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The present-giving part of the day didn’t take that long, and for the most part it was the usual stuff—
alarmingly so, given the complicated web of relationships in the room. Penis-shaped chocolate was all
very well, Will thought (actually he didn’t think that at all, but never mind—he was trying to live and let
live) but was penis-shaped chocolate an appropriate gift for your boyfriend’s currently boyfriendless and
celibate ex-lover? He really didn’t know, but it seemed a little tasteless, somehow—surely the whole
subject of penises was best left alone on occasions like this?—and anyway Fiona had never struck Will
as a penis-shaped-chocolate kind of woman, but she laughed anyway.
As the pile of discarded wrapping paper grew bigger, it struck Will that just about any present given in
these circumstances could be deemed inappropriate or darkly meaningful. Fiona gave Lindsey some silk
underwear, as if to say, ‘Hey, it doesn’t matter to me what you two get up to at nights,’ and she gave
Clive a new book called
The Secret History
, as if to say something rather different. Clive gave Fiona a
Nick Drake cassette, and though Clive did not know about the hospital business, as far as Will was
aware, there still seemed to be something weird about him forcing a possibly suicidal depressive’s music
on a possibly suicidal depressive.
Clive’s presents for Marcus were in themselves uncontroversial, computer games and sweatshirts and
a baseball cap and the Mr Blobby record and so on, but what made them seem pointed was their contrast
with the joyless little pile that Fiona had given Marcus earlier in the day: a jumper that wouldn’t do him
any favours at school (it was baggy and hairy and arty), a couple of books and some piano music—a
gentle and very dull maternal reminder, it transpired, that Marcus had given up on his lessons some time
ago. Marcus showed him this miserable haul with a pride and enthusiasm that almost broke Will’s
heart… ‘And a really nice jumper, and these books look really interesting, and this music because one
day when I… when I get a bit more time I’m going to really give it a go…’ Will had never properly
given Marcus credit for being a good kid—up until now he’d only noticed his eccentric, troublesome
side, probably because there hadn’t been much else to notice. But he was good, Will could see that now.
Not good as in obedient and uncomplaining; it was more of a mindset kind of good, where you looked at
something like a pile of crap presents and recognized that they were given with love and chosen with
care, and that was enough. It wasn’t even that he was choosing to see the glass as half-full, either—
Marcus’s glass was full to overflowing, and he would have been amazed and mystified if anyone had
attempted to tell him there were kids who would have hurled the hairy jumper and the sheet music back
in the parental face and demanded a Nintendo.
Will knew he would never be good in that way. He would never look at a hairy jumper and work out
why it was precisely right for him, and why he should wear it at all hours of the day and night. He would
look at it and conclude that the person who bought it for him was a pillock. He did that all the time: he’d
look at some twenty-five-year-old guy on roller-skates, sashaying his way down Upper Street with his
wraparound shades on, and he’d think one of three things: 1) What a prat; or 2) Who the fuck do you
think you are?, or 3) How old are you? Fourteen?
Everyone in England was like that, he reckoned. Nobody looked at a roller-skating bloke with
wraparound shades on and thought, hey, he looks cool, or, wow, that looks like a fun way of getting
some exercise. They just thought: wanker. But Marcus wouldn’t. Marcus would either fail to notice the
guy at all, or he would stand there with his mouth open, lost in admiration and wonder. This wasn’t
simply a function of being a child, because, as Marcus knew to his cost, all his classmates belonged to
the what-a-prat school of thought; it was simply a function of being Marcus, son of Fiona. In twenty
years’ time he’d be singing with his eyes closed and swallowing bottles of pills, probably, but at least he
was gracious about his Christmas presents. It wasn’t much of a compensation for the long years ahead.
Twenty-Three
It was good having a mum and dad who didn’t decide things together, Marcus thought; that way you
got the best of both worlds at Christmas. You got things like jumpers and sheet music, which you had to
have, but then you got things like computer games and fun stuff as well. And if his mum and dad had
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still been together, what would Christmas have been like now, with just the three of them? Pretty boring,
probably. This way it was more like a party, what with Will and Lindsey and, well, he wasn’t really
bothered about Lindsey’s mum, if he were honest, but she sort of helped to fill the room up.
After presents they had lunch, which was a big ring doughnut-type thing made of pastry rather than
doughnut, with a lovely cream and mushroom sauce in the hole in the middle, and then they had
Christmas pudding with five-pence pieces hidden in it (Marcus had two in his portion), and then they
pulled crackers and put the hats on, except Will wouldn’t wear his for very long. He said it made his
head itch.
After they’d watched the queen on TV (nobody wanted to, apart from Lindsey’s mum, but whatever
old people wanted they got, in Marcus’s experience), Clive rolled a joint, and there was a bit of a row.
Lindsey was angry with Clive because of her mum, who had no idea what he was doing until people
started shouting about it, and Fiona was angry with Clive because of Marcus, who had seen him roll a
joint about one thousand million times before.
‘He’s seen me do it hundreds of times before,’ said Clive. It was the wrong thing to say, as it turned
out, so Marcus was glad
he
hadn’t said it.
‘I wish you hadn’t told me,’ said Fiona. ‘I really didn’t want to know.’
‘What, you thought I’d given up dope the day we separated? Why would I do that?’
‘Marcus was younger then. He was always in bed before you started rolling up.’
‘I never smoke any, Mum. Dad won’t let me.’
‘Oh, well that’s all right then. As long as you’re not smoking any, I have no objection to your father
indulging his drug habit in front of you.’
‘Ha, ha,’ said Marcus. Everyone in the room looked at him, and then they continued the argument.
‘I’d hardly describe the occasional spliff as a drug habit, would you?’
‘Well obviously I would, because I just have.’
‘Can we talk about this another time?’ Lindsey asked. Her mother hadn’t said anything so far, but she
certainly seemed interested in what was going on.
‘Why? Because your mother is here?’ Marcus had never seen Fiona get cross with Lindsey before, but
she was getting cross with her now. ‘Unfortunately I can never have a conversation with Marcus’s father
without your mother being present, for reasons I have yet to fathom. So you’ll just have to bloody well
put up with it.’
‘Look, I’ll put the dope away, OK? Then we’ll all calm down and watch
International Velvet
and
forget about it.’
‘
International Velvet
isn’t on,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s
Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom
.’
‘That wasn’t the point I was making, Marcus.’
Marcus didn’t say anything, but inwardly he disagreed: it hadn’t been the only point, but it had
certainly been one of them.
‘I know he takes drugs,’ said Lindsey’s mum suddenly. ‘I’m not daft.’
‘I don’t…
take drugs
,’ said Clive.
‘Well, what do you call it then?’ said Lindsey’s mum.
‘It’s not drug-taking. It’s… just normal. Drug-taking is something different.’
‘Do you think he takes them on his own?’ Fiona said to Lindsey’s mum. ‘Do you think your daughter
just sits there watching him?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘She doesn’t mean anything, Mum. I think Clive’s idea is an excellent one. Let’s put it all away and
play charades or something.’
‘I didn’t say anything about charades. I suggested watching
International Velvet
.’
‘It’s not
International
—’ Marcus begun.
‘Shut up, Marcus,’ said everybody, and then they all laughed.
The row changed the atmosphere, though. Clive and Fiona agreed to have a proper conversation about
the dope thing some other time, Fiona and Lindsey snapped at each other a couple of times, and even
Will seemed different, although none of it had had anything to do with him. Marcus reckoned Will had
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been having a good time up until then, but afterwards he seemed apart from it all, whereas before he’d
been one of the family. It was almost like he was laughing at them for rowing, for reasons Marcus
couldn’t understand. And then, after they’d had supper (there were cold meats for the meat-eaters, and
Marcus had some, just to see the look on his mum’s face), Suzie came round with her little girl and it
was their turn to laugh at Will.
Marcus didn’t know that Will hadn’t seen Suzie since his mum had told her about Ned and SPAT and
all that. Nobody had said anything, but that didn’t mean much—Marcus had always presumed that after
he had gone to school or to bed adults did all sorts of things they didn’t tell him about, but now he was
beginning to suspect this wasn’t true, and that the adults he knew didn’t have any sort of a secret life at
all. It was obvious when Suzie walked into the room that this was an awkward moment, especially for
Will: he stood up, and then he sat down, and then he stood up again, and then he went red, and then he
said he ought to be going, and then Fiona told him not to be pathetic, so he sat down again. The only
spare chair was in Will’s corner, so Suzie had to sit next to him.
‘Have you had a nice day, Suze?’ Fiona asked her.
‘OK, yeah. We’re just on the way home from Grandma’s.’
‘And how’s Grandma?’ asked Will. Suzie turned to look at him, opened her mouth to reply, but
changed her mind and ignored him completely. It was one of the most exciting things Marcus had ever
seen in real life, and easily the most exciting thing he had ever seen in his own living room. (His mum
and the sick on the Dead Duck Day didn’t count. That wasn’t exciting. It was just horrible.) Suzie was
snubbing, he reckoned. He’d heard a lot about snubbing, but he had never watched anyone do it. It was
great, if a bit frightening.
Will stood up and sat down again. If he really wanted to leave, Marcus thought, nobody could stop
him. Or rather, they
could
stop him—if everyone in the room grabbed him and sat on him he wouldn’t
get very far. (Marcus smiled to himself at the thought of Lindsey’s mum sitting on Will’s head.) But
they
wouldn’t
stop him. So why didn’t he just stand up, stay stood up and start walking? Why did he
keep on bobbing up and down? Maybe there was something about snubbing that Marcus didn’t know.
Maybe there were snubbing rules, and you just had to sit there and be snubbed, even if you didn’t feel
like it.
Megan wriggled out of her mother’s lap and went over to the Christmas tree.
‘There might be a present for you under there, Megan,’ said Fiona.
‘Oooh, Megan, presents,’ said Suzie. Fiona went over to the tree, picked up one of the last two or three
parcels and gave it to her. Megan stood there clutching it and looked around the room.
‘She’s wondering who to give it to,’ said Suzie. ‘She’s had as much fun giving them out as opening
them today.’
‘How sweet,’ said Lindsey’s mum. Everyone watched and waited while Megan made her decision; it
was almost as if the little girl had understood the snubbing business and wanted to make mischief,
because she toddled over to Will and thrust the present at him.
Will didn’t move. ‘Well, take it from her then, you fool,’ said Suzie.
‘It’s not my bloody present,’ said Will. Good for you, Marcus thought. Do some snubbing of your
own. The only trouble was that as things stood Will was snubbing Megan, not Suzie, and Marcus didn’t
think you should snub anyone under the age of three. What was the point? Megan didn’t seem to mind,
though, because she continued to hold the present out to him until he reached for it.
‘Now what?’ said Will crossly.
‘Open it with her,’ said Suzie. She was more patient this time; Will’s anger seemed to have calmed her
down a little. If she wanted a row with Will, she clearly didn’t want it here, in front of all these people.
Will and Megan tore off the paper to reveal some sort of plastic toy that played tunes. Megan looked at
it and waved it at Will.
‘What now?’ said Will.
‘Play with her,’ said Suzie. ‘God, spot the childless person here.’
‘Tell you what,’ said Will. ‘You play with her.’ He tossed Suzie the toy. ‘As I’m so bloody clueless.’
‘Maybe you could learn to be less clueless,’ said Suzie.
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‘What for?’
‘I would have thought that in your line of work it might be handy to know how to play with kids.’
‘What’s your line of work?’ Lindsey asked politely, as if this were a normal conversation amongst a
normal group of people.
‘He doesn’t do anything,’ Marcus said. ‘His dad wrote "Santa’s Super Sleigh" and he earns a million
pounds a minute.’
‘He pretends he has a child so he can join single parent groups and chat up single mothers,’ said Suzie.
‘Yeah, but he doesn’t get paid for that,’ said Marcus.
Will stood up again, but this time he didn’t sit down.
‘Thanks for the lunch and everything,’ he said. ‘I’m off.’
‘Suzie has a right to express her anger, Will,’ said Fiona.
‘Yes, and she’s expressed it, and now I have a right to go home.’ He started to weave his way through
the presents and glasses and people towards the door.
‘He’s my friend,’ Marcus said suddenly. ‘I invited him. I should be able to tell him when he goes
home.’
‘I’m not sure that’s how the whole hospitality thing works,’ said Will.
‘But I don’t want him to go yet,’ said Marcus. ‘It’s not fair. How come Lindsey’s mum’s still here,
and no one invited her, and the one person I invited is leaving because everyone’s being horrible to
him?’
‘First of all,’ said Fiona, ‘I invited Lindsey’s mum, and it’s my house too. And we haven’t been
horrible to Will. Suzie’s angry with Will, as she has every right to be, and she’s telling him so.’
Marcus felt as though he were in a play. He was standing up, and Will was standing up, and then
Fiona stood up; but Lindsey and her mum and Clive were sat on the sofa watching, in a line, with their
mouths open.
‘All he did was make up a kid for a couple of weeks. God. That’s nothing. So what? Who cares? Kids
at school do worse than that every day.’
‘The point is, Marcus, that Will left school a long time ago. He should have grown out of making
people up by now.’
‘Yeah, but he’s behaved better since, hasn’t he?’
‘Can I go yet?’ said Will, but nobody took any notice.
‘Why? What’s he done?’ asked Suzie.
‘He never wanted me round his flat every day. I just went. And he bought me those shoes, and at least
he listens when I say I’m having a hard time at school. You just tell me to get used to it. And he knew
who Kirk O’Bane was.’
‘Kurt Cobain,’ said Will.
‘And it’s not like you lot never do anything wrong ever, is it?’ said Marcus. ‘I mean…’ He had to be
careful here. He knew he couldn’t say too much, or even anything at all, about the hospital stuff. ‘I
mean, how come I got to know Will in the first place?’
‘Because you threw a bloody great baguette at a duck’s head and killed it, basically,’ said Will.
Marcus couldn’t believe Will was bringing that up now. It was supposed to be all about how everyone
else did things wrong, not about how he had killed the duck. But then Suzie and Fiona started laughing,
and Marcus could see that Will knew what he was doing.
‘Is that true, Marcus?’ said his father.
‘There was something wrong with it,’ said Marcus. ‘I think it was going to die anyway.’
Suzie and Fiona laughed even harder. The audience on the sofa looked appalled. Will sat down again.
Twenty-Four
Will fell in love on New Year’s Eve, and the experience took him completely by surprise. She was
called Rachel, she illustrated children’s books, and she looked a little bit like Laura Nyro on the cover of
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Gonna Take A Miracle
—nervy, glamorous, Bohemian, clever, lots of long, unruly dark hair.
Will had never wanted to fall in love. When it had happened to friends it had always struck him as a
peculiarly unpleasant-seeming experience, what with all the loss of sleep and weight, and the
unhappiness when it was unreciprocated, and the suspect, dippy happiness when it was working out.
These were people who could not control themselves, or protect themselves, people who, if only
temporarily, were no longer content to occupy their own space, people who could no longer rely on a
new jacket, a bag of grass and an afternoon rerun of
The Rockford Files
to make them complete.
Lots of people, of course, would be thrilled to take their seats next to their computer-generated ideal
life-partner, but Will was a realist, and he could see immediately that there was only cause for panic. He
was almost sure that Rachel was about to make him very miserable indeed, mostly because he couldn’t
see anything he might have which could possibly interest her.
If there was a disadvantage to the life he had chosen for himself, a life without work and care and
difficulty and detail, a life without context and texture, then he had finally found it: when he met an
intelligent, cultured, ambitious, beautiful, witty and single woman at a New Year’s Eve party, he felt
like a blank twit, a cypher, someone who had done nothing with his whole life apart from watch
Countdown
and drive around listening to Nirvana records. That had to be a bad thing, he reckoned. If
you were falling in love with someone beautiful and intelligent and all the rest of it, then feeling like a
blank twit put you at something of a disadvantage.
One of his problems, he reflected as he was trying to dredge his memory for a single tiny scrap of
experience that this woman might regard as worth her momentary contemplation, was that he was
reasonably good-looking and reasonably articulate. It gave people the wrong impression. It gave him
admission to a party from which he should be barred by ferocious bouncers with thick necks and tattoos.
He may have been good-looking and articulate, but that was just a quirk of genetics, environment and
education; at his core he was ugly and monosyllabic. Maybe he should undergo some sort of reverse
plastic surgery—something that would rearrange his features so that they were less even, and push his
eyes closer together or further apart. Or maybe he should put on an enormous amount of weight, sprout a
few extra chins, grow so fat that he sweated profusely all the time. And, of course, he should start
grunting like an ape.
Because the thing was that when this Rachel woman sat down next to him at dinner she was interested,
for the first five minutes, before she’d worked him out, and in that five minutes he got a glimpse of what
life could be like if he were in any way interesting. On balance, he thought, he’d prefer not to have that
glimpse. What good did it do him, after all? He wasn’t going to get to sleep with Rachel. He wasn’t
going to go to a restaurant with her, or see what her sitting room looked like, or get to understand how
her father’s affair with her mother’s best friend had affected her views on having children. He hated the
five-minute window of opportunity. In the end, he thought, he would be far happier if she turned round
to look at him, just about managed not to vomit, and turned her back on him for the rest of the evening.
He missed Ned. Ned had given him an extra something, a little
il ne sait quoi
, that would have come in
handy on an evening like this. He wasn’t going to bring him back to life, though, poor little sod. Let him
rest in peace.
‘How do you know Robert?’ Rachel was asking him.
‘Oh, just…’ Robert produced television programmes. He hung out with actors and writers and
directors. People who knew Robert were arty movers and shakers, and were almost obliged to be
glamorous. Will wanted to say that he had written the music for Robert’s last film, or given him his big
break, or that they met for lunch to talk about the godawful mess that was this government’s arts policy.
He wanted to say that, but he couldn’t.
‘Just… I used to buy my dope off him years ago.’ That, unhappily, was the truth. Before Robert
became a television producer, he was a dope dealer. Not a dope dealer with a baseball bat and a pit-bull,
just someone who bought a bit extra to sell on to his mates, who at the time included Will, because Will
was going out with a friend of Robert’s… Anyway, it didn’t matter why he was knocking around with
Robert in the mid-eighties. The point was that he was the only person in the room who neither moved
nor shook, and now Rachel knew it.
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