looked up from their Gameboy; Marcus
hoped that one of them had lost a life. He felt great. If Kurt Cobain himself had walked through the
form-room door looking for him, the mouths of his classmates couldn’t have opened any wider.
‘What are you lot staring at? Marcus is our friend, aren’t you, Marcus?’
‘Yes,’ said Marcus. Whatever his relationship with Ellie and Zoe was, ‘yes’ was definitely the right
answer here.
‘Come on, then, let’s go. You don’t want to hang around here all lunchtime, do you? Come to our
form room. It’s a waste of time hanging out with this lot. Boring fuckers.’
Marcus could see some of them start to blush but nobody said anything. They couldn’t, unless they
were prepared to argue with Ellie, which clearly none of them were. What would be the point? Even Mrs
Morrison couldn’t argue with Ellie, so what chance did Frankie Ball and the rest of them have?
‘OK,’ said Marcus. ‘Hang on a minute.’ He wanted them to wait simply because he wanted the
moment to last longer: he didn’t know whether Ellie and Zoe would come looking for him ever again
and, even if they did, he doubted whether they’d announce to the world, or the part of the world eating
sandwiches in his classroom, that he was their friend and that everyone else was a boring fucker. That
would be too much to ask. But now he’d asked them to hang on, he had no idea what they might be
hanging on for.
‘Shall I… Do you want me to bring anything?’
‘Like what?’ said Zoe. ‘A bottle?’
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‘No, but, like…’
‘Or condoms?’ said Ellie. ‘Is that what you mean? We can’t have sex in our room, Marcus, even
though I’d like to, of course. There are too many people in there.’ Zoe was laughing so hard that Marcus
thought she might be sick. Her eyes were closed and she was sort of choking.
‘No, I know, I…’ Maybe asking them to hang on had been a mistake. He was turning his moment of
triumph into what seemed like a year of horrible awfulness.
‘Just bring your sweet self, Marcus. But get a move on, eh?’
He knew he was red in the face, and the condom bit had been bad. But he still got to walk from his
desk to where Ellie and Zoe were standing while everyone else watched, and when he got there Ellie
gave him a kiss. OK, she was making fun of him, but it didn’t matter, there weren’t many people in his
class that Ellie would bother to spit on, let alone kiss. ‘There’s no such thing as bad publicity,’ his dad
had said once, ages ago, when Marcus had asked him why some actor was letting Noel Edmonds pour
stuff over his head, and now he could see what he meant. Ellie had kind of poured stuff over his head,
but it was really, really worth it.
Ellie’s form room was upstairs and the walk made the good bit, the fucking-hell-Marcus-and-Ellie bit,
last longer. One of the teachers even stopped him to ask if he was OK, as if anyone hanging around with
Ellie must have been kidnapped or brainwashed.
‘We’re adopting him, sir,’ said Ellie.
‘I wasn’t asking you, Ellie. I was asking him.’
‘They’re adopting me, sir,’ said Marcus. He didn’t mean it as a joke—he just thought that saying what
Ellie said was sensible—but they all laughed anyway.
‘And you couldn’t hope for more responsible parents,’ said the teacher.
‘Ha, ha,’ said Marcus, although he wasn’t sure he should have done this time.
‘We’ll take that as a compliment,’ said Ellie. ‘Thank you. We’ll look after him. Have him home by
midnight and all that.’
‘Make sure you do,’ said the teacher. ‘In one piece.’
Ellie made him wait outside her form room while she announced him. He could hear her shouting.
‘OK, listen everybody, I want you to meet Marcus. The only other Kurt Cobain fan in the whole
fucking school. Come in, Marcus.’
He walked into the room. There weren’t many people in there, but those that were all laughed when
they saw him.
‘I didn’t say I was a fan as such,’ he said. ‘I just think they have a good beat and their cover means
something.’
Everyone laughed again. Ellie and Zoe stood beside him proudly, as if he had just done a magic trick
that they had told everyone he could do even though nobody believed them. They were right; he did feel
he’d been adopted.
Twenty-Two
Will had been trying not to think about Christmas, but as it got nearer he was beginning to go off the
idea of watching a few hundred videos and smoking a few thousand joints. It didn’t seem very festive,
somehow, and even though festivities invariably entailed The Song somewhere along the line, he didn’t
want to ignore them completely. It struck him that how you spent Christmas was a message to the world
about where you were at in life, some indication of how deep a hole you had managed to burrow for
yourself, and therefore spending three days bombed out of your head on your own said things about you
that you might not want saying.
So he would spend Christmas in the bosom of a family—not his family, because he didn’t have one,
but
a
family. There was one family he wanted to avoid at all costs: no way did he want to spend
Christmas eating nut fucking roast, not watching TV, and singing carols with his eyes closed. He had to
be careful, though, because if he just let himself drift along he’d be carried right over the weir; he had to
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start swimming in the opposite direction fast.
Having decided with such unshakeable firmness that he would absolutely definitely not be celebrating
25 December with Fiona and Marcus, it came as something of a surprise to him to find himself
accepting an invitation from Marcus the following afternoon to do exactly that.
‘Do you want to spend Christmas round ours?’ Marcus asked, even before he had stepped into the flat.
‘Ummm,’ said Will. ‘That’s, ah, very kind of you.’
‘Good,’ said Marcus.
‘I only said that’s very kind of you,’ said Will.
‘But you’re coming.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because—’
‘Don’t you want to come?’
‘Yes, of course I do, but… What about your mum?’
‘She’ll be there too.’
‘Yes, I’d sort of presumed that. But she wouldn’t want me there.’
‘I’ve already spoken to her about it. I said I wanted to invite a friend, and she said OK.’
‘So you didn’t tell her it was me?’
‘No, but I think she guessed.’
‘How?’
‘I haven’t got any other friends, have I?’
‘Does she know you still come round here?’
‘Sort of. She’s stopped asking me, so I think she’s given up worrying about it.’
‘And there really isn’t anyone else you’d rather ask?’
‘No, course not. And if there was, they wouldn’t be allowed to come to my house for Christmas lunch.
They’d be going to their own houses. Except they live in their own houses, so they wouldn’t be going
anywhere, would they?’
Will was finding the conversation depressing. What Marcus was saying, in his artful, skewed way,
was that he didn’t want Will to be alone on Christmas day.
‘I’m not sure what I’m doing yet.’
‘Where might you be going instead?’
‘Nowhere, but…’
Any conversational holes that needed filling were usually filled by Marcus. His concentration was
such that any ums and ers and buts he looked on as cues to change the subject entirely. For some reason,
though, he suddenly abandoned his usual technique and stared at Will intently.
‘What are you staring at?’ Will said eventually.
‘I wasn’t staring. I was waiting for you to answer the question.’
‘I answered it. "Nowhere," I said.’
‘You said "Nowhere, but…". I was waiting for what came after the but.’
‘Well, nothing. I’m not going anywhere for Christmas.’
‘So you can come to us.’
‘Yes, but—’
‘But what?’
‘Stop asking me "But what?" all the time.’
‘Why?’
‘Because… it’s not polite.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because… I clearly have reservations, Marcus. That’s why I keep saying "But". I’m obviously not
one hundred per cent convinced that I want to come to your house for Christmas.’
‘Why not?’
‘Are you being funny?’
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‘No.’
It was true, of course: Marcus was never deliberately funny. One look at Marcus’s face was enough to
convince Will that the boy was merely curious, and that his curiosity showed no signs of abating. The
conversation had already been extended way beyond Will’s comfort point, and now he was beginning to
worry that he would eventually be forced to articulate the cruellest of truths: that Marcus’s mother was,
like her son, a lunatic; that even disregarding the sanity aspect of things they were both a pair of losers
anyway; that he couldn’t imagine a gloomier Christmas; that he would much, much rather revert to his
original plan for oblivion and the entire output of the Marx Brothers than pull wishbones with either of
them; that any sane person would feel the same way. If the kid couldn’t take a hint, what option did he
have? Unless…
‘I’m sorry, Marcus, I was being rude. I’d love to spend Christmas with you.’
That was the other option. It wasn’t his chosen option, but it was the other option.
As it turned out it wasn’t just the three of them, which helped him no end when he showed up. He was
expecting one of Fiona’s logic-free lectures, but all he got was a look; she clearly didn’t want to resume
hostilities in front of her other guests. There was Marcus’s dad Clive, and his girlfriend Lindsey, and his
girlfriend’s mum, six of them altogether, all squashed round the fold-out dining table in the flat. Will
didn’t know that the world was like this. As the product of a 1960s’ second marriage, he was labouring
under the misapprehension that when families broke up some of the constituent parts stopped speaking
to each other, but the set-up here was different: Fiona and her ex seemed to look back on their
relationship as the thing that had brought them together in the first place, rather than something that had
gone horribly wrong and driven them apart. It was as if sharing a home and a bed and having a child
together was like staying in adjacent rooms in the same hotel, or being in the same class at school—a
happy coincidence that had given them the opportunity for an occasional friendship.
This couldn’t happen all the time, Will thought, otherwise SPAT would have been full of happy but
estranged couples, all introducing their exes and their nexts and their kids from here, there and
everywhere; but it hadn’t been like that at all—it had been full of justified and righteous anger, and a
very great deal of unhappiness. From what he had seen that evening he didn’t think too many SPAT
families would be reconvening for a game of Twister and a sing-song round the tree today.
But even if it didn’t happen very often, it was happening here, today, which at first Will found rather
sickening: if people couldn’t live together, he reckoned, they should at least have the decency to loathe
each other. But actually, as the day wore on and he had a little more to drink, Will could dimly see that
to strive for pleasantness and harmony once a year wasn’t an entirely contemptible ambition. A room
full of people trying to get on made Marcus happy, for a start, and even Will was not cynical enough to
wish Marcus anything but happiness on Christmas Day. On New Year’s Eve he would make a resolution
to recover some of his previous scepticism, but until then he would do as the Romans do, and smile at
people even if he disapproved of them. Smiling at people didn’t mean that you had to be friends with
them forever, surely? Much later in the day, when common sense prevailed and everyone started
squabbling, he learnt that smiling at people didn’t even mean that you had to be friends for a day, but for
a few hours he was happy to believe in an inverted universe.
He had bought presents for Fiona and Marcus. He gave Marcus a vinyl copy of
Nevermind
, because
they didn’t own a CD player, and a Kurt Cobain T-shirt, so he could keep in with Ellie; he gave Fiona a
pretty groovy and pretty expensive plain glass vase, because she’d complained after the hospital
business that she didn’t know what to do with the flowers. Marcus gave him a crossword-solver’s book
to help him with
Countdown
, and Fiona gave him
The Single Parent’s Handbook
as a joke.
‘What’s the joke?’ Lindsey asked him.
‘Nothing,’ said Will quickly and, he could see as soon as he’d said it, feebly.
‘Will pretended to have a kid so’s he could join this single parents’ group,’ said Marcus.
‘Oh,’ said Lindsey. The strangers in the room, Lindsey and her mum and Clive, looked at him with
some interest, but he declined to elucidate. He just smiled at them, as if it were something anyone would
do in the circumstances. He wouldn’t like to have to explain what those circumstances were, however.
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